Walden Three
AI and the intention economy
My cat is called Walden. When people ask about the name, I point them to the book. They usually say something like ‘never heard of it!’ or ‘damn, that’s annoying!’ and we move onto something else.
Walden was published in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau. The book describes the two years during which Thoreau lived alone near Walden Pond in the Massachusetts town of Concord. Between July 1845 and September 1847, Thoreau built a small cabin, grew vegetables, and fished for food. He spent his days reading and writing, though he did regularly walk a mile and half to Concord to pick up supplies.
His mother sometimes brought him food and did his laundry, which the sceptical reader likes to mention with a certain amount of satisfaction. Others say that any help he received doesn’t diminish the value of the book or its ideas.
Walden is on one level a meditation on the march of industrialisation. It asks what is lost by the project of progress, which it weighs against the tranquility of nature. Modernity is found wanting.
Thoreau writes about warring ant colonies, the sound of squirrels on the roof of his hut, and the shifting colours of the pond. Nature is a wellspring of spiritual renewal, a cure for the bloated belly of American life.
The book argues that the trappings of modernity create anxiety about the world and our place within it. There is just too much stuff going on. The post office is pointless because letters are rarely worth reading. Newspapers never tell a person anything of value. On the railroad rides the slow train to nowhere.
We throw away clothes because we are worried about visible signs of repair. The modern man, Thoreau tells us, is more concerned with what is respected than what is respectable.
Walden takes this idea to its logical conclusion: the vast majority of economic life is pointless wheel-spinning. People work for superficial reasons when they ought to be more concerned with something deeper.
This is where the phrase 'men lead lives of quiet desperation’ comes from, which is now probably better known than the book. The idea is that some forms of work represent a kind of trap, which Thoreau tries to prove by calculating how many days of labour are required to purchase various goods.
It reminds me of the Adlerian view of ‘work’ as a contribution a person makes to the world around them. It’s anything that allows us to exercise capacities, stretch the mind, and make ourselves useful in the broadest sense. Building a cabin was practical work. Writing was intellectual work. And reflection was spiritual work.
But above all, the book is about intentional work.
Thoreau tells us that he “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
It’s a deliberation on the deliberate. When Thoreau meticulously records his expenses, he's making visible the economic decisions we normally make on autopilot. When he tells us about harvesting vegetables, he’s reminding us that someone else grew our last meal.
This is an important element of transcendentalist philosophy, which emphasises heightened consciousness and the examination of one's relationship to society, nature, and self.
Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, on whose land he was living, talked up this kind of self-awareness in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance. Thoreau’s stay in the wilds of New England took it further by creating a controlled experiment where it might flourish.
Walden Two
Almost 100 years later, the psychologist B.F Skinner thought about something similar. In Walden Two, Skinner depicts a utopian community for whom all aspects of life are designed to maximise happiness through the steady drumbeat of positive reinforcement.
The community operates under the guidance of ‘planners’ who make decisions based on experimental evidence. It’s a book that argues that environmental design is the pathway to human happiness at scale, that science can solve just about any ill, and that external action matters more than inner states.
Walden Two is a vehicle for Skinner’s theory of radical behaviourism, which held that all behaviour emerged through reinforcement. In language, for example, Skinner thought that children produce random sounds that are selectively rewarded by parents, which gradually shaped initial utterances into recognisable speech.
Language was not a window into an inner mental life, but a set of conditioned responses honed by environmental feedback. Skinner famously called this process ‘operant conditioning’ in which behaviour is dictated by its consequences.
Many were open to Skinner’s perspective, but others were less sympathetic. In the 1950s, the American psychologist Karl Lashley challenged the programme of radical behaviourism by arguing that the stimulus-response model was insufficient for language.
Lashley thought that humans plan entire sequences in advance, a fact made clear by spoonerisms in which speakers transpose sounds across words like ‘you have tasted the whole worm’ instead of ‘wasted the whole term’. Not long after, a young Noam Chomsky would argue that language was essentially innate before the pendulum swung back the other way to rest between the two extremes of nature and nurture.
Like its namesake, Skinner’s book sought to help us make sense of the best way to live. But where Walden is about awakening from the unconscious patterns that govern life, Walden Two argues that we should embrace them.
Both were rebelling against the routines that shape the reality of the everyday. They diagnosed the same problem but prescribed different solutions. Where Thoreau said ‘Become more conscious!’ Skinner said ‘Design better unconscious systems!’
Today, the AI project plays host to questions of behaviourism. It lurks in the background when researchers look to the brain for inspiration, and has become a source of interest for critics seeking to probe the persuasive potential of large models.
More recently, researchers have written about the ‘intention economy’. Where once the concern was that attention was the currency of the information age, this vein of analysis argues that the firms developing AI are looking to harvest data about user intention and sell it on to the highest bidder.
I’m sceptical that AI will birth an intention economy. After all, who needs to harvest data when you could serve a model for thousands of dollars every month? Why push ads into a conversation when you could make access to your agent free on the understanding that you take a small cut of any revenue generated?
But the intention economy is a useful conceptual tool for visualising what the second order effects of large models might look like. It helps us to imagine a place that would have intrigued Skinner and horrified Thoreau.
As Walden shows us, being aware of the system doesn't necessarily provide any respite from it. It’s an essential precondition, but also an insufficient one. We recognise patterns of technological influence while still being subject to them.
In this sense our moment doesn’t represent such a clear break with the past. The question is not how to resist novel forms of control, but how to develop responses proportionate to the intensification of the patterns that have always surrounded us.
In his 1979 autobiography Skinner said “Thoreau had tried to solve his problems by a kind of withdrawal from society; what we needed was a more productive relation to it.” From Skinner's perspective, Thoreau diagnosed legitimate problems with the industrial world but responded by turning away from them.
Building a cabin at Walden Pond was a solution that might work for the few but doesn't work for the many. Skinner's alternative represents a belief that collective action was needed for everyone to find their Walden.
The rub is that Skinner's ‘productive relation’ produces its own type of retreat. Not of a conscious withdrawal into nature, but of an unconscious withdrawal into artifice. Everything is perfect in Walden Two. Crime is non-existent, work is rewarding, and people are happy. They don’t worry about their place in the universe.
In fact, the thought never crosses their mind.