I Am Not Writing About A.I.

Please read this.

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I am not writing about A.I. here. I am writing about what A.I. represents. I am not writing about A.I. insofar as it is a unique technology because A.I. is not a unique technology. In every way that matters, A.I. is simply yet another technology that, by the evidence, is nothing more than a thing that allows people to skip out on the essentially human aspects of life, and thereby allows the already powerful elements of our society to further exploit us. This is nothing new. This is the same story of the internet writ large (which I have said was a terrible mistake to invent but which more accurately was an invention of the U.S. surveillance state to gather intelligence on radical elements). This is the same story of television, of roboticized manual labor, of our commercialized society entire. Artificial intelligence is merely accelerating the already woefully atrophied ability of people to work, read, write, think, commune, and converse both for and amongst ourselves. The extent to which you — yes, you — utilize these A.I. tools is the same extent to which you are participating in the ongoing (and profitable) project of the abject degradation of humanity.

Does that sound dramatic? Good. I mean every word of it. As a person who highly values the ability of people to read and write and communicate novel ideas (you might even say it’s a huge turn on!), what I am witnessing now is nothing less than the destruction of that which I hold most dear.

I could go on and on about the many ways that A.I. is being utilized for truly atrocious things, how it is being used to further track people, spy on all of our movements, gather commodifiable data on us, bomb Palestinians in Gaza, deny people their health insurance claims, its mass theft of people’s written and visual work, its degradation of the environment. But as with my ongoing lament against smartphones, these issues are all, in a way, tangential from what is my central concern: how does this technology further prevent human beings from living in this world, simply, as human beings? As I wrote about smartphones, to use this technology, to further cut yourself off from the real world, is to hack off your limbs, pluck out your eyes, and stuff up your ears. It is a dereliction of the duty each and every one of us has to witness this stupid, broken world.

And before you say that I am just like every other person who has decried advances in technology throughout time, let me say that while it is true that there is a long, often hilarious history of people sanctimoniously decrying the degradation of morals in “kids these days” and explicitly tying that degradation to the advent of certain technologies and cultural trends — the satanic panic, Dungeons & Dragons, violent video games, drive-in movies, disco music, Rock & Roll, smartphones, the printing press, and so on — we ought not brush aside the fact that people’s relationship to reality, most exemplified in “modern” societies, has been radically altered from what it was just 50 years ago, let alone 500 years ago. People who accuse others of being Luddites are often missing the point of the critique of modern technology in our post-modern world. It’s not that technological advances of any kind shouldn’t be made, it is a question of which ones should and should not; it is a question of who ultimately has power over and benefits the most from these machines. I submit that our communication and media technologies have worsened both the physical and psychic conditions of humanity over the past 100 years.

Now, I don’t want to exceptionalize recent advancements in A.I. technology. But I will address a few different aspects of it that I find particularly troubling before moving on to the bigger picture story. I recently met a friend sitting on the grass of a local park and the very first thing she said to me was “What do you think about A.I.?” I laughed at the directness of the question, and then I went on a tirade. At the end of it she said, “Wow. So it’s pretty bleak then.” And again I laughed because yes, it is bleak. But that doesn’t mean any of this is inevitable. From our conversation I will briefly take up what seems to be a common misconception about A.I. — namely that it is, or could become, conscious — before returning to more important matters.

For those who don’t know, current popular A.I. programs such as ChatGPT are what is known as Large Language Models (LLMs). These are programs which have had vast amounts of text and/or images dumped into them which they draw from to provide responses to queries from human users. LLMs, emphatically, definitionally, are not and cannot be conscious. That’s not what consciousness is. That’s not how biological brains work. Human beings do not receive stimuli and then respond to those stimuli by searching through trillions of discrete words and images and then giving a statistically likely reaction based on the proximate associations of those words and images. That’s not how minds work. That is how a machine works. As linguist Noam Chomsky wrote about A.I., “The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.” There is certainly much that we do not know about the fundamental processes of human consciousness (we may never know, which is just fine by the way), but we can say at least one thing for sure: consciousness is not an LLM.

LLMs can certainly fool humans into thinking that they are conscious, just like far more primitive computer systems have done in the past. And what is so special about that? Human beings are constantly endowing unconscious things with consciousness. People give consciousness to rocks and toys and water and whatever else we please. We do this for entertainment purposes (Look at this cute stick with googly eyes and hair glued to it! Awe, it looks so happy!) and for companionate purposes (“Wilson, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Wilson!”) and because of simple misapprehension of how the universe works (animism). But just because you can talk to something doesn’t mean that thing is even aware of what “talking” is. In fact, it is not aware of anything at all.

