Alienation pops out from every corner of the life that is passed on to succeeding generations. And so it will be; so long as a fortune can be made by some to enslave others.
Our artificial world with its artificial thinking – ‘mock flocking’ to Elvis, or The Beatles, or Taylor Swift: human life becomes about copying patterns set up by businesses to get us to buy goods.
Artificial life though has had a long provenance, going back to Noah inventing a big boat to scoop endangered species from the Flood. To Greeks sitting around talking in man-made structures about thinking.
I was reminded of all this the other day when I read a review about a writer called Jonathan Haidt who has written an excoriating book (The Anxious Generation) about mobile phones and children’s education. Mobile phones seem to follow the principle that “those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”.
Our phone culture is curtailing our children’s future and cutting off all that is whole and human.
But human beings have been using the artificial for thousands of years and for hundreds of years to make products that enslave the mind. To create docility. To control and dumb down people’s feelings for each other.
Humans binding together into cities, beyond family and tribe, is where the mobile phone starts, and with it the fortunes of a cluster of billionaires. Hence you could say that the madnesses we now surround ourselves with, which have become a part of the everyday, took a long time coming.
Eighteenth-century engineers and investors invented an artificial class of people who became known as ‘the working class’. Similarly a new middle class who – with the inspiration of novelists like Jane Austen – created a new world of manners to complement the murderous working conditions faced by the factory and mill workers, who became extensions of the machines they operated and worked in such appalling conditions that the charities of the caring could flourish and grow.
Slums were created, artificially and out of nowhere; magicked into being so we could have clear signs of social difference through the class system.
So artificial is our world that we struggle to get back to the nature – which is constantly challenged by our appetite for goods – that we issue out of. So far the process of creating children is on most occasions a pretty straightforward process, but there is bound to come a time when artificial interventions will dispense with the need to procreate. In the same way we award the car company the responsibility of moving us about the planet artificially, babies will need neither egg nor spunk to spring them into life.
AI will only add to our ability to take this wildly unnatural world and make it more unnatural.
Unfortunately there is no world leadership to challenge and control what’s coming down the line. Except on rare occasions, humans are not great at heading off the gradual decline of human sentiment and naturalness.
Of course, mobiles and sundry inventions can help us if used moderately. But the constant need to be in touch with one another is a new artificial invention, along with an earlier class system that ensures we have the poor and the needy.
We enter the realms of trying to build the impossible: in my opinion if we don’t win control of our galloping artificiality we are screwed.
Perhaps AI should be called UI: Unnatural Intelligence.
John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here.
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