I’ve been thinking a lot about industrialization and how some of the modern arguments regarding AI and our current generation of change in technology amount to, Humanity has always adjusted to change. I feel like that’s a really stupid line to draw in the sand.
Yes, we’ve always ‘adapted’ and not all change is bad. The development of sewage systems, improvements in architectural engineering, the moon landing. There are so many examples in history of how innovation has spurred the next phase of civilization. But not all of it is great, and our adaptations can also distort our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the earth.
Sometimes it’s about what we do with invention—and in the United States this is broadly affected by capitalism. Was the invention of the motor vehicle a bad thing? Absolutely not. But the national push for car culture, through the suburban sprawl and dismantling of public transit, sells more automobiles and is not publicly funded (yet it can be publicly bailed out). Cars put us in our own world while a subway brings people together, even if they’re all just reading. Car culture divides people, but it can sell a lot of units.
(This doesn’t even cover the power of the fossil fuel industries and how we’re actively destroying the planet for their economic benefit alone, and how completely fucking insane that is at a fundamental level.)
Then there’s the sensory side of things. Take the evolution of how we listen to music—from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming services. We lose something with each change. When cassettes hit the market, people could fast-forward through songs, although it was a bit of a pain in the ass. The arrival of the CD made it simple. Once music hit the computer, the idea of collecting albums faded. With streaming services, the idea of listening to music has completely changed since its analog beginnings.
That same ‘progress’ can be traced back with most mediums that now exist mostly on a screen, and with each we’re losing connection to the worlds of creativity, sentiment, and inspiration—and, to a degree, individual thought. Our experiences with the world are predominantly visual now—with people, places, and things. Our fundamental sensory experiences are imbalanced and so our relationship with the world is skewed. You hear it every time a friend gets back from a trip and says something like, You have to go, it’s not what you’d expect at all. Yeah, because just seeing a photograph of something tells you barely anything about it.
I really like writing letters to friends, and it’s such a meaningful act to both send and receive something made by hand. The experience is an understanding that someone took time to do something, and that creates meaning. These digital interactions have no correlation with time, and therefore we lose the sentimental relationship that underlies how people connect to one another through acts of making something.
Innovation and development are part of how we grow as a species. Humanity separated itself from the rest of the natural world with its ability to build tools. Yet for every invention we’ve used for good, there are like ten examples of profiteers pushing a harmful agenda for the sake of their bank accounts. A gun is useful if you’re hunting for food, but what have we brought upon ourselves because of it otherwise? How much have firearms been used to ruin or end lives throughout history just so a couple people could be rich?
This is why I don’t trust anyone who supports AI in the least. Could it help us cure diseases faster? Maybe. But the internet had potential to revolutionize how we run the world and instead a few psychotic narcissistic capitalists turned it into a mall of hate for their individual benefit. All of these Silicon Valley types are the same, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that this level of development won’t be used against the people more than for them.
