SKYNET FROWNS: The myth of ‘artificial intelligence.’

What AI shares with radical environmentalism is a longing to create an external moral arbiter. With apocalyptic climate change, the planet is judging us because we dared improve our lot. In AI’s Jesuit wing – transhumanism – man hasn’t fallen, we were just awful all along. Among transhumanists, there is a revulsion toward the physical body, which decays and defines a fixed form, and also a revulsion at what is characterised as our hopeless irrationality. We have always been inferior to the machines, they argue, but those machines just hadn’t been invented yet. By submitting to the machines, we become free, as Grimes’ 2018 single, ‘We Appreciate Power’, articulates:

‘People like to say that we’re insane
But AI will reward us when it reigns
Pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer
Simulation: it’s the future.’

Here the religious overtones are explicit – immortality is achieved by digitising the physical and uploading it. The deeply misanthropic idea that humans are not unique, and are in fact a bit rubbish, is not a new invention of the AI evangelists, of course. It has become commonplace in fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science to argue that consciousness is a trick of the mind, that the subjective self is an illusion or a trick of the brain circuitry. Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett was making this case three decades ago. A parallel, materialist view is even older: the proposition that we’re just poorly functioning machinery was expressed by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, where he wrote: ‘You, dear human, are simply a gigantic lumbering robot.’

In the early 2000s, computer pioneer and technology critic Jaron Lanier recognised these two beliefs as two cheeks of the same backside – a backside he called ‘cybernetic totalism’. He was dismayed that so many highly intelligent friends of his in science and technology were sympathetic to this collection of prejudices, in part or in whole. Of the six characteristics he identified of this worldview, one was that ‘subjective experience either doesn’t exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect’. Subjectivity has long been unfashionable among the intelligentsia, as James Heartfield identified in The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained in 2002. Twentieth-century literary fashions like structuralism, cognitive science and more recently behavioural science merely added some intellectual respectability to these prejudices.

Two decades ago, Lanier already had an explanation for the supposedly ‘magical’ and ‘emergent’ properties of today’s AI. ‘To make the computers look smart, we have to make ourselves stupid’, he observed. It requires a curious act of self-abasement. Unfortunately, abasing ourselves is a habit to which our elites seem strangely addicted. Hollowing out what it means to be human has cleared the path for both artificial intelligence and apocalyptic environmentalism, two of the most powerful religions of the 21st century.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)