By Chudi Okologbu Uwandu
The phone in your pocket knows a great deal about you. It knows where you slept last night, whom you called, what you searched for, and how long you lingered over a certain photograph. Nobody forced it on you. You bought it, charged it, and carried it with you into church.
I have been thinking about what that means ever since my young friend, Frankie Nnamdi Ikemefune, said something in one of his videos that stopped me.
At 33 Frankie speaks like a sage. At 72, I follow a man less than half my age, and I am glad to. He observed that the eye can see everything except itself.
The only way it ever sees itself is through other people, so he urged friends to sit together once in a while and look into one another’s eyes.
That thought took me back to a novel written in 1949 by the English author George Orwell. It is called Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The story is set in an imaginary country ruled by a Party. Its leader is called Big Brother, and his face looks down from posters with the words: Big Brother is watching you.
The hero is an ordinary clerk named Winston Smith. His job is to rewrite old newspapers so that the past always agrees with whatever the Party says today.
In his flat hangs a telescreen, a screen that shows programmes and also watches the person watching it. It can never be switched off.
Winston starts a secret diary and believes he has found one private corner left. He is caught and broken, and by the end of the book he loves Big Brother.
That is the horror of it. The Party was not satisfied with his obedience. It wanted the inside of his head.
Now, Orwell’s Big Brother needed walls, wires and watchers. Ours has no need of them, because he runs on two things you hear about every day:
Algorithms and Artificial intelligence.
Many of us use them without quite knowing what they are, so let me explain them plainly.
An algorithm is a set of step-by-step instructions, rather like the recipe for a pot of ofe onugbu, or edikaikong. When you open Facebook, an algorithm has already studied what you like and how long you stay on each post, and it has arranged your screen to keep you there.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, goes a step further. It is a computer system trained on enormous amounts of human writing, pictures and speech, until it can do things we used to think only a person could do.
It can write a letter, translate a language, recognise a face, and even copy a voice. So the algorithm chooses what you see, and AI can make something new and speak back to you.
Let us be fair, though, because there is a wonderful side to this new world. A farmer in Nepal, Birmingham, Kebbi, or Alimosho, can ask his phone what is wrong with a sick crop.
A village child can have a patient tutor at any hour. A doctor can read a scan faster than ever before. I use these tools myself, and I am grateful for them.
Still, it helps to compare two warnings. Orwell feared a world that would crush us by force. Another writer, Aldous Huxley, wrote a novel called Brave New World and feared a world that would soothe us into surrender, with comfort and entertainment doing the work that cruelty does in Orwell.
When I look around, our age looks a good deal more like Huxley’s.
The danger, then, is a quiet one. People who know they are being watched begin to edit themselves.
They perform for the camera and the crowd, and after a while they forget where the performance ends. Yet every man needs a private room inside himself, a place to think, to doubt, to grieve and to pray before he is ready to speak.
Our Lord told us to pray in secret, and the Father who sees in secret will reward us openly. Take that room away and you are left with agreeable, shallow people.
You may ask whether the machines will replace us. Honestly, nobody knows, and I would be careful with anyone who says he does.
Yes. Some kinds of work will disappear, as the telephone operator’s did, and new kinds will appear. But a machine does not repent, forgive, keep a covenant or stand before God. Those things belong to persons.
Which brings me back to the eye. It needs a mirror, or still water at the stream, or a friend, and Frankie is right about that. The telescreen is the opposite arrangement, an eye that sees us and is never seen in return.
There is, however, another eye inside each of us, and it is called conscience. The word means “knowing with,” an inner witness that knows with you what you have done. Paul tells the Romans that the law is written on the heart, and that conscience bears witness. No camera can reach it.
So here is my small advice. Treat AI like a fast young reporter: well read, quick, and sometimes confidently wrong.
Check what it tells you before you repeat it. And if a voice on the phone ever asks for money in the name of a relative, call the family first.
The young and the old need each other here. The Igbo say that what an elder sees sitting down, a child cannot see standing up. Frankie has the sharper eyes of youth, and some of us have the longer memory. Together we see more.
The warning in Orwell is about more than machines seizing the inner room. We may hand over the key ourselves, before anyone has asked.
In the bible, Apostle Paul says that now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.
Until that day comes, sit with your friends, look them in the eye, and keep some things between you and God.
*Chudi Okologbu Uwandu, journalist, cultural chronicler and public affairs commentator, writes on politics, society, and the rich heritage of his people.
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