Caveat: I am no expert on AI or technology. But there is a place for intuition in understanding our current moment. So, my gut tells me something has gone awry with wider discussions and framings of AI, perhaps especially LLM’s like Chat GPT. The smell of bullshit pervades.
What am I smelling?
I’m starting to suspect the current hype and hysteria around so-called AI* is the closing rather than opening act of what we might call the rise and fall of the computer. Rather than revealing a horizon of practical possibilities, AI represents the terminus of our current technological era.
This explains the hyperbole of tech boosters, as they’ve fully embraced their role as the frightened prophets of a failed messianic transfiguration. There will be no robot Jesus, no robot anti-Christ, no machine apocalypse, no technological transcendence of the body. There is no singularity on the horizon. Jobs was no son of God. Musk will not reach the heavens.
The tech-divinations, brought to a new fervour with the AI-scare, are a natural consequence of the psychological contradictions faced by any true believer with an ideology, brought into fatal contact with reality. Their vision of the world-transformed must be realised, or the world-as-is must come to a tragic end. But in fact, our world is highly resistant to both outcomes.
The real danger of AI—and the computer-era’s denouement—is that those with power over the technology will use it to try to tighten their control over, and ability to exploit, human beings. They will seek to order and control the world with greater efficiency, meaning with less reliance on untrustworthy human beings, by way of evermore fear-/salvation-mongering.
They will do what masters have always done, try to convince the mass of humanity they are sinful, incompetent, unworthy, that we deserve our lowly position, as the masters deserve their exalted one. Despite all the rhetoric of disruption and innovation, these lads stick to the old psalms.
In the gloaming of our computer age, the masters will promise they can still change the world, or, if that proves unconvincing, warn they are the only ones who can save it. Meanwhile, day in and day out, the rest of us will confront the stupidity of computers, which becomes evermore obvious, and painful, as the computing machines are put in control of more and more of our world, making it shitter all the time.
And still, they will be used to shape the world, not because the computers can manage or restructure our world better than we can, but because they serve their masters better than we ever will. The computer (the complex computations) are simply a tool, and big tech is trying to make their tools bigger, stronger, and more powerful because they’re less and less effective, as we’ve become wiser about them and the masters more ambitious–their hubris is limitless.
The fight is not between the human and the machine; there will be no real-life rematch between Sarah Conner and the Terminator. Our fight is between the humans who want to use their machines to dominate** and the humans who refuse to be dominated by, or turned into, machines.
The true promise of the computer age, nearing the terminus of its material development, is the possibility of the intelligent and social use of that technology, for common and public ends. But this requires, as real democratic society always does, honesty about what the tech really is and what it can do, realism about its limits and costs, and the maturity to use it in a humane way.
There is a further link here between the computer age and the broad set of developments we call neoliberalism. Faith in so-called AI belongs to the same human-hating thought-world as belief in the rationality of market signals, one which is impatient and frustrated by humanity’s resistance to order and rules, driven by that old-time religious passion to perfect the world. Or if that fails, the desire to watch it burn, or sink, or drown–whatever, just so long as all the messy, smelly, confusing, and frustrating people disappear. Then the master’s can enjoy a perfect future with their obedient automatons.
*Let’s be real, it’s not intelligence, there’s no volition or creativity here, it’s an evolving capacity for computation, which his essentially calculation and rule following.
**Or those strange humans who want to become machines of domination.
Dr Joe Hoover 