AI-controlled Digital Concentration Camp
Since he came to the scene as a dominant force in the last few hundred years, one of the main instinctual reactions of the bourgeois type is to avoid any responsibility for his actions. This characteristic which became increasingly more prevalent, as is confirmed in many cases, reveals the feminine nature of the race of peasants where bourgeois type predominantly comes from. Progressive tendency of those managing the system to delegate responsibility to various abstract entities, constantly playing victims, finding villains, etc. has worked very well for decades, because it found the match in an equivalent tendency of a managed mass- man to point fingers, to transfer blame to others and being interested only in his “own thing”. Generally immense amount of systemic issues have accumulated over decades of this kind of approach where real action in facing survival issues is almost absent and what’s considered work amounts to dealing with complications produced by much more fundamental systemic flaws.
Development of AI systems in a general trans-human and post-human climate is a logical next step in delegating all decisions to abstract, and in this case post-human entities, like various AI systems, restricting human action to some kind of administration of these systems and following AI- generated superior ideas and suggestions. Although current AI systems have very impressive capabilities, especially for people not familiar with AI developments since it was invented after the Second World War, given the state of the programming craft which hasn’t changed or even deteriorated since the 1980s, one should be very careful in attributing it superior qualities it does not really have. Since it’s inception after the Second World War, AI went through several “hype” periods when people thought that every problem can be solved with it, but in reality most AI systems over the decades, including the current ones, are very brittle systems without much resourcefulness which typical human has. Current systems are more impressive for particular domains, but not much smarter than their predecessors. They take advantage of large amounts of data available on the Internet and powerful hardware which developed exponentially as was predicted by Moore’s law. Their inefficiency does not seem like a problem yet, but it might become a huge one given the growing energy restrictions which befalls the world on the verge of bankruptcy.
The praise AI developments are getting recently should be put in the wider context of the technological optimism which is one of the aspects of the implicit religion of the “last man”. Most of that optimism is misplaced given the poor state of the software systems in general, and the craft which produces and maintains them. It is well known that 80% of the effort in the production of a software system goes into it’s maintenance, so one should put that in the perspective of the end of all fiat currencies and general worldwide bankruptcy, and ask the question, who is going to pay for all of the maintenance of those systems in this context? It is also known, but less so, that almost all hardware and software inventions which today represent the mainstream of the craft of programming and software engineering come from the 1960s and 1970s when they were mostly financed by US Department of Defense and created by very small number of “geniuses”. Many of the best of those ideas were not adopted by the mainstream which makes the situation worse than it would otherwise be, but aside from that, one can say that since the 1980s there were no real advances and major inventions, especially not those which were widely adopted, in any discipline of Computer Science and Software Engineering. In addition to that, number of practitioners of the craft has risen exponentially, but number of those who meet any higher standards has not risen proportionally, so the whole discipline is in a state where what rules is the tyranny of the majority, leading to incredible structural problems in many software systems. In conclusion, as every honest software engineer knows, the greatness of software systems, as is often perceived by the public and many “leaders”, is a myth, and the same can be applied to the current hype around AI systems, without discounting their ability to further the advance of the system into the post-human era.
Current AI systems have capabilities to make a lot of service sector jobs irrelevant or even not needed. This reveals artificial origins of those jobs which were primarily created to keep up Ponzi scheme going and not to make the economy more productive, and certainly not to give people a chance to have a dream job, which is typical way they are marketed. That way incredible inefficiency of the system is revealed since one generally does not automate that which is not inefficient. Most of these jobs are performed poorly, incompetently and are only temporary distraction while the Ponzi scheme lasts. These developments are also recognized by the organizations like WEF, but are accompanied with the utopian belief that many more new jobs are going be created in the green economy. Those jobs are marketed as more interesting and advanced as the jobs people were involved in during the last few decades, following the same pattern which was used to market the current jobs several decades ago at the start of the era of deindustrialization. What they do not address is where are they going to find enough money to pay people to perform those jobs since for most the only reason why they perform the current ones is the salary which they can spend in their free time. It is very difficult to imagine people performing those jobs for free or for salary which does not allow them to live comfortably at least at the level of comfort they got used to during the last several decades. It is even more difficult to imagine that the Collective West will be able to continue with it’s practice of printing paper currencies out of thin air long enough to make the salaries as large as they were during the last several decades. It is imaginable that some portions of the population who will be more concerned with the climate change might be mobilized to perform some jobs for free or for minimal salary, but is hard to imagine that being possible for vast majority of others who view it as just another trend which they have to conform to in order to not get socially isolated. It could be that the system will be set up in such a way to put most of the population in a situation in which they are forced to get involved, which is probably the only way that kind of system could work. In any case, a lot of genius level intelligence is needed to make this kind of system work long enough in order for it to be considered relevant.
