Article

Character

Culture

Digital

23 January 2025

7 min read

Apple’s AI ads show how we can lose our moral skills

Apple Intelligence promises to safeguard us from the worst of ourselves.

Jenny Lander

Jenny is training to be a priest. She holds a PhD in law and writes at the intersection of law, politics and theology.

A worker at a desk sits back contemplating a situation

Dour Dale contemplates AI.

Apple.

“I got through the three stages of the interview process, and they said I had done well, but they aren’t hiring any computer science graduates anymore. AI is cheaper, and faster.”

John*, a bright 24-year-old coder and philosopher, has just completed an MSc in Computer Science from one of the top universities in the UK. And he can’t find a job. AI has outcompeted him. In a couple of years, he says, entry level into computer science as a field will require a PhD. What about in ten years, or twenty? Will the only people able to work in the field have to effectively be geniuses to keep up with a technology that’s metastasizing at the rate of knots? It felt painfully ironic to be discussing over coffee the death of an entire sector of meaningful jobs less than a week after the new Labour government announced its plans to “turbocharge” AI (Artificial Intelligence) as the saviour of the nation’s economy. What are we willing to sacrifice in the name of “national renewal”?

As worrying as John’s story is, there is much more than jobs – and the skills, knowledge and social relations tied up in them – on the line when it comes to AI. The alleged saviour of the nation’s economy is after your soul as well, it turns out.

This came home to me starkly over the Christmas holidays with the new advertisements for Apple Intelligence tools on MacBook Pro. In the first ad, “Lazy Lance” – a procrastinating business professional – sheepishly shifts in his seat. He has been asked to make a presentation on the new business prospectus, and he has been caught out, unprepared. But he is saved at the last moment. The click of the “Key Points” button using the new Apple Intelligence software on his MacBook Pro provides him with the critical breakdown summary needed to avoid becoming the pariah of the team. The sheepish shifting turns to smug smile: his substandard performance has evaded detection with the ready aid of Apple Intelligence.

In the second ad, “Dour Dale” – a disgruntled office worker – writes a scathing email to the “monster” who has devoured his pudding from the communal fridge. Before clicking send on this missive, he raises his eyes from the raging words on his screen to see a pious teddy bear holding a love-heart which says “find your kindness.” This moral cue from a cuddly toy prompts Dave to select the “Friendly” button from the dropdown list on Apple Intelligence writing tools, which immediately converts his childish strop over pudding thievery into a mature response in which he kindly expresses his disappointment along with a polite request for the pudding to be returned. The only moral effort required of Dale is the click of a button; Apple Intelligence sorts out the bile and the blame and re-presents his pudding fury in a professionally palatable manner.

These advertisements for AI tools are designed to provoke an empathetic laugh. Who indeed can honestly say they have never arrived unprepared to a meeting, or at least mentally penned a vindictive response to the tiniest office slight?

AI is poised to strike at the root of our individual virtue, by inserting itself as an emotional regulator.

However, underneath the easy laughs, I felt a profound sense of dis-ease when watching them. They indicate just how far AI has already begun to penetrate our moral economy. By inserting a technological tool to disguise or translate social interactions into new terms, our moral relations with each other are deceptively smoothed to avoid the social and personal costs of shame (e.g. Lance using “Key Points” rather than owning up to his poor work ethic) and anger (e.g. Dale using “Friendly” mode to transform his email from raging diatribe into courteous appeal). As appealing as it sounds to have automatic tech weapons to tranquilise social and emotional bugbears, they also remove daily opportunities to learn how to live and work together.

For example, as excruciating as it is to be the person who came to the meeting woefully under-prepared, embarrassment can be a very useful corrective in learning the art of time management as well as the virtue of pulling our weight. We probably all know from school what it feels like to work on a group project, when only half the group cares about the outcome. If we do not learn moral skills of responsibility and accountability in our formative years, the workplace becomes a vital school for virtue in adulthood where we learn what it means to be trusted and how to be worthy of it. As in the case of Lance, AI now offers us everyday tools which help us to avoid embarrassment and effectively hide our lack of effort, taking the edge off of the very exposure that would help us to grow in both skill and trustworthiness. This is not propaganda for the Protestant work ethic but rather a top survival tip for the human soul in hyper-capitalist economy. Maintaining the moral significance of our labour as a school of formation in self-respect and trustworthiness does not baptise the extractive and exploitative nature of many workplaces. Rather, it offers a means of resistance to the soul-destroying idea that we are all replaceable, that nothing really matters and that our efforts are simply grist for the eternal and insatiable mill of market supply and demand.

