Why can't we * just stop * the hyper-charged, techno-capitalist destruction of life on this planet by the dysfunctional tech-bro’ billionaires?
Why can't we * just stop * the hyper-charged, techno-capitalist destruction of life on this planet by the dysfunctional tech-bro’ billionaires?
A *small* question that forms the second part of Chapter 10
In this post, we tie in a few of the ideas we’ve been slowly, carefully, mindfully (most definitely not demurely) getting alive to in this collapse awareness journey. We have had to wade our way through a cerebral understanding of systems collapse theory, a metacrisis or metamodernist explainer, and another that mapped out Moloch game theory to arrive here. I know it’s been hard-going, but now we’re in a position to answer a question that burns.
I should also add that I’m starting this section with a very raw “writers note” preamble.
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If you’re new to this new book publication process? You can start at the beginning and navigate around the first nine Chapters using this Table of Contents if you like. The audio version is at the bottom, available only to subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together in real time.
Note: I’ll keep running these little prompts to donate a $5 virtual coffee to the project…but please don’t feel compelled to kick in. Your subscription fee is more than enough. I’ve also decided all funds from these donations will go toward paying an editor at the end to get things tidied for the ebook I’ll send to everyone.
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A WRITERS NOTES preamble
As I often do when writing a book, I hit an emotional brick wall. I spent a year trying to get my head around an answer to the question I pose here in today’s post. I have reams of notes that speak to the connection between collapse, generalised AI, Elon Musk, transhumanism, longtermism, Elon Musk (again), Effective Altruism, the Sam Bankman-Fried fiasco, my interviews with Will MacAskill and Peter Singer, singularity, masculinity, pro-natalism, eugenics, Donald Trump (and Elon Musk), Project 2025, geoengineering and so much more. I’ve struggled to know how much to include, what is relevant, and how much of it is useful. It’s all relevant, of course. It’s all… all of it! It’s all…so much!
Alas, I ground to a halt and just now spent an hour on the floor watching the fibres of my jumper dance in the sun.
UPDATE 26 September: This post was initially published in a slightly rawer format. It has now been tidied and updated.
A wonderful reader here - Bec Baigent - reached out to help me with referencing. She will be doing this in real-time with you and me, too.
Sometimes we have to do what we have to do. And sometimes we have to shake up the snow cone to get a more dynamic, systems-shifting perspective…
Q: Why don’t we stop AI and the tech bros already? How are they getting away with their tirade? What gives?
So, in our civilisation, a very small handful of overwhelmingly white, rich men1 are creating artificial intelligence (AI) and other related technologies that are eliminating entire labor markets, toppling democracies, destroying intra-human trust, deepening inequality and bigotry, decimating our mental health, driving teens to take their lives, and fooling us into thinking Taylor Swift is endorsing Donald Trump in November. Oh, and this technology might also wipe out all life on Earth. These “dudes” get away with doing this, indeed they make squillions from it, while the rest of us helplessly imbibe their Kool-Aid, in part because the overwhelm of it all sends us into an Orwellian acquiescence.
We cry out to each other, on the socials, into the ether, How can this possibly be happening? Who is responsible? What can be done? What has become of all of us? The complexity of the answers that come back send us further into the baffling spiral. We must be the stupid ones if we can’t make sense of so much chaos!
I’ve sat with this particular spiral for some time (almost two years!) and feel I’m now able to outline some sort of understanding of what is actually going on beyond the late-night Adderall-addled “X” hyperbole, one that can best allow us to move through the rigid - and distracting! - stalling point it poses.
Shall we do this?
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A big part of the problem for anyone who starts to pose these kinds of very existential and urgent questions are the contradictions and cognitive dissonances that get served back. They need to be pieced apart a little.
On the one hand, we are told by these “tech bros” that their AI is required to save humanity. Thus, they should not be stopped. They make transhumanist and what’s called “accelerationist” and techno-optimist arguments that claim the complexity of the climate crisis, for example, is such that our clunky, inferior human brains can’t solve it and that they need to be upgraded with technology.
We, the four-year-olds in the equation, need robots to help tidy the bedroom.
There’s also often a seductive quasi-spiritualist element to their arguments - this upgrade can best enable us to reach enlightenment, we are told.
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Of course, there is an underlying assumption that informs this line of reasoning: Humans Are the Overlords of the Universe and can (or should) fuck with nature and billions of years of complex evolution and emergence to suit their overlord-y, selfish desires.
Last year the tech billionaire investor and co-founder of Netscape Marc Andreessen released a lengthy “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that set out this accelerationist, anthropocentric, more-more-more vision in point form. It’s referred to in tech circles with some reverence. Here’s a random selection of the dot-points to give you a feel:
“Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die… We believe everything good is downstream of growth.”
“We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.”
“We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.”
“We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature.”
“We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
“To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place2: ‘Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.’”
It unhinged my brain when I first read it.
But my advice is that we do not dwell too long on how utterly insane, repulsively arrogant and unwise such thinking is. To do so is to send ourselves over a cliff and we’re - all of us here - needed on solid ground right now.
Also, it only gets worse…
*
OK, so many of these very same technologists, in the next breath (and brace your neck for the whiplash), tell us that their humanity-upgrading technology could… also kill us. Like all of us. They explain that their artificial intelligence will continue to emerge via accelerating self-improvement feedback loops until it overtakes human intelligence, at which point we lose control of it. Some argu3e it will happen as soon as next year, others by 2030.
They’ll often use Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer thought experiment to explain how it will go. A super-intelligent AI is given the simple goal of manufacturing as many paper clips as possible. Bostrom explains that the AI will necessarily keep on producing paperclips, as programmed, wiping out any human who stands in their way and converting all energy and atomic matter on the planet to…paperclips.
There’s even a trend doing the rounds at Silicon Valley dinner parties where tech types talk their “p(doom)” figure. P(doom) stands for “probability of doom”. They will cite a number between 0 and 100 that represents what they think the chances are of an apocalypse by the end of this century. Chat GPT’s Sam Altman has a p(doom) of 50. Elon Musk is a 20, but says “we should do it anyway”. The head of the Centre for AI Safety Dan Hendrycks is an 80-plus4.