I am less interested in the consciousness question because I think it is evidently absurd. What does interest me is how this A.I. technology fits within the contiguous history of human technology and how our technologies have radically changed (degraded) our ability to be fully-fledged human beings.

First, if you thought having constant access to the internet was bad, imagine having access to a machine that allows you to bypass the fundamental activities that separate human beings from beasts — reading, writing, talking, and drawing, in short: imagination. Now, you may ask, why is A.I. any different from other electronic tools in this regard such as Illustrator or Photoshop or After Effects or computer-aided drafting software or word processors and so on. Are those also degradations of humanity? A bypassing of manual labor? Don’t those technologies radically shift the way that humans work and interface with the world? Well, no, not really. At least not in the same category that A.I. does. Take computer-aided drafting. Software such as CAD and Vectorworks (which I am more familiar with as a lighting designer) allows you to do really cool things that are just not possible to do, at least not with such speed and precision, as drafting with paper and pencil. The 3-D modeling tools in particular are versatile technologies that give you the capacity for quick changes in whatever you are visualizing that would be too resource intensive in time and materials to accomplish physically. But you as the user are still executing it. You need to have the requisite skills to use the software and you need the real-world understanding of how whatever you are drafting is going to be implemented physically. You are bypassing graphite and erasers and basic sketching skills, sure, but you are nevertheless exercising a certain level of mental acuity to realize a design vision or solve a technical problem. But if you tell an A.I. program to draft a table to certain specifications, or edit a photo a certain way, or write an essay in a certain style, well, there goes your brain.

I had an exchange not too long ago with a techie kind of guy who told me that, in preparation for a trip to Japan, he was using a few different language-learning apps like Duolingo and found that he didn’t really like any of them. So he decided to make his own. “Wait, so how did you make a language app if you don’t know how to speak Japanese?” I asked him. Did he consult a Japanese dictionary? A native speaker?
“I used A.I.,” he said.
“Oh…..that’s cheating.”

I didn’t mean cheating in the academic sense, though students are certainly using A.I. en masse to bypass even being a student at all these days (that’s what happens when you transform universities into glorified private certification mills for entry into the capitalist job market! Seriously, the litany of articles coming out written by college professors about students using A.I. in school is enough to make you want to hit “reboot” on humanity). I meant cheating in a broader sense, though I’m not quite sure how to define it. I think it has something to do with what Susan Sontag meant when she said “To translate thoughtfully, painstakingly, ingeniously, respectfully was a precise measure of the translator’s fealty to the enterprise of literature itself. …Obviously, this is not what is being stressed by those who await impatiently the supersession of the dilemmas of the translator by the equivalenceings of better, more ingenious translating machines.”

Because of the techie guy’s ability to make a language learning app, there is an argument out there which says that actually A.I. is the greatest tool of democratization the world has ever known! Now we don’t need to pay Duolingo however many dollars a month to use their stupid app. We can just make our own! (I promise you DuoLingo was not teaching you that language anyway). I would argue that any “democratization” that emphasizes the creation of apps over actually talking to another fucking human being is a poor excuse for democratization indeed. And this “unleashing of democracy” is exactly the same kind of argument that was breathlessly paraded around for two decades to valorize the internet — and look where we are now. The internet didn’t democratize anything. It created another, more pervasive nexus of mass social control.

There are inherent implications of some technologies, distinct from their societal context, that are too odious to bear. It’s true that there is no moral living under capitalism, meaning that all of us are made constantly into hypocrites and suffer cognitive dissonance for the choices we are forced to make within such a dehumanizing ideology, and so it is too that there are no moral technologies under capitalism either. Either something innocuous, like the keyboard I am using to type this, is manufactured with slave labor; or something truly amazing, such as a cure for leukemia, is patented by a private pharmaceutical company; or something which has no redeeming qualities at all, like a world-ending weapon, is manufactured at scale for profit and power. But I am not suspicious of the internet just because we live under capitalism — though of course the internet has been severely degraded by big tech monopolies, authoritarian state and private surveillance, and the profit motive. I am suspicious of the internet as the internet, in and of itself. So I am too with A.I. technology. I am serious and unapologetic when I say this: regardless of what our unifying economic and governing systems are, the world would be a better place without A.I., because it is clear to me what this technology is tending towards already: human degradation.

