As artificial intelligence begins to mediate more of our cognitive labor, we face a fundamental question: what should humans still be expected to do for themselves? Aldo Leopold, writing decades before the digital era, saw a version of this dilemma. A forester in his early career, and later the inaugural professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, he is best known for his reflective writings on nature, which emphasized local, informal sets of knowledge alongside a strong ethical commitment to the environment. In “Wildlife in American Culture,” he warned that tools marketed as aids often displace the very skills they were meant to support. In his words: sporting goods stores, for instance, have “draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them.”
In the case of large language models and their rise, the local knowledge being threatened is writing, rhetoric, and cognition itself.
One does not need too much imagination to understand how Leopold’s critique of over-mechanized hunting is generalizable to the relationship between technology and all facets of life. In the case of large language models and their rise, the local knowledge being threatened is writing, rhetoric, and cognition itself. There is something crucial but ineffable about the role these processes play in our society, the latter activity being such a fundamental part of ourselves that we named ourselves Homo sapiens: “man thinking.” To avoid a complete identity crisis, we have to contend with how we integrate artificial intelligence into our society, likely in a more thoughtful way than laissez-faire adoption at the individual level. This, ultimately, requires a reframing of how we conceptualize technology itself, with values primarily geared towards forbearance, moderation, and the prioritization of local communities.
The consequences if we fail to do this are dire: even with the technology we have today, it is not too difficult to envision a collapse in rhetoric. I mean this not in terms of persuasion or its relationship to truth, as the poststructuralists once held, but in terms of the limits of human cognition, of swimming through a vast sea of AI-generated slop disconnected from human intention and responsibility. Removing the filter that human effort poses in the creation of rhetoric involves removing a kind of epistemological Chesterton’s fence. Writing was once a seal of authenticity, guaranteeing the presence of human thought. No longer. The mass production of disinformation or propaganda, furthermore, will be an impediment to cultural or political efforts. Such attacks could be pursued by any number of actors, from the “top-down” (governments using their technological advantage to widen their disparity in force) to the “bottom-up” (localized disinformation campaigns with ideological motives).
Lest this essay turn into an anti-technology polemic, we perhaps ought to turn to science and technology studies to figure out responsible uses of technology (as Leopold puts it, uses that “nourish our culture”). Bruno Latour, a founding figure of this field, argues that the Western paradigm largely avoids responsibility for the syntheses of nature and society we create. We have long drawn a dividing line between technology and humans, imbuing one with ethical responsibility and treating the other as merely contingent— therefore, technologies are “neutral” and it’s simply how they are used that matter. Rather than focusing our rights exclusively in the social domain, he argues, we ought to construct a “parliament of things,” moving our discourse beyond humans and towards what sorts of technology we ought to admit into the world.
It is precisely this “parliament of things” we need now, in jointly considering technology and its effects rather than leaving it to the masses. This parliament of things, importantly, does not necessarily have to be governmental in the way we conceive it today. All sorts of breakaway sects, in essence, have convened such a parliament—the Levelers in Civil War-era England, the Luddites, the Amish—by concluding that their world would be better off by selectively choosing what technologies enhance the human condition, and which technologies diminish it.
I come back again to Aldo Leopold, because this approach resonates with his most famous essay: “The Land Ethic.” Here, Leopold creates a distinction between a philosophical definition of ethics (that which divides actions into varying shades of social acceptability) and an ecological definition of ethics (the act of not using the entirety of force or power at one’s disposal). Leopold has all sorts of synonyms for this kind of ecological ethics (he refers to it as sportsmanship in “Wildlife in American Culture”), and this forbearance, of knowing one’s precise place in a much larger system, might be the central thread in his writing. We may be animals of distinction, but we are still animals in a kind of information ecosystem, hence exercising every single tool at our disposal comes at the peril of our health and the health of the broader community.
In today’s cultural environment, these notions of technological rejection, ecological ethics, or forbearance seem horribly quaint or naïve—many see power as something to maximally leverage without guardrails. It’s crush-or-get-crushed: to hold back is to be a sucker, to exercise restraint is often indistinguishable from surrender. The game-theoretical equilibrium doesn’t appear to be in the moderate state’s favor, either, due to global externalities: hold back on your development of technology, and risk being eaten by a country that has waved away the cost and embraced the proliferation of force.
Sitting at the plateau on the exponential growth curve of industrialization, we may yet be at the base of a second, much larger exponential function with consequences as foreign to us as the World Wide Web would be to a pre-enclosure peasant. The key term in that sentence, though, is “may”: privileging our past conceptions of humanity in our visions for the future seems to me to be the surest form of hedging one’s bets. Even those who treat the posthuman, post-cognition pipe dream as inevitable and desirable might find this positioning prudent.
Preserving the human within us presents a second possibility, as something we can return to if the technologist’s dream comes true in all the wrong ways. If our ability to discern positive “signal” in our interactions on the internet diminishes, we can fall back on local interactions, on communities wrought by proximity rather than strictly common interests. To put this in concrete terms, Leopold’s ethical paradigm suggests we create spaces—churches, schools, even entire communities—that choose not to adopt every technology simply because it exists. Such institutions are not technophobic, but ecological. Local activities like religious routine, oral tradition, and face-to-face democratic practices serve as continuity anchors, as reminders that our most resilient forms of meaning remain grounded in thinking and work that resist abstraction. Yet it is precisely their groundedness that makes them vulnerable: local proceedings and their erasure often function like a one-way valve, requiring far more effort to restore what once was than to initially displace it. If we are to have something worth inheriting, then, it will be because some subset of society recognized the technology-aided erosion of values and refused to give up their roots.
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