The Passenger We Call Humanity: How Homo Sapiens Lost Their Nerve

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.  (Genesis 1:27-28)

If there were an equivalent to Paul Revere is today's creative arts, they might go charging through the darkened highways and byways of this land frantically shouting "The robots are coming!  The robots are coming!"  Robots and computers and algorithms that are capable of producing human-like writing, visual art, and even music and video.  But alas, our friend is too late.  The call is coming from inside the house.  They're here.

The question, and promise, of automation is nothing new.  Aristotle wrote in his Politics, "If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... if, for example, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, then chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves. (Book I, Chapter 3).  Machines, particularly those that could order themselves and require little supervision, could reduce human drudgery and relieve the need for bondage.

However, speaking from the middle of the 4th century BCE, it appears that The Philosopher has missed a great deal and thus his paean to the possibilities of automation comes off as overly rosy.  For example, without the Reformation and the looming spectre of John Calvin, Aristotle misses out on the Protestant Work Ethic, which tied working up in virtue as a way of attaining dignity and serving god.  Further, the ethic of accumulation that underpins the Capitalist order (and echoes the Calvin's assessment that material success is a sign of divine favour) funnels all considerations into the rubrics of efficiency and monetization, eventually coming to market optimization.

Instead of setting humanity free from drudgery in order to pursue their self-actualization, the deep learning models of contemporary artificial intelligence point to something far more alarming and insidious.  Humanity, in outsourcing its art and expression to the algorithm, has lost confidence in itself as a species.

We have a long history of doubt and ambivalence when it comes to the improvement of machines and the possibility of them supplanting us as the dominant force on this planet.  In James Cameron's Terminator franchise, the artificial intelligence Skynet becomes self-aware and declares war on humanity, cranking out loads of identical killer robots bereft of individuality or personality and hell-bent on wiping us off the face of the Earth.  This is played in another direction in the Wachowski's Matrix property, where human beings are kept in a suspended animation and used as an ersatz power source.  The grand commandment of Genesis, to replenish and subdue the Earth and have mastery over it is turned on its head and we wind up as so much bioelectric livestock powering the goals of our artificial successors.

It's been this way since Frankenstein, and probably before.  We attribute our will to power to machines and assume they will forcefully wrest the planet from us.  That is, after all, what we have done to every species and ecosystem we have encountered.  Vulnerable beings are exploited, enslaved, and marginalized.  At first we did this openly, but eventual modesty necessitated the need for fig leaves like the carceral state, austerity, and supply-side economics.

But while we were distracted standing watch for gun-toting cyborgs, we missed the part where they absconded with our humanity in a far more fundamental way.  And we missed it because we were amusing ourselves almost to death.

“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” (Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man)

Schiller, in his consideration of what really makes us human and thus separates us from both lobsters and toasters, puts forward the idea that we find our strongest self-actualization when we are at play.  We come to the fullest fruition of our humanity through being relieved of the forces of need and duty and thus able to enjoy liberation from necessity.  When we play, we exert energy for no other purpose than to do so pleases us.  This experience of freedom links play to aesthetic activities and the pursuit of beauty and truth.  It is something we pursue as an inherent good, for its own sake.

So it is with art.  We make art (whether painting, sculpture, films, plays, or music) as a way of expressing this phenomena that is "me."  It is among some of the most demanding activities we can engage in, and this exercise of our capacities to their fullest extent is at least one way to take pleasure in one's own existence, a pleasure that may be magnified in the company of others because we are social creatures after all.  If play is understood this way, then it is an activity that needs relatively little explanation.  Life is an end in itself, and a desire to exercise the powers of life follows naturally.  This desire to express connects us strongly to the natural world and to one another.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 52)             

 

Hawks can screech their defiance to the air. A human being can yawp over the roofs of the world. These are fundamental cries of "I am here. I have force." It is difficult to imagine a robot yawping, and impossible to conceive of a toaster doing so. Could an algorithm yawp?

 

I am inclined to say that robots, algorithms, and toasters (no matter how brave) cannot properly yawp. There is, in this case, no actual "I" to do the yawping. The code that may animate the toaster, or the algorithm that filters your media, has no sense of experience. You can't really ask yourself, "What is it like to be an algorithm?" It's not like anything. It has no sense of what it is to be here and now. And yet it is precisely these packets of code, and the infrastructure surrounding them, that we are excitedly testing the expressive capabilities of with ChatGPT, DALLE, and a whole rogues gallery of other programs. 

 

 

As a teacher, I cannot say that I find it particularly surprising that students are turning to artificial intelligence for help (and more) with their homework. This is what they have been incentivized to do. They need the degree to get the better job. They want the better job to make more money. The term paper is something they must do along the way, and the intelligent student will work smart, not hard. The big bad wolf has a passion for pork, not for breath exercises.

 

That the students are ultimately cheating themselves is something, I fear, many are too shortsighted to see. In outsourcing their thinking to machines, they abdicate one of their responsibilities as an adult in society. Tom Rachman, writing in The Globe and Mail, notes that this does not bode well for Democracy, the form of government that (despite its problems) is most rooted in a faith in human judgement. Or, as Frank Herbert put it:

 

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”  (Frank Herbert, Dune)

 

How far are we falling? Is our faith in ourselves so delicate that we will gladly abdicate in favor of our own creations? A recent study reported in Futurist indicates that over half of all textual content on the internet has been either generated or translated by low-quality AI.  As the technology has become more effective and ubiquitous, the web has been flooded with AI generated material that has picked up the not-so affection nickname of "AI Slime." This "Slime" has been crowding into the algorithmic feeds, inundating users. Further, given that most of these AI are trained on the text of the internet, it's also infecting their own training data (especially in under-resourced minority languages).

 

Such terrible food. And such small portions! No wonder the Dead Internet Theory is gaining credence. It essentially kicks enshittification into overdrive. When a platform launches, it treats its users well to deliver value. Once they are locked in, the platform turns to advertisers. Then, once both buyer and seller are trapped, their data is mined further and the platform humps that corpse for payouts to shareholders. It feels almost poetic that this low-effort slime is also being largely engage with by AI-driven bots, as opposed to humans with money to spend.

 

The promise of the release from drudgery was meant to increase humanity's access to self-actualization. In study after study, people indicate that if they did not have to worry about money, they would turn to the creative arts. They would paint, or draw, or write. Our primitive ancestors began painting their caves as soon as we were good enough at hunting to ensure a surplus of food. Even the famous quote beginning "I must study politics and war.." from John Adams points to an idea of freeing humanity generation by generation to pursue what we find best in life.

 

Yet, the clarion call of late-stage Capitalism seeks to have computers write loads of books that nobody particularly wants to read. To crank out quickly loads of subpar images and videos to keep the mill full of grist. After all, if we aren't aspiring to write our novel, then we can focus a bit better at getting those TPS Reports (with coversheets, natch) to the boss by Friday.

 

It is ridiculous. But we've done it to ourselves because, and this is important, that is what has been incentivized.  The species that once went to the moon, created both War and Peace and Flappy Bird, moved mountains, and (at least temporarily) stopped fascism in its tracks no longer has the stomach to write or paint. Computers can do it faster (if not better) and will improve as computing power increases. It's a brave new world of slime.

 

How ridiculous are we talking here? Let us consider outsourcing another element of our basic humanity, the drive toward sex and intimacy. If we want to do this efficiently, we can simply stuff a vibrating dildo inside a masturbation sleeve. Make sure the batteries are fresh, press the buttons, and voila! Instant, unlimited, and efficient sex. The dream of capital come true.

 

Aren't we having fun?