The world is changing again. Do you feel it? Some say by 2027 we will enter a brand new paradigm, via Artificial Intelligence singularity or [The Geophysical Event] or otherwise in a sudden evolution of the nature of the human consciousness. Might we already be there? The Internet has certainly changed much in the last 5 years. Have you?
Did you know over half of the Internet today is bots? (moreover, >80% is bot-like activity.) {Hopefully you are not one of them.} A.I. has become ubiquitous in corpo labor and street-level advertising. Your friend might be asking CatGPT or Rock about world-historical events and crucial life choices. Aren’t you?
The truth is that Artificial Intelligence, in the form of these Large Language Models (LLMs), is both a snake oil pitch in the vein of the magical thinking that transformative yet mysterious tech can produce <and> an effective means of demeaning the human consciousness. {LLMs do not reason but instead guess, often lie, always appeasing the user, all built on stolen data & art; Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) coming from LLMs is highly unlikely.}
For now, I’d say the plan is to make the general populace utterly dependent, psychically and thus economically, on these ambivalent chatbots. For the people presiding over the most narcissistic age in human history, this has various implications one can feel free to wildly speculate about.
A new age of mass automation {& psychosis} is upon the world’s labor forces. It is a familiar playbook in the capitalist formation of the economy: Displace mass-level labor to cheaper alternatives and raise the bottom line, grow the stock price, ad infinitum. Evermore the goal remains driving up more subscription / rent revenues into the various tech-makers’ already draconic hoards. A.I. investment is trumping all other enterprises at the moment. It is almost like the world is betting everything on this tech to deliver the future on a silver platter. {It is also worth mentioning that these A.I. data centers end up using precious water resources in dry regions where annual temps rise and drought is common.}
But is this something the taxpayers’ desire? Everyone can see prices rising, economic dreams dissolving. Housing, healthcare, wages, and taxes are always the primary drivers of political complaint; and yet, we are getting unwritten Neo-NAFTA via A.I. with labor power once more being removed from American households at the behest of the big industry players it benefits. Meanwhile: Rent goes up, wages stay stagnant. GDP growth seems to only be benefiting millionaires and billionaires {and some say even millionaires are struggling. Yeesh!} Costs of living continues to skyrocket via inflation. This will spear-head new forms of economic anxiety and despair, even as chatbots start to cause bouts of schizophrenia in the tax-paying public.
Can a chatbot build resilient and future-forward infrastructure? Can a chatbot move earth from Point A to Point B? Will a bot be able to discern right and wrong? (Do we want them to?) Is that little chatbot you are pouring your mindscape and true life confessions into going to be secure from data thieves and corporate leaks? {Are you being gaslit by a digital ghost?}
More importantly: Why isn’t America laying down steel anymore?
Oh, I see you can build a god-tier, high-accelerationist A.I. Agent! {One million new terrible startups blink in and back out of existence; ten thousand email jobs go missing in the same blip} Fantastic. But where is your agency as a human citizen? Is your income secure from automation? Can you comfortably pay your bills? {If you are American, do you have healthcare?} Do you believe our governments have a plan to orchestrate the continuity of neoliberal necro-capitalism in an age of dwindling real (i.e. non-artificial) profits and labor displacement? Are they counting on mass homelessness to usher in legal slavery for subsistence?
A.I. is simply the next stage in the methodology of co-opting human psychology in the destination of expensing more and more of our life energy loops into recurring revenues for banks and billionaires.
Important A.I. Implementation Result: We are entering an age where the ability to hold your concentration for more than minutes at a time will be seen as a serious skill and where the action of storing up your own fleshy databanks {i.e. reading books} will be a transcendent soul-class signifier of your present stature as a human being who retains a healthy brain.
Readers, thinkers, lovers, artists ~ these will be the golden children of the next age.
Let this truth be some kind of silver lining.
My advice to the average human being facing this mainstream reality would be to alter course, post-haste. Turn away from the techno-reality of artificiality that is being offered from the corporate institutions of our present world-build. Do not give your brain over to these jackals and their lying machines. 1) Read books, yes (more than ever!), but 2) go harder in the real raw territory of life experience ~ communal relations, labor organizing, historical perspectives, hard science, artistry and artisanship, family-rearing. Start jobs and complete them. Make art. Study and learn every day. Everything great about the human being sources from our ability to engage our consciousness with what matters most. By our wills alone may we evolve toward better fates than our predecessors and transcend our political circumstances.
Democracy is failing and wealth & power continue to consolidate. This is nothing new. The 21st century is young and there are many transformations yet ahead. The United States where I live exercises fascistic hegemonic control over the world and regularly chooses war; no doubt other paths are available and lay ahead of us. The slow fall of every empire may be inevitable. But the mothers and fathers of the next generation are here to act either way in the here and now. We need to be organizing for the sake of our collective future, with or without the help of governments and corporations. I do foresee a future of decentralization shockwaves and raw independence, for good and ill.
At any rate, the future is promised to no person or nation. Preparation and good judgment are necessary for survival in the fearless future of AI-accelerated social barbarism and prospective climate collapse, among always evermore wars.
Governments and warmongers be damned, I personally believe humans are more resilient and compassionate and ingenious than we yet give ourselves credit for. And after all of history and these billions of coin flips that landed us here, I have to believe that a better future is possible, beyond all this corruption and waste. There is a future worth loving and *seizing* on offer. It is just up to enough of us to pursue that future.
So I say learn to be a human again in this age of post-humanity. Return to the roots of reading, playing, and acting ever-presently with passion. Solve problems, make connections, stay curious. Whatever you do, go forth with passion and the world shall align to you and redound with compassion.
I have my own struggles. These are my honest beliefs.
One way or another, time to alter course and accelerate. ~
Thresholds of Transformation 