In the case of Dale, Apple Intelligence goes beyond protecting users from social shame: it promises to safeguard us from the worst of ourselves. Of the two Apple Intelligence advertisements, I find Dale’s to be even more pernicious because it evidences how AI is poised to strike at the root of our individual virtue, by inserting itself as an emotional regulator. Rather than doing the difficult work of redrafting the email himself, which would require Dale to critically examine his own reactions and put himself into the shoes of the recipient, Apple Intelligence offers to do it automatically. By short-circuiting Dale’s process of recognising the emotions underneath his rage, he misses a critical opportunity to learn for himself what his anger is all about, and even more than that, to practice the art of genuine self-mastery in conflict. The AI tool smooths out the conflict on the surface, while Dale is presumably left with all those rotten feelings built up and unprocessed, because he has not had to do the difficult work of converting his aggressive monologue into a respectful dialogue with another human being.

The insertion of these seemingly innocuous AI tools into the spheres of our everyday, workaday lives introduces new means and modes of (self) deception in our habits, where we are able to hide much more easily from honest moral evaluation of the quality of our work as well as our interpersonal relationships. It also risks new heights of moral “de-skilling” over time as we live in a social and economic world that has become so deeply mediated by technology, to the point where we may very well eventually trust Apple as the gold standard of professional behaviour rather than our own discernment. The soul – our very interiority – is the new frontier of economic expansion, in the name of securing Britain’s place in the ranks of global competitiveness.

To AI enthusiasts, all this may sound like Luddite naysaying. Many people find AI tools helpful in the process of research and preparation. Even some priests, I have recently discovered, use Chat GPT to aid sermon-writing. And what, as a priest friend asked me recently, is the problem with these time-saving tools, as long as we use them critically?

Apart from the obvious answer that AI can’t be trusted to get all the facts right, let alone the word of God, this question presumes that human beings’ critical faculties and moral compasses remain fundamentally unaffected by these new technologies. It may be true for older generations (whose formative years occurred well before the meteoric surge of digital technology in the early 2000s) that technology continues to function as an optional extra to make life that little bit easier. But for Gen Z and below, and even for some younger millennials, intuitive digital technologies have become so fused with the ways that we learn and process information that it is no longer – if it ever was – a neutral tool to improve our lives. We are only learning now about the extent to which social media has thoroughly penetrated the emotional worlds of teenagers, with severe consequences for their wellbeing. What will be the consequences for the generations to come, when AI becomes so integrated into the emotional and social fabric of our lives that we cannot quite tell where we start and it begins? The risk with “turbocharging” AI is not only a huge number of jobs, but the atrophy of our moral muscles as AI encroaches further into the heartlands of what it means to be human. While a few tech elites may always stay one step ahead of AI and keep it safely in the toolbox rather than the driver’s seat, most of us time-poor plebians are being taken for the ride of our lives.

*Name changed for anonymity.

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Article

Culture

Generosity

Virtues

4 June 2025

6 min read

We need to rescue volunteering

Our use of the word now reflects unwanted obligations, rather than a deep desire to serve.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

Two small lifeboats raft together on a river rescue.

Lifeboats on the River Thames.

x.com/rnli_teddington

It’s a hot summer evening and there are 30 of us sweating in our dry suits. Tuesdays usually mean lifeboat training, but this night is a little different. An intermission from the usual intensity of a team-building exercise: racing two lifeboats across the river Thames. Allocated into teams of two rowing in a knockout tournament, we are going to be here for a while. Our cheers provide the soundtrack for the BBC radio crew recording a programme on volunteering. The mood is convivial; the competition is fierce. None of us have to be here; all of us choose to be. We are a lifeboat crew, and we are all volunteers.

Around 25 million people in the UK do some form of volunteering. And they are celebrated during Volunteers’ Week, which has been running for 41 years. The benefits are well documented these days. The mental and physical health boost. A sense of purpose. The chance to learn new skills. A route to forging connections with other people.

Despite this, though, the number of people volunteering has been on a twenty-year decline. One in three organisations are struggling to retain volunteers, in part due to the cost-of-living crisis making people’s time and capacity more precious than ever.