AI systems are going to have significant role in the green transition and other agendas of the Great Reset. Coupled with the Internet of Things they are going to represent a backbone of the system which will constrain actions and maybe even thoughts of people so that they fit rules and regulations of the green transition. Ideas like carbon footprint and 15- minute cities are just the tip of the iceberg of the possibilities this kind of technology enables. Although this system is not established yet, it can be imagined as some kind of digital concentration camp where most people will get locked into without even noticing that their freedoms were taken away from them, since all of the material benefits which it will initially provide will not allow to most to imagine it’s negative aspects, and once it is normalized, it will become just one more thing people will get used to. Despite it’s proclaimed goals of making lives easier in the context of the myth of progress and contributing to the green transition, the main goal of this system is to create a cover-up for the global bankruptcy the world at large faces. People of the world and especially those in the Collective West have been living beyond their means for too long, so as this decades long Ponzi scheme is ending, there is a need for an efficient way of monitoring and constraining the material urges of the population which for many decades got used to all of the comforts of the consumerist system. These kind of developments will reveal the illusory nature of the freedom consumer-bourgeois man enjoyed for decades because he either won’t notice that it will be taken away from him or will unsuccessfully try to fight for retaining some parts of that freedom as the new system is getting established. In the similar pattern of the recent crises of the 2020s most people will passively accept all aspects of the new normal established by the green transition, while minority might be forced into finding alternatives to life in this kind of system. For most people there are no alternatives given that the current system is too inefficient to sustain itself in the situation of growing material demands of the people all around the world. The biggest challenge in establishing this system is to place it into the larger narrative of the climate action and green transition, where what is at stake is the future of the planet and well being of future generations, so that the system is accepted by most despite all of the material constraints it will enforce. There certainly will be cases where despite all of the advanced technologies and well-planned methods of control, the system won’t work in practice. In majority of those cases what will develop are various Mad Max scenarios, which the new system is primarily designed to prevent, where general chaos of lost individuals trying to survive in the coarsest possible way dominates. In some cases there are possibilities of creating structures which are stripped from most of the influence of the consumer-bourgeois era and are dominated by the return to the premodern ways of survival, in some cases even contributing to the renewal in the new cycle as the current one comes to a close.
Bourgeois man’s recent obsession with AI systems can be considered as just a continuation of his general obsession with technology, but it also hides his deeper tendencies. In a situation of polycrises the world and especially Collective West finds itself in, where it is clear that it deals with systemic issues whose magnitude matches or surpasses those of any other period in history, which the bourgeois man is the most responsible for, tendency to avoid taking responsibility appears, not just because of practical but also existential reasons. If it is technically possible to create AI systems which are able to make decisions on their own, or with some administrative help of humans, and those systems are marketed in a way that they are eventually considered superior to humans, then there is no reason not to put them in the decision-making positions. Whichever decision is made by the AI system in this kind of environment, the effects cannot be blamed fully on humans, since they at most have administrative role in the process. That way bourgeois man in general, and especially those in the position of power, can avoid blame for most of the crises which burden the world, despite their role as the main perpetrators of those crises. This kind of scenario probably represents the ultimate expression of the bourgeois man’s nature in which his rights, which in recent decades meant that he can do whatever he wanted, are not matched by obligations and responsibilities for his actions.
All of these trends reveal a fundamental characteristic feature of bourgeois man which boils down to having “freedom” to do whatever he wishes without any consequences. This feature, emanating from the deep racial makeup of pre-Indo-European non-Aryan peasant race of Europe, has always been around, in the last approximately 1000 years has been under control of the last noble race of Europe, and then finally took over after the demise of the “old world”. Given that most of the human substance was lost as a consequence, AI developments do not come as a surprise. In addition to automating jobs which were illusory from the very beginning, AI can relieve bourgeois man from those responsibilities which still burden his shoulders, like his job or decisions he makes in his mundane everyday existence. There is also deeply symbolic meaning in the rise of AI, in that it reveals the tipping point of the progressive decline in bourgeois man’s ability to face the reality and survive. As a consequence his bourgeois race faces extinction and replacement by the race of AI machines, just like other human and animal races did in the past.
