Can you still be human?

Be aware of what is coming

I now think that there is no greater catastrophe awaiting us than that which will be brought about by advances in AI.

Its effects on the human soul and on everything that makes life worth living are so great that they are beyond the ordinary human mind’s comprehension; nothing remotely like this has ever been seen before. This can be the only explanation of the weird indifference that many people still seem to show even at this, the eleventh hour.

Above all, I am here thinking of social and political changes that are now happening very fast, and not necessarily driven by politicians themselves, but inevitably seized upon by those – be they governments or global corporations – who desire total control of the human body, mind and spirit, once the technology is there to do so. So not so much Machiavellian scheming, then, necessarily, as Machiavellian opportunism. This is how evil prospers. It is true that much control and monitoring is already in place across the internet, without being obvious to many; but worse, much worse, can come.

No change, however evil, is introduced without its being presented as an unimpeachable good. One needs only to think of the appalling atrocities of the 20^th century carried out in the name of what were presented as high ideals that no loyal citizen could oppose: any who nonetheless did so were soon ‘disappeared’, tortured and killed. The rest caried on ‘disappearing’, torturing, killing.

You may have read reports over the last year or two of devices that can read and transcribe the thoughts of subjects, in some cases without the subjects even having to articulate them inwardly. These are scientifically attested. Obviously this brings hope to many who are speech-deprived through, say, motor neurone disease, and ultimately more common conditions such as stroke; and no one with a heart could wish to deprive suffering humans of such a joyous release. Indeed I am aware that I may, one day, be one of them myself. Equally obviously how can we not see how this might be used by despots to have total control of a kind not even dreamt of by earlier tyrants of the like of Stalin? And if it can be so used, be sure that it will. We must at all costs avoid being ‘useful idiots’, by reckless embrace of new technology. To be clear I am not in the slightest impugning the motives of the teams that have with skill and ingenuity brought about these developments. Motives are one thing, and come before; consequences are another, and come after.

It might be possible for some to think this just an alarmist fantasy. But you’d have to really try. You’d need to blind yourself to what is going on around you. As little as ten years ago, it was still possible to live one’s life – albeit, a little inconveniently – without a mobile phone. Now, most of us can no longer do such basic things as open our bank account or make a GP appointment without one. (In many areas, landlines are being unilaterally discontinued, and no doubt that is the shape of the future.) I try to use mine as little as possible, but nonetheless I must have one available. Even the elderly, even children – even the homeless, it seems – must now have a phone at their side. There is so much to be said against such a state of affairs because of the pervasive effect on human flourishing; but for now I am thinking exclusively about the most blatant, the grossest loss of human dignity and freedom.

Government surveillance advances apace. In Britain, we have been justifiably proud that we were not obliged to carry identity cards. Previous attempts to introduce them have been rebuffed. But the world is now a different place, and because of the problems imposed on a society by mass and illegal immigration, the Labour government plans to introduce them very soon. The arguments in favour seem to speak for themselves; and I have to concede that many civilised European nations have had such ID cards for a good while without becoming obviously totalitarian in nature. Until recently, that is. It’s worth reflecting that ID cards have not, in fact, saved those countries from illegal immigration; and we would be about to adopt such a scheme at just the time that a sort of creeping, or ‘soft’ (=not so soft), totalitarianism is indeed becoming a keynote of life in many Brussels-dependent EU countries. So is the government proposing something useful, or just caving in to the (ever more closely totalitarian) Zeitgeist here?

Next reflect that there is an epidemic of mobile phone theft. According to the Metropolitan Police about 80,000 mobiles were stolen in London alone last year. This is distressing to those robbed, and represents a massive security problem. Mark my words, it will not be long before some ‘useful idiot’ has the idea that it would be so much more secure to have a readable chip inserted in every legitimate citizen: with it they could gain entry to buildings, do their shopping, take public transport, make medical appointments and do their banking, all with the touch of their hand. Equally we do not know what a readable chip may itself be reading …

Of course it may be that ID can be best achieved by fingerprint or iris recognition, which, while still undoubtedly intrusive, are nonetheless far safer and far less intrusive than any chip. But even they would in principle enable a government or corporation to monitor our every activity, both on and offline, what we buy, who we spend time with, where we are at any moment, and so forth, as the Chinese and other totalitarian so-called ‘social credit’ schemes do. And such schemes offer ‘inducements’ not to step out of line: say the wrong thing, be seen with the wrong person, and you suddenly find yourself unable to travel, or out of your job, or out of your house.

