Maybe the Machines Are Right About Us
Behave yourselves BEFORE Skynet becomes self-aware.
I am a little under the weather, but I hate leaving you without content for today, so I decided to look for a video for a quick #FreedomShorts post. Naturally, my go-to was Dust, since Dust shorts are frequently good for freedom-related messages (usually wrapped in a grim, dystopian package).
The first thing I found seemed to fit the bill. Even though the whole of the story is perhaps somewhat mediocre, it gives us a launch point for a quick discussion. I hadn’t wanted to write much, since I need to rest, but the topic is just too good.
The first few seconds set the stage, when we hear
This is an important announcement: For the safety and security of our society, all remaining humans must be identified and reported.
So there it is. Cyborgs—or AI, androids, robots, etc.—run the world. Humans are a threat.
Needless to say, we’ve seen this many times in science fiction. We create artificial intelligence; artificial intelligence deems us irrational; artificial intelligence destroys us. It’s a perennial fear, and for good reason: these things seem increasingly possible as our technology continues to advance.
Our takeaway is almost always the same: Oh goodness, how terribly scary. We should be careful with how we develop technology.
But just now, hearing that opening announcement in the video, a different takeaway popped into my head:
Maybe they’re right about us.
We are irrational.
Nearly all of us go through every day of our lives believing that we are slaves in need of masters. Nearly all of us believe that those masters have special rights that the rest of us don’t have. Rights to do terrible things “legitimately.”
Nearly all of us believe that it is perfectly fine to extract money through violence…so long as someone else is doing the extraction for us.
Sure, I am perfectly happy to force a fellow human to become the disposable means to my ends. It’s ‘democracy.’
No. It’s grotesque.
The masters we empower slaughter their way through history—killing almost half a billion in a single century—and we just deem it the price of doing business.
Without government, there would be warlords!
Really? Warlords with the power to tax, conscript, print money, and kill 400 million people? And we think that something else would be worse? So much so that we’re not even willing to consider other options?
Now THAT’s irrational.
A tiny cabal of ideologues, shadow-players, and creepy billionaires decide it’s time to subject the entire planet to draconian controls, lockdowns, and injections with poison. People not only comply, but many eagerly join in. Some even deputize themselves to be unpaid enforcers of the covid regime.
Why? Because they’re bored. Because they are low-status individuals whose monkey programming tells them that they can climb in a dominance hierarchy by scolding and ratting out their neighbors.
Monkey. Programming.
There is ample precedent for this. As Michael Malice has reported to great effect, when the East German Stasi files were finally released, we realized just how pathetic and untrustworthy humans really can be.
The Stasi didn’t need to threaten or hold things over people’s heads. Many eagerly became informants—not only on strangers or neighbors, but on their own families. On lovers with whom they shared a bed every night. Malice gets choked up just talking about it, and rightly so. (See video at the end.) By the end, nearly one in three were informing on their fellow humans in some way or other.
Obviously I am not on Team Robot. I do not want to see Terminator or The Matrix or Battlestar Galactica anything of the sort come true. I am on Team Humanity.
But c’mon, team—you have to admit that our would-be robot overlords have a point. We do behave absurdly. Emotionally. Illogically.
The solution is not to slow the pace of technological development. That simply isn’t going to happen. The solution, rather, is to get better.
The solution is for us to evolve before AI does.
Humans are animals who are capable of higher order thinking and modifying their environments for comfort, but animals nonetheless. Look at any number of experiments (Milgram, etc.) or experiences (Malice’s Stasi example) to see our animalistic side express itself. Imagine the power grid going down, how long before people a savagely slaughtering each other over food, water and shelter? I’d give it a week, maybe two.
Now, to bring all together while paraphrasing Charlton Heston in Soylent Green: “Governments are people!” How else would one expect people to behave given the amount of power governments have?
Your post, Christopher, reminds me of our American slogan “See something, Say something!” I see posters everywhere.
We have already set up a system of reporting here. I think of the movie, Equilibrium.
The second video said, “we need an alternative.” That’s it!! Instead of reporting to and obeying a system that is devouring humans let’s shift our focus to protecting our privacy and property so they don’t have access to us, our loved ones, and our stuff.