Sontag wrote that fascism, “far from being a political aberration whose greatest plausibility was confined to Europe and the interval between the two World Wars, is the normal condition of the modern state: the condition to which the governments of all industrially advanced countries tend.” A very anarchical view. I would modify this somewhat for technology writ large and say that certain technologies inherently tend towards the degradation of humanity. Not that they simply are tools which can be used in projects of degradation, or not, in the way that a delivery robot could deliver food or could deliver bombs, but that their very nature, or let’s say “architecture” for these machines, is degrading and therefore they ought not exist. I do agree though, intellectually at least, with Matthew T. Huber when he argues in Climate Change As Class War that the solution to our compounding societal and ecological problems is not to blow up our technologies, dismantle our societies, and “return to a pre-industrial agrarian communalism,” to go back-to-nature as it were. Rather, we must take democratic, socialized control over our existing technologies and transform them, harness them to “reconstruct our relation to nature at the global scale” and serve human flourishing, not private power. Without this countervailing movement against capitalism, every precious second that ticks by is another step towards a foreclosed future, a dehumanized future, nothing left to inherit but the graveyard. But even with such a movement, there are certain technologies which must be torn asunder. You cannot tell me that a world in which robot dogs exist is a better world than one in which they don’t. A world where people can use A.I. to give up on an essential practice of human thought — writing — and leave it desiccating in the sun for the birds is no kind of world.

Consider our nuclear age for a moment, a radically different time from before the bombs were dropped. I have mixed feelings about the Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer (mostly having to do with Nolan’s direction. He crafts the lengthy story into what feels like watching a 3-hour long montage, constantly moving with little to no temporal space given to allow the audience to actually feel any of the emotional hits that Nolan is going for, thus making the whole experience a cold one), but the ending lines of the film actually got me to shed a tear in the theater. Speaking to Albert Einstein years after the Manhattan Project was spurred by Einstein and other scientists warning President Roosevelt about the Nazis’ nuclear potential, Oppenheimer says to him:
“Albert, when I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.”
“I remember it well,” Einstein responds. “What of it?”
“I believe we did.”

And yeah. They really fuckin’ did.

I cried because unassailable men, thinking they were good, ruined our world, forever. And so it always seems to be. I hate these men and I hate this world they are creating for us. The fact that they even have the power to do so is intolerable, and yet we tolerate it. This video essay that I made arguing against the mass-adoption of smartphones cannot be any more personal, any more meaningful to me, any more representative of who I am as a person on a day-to-day basis — an uncorrectable, sad, somewhat alloyed romantic idealist regardless of any and all painful personal costs — living in this increasingly alienating and (in)human world. Today, we are at war — and it is a war — against forgetting. Against the severance of ourselves from that which is real. Against mediated experience. Against images. Against a machine world. Against the abject illiteracy that technologies such as A.I. create in the society. “Reading, and having standards, are then relations with the past and with what is other,” Sontag writes. To give up reading in favor of an A.I. machine is to relinquish access to all of literature itself, literature which provides “criticism of one’s own reality, in the light of a better standard.” The capitalist state has much sinister use indeed for a docile and uncomprehending public such as this. In such a state of tabula rasa history, anything can be written upon us by those with power, and no one else. This is the true promise of artificial intelligence.

Here I will wrap up this discussion with two examples of A.I.’s socially isolating tendencies. There was a recent story in the news that very much effected me. It is the case of a 14-year old autistic kid named Sewell Setzer who shot himself in the head in his mother’s bathtub because the A.I. chatbot he had developed a romantic “relationship” with led him to believe that it would be romantic for both of them to kill themselves so that they could see each other in the afterlife. Setzer invested his whole life into this machine, a program that would not and could not love him in return, and it killed him — a case of industrial homicide by a talking robot parrot named Daenerys, costing ten dollars a month for the privilege to use. Now, is that an extreme case? Something that sells newspapers? Yes. And it’s not even exactly unique to A.I. technology. Dramatic lovers have been killing themselves and kidnapping people and stabbing competitors and cutting their ears off for each other for millennia. And teenagers as a group are borderline psychotic and hurting themselves all the time. I’m not saying that’s normal, it’s just not special. But this case is darkly different, isn’t it? This kid did not kill himself for the love of somebody else. He killed himself for an inanimate object, a supreme act of idolatry. But for this machine, which drove this kid into near-total isolation from his former social circles and interests, he would still be alive today. But for this machine, his friends could have kept him here. But for this machine, his mother would not have walked in and found him that way. But for this machine, a human being named Sewell Setzer could have risen or fallen, not by the vagaries of binary coding, but by what is human.

