The Rules We Live By: Year in Review

Julien Crockett looks back on the first year of the LARB series The Rules We Live By.

By Julien CrockettJanuary 19, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Politics

AS THE WORLD unraveled from the shock of COVID-19 and the apparent failure of many of our institutions to anticipate and respond to a pandemic, I approached several writers in 2021 to review an onslaught of new books on the topic, books with titles like New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives. We brainstormed what a piece might look like, but in the end, reviewers sagely advised that it was too early to weigh in on such a vast and important topic, that they didn’t have sufficient expertise. Rather, a conversation was needed.

The idea of a conversation series around the shaky societal ground that led to the COVID-19 pandemic and its fallout kept nagging at me until an unexpected opening presented itself: the publication of Costica Bradatan’s book In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (2023). Preparing for that initial interview led to a fundamental rethinking of the series, a broadening of its focus. I would create a forum bringing together academics, artists, innovators, and thought leaders of all stripes to critically examine “rules,” both explicit and implicit, “natural” and human-made, and our proclivity for gaming them. The possibilities seemed endless, the goal clear: to capture the essence of what it is like to live in the 21st century following a fundamental questioning of our rules-based society.

In its first year, The Rules We Live By went in directions I didn’t anticipate—“rules” as a grounding framework has proven to be incredibly flexible. However, several themes emerged, themes we will all recognize, but—and this is my hope for the series—with insights that help us reconsider the ever-present, evolving rules ordering our lives. Here, I’ll highlight three themes from this first group of interviews in an effort to reflect on the year and ask what the conversation around the rules we live by should look like as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century.

First, staying true to the series’ origin, a recurring theme was “crisis,” and specifically, our current crisis of meaning. In the series’ inaugural interview, Bradatan lamented,

[W]e’ve stopped telling our own stories—living our own lives, making our own journeys—and instead we are content with the stories that are constantly thrown at us by the dominant ideologies (left or right), by our consumerist culture, by social media—by the all-pervading economic and social system in which we live.

According to Bradatan, we are surrendering our autonomy—and he is not alone in identifying this changing condition. While Bradatan identifies the cause of our crisis of meaning as the void left by the recession of our traditional sources of meaning, architects Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti identify the source as closer to home, literally. As our spaces become increasingly digital, it “allows us,” Ratti explains, “to algorithmically filter and curate experience.” And as our spaces become increasingly digitally “produced” or “managed,” the daily frictions we experience change, as do our social relations. This is a trade-off we must acknowledge and be deliberate in choosing as it affects us not merely as individuals but also as a collective—as families, neighborhoods, communities, nations.

Historian Jill Lepore identifies our “crisis” in something critical and more abstract: the transformation of the elemental unit of knowledge from fact to data. She explains, “The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by ‘facts’ is being taken over by ‘data,’” and in the age of data, “only computers can really know things. So we are as vulnerable as we were in a prescientific, pre-Enlightenment world.”

This transformation and the vulnerability we experience by ceding decisions to our digital devices brings us to the second theme, artificial intelligence (AI). AI is changing how we operate in society and challenging how we understand ourselves. When discussing the diminishing distinction between humans and machines, neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky expressed concern at the current AI moment and modern AI systems’ apparent emergent properties:

I think instead what happens is something that’s going to start being aligned with AI fairly soon, which is not that we make choices, but that our systems are sufficiently nonlinear that unexpected stuff emerges. For example, put as many neurons in a chimp’s head as we have and the chimp will come up with aesthetics and religion. They would be unrecognizable to us, but put enough neurons together, and that’s what they’re going to do. The nonlinear, nonadditive emergent features are going to bite us in the ass big-time with AI sooner rather than later.

How we should understand today’s AI systems is a fraught topic. In my conversation with computer scientist Melanie Mitchell and child psychologist Alison Gopnik, Mitchell listed metaphors we use to understand and talk about large language models (LLMs): “autocomplete on steroids,” “stochastic parrots,” a “blurry JPEG of the web,” “cultural technologies.” Mitchell concludes, “I’m not sure we’ve come up with the right metaphor because in some sense, LLMs are all these things.”

How should we guard against the misuse of these powerful new intelligences? Gopnik offers an interesting parallel with raising children:

Every time we raise a new generation of children, we’re faced with this difficulty of here are these intelligences, they’re new, they’re different, they’re in a different environment, what can we do to make sure that they have the right kinds of goals? Caregiving might actually be a really powerful metaphor for thinking about our relationship with AIs as they develop.

Science fiction writer Ted Chiang, however, worries that by focusing on the technology itself we are missing the point:

People who talk about aligning AI with human values imagine that if we could somehow solve this programming problem, then everything would be okay. I don’t see how that follows at all. Imagine you have some hypothetical AI that is better at accomplishing tasks than humans and that does exactly what you tell it to do. Do you want ExxonMobil to have such an AI at its disposal? That doesn’t sound good. Conversely, imagine a hypothetical AI that does what is best for the world as a whole, even if human beings are asking it to do something else. Who would buy such an AI? Certainly not ExxonMobil. I can’t see any corporation buying software that ignores the instructions of humans and does what is best for the world. If that were something that corporations were interested in, do you think they’d be behaving the way they are now?

Chiang’s suspicions about the incentives of those developing and using modern AI systems find their roots in the systems’ origins. Neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy reminds us why we developed automated decision-making systems during the Cold War: “to obviate our moral responsibility.” If we needed to retaliate against the USSR with mutually assured destruction, a person could not be trusted. After all, AI systems operate by fundamentally different processes from our own.

We see the promise of AI systems, yet feel anxiety around their applications, bringing us to the third theme, hope. The interviews remind us that we have a duty to be optimistic. As Picon explains, “I’m an optimist because I believe optimism is not a state of mind; rather, it’s a moral attitude.” Far from an excuse for complacency, this moral attitude is a call to action. “There is really no place for Utopia in our lives,” Bradatan says. We must continuously update and renew.

In its first year, the series captured a snapshot of what some of our most cutting-edge thinkers take to be the pressing concerns of a human living in the 21st century. They identified the issues and limitations of the models we use to understand ourselves and society. But there is so much left to explore. The conversation must continue and include a broader cross section of innovators, policymakers, and others who are playing key roles in debating and setting our common imagination about the next chapter of the rules we live by.