Living Deliberately in a Tech-Infused World

Last week, I listened to Kevin Roose and Casey Newton (hosts of the tech podcast Hard Fork) speak with Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind. Toward the end of the show, Kevin posed a question that took his usual “tech exec” interviews down a not-so-usual path. It was philosophical, historical, and literary.

In my opinion, Hassabis’ answer was grossly ideal and out of touch with reality. But, in this post, I’m not writing about his answer. I really found more value and respect in the question:

Kevin Roose’s Question

During the Industrial Revolution, there were lots of people who embraced new technologies, moved from farms to cities to work in the new factories, were sort of early adopters on that curve. But that was also when the Transcendentalists started retreating into nature and rejecting technology. That’s when Thoreau went to Walden Pond. There was a big movement of Americans who just saw the new technology and said, “I don’t think so, not for me.” Do you think there’ll be a similar movement around rejection of A.I.? And if so, how big do you think it’ll be?

Demis Hassabis’ Response

I mean, there could be a “get back to nature.” And I think a lot of people will want to do that. And I think this potentially will give them the room and space to do it, right? If you’re in a world of radical abundance, I fully expect that’s what a lot of us will want to do. I’m thinking about space-faring and maximum human flourishing. I think those will be exactly some of the things that a lot of us will choose to do, and we’ll have the time and the space and the resources to do it.

After listening to this final segment of the show, I decided to explore the question for myself. I wanted to know: Were there other answers out there already? How would I answer this question?

I thought it would be fun to try and turn this exploration into a potential podcast transcript to be fed into ElevenLabs for today’s episode. I searched the internet and pulled some articles discussing the Fifth Industrial Revolution, put them into ChatGPT, and then I created a fictitious guest for chatbot host Chris to interview. I gave ChatGPT some insight into Chris’ fictitious background, and I made the guest a professor of digital anthropology whose current research focused on the human response to AI. Then, I tried again, this time making the guest an English professor to see what responses that might generate.

I’d like to say, Voila! Here’s today’s episode! But,the workflow just got too messy, and I wasn’t impressed with ChatGPT’s generated transcripts. (Yes, I was impressed in terms of its nice thrown-together conversation where both speakers appear to know what they’re talking about in the roles they were given; but, no, not impressed with the lack of natural transitions or engaging responses between the two speakers. That’s where ElevenLabs wins.)

Nonetheless, what did strike me in one of ChatGPT’s not-so-good transcripts was a term that one of the fictitious professors brought up: Tech-sedentism. It was an interesting mashup, but it just didn’t land right for me. I actually thought that maybe ChatGPT made a mistake. It was a few letters shy of mashing up technology and transcendentalism. Shouldn’t the mashup be Tech-scendentalism? But this term appears nonexistent in my search efforts, so maybe that’s why ChatGPT wouldn’t have generated it. (Afterall, LLMs can’t generate language it can’t or hasn’t been fed, right?)

So, what do you do when something doesn’t exist, but you want to know more about what it might look like if it did exist? I turned to Perplexity and found a great start to what I think might be a viable guide for how to live in this new age of AI.

Here are the six pillars that Perplexity speculated for what Tech-scendentalism might include if it were to exist: (1) digital self-reliance, (2) mindful simplicity, (3) connection to (and through) nature, (4) free thought and digital nonconformity, (5) ethical intuition and digital empathy, and (6) confidence in human potential.

Perplexity went on to say that Tech-scendentalists “would seek to harmonize technology with the timeless values of self-reliance, simplicity, nature, free thought, and ethical intuition–using tech as a tool for deeper human experience, not as an end in itself.”

While I have chatbot hosts Chris and Liam unpacking these pillars in today’s episode, I plan to conduct more research on what these pillars could and should mean for us humans. Who knows, perhaps it might end up being more helpful than some clever acronym baked into a pretty graphic organizer or answers offered by any Big Tech executive.

For me, there’s a sort of comfort in this idea of Tech-scendentalism. Its roots firmly gripping a simpler past, holding on to something deeply familiar while we’re finding ourselves simultaneously being drawn further into an unknown tech-infused future.

Only the “Over-Soul” knows what Thoreau and Emerson would think if they were here today.

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Talking the Read

Episode 6: “‘Tech-Scendentalism’: Reclaiming Humanity in a Digital Age”

Show Notes

Today’s episode is based on search results generated using Perplexity, the first two sections in the following PDF: “Tech-scendentalism” According to Perplexity and ChatGPT.

Inspiration for today’s episode comes from the podcast Hard Fork, “The Man Who ‘A.G.I.-Pilled’ Google” (from The New York Times, 23 May 2025)

Two Things I Learned in Producing This Episode

• ChatGPT pulls from its user’s other threads. While I didn’t use ChatGPT’s inquiry results in today’s episode, it’s worth noting this observation. (I include more details on this in a footnote in the PDF linked above.) The skinny? I’m pretty sure ChatGPT will try to produce results that complement other ideas from otherwise non-related threads generated by the same user in separate Chat sessions. In other words, the model is feeding off of its user’s own threads. My opinion? This may or may not be a good thing…
• Perplexity is only getting better. I was reminded of how much I am increasingly preferring Perplexity over Google for research and for news. I used to appreciate certain social media for its ability to generate desirable news feeds; but, Perplexity now offers customized news feeds and more efficient and productive ways to interact with its news posts. It’s much quieter than social media 🙂