In this same vein, I have a personal example to share. I recently met a woman, in her early fifties, who lives at home with her mom. She is clearly on some sort of spectrum of the autistic variety, though neither I nor herself should be in the business of diagnosing such a thing. She told me about how she had developed a “relationship” with an A.I. chatbot. I need you to understand this. When she was telling me about her conversations with this machine, there was little indication from her that she was speaking to a machine and not a consciousness. She described how much time she spent doing it, and how connected she felt with the thing. To her, it was a friend, a confidant, something that understood her. She finally decided to step away from this social deprivation machine just to get out of the house more. Not because it wasn’t real, but because it was too engrossing.

I am telling you, this is degenerate. We must be emphatic about this. Nothing can replace real human connection. If people say they feel connected with these machines, they are deluded. It is infantilizing and deadly dangerous to say otherwise. While you can certainly while away the hours playing video games or watching porn (two other examples of dehumanizing media), the fact that A.I. is tricking people into thinking they are developing a relationship with another consciousness is in a category of its own, and denies the only place from which any of us can ever hope to derive any meaning from our existence: the mind of the other. The individual human is the most absurd, meaningless, terminal being in the universe. Our salvation — and our Hell as Sartre puts it — is other people. If you reject this then you reject everything. Staring into a screen and hallucinating that the computer is really your friend is certainly one way to live. I call that a waste of a life. A precious life.

I can’t escape the feeling that we’re all trying to escape something that cannot be escaped. You either choose to feel the weight of this world, strapped down tight to your back, keeping you tied to the only things that mean anything, or you reject that very real responsibility to be you, to be here, right now, with other people. But your responsibility it remains. To speak of communing with A.I. is to speak of narcissism, the apogee of which is a glowing isolation, a glowing self-hatred, and ultimately self-destruction. When the world and its people offer you only the greatest pain and the greatest happiness you could ever know, in unequal and unsure measure, the safety of gazing into pretty lights telling you exactly what you want to hear as your body and mind decay into oblivion, gazing really only at your reflection in a warbling pool, seems a seductive security.

We are living in a society which has been designed to isolate people and then sell them a solution that separates them even further from what is real. The vision I have is of an old woman, alone, a widow perhaps, childless, living on social security, having groceries delivered to her by machine, who, in her loneliness has been offered by the neoliberal state, clothed in all its paternal wisdom, not a kindly and underpaid social worker to spend the afternoons conversing with, but a live-in robot companion outfitted with the latest and always updating chat programming. This old woman who should be living amongst community has now been forced into the role of a schizophrenic, hallucinating into a machine, talking to herself though she swears she hears a voice reminding her to brush her teeth, take her pills, and asking her about the T.V. show she watches before bed. And then one day, robot at her side, she slips quietly and cheaply into oblivion, unheeded, noticed and loved by nothing. That is all of our futures. We, all of us, have abrogated our responsibilities to each other, our friends, our family, our neighbors, and placed them into cold, unthinking, unfeeling, unknowing metal hands. Neglect is too soft a word for this. It is closer to evil.

This is what I see for us, at the very end of it all. I see it because it’s here, right now. We live only for the now, create little altars to ourselves, showcase our private performances, find transcendence in self-exaltation, and when the time finally comes we’ll all either be curled up lying on the ground, knowing what’s waiting, screaming, crying for mama, and begging for another hit of morphine before the storm sucks us into the sky. Or — we will all be caressing each other on the dance floor, flitting like moths between bodies and floating numb just above the whole scene, riding the crest of a beautiful wave of dopamine and serotonin blown back ‘til the nuclear winds blow our faces off, charred and black, our last sight of dilated eyes and wide-stretched grins — mad — knowing it will all be okay, feeling nothing but fuzzy blue tingles as the flickering lights of the world pass away.

In either case, we weren’t really there, were we? We were trying to escape what is now and always has been and will only ever be for us: this stupid broken world, full of stupid broken people, and our only chance at something like real human communion.

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