Like I Just Told that Website, "I'm Not a Robot!"
Where’s a Lorax when you need one?
This “bossy” little creature with a bushy mustache spoke up for endangered Truffula trees in Dr. Seuss’s beloved 1971 book. We young readers learned, through the book’s villain, the once-prosperous Once-ler, that the Lorax had pleaded with him to spare the trees being chopped down incessantly in the pristine woods somewhere near Weehawken. (Yes, Doc Seuss reports that’s where nature got whacked./If it sounds inexact, you can fact-check that fact.)
The Once-ler says his family had built a factory there to mass-produce various items weaved from the Truffula’s silky tufts. “You never can tell what some people will buy,” he tells the Lorax. Despite their dispute, all the trees were eventually destroyed.
The Lorax disappeared from the barren scene, too, but he left behind a one-word message: “Unless.” Now, reviewing these events for us picture-book visitors, the Once-ler confesses his greedy assault on the ecology had been a mistake. The word left behind is a warning for all readers: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
As I consume today’s news stories about artificial intelligence (AI), full of technical details foreshadowing the triumph of “artificial super-intelligence” (ASI), I feel increasingly tempted to curl up on the couch, fall silent with a sigh, and ponder the need for a next-gen Lorax.
A ”Lorax II” could be a more modern, conventional-looking curmudgeon. He or she would speak not for the trees, but for human beings. Someone must sound louder alarms about lurking dangers which AI’s optimistic entrepreneurs downplay.
Tech-driven trends in Weehawken, and everywhere, risk defiling great gifts which people have taken for granted—our free spirits and creativity, our livelihoods and connections to others, our clarity of knowledge and our response-ability to achieve new heights together, even hopes for heaven.
Is a new team of tycoons gambling with our future by planning AI tools that can manipulate truth and erode trust? We’ve already seen social media muddle many hearts and minds in surprising ways.
I can hear some advocates saying, “Once you’ve tried artificiality, you’ll be bored by the tedium of reality.” If I were to reply with nostalgia for real-life adventures which enriched our youth—“Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”—I wonder if my audience would opt for the menu of streaming platforms on the screens in their hands.
If I or any neo-Lorax bemoaned the threatened chopping-up of digitized facts into customized information and friendly quick fixes, people could dismiss me as a Luddite. They might wrongly allege I want to block important advancements and efficiencies, although I welcome valid prospects to improve medical care and other fields of teaching or learning.
Would my romanticized insistence on the most authentic human experiences—like building relationships, adopting noble goals, and sacrificing for one’s talents and ties—be overridden by indifference, natural laziness, and disdain for the hard work of personhood?
Some people might reject “reality” as an untenable rallying cry because they want to concoct and impose their own truths to the exclusion of others.
Another group already has handed down a “guilty” verdict about humanity’s shameful record and wasted efforts—assuming our flawed race’s fate is fake-truth narcotics and rule by robotics.
Still in my fetal position on the couch, I think of Pope Francis, who spoke a lot about AI during his tenure as head of the Catholic Church. He spoke for the humans, urging careful reasoning and regulation to keep AI “person-centered.”
He also cautioned that we persons must up our game as collaborative pilgrims energetically pursuing a noble mission, protecting our dual destiny of humility and greatness.
But then I think of the poem, “The Second Coming.” In that dark vision, William Butler Yeats warned, “Things fall apart.” If people are meant to be the benchmark of excellence and life’s true meaning, I don’t want us to be the center that “will not hold.”
Who, besides Francis’s successor Pope Leo XIV, might victoriously champion the human being and our civilization as realities to explore and cherish? How can such champions reply to our era’s product developers? We need robust arguments which override society’s loud voices of negativity—and its quietude of distraction.
I conclude that no single pope, president, prophet, or tycoon can present arguments sufficient to short-circuit the dangers of AI.
We need a critical mass of humans, delivering a well-considered and passionate paean to the facts of life— celebrating who we are as unique individuals, common-good communities, and aspiring avatars of an irreplaceable, global, transcendent wisdom.
We must charm today’s tech-stars, showing we’re flawed but lovable. We lack certain features of artificial smarts, but we’re wonderfully authentic, on the right side of history and the right side of mystery.
The Lorax can teach us a few things about this. He speaks up not only passionately, but promptly. He voices his concern once the very first tree has been felled, partly because he senses danger coming but mostly because he knows it has come.
That stump had been his home, Dr. Seuss shows us, noting his character is “mossy” as well as bossy. He is one with the trees, viscerally eager to save them—an authentic spokescreature, ready to “represent,” as today’s lingo puts it.
The only thing the Lorax lacks is other Loraxes. I wonder: Weren’t there comrades inside other Truffulas who could have shown up in support of their hero? The entrepreneurs could have seen the forest for the trees; they would have appreciated the big, beautiful picture of creation that shouldn’t be deconstructed into trivial or grandiose inventions.
That’s the lesson we humans have to learn today if we want to build a critical mass—an omnipresent, resonating voice which can respond to a tide of technological change as it rolls from person to person, application to application.
We are the humans in the crosshairs. “We Are the World,” proclaims the song by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. Anchorman Howard Beale in the film “Network” told his audience to assert, “I’m a human being, Goddamit! My life has value!” Even Dr. Seuss’s tiny Whos shouted in unison to save their lives: “We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!”
We’re not merely interest groups choosing spokespeople to design strategies of power, pride, and greed to be amplified in the media.
Humans truly must “up our game,” as Pope Francis advised, to become each other’s heroes. Our conversations and interactions must become testimonials to the gifts we hold in common, not the divisions which plunge us into the isolation of video-arcade basements.
Just as the Lorax drew his zeal from his oneness with the trees, we must draw our zeal from our oneness with humanity. Through faith in ourselves, in values and virtues, and in God, by letting truth, goodness, and beauty point us toward transcendent answers to our deepest cravings, we can recapture the delights that accompany life’s challenges.
We should also be comfortable with ourselves and others, allowing each other to say, “I’m only human.” This requires humility and forgiveness. Our flaws are obvious, but the Once-lers will see our love makes us lovable.
This authenticity shouts loudly about a great inheritance—an endowment of rights, duties, and potential still surviving (not merely digitally archived) in downright brilliant documents like the U.S. Constitution. Could ASI generate such mature, foresighted genius?
Confident that we can jointly discern right from wrong, true from false, we’ll continue to display the shared identity, inherent dignity, insightful skepticism, and buoyant hope which has built families and societies over centuries
All of this takes me back to the little prophet of Weehawken, whose boldness needs and deserves a revival, at scale. We honor his rebellion against lowered expectations.
Remember his timeless word to the wise: Unless. Beyond bearing witness to our best with authenticity, solidarity, and persistence, we need an additional step. There’s one crucial rule to choose human or bot./Quoth Lorax and Seuss: “Care a whole awful lot.”
Image from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.
Phronesis Plus
Welcome behind the paywall, where you’ll find premium content for “Phronesis in Pieces.”
The Premium Section of “Phronesis”— Updated All Year
In “Phronesis Plus,” find additional new material via the navbar, especially the abundant Bookshelf of resources. About ten links were added in June. Many categories of information are available for browsing by avocational students of phronesis.
The “About” page compiles updated connections to samples of Bill Schmit’s multimedia work, including examples from June.
The navbar item offering Papal texts is focused on several years of coverage I provided regarding the annual World Communications Day messages. They include context for the 2025 message covered in January. (The section has been updated to include extensive coverage of Pope Francis’s remarks on artificial intelligence.)