One aspect of trans-humanism is motivated by great disappointment with current state of humanity, and a yearning for transcending this situation by creating systems which will be stripped from the “all too human” flaws and be able to improve themselves endlessly. Although this line of thinking perfectly aligns with reality of common humanity being left to it’s own devices after the dissolution of nobility, it hides a big flaw since these same fallible humans are going to program those systems and reality is very far away from those utopian goals given the very primitive state of the programming craft and understanding how mind and humans in general work. Trans-humanists are generally thinking in terms of evolutionist and progressive myths, so their urge to “improve” humanity is understandable as it represents the logical next step in a sequence of previous world-improving movements like Enlightenment, Bolshevism and liberal democratism. They take that line of thinking to the extreme since, given the tipping point of the dissolution of man, getting rid of (most) humans is one of the possible solutions to the problem and consequences of the development of trans-humanism. Whatever the actual effects of these technologies will be, they reveal a hidden yearning of common people in general for new noble structures which will bring new light to the world which for too long has been covered with darkness, so aside from creating the largest dystopia the world has ever seen, AI developments have a potential of waking up some parts of the population to their flaws and the need for transcending them, for which the appearance of the new nobility represents the only solution.
Another less extreme aspect of trans-humanism are tendencies toward integration of a man and a machine. They have their roots in Cybernetics which started developing after the Second World War and was a predecessor of the field of Artificial Intelligence. One of the original ideas in that space is “Man-Computer Symbiosis” of J. C. R. Licklider which in that symbiosis viewed opportunity for elevating man’s existential condition to the higher level. Most of the original work on the Internet (then called ARPANET), personal computers and AI were inspired by these ideas. Most of these ideas were not adopted during the commercialization of personal computing and the Internet which followed, which determined their current status, aside from their use in business, as distractions and addictions of the masses. Science, engineering and business certainly benefited from the adoption of computers, which amplified their efforts, so nature of their overall influence on the state of man is not clear. From the traditional perspective they amplified and further expanded already problematic developments in disciplines which from their beginnings had no connection to the “above”, being lost in their attempts to explain the natural world or solve problems which make life of a bourgeois man more comfortable. On the other hand, introduction of computers and computation into the domain of science and engineering, and even to everyday lives of people, have brought tools which can be used to explain workings of intricate systems, including natural, social and computer systems, and most importantly the human mind. Lately this kind of perspective on computation was called Computational Thinking which uses tools of computation like algorithms and processes to deal with problems in various real-world situations. It is clear that computation has a potential to tackle meaning which science feared from it’s inception and that it can help explain and build any system whose behavior can be represented with a set of interacting processes. It is also clear that it can be used in dealing with topics which were usually considered philosophical, but from the traditional perspective all of these developments can be considered as those which operate on “all too human” level, having effect only on already inflated bourgeois man’s intellect and ego, lacking almost any existential dimension which might have significant influence on man’s life, aside from those of trans-humanism which threaten the very existence of the bourgeois man.
AI developments fit very well into the tendency of the postmodern to deconstruct the modern. Many of the modern constructions, like the way people work, they relate to each other, and how they perceive themselves is going to be questioned, and in the end destroyed. One should note that this does not mean that premodern equivalents of those conceptions are going to necessarily be affected. This could be one of the challenges a man faces today where it is clear that developments of the trans-human system is threatening his own survival. There is a possibility for those more differentiated men to face the fact that what is threatened was mostly the illusion from the beginning and take up the challenge of returning to their premodern roots, to the more superior way of life and what it means to be a man. In order to meet this challenge ideally one would need some amount of noble blood and spirit, but even if that is mostly absent, one can start with differentiated view of the world, a world in which there is a place not just for materialism of the common man, but also for the “more than life” of the man of noble race.
Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. - Marvin Minsky
[People] like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don’t much like how people are now. We’re too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves. - Marvin Minsky
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either. - Marvin Minsky
My goal is making machines that can think by understanding how people think. One reason why we find this hard to do is because our old ideas about psychology are mostly wrong. - Marvin Minsky
Software engineering is an oxymoron. - Alan Kay
Programming provides a pleasure of philosophical contemplation. - Gerald Jay Sussman