A man in Liverpool remarked recently, resignedly, about losing his job to a robot, “We have to find perfection.”
I don’t believe I’ve seen it phrased quite that way before.
I read this in an article. We read, or see on a screen what others have seen, and go from one essentially imaginary worry to the next. Okay, and today we’re on robots.
Why are we replacing ourselves?
On a blasé level, tech improves everything capitalism was good at to start with.
So there’s that: some people will make more money with robots than without them, and those that don’t can go bankrupt and start over—avoiding consequences is what makes capitalism so jolly world destroying.
And since people are being turned into robots as fast as they’re being replaced by them, the workers will shuffle off to the next gig with nary a raised pitchfork or guillotine, or god help them, labor unrest in sight.
But zooming out a few thousand years, we’ve been building robots forever. ‘Robot’ being a fancy word for tool. Tools gave us power to fight back against the whims of the universe and then, like, pave it.
It’s only now that we’re going, waaaait a minute… These tools are so good we can program them to think for us.
Oops.
So maybe it’s unintentional. We’re just doing what we do without paying attention to the ultimate consequences, which is what we do, etc.
But if you, say, follow a Silicon Valley tribe working on AI, you’ll discover—oh nooo—there is serious madness lurking within the hearts of humans.
Like the ex-Google employee who’s working on an AI ‘godhead.’ Ontologically absurd as that is. Interestingly, the designer and programmer of the god-head was fired by Google for stealing and then fired by Uber for being uncooperative. So imagining the moral order the ex-googloid godhead would impose makes for a great drinking game.
It’s cool among the atheist in-crowd to crow that man invented God, but that’s just an example of the semantic confusion that’s overtaken our culture since the English language went viral. How many people can speak one language, before the chasms of cultural variation and sheer distance render Globish into gobbledegook?
The inflation of regional phrasing and made up words (fifteen words a day are added to the English language, Google says) may be a requirement of our drive to evolve into a planet-wide über-connected neuron ball so that we may finally, at the speed of light, ponder a universe of porn that is expanding faster than the speed of light, so there you go—the only thing evolving faster than tech is its own redundancy.
Meanwhile more people using more words is unmooring words from their meaning.
Like ‘man invented God.’ When did religion become a word for God?
Religion is something people do, like turning plants and fish into bouillabaisse, or watching Kardashians.
God is a word for mystery. It’s what we don’t know and we don’t do. It’s also, homonym-ically, a word for creator. Like, what made the big bang? Or if there’s an infinite series of big bangs, what makes that? Or what makes infinity? All of which are absurd rhetorical questions that cannot be answered; God is an app for that.
The ex-googloid AI godhead is meant to be worshipped and presumably have all sorts of human behavior ordering tenets written by it to be scrutinized and argued over by scribes and eventually, if it really takes off, used by people to murder each other. No worries. That’s what people do.
We make religions just like we make screwdrivers and robots. A religion is a great meta-tool if you’re trying to work on an entire society.
Another lost word is meme: a brilliant word coined by Richard Dawkins to describe self-replicating thought constructs like corporate brands, or political parties, or religions, but which is now used to reference stupid cat videos.
And the point being, you shout?
Only this: that if we don’t know what our words mean, how can we describe what we are, and if we don’t know what we are, what is it we think we are replacing with robots?
The late great Buckminster Fuller used the term “precession” to describe the end result of human (and all other creatures’ and forces’) efforts. The sun, full of gravity, desires to pull the earth toward it; the end result is that we go around it. A bee strives to go in and out of flowers; so it goes from flower to flower, unknowingly pollinating them.
Whether we’re building robots to make money, to proselytize dogma, or to have sex with (Oh come on, you know that’s gonna happen. Humans fuck cucumbers, stuffed animals, and even vibrating hunks of plastic—and wasn’t the vibrator the first true robot in the modern sense of the term? It even stole jobs, invented as it was by a Victorian era physician who was exhausted from treating his patients for ‘hysteria.’), the end result will be what the universe wants, not us.
Call it evolution. Or a couple deeper why’s behind that, a mystery. And would that be so far from perfection?