The people crave extinction

When god is the machine

I was sitting in a bar this weekend and listening to a patron and the bartender have the most mind numbing, infuriating, and generally maddening conversation I’ve overheard in a while. They were talking about the “AI revolution” and making bold and sweeping declarations about what it means for society, for daily life, for art, for everything. This started by the bartender claiming AI is just a tool, you know, like a tractor or a hoe or an easel. That it would be nothing without your input even if it - and I quote - “wrote a whole screenplay” for you. It’s still your ideas! Still your art! The conversation continued and I sat for another beer because I was glued to this slow-moving train crash. The patron at the bar was far more enthusiastic about AI and in meeting some resistance from a woman who was a veteran film photographer and hated the notion, told her she was “digging her own grave”. He insisted that art “isn’t worth buying anymore “ because AI is just going to do all of it, better, and for free! It took everything in me not to interject. This was vulgar. The total dismissal of the humanity of the arts. The idea that there is this one weird trick to reproduce the essence of being a conscious and sentient human being. To outsource your very self to a machine. Somehow this is good, great even! Not a deeply depressing sign of a looming dystopia. Not at all.

Photo by Gabriele Malaspina on Unsplash

As much as my work focuses on the zooming out and not blaming regular, powerless, overly-propagandized people for their own terrible conditions, there was a loud part of me in this moment that was like “yeah we deserve whatever happens to us”. I still find it so baffling the way regular people can basically root for their own downfall, can submit their humanity to machine, can discard all the important parts of being a conscious and self-aware being and sacrifice those things on the false altar of profit for the worst among us.

Thoughts began to flood my mind. What is all this for it not for the very things that prove to us that we are really alive? How can people root for their own extinction? Their own emptiness? How can anyone see the stripping of all the things that make us different and unique and make each life its own universe and root for that to be subsumed by a non-thinking chunk of wire and metal? Should we all just live in the same grey on grey sterilized boxes and go to our useless, dead-end jobs and own nothing and create nothing and have nothing be truly ours or a testament to the fact that we lived a life? Why are there so many people willing and ready to hand that over to people who wouldn’t muddy their shoes to step over you if you were dying in a ditch? What are we sacrificing all of this for?

Fascism wins by people thinking that they can give up on this or that basic part of who and what they are for some unrealized future gain, for some comfortable life someday, for the idea that their identity can be imbued into the state and that the state will care about them, by thinking that the crushing of your enemies is an acceptable replacement for a decent, well-lived life. Witnessing the willing sacrifice of everything it means to be alive for a big bucket of nothing is hard to comprehend yet so incredibly common. As this country has lurched rightward, the amount of people that seem to be willing to forfeit all their dreams and hopes for the pyrrhic victory of being on the winning team has grown exponentially. No longer is there any interest in self-actualization, community, building something to pass down to future generations, planting trees you will never sit under, connection, understanding. It’s all about personal aggrievements and hollow wins. It’s about making the others pay, it’s about deriving your sense of self from the God on the TV screen. It’s unclear to me what payoff these types even think they are getting out of this Faustian bargain. So the machine will do the poetry and the screenplays and the drawing and the music, so that you can what? Have more time to do launder and attend zoom meetings? Is that the vaunted future you are hoping for?

As much as the ruling class is forcefully seizing from us, even more tragic are the things we are handing over without a fight. A slew of recent articles have been written about people using ChatGPT to write the obituaries of their closest loved ones, and how AI obits (and even eulogies!) are big business. Nothing is holy, nothing is safe from the profit motive - not even the rituals of mourning our dead. We have become so alienated from each other but moreso ourselves, hollowing ourselves out freely - scraping out our insides and handing these most innate, precious parts over to the market. We don’t even know who the hell we are anymore. The sacred is now the profane.

There is no search for meaning, no lofty goals. Everything is on offer, everything is for sale. In so many ways we have become the machines we are deferring to. We are moving through lives in desperate search for expediency with no internal guide that tells us some things matter more than getting the job done. We are shuffling through the world, through our one inestimable human existence, trading away all that should be sacrosanct to save a few minutes here or there. Never questioning what this all is for, never seeing the divine in each other or ourselves. What truly separates us from these pattern matching algorithms if we are willing to give over all that makes us human? If we cannot appreciate the beauty of our aching humanity everywhere we look?

I don’t know what will shake us awake from this slumber and our slow march towards oblivion. I don’t know how exactly we reclaim the sacred parts of being alive and declare them untouchable by markets and machines. What I do know is that there is no future worth existing in if we decide that there is nothing of value that a human can make that an algorithm cannot. If we continue to surrender, bit by bit, each piece of our humanity in our hubris, eventually there will be nothing left. We will have destroyed ourselves. Utterly and completely. And in some ways, we will deserve it.