Is the world too much with us?

For some reason, without any conscious effort, out of the blue I remembered that at my high school graduation way back in 1962 from Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, the poem The World Is Too Much with Us by William Wordsworth was on the program. At first glance, the poem, written in 1807, might seem more apt for today’s world than for the world of 1962 or even 1807. I still remember the words:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Wordsworth was one of the most influential poets in Western literature. His most famous work, The Prelude, is considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism.

But what of this poem? It was written during the Industrial Revolution, a period of technological innovation that disrupted entire society and thoroughly transformed British life — and that of the Western world. The poem laments the withering connection between humankind and nature, blaming industrial society for replacing that connection with material pursuits. For Wordsworth we have lost the ability to connect with and find tranquility in nature. In exchange for material gain, we have lost the rhythms of the natural world. As a result, those rhythms no longer have an emotional impact on us.

In a more modern context, some would argue that this is the result of capitalism. But it is not. It is the result of technological change and would occur regardless of the political or economic system. The poem laments the loss of a more agrarian life for that of an urban one. It is a familiar refrain for some of us who have seen back-to-nature movements come and go.

What of the 1950s? Why the importance at a 1962 high school commencement? What were our teachers trying to tell us? Looking back, the 1950s were really disruptive. I remember our first color TV — a tiny screen in a 1,000-pound cabinet that required four men to wrestle it up the steps from the driveway to the living room. There was UNIVAC, the first commercially produced computer, there was Sputnik in 1957, the development of the hydrogen bomb, and the tensions of the Cold War. There were also innovations in the music industry, such as LPs and 45s, that revolutionized how music was enjoyed and distributed. I remember my first transistor radio, which made it possible to take my music with me instead of being stuck in the house listening to the R&B station at the end of the AM dial. (BTW, did you see where Congress is mandating that automakers keep AM radio in their vehicles?) Underlying all of it was an explosion in patent filings, reflecting an unprecedented pace of innovation that transformed entire industries and profoundly reshaped daily life. The transition from vacuum tubes to transistors made computers smaller, faster, and more reliable, and the introduction of integrated circuits in the 1960s advanced computing further still, leading to more compact and efficient machines.

So it is not hard to imagine all the disruption caused by the surge in technological change in the 1950s, and how that disruption would still be echoing at a high school commencement in 1962.

Now the world is all a-twitter over AI. Some have predicted a doomsday scenario much like the Terminator or Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL. Did you know that if you shift each letter of HAL forward one, you get IBM, the AI of the 1950s. How times have changed — yet somehow they haven’t. But regardless of any threat to mankind, AI is transformative and will be more so as it matures. Will a future generation look back lovingly on a world without AI and recall Wordsworth’s words? Maybe. But I am more optimistic. Technology has always freed mankind from the mundane. When peasants were pushed off the land and into the cities by the agricultural revolution, many said we would starve because agricultural production would fall as people left the land to the machines. They were wrong. Yes, life in the cities was simply awful during that transition period. But out of the Industrial Revolution came the wealth and prosperity that has practically eliminated the grinding poverty and hand-to-mouth existence of our ancestors.

I am not a Luddite. I bet AI will do the same – is there a prediction market for that too? Instead of fearing for the lives of my grandchildren, I am envious of what their future will look like. But somewhere in the back of my head is the story from The Twilight Zone about seemingly benevolent alien beings landing on earth, curing disease, ending wars, ending hunger and poverty. The humans find a book belonging to the aliens entitled “To Serve Man.” It was a cookbook.