Beyond that, our use of the word seems to have shifted to reflect unwanted obligations, rather than a deeply held desire to serve. ‘I suppose I better volunteer to put out the chairs’ we might pronounce with the deathly weight of Katniss Everdeen’s ‘I volunteer as tribute,’ glancing to the left and the right in case anyone saves us from the undesirable task. It seems the very idea of volunteering needs rescue.

It wasn’t on my radar to be lifeboat crew, but an unexpected new job in an unfamiliar London suburb unlocked this possibility. When I considered ‘Why wouldn’t I?’, I couldn’t find a strong reason. So, one autumn evening I trekked down for my first Tuesday night at Teddington lifeboat station. It was time to fill in the paperwork: I was officially a volunteer.

Over the months that followed, I found myself wondering why other people gave their time, energy and skills to complete the nearly 50 training modules and to be available 24/7 when someone on the water was in need. I hungered for people’s stories, to know why they kept answering the call when their beds were warm and the night was unknown. So, over the four years that I was on the crew, I asked them. I spoke with teachers and students, company directors and full-time parents. I heard stories of multiple generations on a crew, their family’s blood running orange and blue. One woman spoke of overcoming her fear of heights to scale the side of a boat; another had an unexpected tale of a dolphin attack. Each time, I had the same question: why do you do it?

And I was struck by the fact that none of them gave an answer that fully added up. They could name parts of it: care for people, teamwork, a love of the sea. Sometimes of the reasons they started (‘Dad did it’) were not why they stayed on (‘I could make a palpable difference’). I didn’t meet anyone who didn’t enjoy being on the water. Play and peril can co-exist – and we need to have moments of joy along the way if we’re going to be in it for the long haul. But in each case, the answers always seemed to come up a little short. If I was looking for something neat and complete, I wasn’t finding it.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby. At some point, volunteering will cost you something.

Back on the river, the knockout races are suddenly interrupted. A call from the coastguard: there’s a person in difficulty in the river. The mood switch is instantaneous; the action swings from contesting to collaborating to get a boat headed upstream as fast as possible. Somewhere, someone is having a very bad day. This is what we exist for.

The RNLI was born out of a need. In the early nineteenth century, nearly 2,000 ships – and their crews – were being wrecked on British and Irish coasts every year. Sir William Hillary saw this loss firsthand from his home on the Isle of Man, joining with others to rescue as many as possible – but it wasn’t enough. People continued to perish. So, he rallied other activists and philanthropists, and in a London pub, the charity now called the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was formed. Hillary’s motto, 'with courage, nothing is impossible’, can still be found adorning lifeboat stations around the country.

None of the lifeboat crew members that I met seemed to think of themselves as anything but ordinary. They were full of admiration in the stories of fellow crew mates, but saw themselves as entirely human, naming everyday needs and familiar comforts. Writing about courage, Andrew Davison recognised that,

‘The willingness of a courageous person to forgo ease, safety, the comforts of home, and even to risk life and limb, does not spring from hatred of any of those things’.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby (also commendable for its health benefits, sense of purpose, opportunities for connection). At some point, volunteering will cost you something. That sacrifice is needed demonstrates the level of care; otherwise, it’s simply another act of self-actualisation in the service of the volunteer themselves.

It’s dark on the river and the boat crew is still out. The BBC’s team has packed up for the evening. We have tidied the station, no evidence of the antics of hours earlier. We depart. Close to midnight, those of us who can, return. We bring the boat in from the water, and make it ready for the next call, which will inevitably come. One less job for those who’ve been on duty all evening. It’s the least we can do.

In the origins of the term is a spirit of offering. The Latin voluntaries carries a sense of ‘to give of one’s free will’. This, perhaps, is where we’ve lost our way with the whole idea. For there to be a sense of duress in volunteering is to strip the generous act of its power. Where there is obligation on one side and self-interest on the other, we can find the middle ground marked by devotion, by having chosen to serve and therefore having the commitment to see it through. This is the invitation that volunteering can offer us, and that I glimpsed from people who had been volunteering on the lifeboats for decades.

Writing to the sea-faring city of Ephesus in ancient Greece, the church leader Paul encouraged people to ‘submit to one another’, which is another way of saying sacrificially help each other. In smaller coastal communities, a lifeboat crew might be called out to save a family member. In London, a city of millions, it will always be a stranger. But either way the decision was the same: to show up. The reasons why we do it don’t always add up. There are flavours of compassion, of wanting to be useful, to be part of something bigger. But there seems to be something else as well. A dedication to meeting a need. Put another way, we might call it love.

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