When Intelligence is Artificial
Some notes on A.I.
Quick note: Enrollment is now open for my 6-week course “Pushing Through: Carrying Your Manuscript over the Finish Line” at Literary Arts in Portland, starting February 23rd. The class will run every Monday from 6pm - 8pm and is in-person. I’ve taught this class several times over the years and it’s always so rewarding! I’ve had many, many students finish manuscripts, and a few have even gone on to sell their books after the class has ended. More info here.
Last week I was on a forum with other writers, artists, and workers on A.I. Everyone was asked to prepare a short statement. Afterward, we had a conversation with the audience. I was pleased to be on an event with friends and artists I admire. Everyone had really smart things to say about the new machines coming for our artistic work. It was in the new Mother Foucault’s Bookstore location, which I hadn’t been to yet. I was pleased that it was warm and inviting but hadn’t lost its hidden gem bookstore charm. Anyways, I’ve been thinking about A.I. for years so it was difficult to collect all my thoughts around the issue, and I still have plenty more to say, but I thought it would be good to share. You’ll find my essay after the break.
In ancient Hebrew, the sixth letter of the alphabet is Waw or W. This was the clearest evidence my grandmother, an evangelical Catholic, had for her belief that the Internet was the Antichrist. She believed that every time you typed www into a browser, you were really typing 666. It is said that the Antichrist would unite the planet under a New World Order, and what was the Internet if not unifying? According to my grandma it was only a matter of time before the government required everyone to have their own personal website, complete with every employer, school record, official ID, and known associations on file. After that, it would be a short fall to requiring every citizen tattoo their personal website on their wrist or forehead to prevent fraud. It’s for this reason that we didn’t get the Internet in our home until the year 2000. I was fifteen.
This was not my grandmother’s only conspiracy. She also believed that the government controlled the weather using chemtrails, that Fluoride, distributed by the government, made humans mentally weaker and easier to control, and that Western doctors were not to be trusted, so much so, that she made her own Colloidal Silver in her kitchen for thirty years, likely the cause of her dementia and lung cancer.
My grandmother was not the only religious extremist in our family. My parents were evangelicals, minus the Catholicism. They loved Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. We spent summers going to church camps, where we sang worship songs around campfires; read the Bible several times a day; and had impromptu prayer meetings that invariably left many members overcome by the Holy Spirit, writhing in dirt and speaking in tongues. We shot assault rifles at cereal boxes. And everything was evil. Dungeons and Dragons, Marilyn Manson, The Babysitters Club, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, those alien stickers I used to buy at the roller rink with the bulging eyes and long, blank foreheads, gay people, any and all rock music but especially Rage Against the Machine, the act of manifesting, Mortal Kombat, etc. etc. etc. I once heard a pastor say that anything was evil if we loved it too much. Something loved too much diverted our attention from God, and when our attention was diverted, the Devil slipped in.
It’s because of this, that I struggle to use the word evil. The definition, according to the cult I was raised in, is so broad that it no longer holds any meaning. However, we’re here to discuss AI, and I can’t talk about AI without bringing up Capitalism, and I can’t talk about AI or Capitalism without using the word evil, so I’ll have to get over my hesitance.
My spirituality is loose these days. I believe that everything on this planet is alive and that every living thing deserves dignity, respect, and love. I believe that there are no good or bad people, that we are, in fact, only made up of our actions. I try to limit and ease the suffering of others. I believe humans are meant to create. Not in the traditional colonial sense of domination over the natural world and hoarding of wealth or the evangelical “quiversful” of children, but in the way that we are at our best when we are creative, when we contribute to the well-being of others.
Specifically, what I mean to say is, humans are meant to cook food and write books and fall in love and put plants in the earth and paint pictures and admire mountains and play music and sit outside under a big moon and lots of stars and laugh about how funny it is to be alive on this planet. We are meant to play. We are meant to hold each other and dance and fuck and spit and smoke and run and sob and eat rotisserie chicken off the carcass.
