The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Reckoning with the power of tech, when there's no going back

In Homo Deus, the futurist Yuval Noah Harari characterises modernity as “a surprisingly simple deal” in which “humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” But with great power comes great responsibility - or, alternatively, great temptation.

The artists always see it first. Prescient poets grasped the contours of that bargain from the very outset: Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was written between between 1588 and 1592, at the dawn of modernity in England, and describes the tribulations of a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of power and knowledge. The German Enlightenment poet Wolfgang von Goethe took up the same theme on the cusp of Europe’s mass industrialisation in the 19th century: his iconic two-part Faust was published in 1808 and 1832.

Remarkably, Goethe also originated the pop-culture version of the same anxiety. The 1797 poem Der Zauberlehrling - The Sorcerer’s Apprentice - is so widely-known and influential that a simplified version of one of its lines has passed into common German parlance. And it also passed into 20th-century American iconography, via Walt Disney’s experimental 1940 creation Fantasia.

Here, Mickey Mouse is apprenticed to a powerful wizard, but must haul water laboriously by hand, from a well at the bottom of the tower, to fill a basin. When the sorcerer leaves on an errand, the apprentice enchants a broom to carry water for him. Then he falls asleep, enjoys a delightful dream of infinite, effortless power a- and is woken by water lapping at his feet. The broom is still hauling water! Mickey realises to his horror that he has no idea how to make it stop. In desperation, he chops the broom to pieces - only to find that each broom now begins carrying water, raising the water even higher. The mounting chaos is only resolved when the master returns and lifts the broom’s enchantment.

Whether it’s framed as a deal with the devil, or the invocation of forces not properly understood, Marlowe, Goethe and Disney all present the danger inherent in modernity’s bargain. It’s not just the loss of meaning: it’s that our powers don’t always take us where we want to go, or stop when we want them to. Equally, though, all three also capture the appeal of the Faustian bargain. Marlow’s Mephistopheles is charming; Goethe’s Faust is eventually saved; Disney’s sorcerer is angry but also (it’s hinted) amused. And in Disney’s work Mickey, the apologetic apprentice, gets away with one whack on the bottom.

I’ve written about the cyborg era’s Faustian trade-offs from a few different angles recently, for example the impact of digital culture on deep literacy and the grotesque effects of limitless surgical self-modification. Does this mean I’m a tech doomer though, who wants it all to go away?

Not quite. For one thing, I’m as cyborg as they come, not least in having been extremely online for 20 years. And I don’t think we’re on an inexorable path to tech-assisted doom. Not necessarily, anyway. So it’s probably time I said a bit more about why we’re possibly not doomed.

In this week’s UnHerd column I wrote about the complicated relationship between fitness cultures and modernity, drawing on Walt Whitman to argue that the Faustian impulse to use tech to escape our physical limits emerged in tandem with the technologisation of health via a burgeoning lifestyle industry. This industry, which first flourished around the time Goethe was writing Faust, seeks to harness technology not to escape but to optimise our embodied nature: to push our limits, perhaps, but not to demolish them.

In Feminism Against Progress I argue that we’ve left the industrial age behind, for a ‘cyborg’ one of digitisation and biotech. A central argument in the book critiques the culturally dominant cyborg application of these technologies, which aims to abolish human nature in the name of individual freedom.

It’s easy to despair when you see the overwhelming institutional dominance of this approach - but I don’t think it’s the only option. Others are exploring how - or if - tech can be used not to escape human nature, but to help it flourish. One such project, which I’ve been following with some interest since it launched, is the Miami-based matchmaking startup Keeper. Launched in 2022, Keeper is AI-powered and looks superficially like a dating app. But it’s explicitly not a dating app; it calls itself a “family formation service”.

Matches are offered one at a time. There’s no infinite scrolling through a seemingly endless array of mating options. And Keeper is financially incentivised to make itself redundant: unlike most dating apps, whose revenue depends on keeping users single, swiping, and subscribed, the service charges for success rather than subscription.

And - importantly - the onboarding processes for men and women are different. A spokesman for Keeper told me that they looked in depth at relationship science when developing the AI component and user interface, and particularly at the factors that contribute to long-term relationship stability - including how these differ by sex. He described the idea of a unisex dating app interface as “crazy”, noting that while it’s not clear whether sexed difference in mate choice is a product of nature or nurture, “it IS there. We know it's there, we see it all the time.”

Given this, if the aim of relationship tech is to find users a partner, it makes sense to calibrate the tech for those differences. It also makes sense to calibrate matchmaking for the factors that support relationship stability, and not just those which drive short-term attraction. This is hugely complex, Keeper told me, “But - it's doable. That's the AI stuff. Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision can do this stuff really, really well.”

Keeper has already chalked up successes. Elsewhere, we find innovators applying cutting-edge health tracking tech to fertility, with the aim of supporting women either to conceive or to avoid conception in a way that’s more in tune with our bodies than the blunt instrument of synthetic hormones. One such is a health-tracking ring that works with fertility apps to deliver something akin to a cyborg form of natural family planning. Anecdotally, I know women who love this tool, and extol how much better it is than being on the pill.

Dr Faustus and the Sorceror’s Apprentice express an ongoing ambivalence that - rightly, in my view - runs through modernity’s relationship to the tech that grants us ever more magical-seeming powers over nature. This ambivalence still applies to those innovations that seek to use tech in ways that harmonise with that nature. The dividing line between this approach and straight up transhumanism is blurred, to say the least. But I don’t think they can be denounced out of hand.

Keeper is one tiny startup, against a torrent of anti-normative culture and tech. It may not be enough. But undertakings of this kind may be our best hope, in pioneering a shift not ‘back’ to some vanished past, but from using tech to escape our nature toward harnessing it to flourishing within that nature. And while we could argue endlessly about the nature of human nature, Keeper’s approach is a salutary one. We don’t need to have established whether sex differences are learned or innate to see the patterns, and to order our technologies accordingly. This applies well beyond matchmaking and fertility: for example I’ve written about the potential afforded by remote work to enable more families to reverse the industrial-era split between work and home, to the benefit of everyone.

Centrally, this means abandoning the delusion that tech is value-neutral, and should seek only to increase individual freedom. Instead, as Jon Askonas has argued, we can’t stop at trying to protect the past from tech’s solvent power. We have to apply that power, too, while explicitly assuming that there are better and worse ways to live, and that we can use tech to scaffold better ones.

And while this sometimes makes me uncomfortable, I don’t see another option. There is no going back to the time before we swapped meaning for power. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we’ve already enchanted the broom. And unlike the apprentice, no one is coming to make it lie down again.