Technology makes you more than alive or more than dead

AI does nothing to change this.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost my brother. Over the last couple of decades, he had the kidney of a motorcyclist and then, if I remember correctly, a young boy's. Transplanted kidneys last 7-9 years. It's hard to get more than two. So, Ben had been living on dialysis for the last few years.

When living on dialysis, you know your clock is ticking. But, still, the machines are miraculous. External kidneys, pumping out blood, filtering it, and then pumping urine-free blood back in.

But when I imagine my brother hooking himself up to this machine every day, I wonder if he hated it, even though he owed the damned thing his life. I think I would. Strange. I never wondered about this when he was alive.

When people are alive, sometimes what is most "alive" about them are the things we fear; our resentments, or how we have wronged them — the guilt. Death has this effect of bringing their humanity blazing to the fore.

Suddenly, I found myself imagining Ben's inner world instead of brooding on our strained relationship. What was it like to do dialysis every day? Could he bear to be grateful for that cursed plastic kidney?

Then, I realized something. We all have this ambivalent relationship with our machines. We've used them for so long, the "organs" they replaced no longer function. At some invisible threshold, we no longer just benefit from shoes, screens, and pumps — we rely on them. We can no longer run free without them humming, always humming.

Our machines transport us through space and time instantaneously via wires or move our bodies through the air at 30,000 feet. Their humming fades into the background and we sometimes forget them altogether. But, sometimes we look around and ask, Why did we build this? It reminds me of Henry David Thoreau noticing that the trains and telegraph lines help us go faster, faster. But to what destination are we rushing?

We’re not just trying to replace our horses and kidneys, but, now, our brains.

Even as I write this, I'm making the first draft via AI voice transcription. Speaking to my headphones as I walk around my Los Angeles neighborhood. I sense it, silently humming, using algorithms (neural networks, actually) beyond my comprehension to sort the vibrations of my voice into the correct syntax of our shared language. Does that add up to a net good?

Ultimately, I think the question is and always was: do they facilitate our spirit or do they squander it?

For one, AI transcription allows me to draft this while not looking at an LCD screen. Instead, I'm looking at the radiant blue sky — the extreme contrast of brightness of the distant leaves and the shade under which I stand.

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he was blind. His daughters transcribed his iambic pentameter verse, line by line, as he dictated it. Milky eyes open and staring into the void, begging the muse, as he did, to ignite his internal light and redeem the blackness of his sight.

Dostoyevsky also dictated some of his best work to scribes. It seems like a better way to draft, at least for some. I like it. Without AI, I wouldn't be able to do it at this point in my career. But, again, to what destination am I rushing?

Milton's scribes (thinking of them as human "computers") allowed him to squeeze more of his genius into the world. Ben's dialysis machines allowed him to squeeze out a few more years of life. For both, I am grateful. But we would never confuse John Milton for his scribes, and I would never confuse my brother for his dialysis machine.

Our machines are just better and better scribes. Never does a good-enough scribe transform into Milton. That’s an entirely different approach. My brother’s death made this point clear as the blue sky.

In this last days, he lived in the basement of his best friend Derek and his wife and kids in Portland. Their kindness toward them, as much as the dialysis, kept him alive for these years. Kindness that I don't know that I could've mustered.

I want to call Derek and thank him for being there as my brother's consciousness flickered out. But also I worry about what his kindness would say about me, as selfish as that sounds. Because I needed to make amends with my brother. One that I had planned to make the very month that he passed away, as fate would have it. I didn't get to.

Derek is going to fly my brother's ashes down to his hometown in Louisiana where me, my dad, and my sister will bury him in the family plot. I’ll say a few words. Maybe I'll make my amends there.

None of that would be possible without the machines we use to communicate and travel, of course. But what all this makes painfully obvious to me is that what is primary is humanity — courage, kindness, and connection. What machines do, ideally, is give us time to focus on each other.

We use machines to do the opposite — to distract and alienate ourselves from the very people we created the machines to protect and enjoy.

When I think of Ben, I can still sense his "presence." Something beyond his brain. Just as strange and incorporeal as it was when he was animated — what made this man my brother, my kin, someone I had known since before I could remember, what made him a "presence" to me is just as mysterious as what might make him a "presence" now. It’s just as mysterious as what makes John Milton “alive” in his work.

That "presence," whatever that is, is more than mechanistic. Ben's death reminded me of that. Death reminds us of what matters and hopefully reminds us to aim our machines at what matters.

If we allow the machines to avoid our fear of death, and therefore of truly being alive — doom scrolling, distraction, and lazy dependence — they make us worse than dead.

But, if we use the machines to enhance our connections – to squeeze out a few more drops of genius, kindness, or life — they make us more than alive.