Capitalist oligarchs have a different plan. The wealthiest in this world have nothing without our labor. Look to the rapid rise of privatized prisons that allow for contracts to be signed promising a minimum number of inmates, which in turn, guarantees a minimum number of essentially unpaid workers, or see the “homeless campus” in Utah where the houseless will be forced to work and the dorms lock from the outside, and it’s plain to see that the vision of chattel slavery is alive and well in the wealthy class. Prison labor specifically has meant that slavery has never really disappeared in America. When laborers are plenty and labor is cheap or free, there’s no limit to the riches the wealthy can hoard.
The ultimate goal of AI is AGI or Artificial General Intelligence, a learning model so large, diverse, and complex it contains every bit of history, scientific fact, painting or sculpture, diary entry, love poem, opinion, short story, recipe, conversation, and joke made by humans. The goal is to build the world’s smartest computer, smarter than any human on the planet. The idea is that if it’s smarter than any human, it can do any human’s job. This is why there are trillions of dollars swirling around AGI, even if not a single AI model is currently profitable. (Sam Altman has assured investors that once we reach AGI, we can simply ask the machine how to make a return on investments.) What is AI if not the ultimate free labor? You do not have to feed computers. (I mean, except for the energy needed to run the data centers, which will be equal to the usage of 22% of American households by 2028, or the water needed to cool the supercomputers down, roughly 500 milliliters per 100 word email drafted in AI, or the billions of books and drawings and movies and songs and conversations and articles and photos needed to train AI. It turns out AI is very, very hungry, and all it does is consume.) AI does not need to sleep. AI does not get sick or have children. AI doesn’t need a vacation. AI doesn’t go to the bathroom. AI doesn’t say hi to its coworkers on the way to its desk or take five minutes to get a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine. AI is the perfect worker who never talks back.
And so now the time has come for me to, begrudgingly, say that I think my grandmother might’ve been onto something. Not that I believe we’re welcoming the apocalypse as described in the book of Revelations, but that the systems under which we currently live are evil, anti-human. Anti-life. This is not unique to AI. AI is but the end all, be all goal of capitalism, which strives to take all pleasure and worth from humans, so that we have no choice but to work for scraps. Toil for long hours so that at the end of the day, we are too tired to pull out our watercolors or call our friends or write a novel or garden or think. AI is chattel slavery without the risk of slave rebellions, prison hunger-strikes, or marches on Washington.
If there was a form of AI that didn’t rely on coal and other forms of dirty electricity or require hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh drinking water, an AI whose only purpose was to run factories, look for signs of breast cancer, and organize calendars, and this meant that humans no longer had to do these jobs, which meant none of us had to work and instead we could return to living life: making art, gardening, taking care of one another, then I would be all for it. But I don’t believe AI is here to free us. AI is here to mimic our art and take our jobs and eject us into timeline where work is still required for shelter, food, healthcare, and energy, but the only work left is scarce and difficult, a timeline where we’ll be forced to take whatever is given to us, because it’s our only option.
My grandmother believed there was no beating the book of Revelations, written down straight from God’s mouth 1,800 years ago. I don’t think evil is inevitable. We are allowed to reject the future being offered to us. Not an easy task, but a possible one. We can and should refuse a world that doesn’t value us, our lives, our labor, or our art. It’s impossible to predict what AI will actually become after the money is spent and the bubble has burst, but I’m not interested in waiting around to see how it all turns out. Instead, I dedicate my life to pleading and begging for something different, a world where everyone has everything need, a world where we can make art and contribute what we can, a world where we become human again, creatures living our animal lives. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, it’s all I see.
Reading: I just finished The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald. It was a beautiful, meditative, devastating story of four German Jews who emigrated during WWII. It’s my first Sebald, but boy, will I be back!
Watching: PLURRRRRR1BUSSSSS! God, this show! The first episode roped me in instantly, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Every episode surprises me several times and it nearly never goes the direction I think it might. My favorite thing on TV right now.
Listening: FEEO’s debut album Goodness has been on my headphones for the past couple months. Like James Blake but sparser. The bass tickles the inside of your brain when you listen loud enough.