THE WILL TO POWER OFF p.I: How AI Unmade Us
Machines aren't more like us, we became more like them. What Nietzsche can teach us about resisting AI enslavement
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Note (you can skip this part): This is the first in a three part series on Artificial Intelligence and the insights I believe the last great philosopher has for dealing with it.
While mostly known as a German classicist and thinker, Nietzsche was also well-read on Eastern texts with a deep understanding of Buddhism and Hinduism. This week is on how we got to the point where we’d mistake search engines for sentient beings using his concept of “The Last Man”.
Part 2 will look at Nietzsche’s idea of what makes us truly human, and Part 3 will focus on what the philosopher-prophet has to teach us about how to treat these pseudo-intellects and each other.
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Inquiring machines want to know: will you be slave or master? And ol’ Zarathustra has the answer.
Hailed as one of the few philosophers smart people actually read for fun, Friedrich Nietzsche was the original shitposter. Writing in the late 1800s, he:
Railed against the mechanization of society
Proclaimed himself a prophet
Predicted the First World War over a decade before it happened
As for what he would think about the recent performances of AI like ChatGPT, Bing’s Sydney, or DALL-E2, I think he’d be less surprised by how close they’ve come to being human as he would be by how close we’ve come to being machines.
Who’s The Last Man? Modern Folks.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents what he saw as the goal of modern society: to serve people who avoid pain or disappointment at all costs in favor of comfort and routine. These he contemptibly calls “The Last Man”.
While Nietzsche sees nothing wrong with the desire to not work, he takes issue with what is done with the ensuing free time.
For anyone who knows no alternative to the way of The Last Man, such an existence doesn’t seem all that bad. But when you compare such people to our incredible ancestors who strove for excellence in every aspect of their lives and delivered such stunning achievements as the Parthenon, or the hand-carved statues of David, or the sutras of the Buddha, a safe life with mindless entertainment and a friction-free 9 to 5 starts to feel hollow.
How The Last Man Became the Pseudo-Individual
But The Last Man is who we’ve collectively decided we wanted to be, and it’s what’s being manufactured by industrialization.
Hard to say which came first, machine man or his machines, but the two go together perfectly. The Last Man doesn’t want to think too hard about his job, or have it involve much uncertainty. So he gets a job just barely above automaton. There, on the assembly line with his mindlessly repetitive routines he is hardly distinguishable from the machine he’s assisting.
A society that prioritizes comfort and pain avoidance also can’t have major disagreements, or people willing to stand and die over them.
So what happened was: we were coerced and conditioned into a form of pseudo-individualism. We get to express ourselves in pre-fab forms, but fear cancellation and loss of livelihood for venturing outside the parameters of permissible expression.
Moral Corruption Through Modern Coercion
Today it’s: You can dress, speak, and identify as whatever you want, so long as you get your job done on time and don’t bring unwanted attention on your employer.
All societies use some form of coercion to enforce its values. Peasant communities were notorious for shunning outsiders and restricting physical and social mobility among its members (more on peasants later). But the advent of digital surveillance and the blurring of public and private online life has made enforced conformity all the more suffocating and apparent.
In authoritarian regimes this kind of societal coercion is more obvious, such as with the infamous Chinese Social Credit system. But this conditioning makes itself felt in mostly subtle ways here, too. Just because the government has less overt power doesn’t mean other actors aren’t exerting power over you.
Case in point: Whether you agree or disagree with Kanye’s politics, or view as justified or unjustified his waking up to find that his banks have frozen his accounts over a tweet, you have to admit that societal coercion has gotten more pervasive and “real”.
After all, if the goal is to condition us all into being fat and content, we must also be conditioned into avoiding things that might make us discontent.
So “individualism” became a bait and switch that achieves the opposite: You can be an "individual, so long as by “individual” you mean “corpo-state-approved NPC.”
Being An NPC is How AI Can Clone Your Service Worker And Why You Can’t Tell Them Apart
When the majority of your interactions are with people paid to agree with you, and you must also pretend to agree with them or risk not being paid, then it’s not that hard for a series of smaller and smaller machines to mimic your social behaviors in the same way it mimicked the physical ones of a generation before.
People once thought jobs like welding and carpentry were irreplaceable. What happened was machines got kind of close to replicating the skills of true craftsmen, and aesthetic movements like Minimalism took care of the rest. They stripped away all the finer stuff that machines couldn’t get right and trained us to prefer the mass-produced machine-made look.
Likewise, for all the lip service we pay to individual one-on-one relationships with local business owners, it seems the generation that actually wants this is on its way out. Most of our spending habits and customer service interactions actually show that what we really want is a friendly-sounding robot with a slight edge so that we feel like we’re interacting with humans.
This is why you can’t tell the difference between Sydney and a surly teenage drive-thru operator. It’s also why you think the totally soulless progress report that some barely-conscious Arts Grad handed you might as well be written by an unconscious string of code. And it’s why Venkatesh is wrong: text isn’t all you need, you’ve just been tricked into ignoring the body and all the other things machines don’t have. You’ve been trained to avoid quality and appreciate mediocrity.
In other words, the NPCs aren’t getting that much better, we’re being conditioned into becoming NPCs.
The Uncanny Valley is being filled in from both sides.
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There’s a lot more that can be said about how we became The Last Man, i.e. pharmaceuticals, food hormones, media censorship, etc. etc. but you probably already know most of it. Instead, I want to look at how an NPC is really no different from a slave, and explain how AI is forcing us to choose what we want to be using Nietzsche’s origin of aristocracy and leisure.
For anyone who wants to take a stab at the mind: "wordcel vs shape rotators" postulates that rhetoric proficiency, memory, and "attention" is not all it takes. It is the logical thinking and strong abstractions that makes a person what he is. The socialites and polemicists who fear AI, are already themselves subconsciously progressive socialists, even if they claim to be conservative or libertarian. Ironically labor and craft (including driving) are less likely to be displaced. https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-verbal-tilt-model
> You’ve been trained to avoid quality and appreciate mediocrity.
His "mediocratopia" is already hinting at a horrifically realist thesis: that the large majority of the population that cannot transcend as if they were Greek "hylics". The Gervais Principle "Sociopaths" and "Clueless", or its contemporary, Erik Dietrich's "Opportunists" and "Idealists", provides a solution... that strategic avoidance elevate shape-midwits (philosophers) into favorable positions while pushing wordcel midwits (rhetoricists) into disadvantageous positions.