The Invention Paradox
When will AI bring salvation?
I am starting a research project about progressive campaigning and online radicalisation. I’m trying to learn as much as possible about the former in order to make a browser game about the latter.
If you want to learn more, work with me on this, or be interviewed feel free to reach out by replying to this email or sharing with someone who you think will be interested. Thank you!
Imagine this: a group of very clever elites have a new invention. It makes everyone feel better. It makes you taller — or shorter, if that’s what you want — more articulate, more able to be who you really want to be. It will make you stronger, better at parallel parking, better at digesting gluten. It helps you find community. Maybe it will make you richer if you care about money. It will give you time to finally ‘have ideas’. You haven’t had an idea in years; with this new invention, it’s ideas all the way down.
There’s just one catch: it only works if everyone uses it. Everyone has to use the new invention otherwise no one will get the benefits. If only half of us use it, you’ll only get something that looks like a benefit, such as a monthly supermarket voucher. Oh there’s also another catch, only little: the invention runs on the crushed bones of the dead. An abundant resource. Dead people are buried all over the world and we will never run out.
Even after many months of talking about the invention, it’s is only at 30% penetration. The elites have to keep crushing bones to keep the invention on even though most people don’t see the point in it. They keep coming back to the benefits that don’t exist yet: maybe women (or men?) will like you more. You’ll go on the best holidays of your life. You’ll be better at public speaking. You’ll suddenly be able to cook. The people struggle to see any of this as a benefit and continue to buy overpriced coffee on the way to their relentless jobs.
The elites continue to crush bones. The anti-bone crushing lobby starts to get annoyed. The elites remind everyone that new inventions are the only way we can differentiate ourselves from the animal kingdom. We are not savages, we need inventions to signal that we are the smartest and most capable complex organisms on the planet. The promises of future benefits intensify: all diseases, gone. All wars, cancelled. All children, safe. All of humanity elevated beyond what paltry present-day humans can imagine. Maybe we could even postpone death and live forever?
This would require a lot more bones to be crushed. An unprecedented amount of bones. The dead must serve the invention in order to benefit the living. Bone-crushing increases by orders of magnitude. The elites have plans that span hundreds of years. This invention transcends all present-day contexts and must be maintained and stewarded for all future generations to come. Yes, stewarded. The elites are stewards now. And so is everyone else. No, the benefits still don’t exist yet — but they will, they will. It’s a waste of time to demand that our lives be better right now when there’s so much work to be done for the future. In fact it’s selfish to reject the invention. If you reject the invention, you hate humans. All humans. Past, future, present. But most of all future. To care about the present is to live in the short term. The elites are busy working on big important problems like what if an asteroid hits the earth or what do we do when the sun explodes. While the people worry about trivial problems like house prices and droughts and food shortages.
The people who use the invention earnestly look icky, unsexy, and uncreative. The elites are too deep in the bone-crushing hole so have no choice but to make it look like the invention is favoured by all. It starts popping up when you try and catch a bus, buy a house, do your laundry, take a walk, buy your groceries, pick a wedding dress, name your pets. The invention suddenly proliferates into everything like mould. Trying to send an email without the invention is impossible now. The elites have been peddling it for so long that their memories have now been skewed to remember life before the invention as a dark time where we were toothless braindead chuds birthing children straight into wet mud and feeding them grass. Their comprehension of reality has been irreversibly mangled by talking about the invention nonstop for three consecutive years. None of their discourse is relatable and they can no longer participate in the rest of society. There is a lot of irony completely lost on them, mainly that the invention was meant to make us into better people but all it did was make the elites worse.
The elites become even more elite (and crush even more bones to keep the lights on). Things start to get weird. Cars no longer have steering wheels; only voice activation. Children no longer have teachers; only a disembodied punishment aura. Society no longer has culture; only weekly meetings where everyone has to agree on what’s cool. The problem is the benefits of the invention still haven’t materialised. It’s power is invisible and unknowable. The elites are running out of bones to crush so they create reasons to use the invention in the always-on industry that is overseas war in order to kill people more efficiently and extract their bones for rapid crushing. After all, they’re only present-day lives. To pursue the crushing of bones now, is to bet big on our disembodied immortal future. Salvation is coming, all we have to do is believe.
Okay stop imagining. When I get overwhelmed with what’s happening I need to make sense of it by putting it into a story. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been listening to interviews for Computer Says Maybe about campaigning against dominant AI narratives, scientifically debunking these narratives, and ways to refactor culture around being mistrustful of anyone who says that in the future, this one technology will cure all disease. These were great conversations and they’re all coming out over the next few weeks, starting this Friday, so look out for that.