Add to this the spread of nanoparticle technology which may be able to be sprayed or spread undetectably in ways that are inhaled or ingested, and can alter mood, or mind and behaviour. The applications of this sort of thing are legion, and very few of them are appealing.

All that I have written about here is just the narrow, sharper end of a much bigger problem of what AI is doing in a much more covert, and on the surface less alarming way, to alter human nature. I have written about that before and mainly elsewhere, but it requires much more space than this Substack entry affords. Undoubtedly I will come back to this. Paul Kingsnorth’s forthcoming book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity is well worth reading on the subject. But my main point here was to focus on the brutal, overt mind control possibilities that are not just a decade away, but within two years of implementation, if rumours from the WEF are to be believed. The technology has been around for a while, and only gets ‘better’.

What prompted this piece? A lovely, intelligent person said to me the other day – and she was by no means the first – words to the effect that ‘AI is here to stay and we have to find a way to live with it’. Although I understood what she meant, I felt chilled by the sentiment, and had to put a different point of view. Because nothing poses a bigger threat than AI, and fatalism is suicidal at this point. We are like the proverbial frog in a pan of water on a hotplate. Just as those who didn’t want to have a mobile phone now find that life is pretty much impossible without one, if a majority are seduced into adopting the next electronic tag whatever it may be, it will soon become inescapable for all. So this is a call, if not to resistance – yet – to extreme scepticism. But certainly not for mindless welcoming responses, such as ‘it’s so convenient’, or ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’.

It is very common these days to hear the fatalistic sentiment that we have to live with ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ may be (in this case it is in fact IT). But this is surely unworthy, as well as being defeatist to a point that is historically very unusual. Human beings have been known, in large numbers to rise up against tyranny, not to lie down in front of it and take whatever comes. So many pointless changes happen all the time and yet instead of questioning them, we simply accept them with a shrug of the shoulders. Of course though they seem pointless to the human being affected, they are not necessarily pointless from a different perspective: that of those who are greedy and hungry for money and power. Demean humanity, control humans, teach them to despise and rebel against their own embodied nature, and produce identical, interchangeable pawns in a game they do not understand they are playing; an excellent project whereby the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Cut jobs, and offer leisure. But leisure is not ours, because while AI saves the super-rich even more money by allowing them to do away with people in their businesses, this doing away with people imposes a huge burden of wasted time on the rest of us. And your time is valued at —precisely nothing.

Who does not now find themselves constantly busy? The young, the middle-aged and the old feel it alike. We are all time-poor; and time is not worth nothing. Time is life. Everything now is freighted with so much bureaucracy; and the bureaucracy is in an unholy alliance with AI. Together they massively, colossally, waste our time. Something that could until 10 years ago have been quickly resolved by a five-minute telephone call to another human being that still retained vestiges of common sense, now involves several hours going round and round in MC Escher-like loops on the internet, from ‘platform’ to miserable ‘platform’, from which there is no deliverance, since nothing on offer – and you have to choose something – fits with real life situations at all. And the system is spectacularly stupid. ‘Password not recognised’, ‘code no longer valid’, ‘we are having problems with our system, please try again another time’ or – my favourite – ‘oops, something went wrong …’ Will those growing up now be able to recognise how life could otherwise be, if there were more people in it?

And that’s just us. What happens to those people who lost their jobs through automation? We know that being unemployed, far from being a route to leisure and pleasure, is the highway to depression, a sense of meaninglessness, and despair.

For humanity’s sake, please question, be sceptical, be aware. Don’t just take each onslaught as inevitable. Push back in what you say and what you do. The opposite of life is not death, but the machine. You are not a machine, and every person who suggests you are should be firmly, but politely, put right on the matter. Stand firm against the tide of machine death that is coming – in perhaps two years’ time. We can have an influence, we do have agency: at least that is the state of things now. Probably in a few years’ time I won’t be able to write this. But whatever happens, it is more dignified to go down fighting than to allow the last of us to become mere robots and slaves. Fight with me.