Someone please change my mind about the robots

Grading papers at the end of the world

It’s a Thursday night, and the flu has wrecked my sleep and loosened my screws a little. In the mirror, my cheeks are flushed and my eyes are bright with fever. On top of this, I’ve just made the unfortunate choice to binge all the Trump news I had been conscientiously blocking out since the inauguration a few days before. I’m reading through the list of executive orders and I’m so afraid for so many people, and I’m thinking about how language is a weapon.

In this crazed state, I decide for some reason that it’s time to get some grading done. I need to grade online assignments, and because I think it’s likely a lot of students will have turned to ChatGPT for help, I open the chatbot myself for the first time ever. (I know, I know it’s literally been years. I just don’t need it in my life!) I play around with the essay prompt and ask for summaries of the readings, and then I chat freely with it for a few minutes, and then I sit quietly at my desk for a long time, staring at the wall and feeling my grip on reality slipping dangerously. I try to record the experience, and the words come fast and spiralling.

~

Our life flashes before my eyes.

We made meaning through language. Now we’ve made a world where language is divorced from meaning—language, which gives structure to thought, which holds collective experience. The sanctity of human understanding is fractured.

The world will be choked by massive quantities of artificially spawned information, information untethered, information multiplying and multiplying and multiplying purely for its own sake. We will suffocate under it. We are bearing witness to a nauseating expansion and simultaneous flattening of the human experience.

Is this the first time humanity has confronted mass meaninglessness?

It’s less like the destruction of the world, and more like the world’s utter neutralization. It’s the end of history, but not a stabilization, not the achievement of order, not a dialectical synthesis: history’s dissolution.

What does it mean to write at the end of history?

Once we believed in historical development according to reason, and we anticipated freedom in the final, grand realization of history’s plodding logic.

Then we learned that God is dead, that the revolution is not coming, that history has no preordained direction and no purpose.

And then there was this, this re-colonization of history by the ultimate, history-dissolving logic: the logic of maximization.

We built the Tower of Babylon in a universe without divine retribution.

And I watched it happen.

~

You can laugh. Basically, I talked to a chatbot and had the reaction of a medieval fanatic confronting the prospect of the apocalypse. (Consider this, from Wikipedia: “The concept of an end of history is a globalist form of the same end of the world philosophy as expressed in various religions.”) Only the fear of God isn’t accessible to me, so I’m left with a lot of fear and no easy way to channel it. The fear hangs limply around me, hangs in the air like a cloud stuck on a mountain, always there but never completely solid.

My fever is long gone now, but it still feels like the world is ending. I think about climate change every day. Politics is a car crash that’s hardly happening in slow motion. Half the world is at war. We watch as power cannibalizes itself.

And yes, I’m worried about the robots! When I think about ChatGPT, this raving part of my brain imagines a future like this: artificial intelligence lays waste to the human experience and effectively negates the concept of freedom. Our every desire becomes knowable and manipulable. We’re defenceless against the algorithms that govern our needs and wants, and entirely subservient to the tech bro overclass. Surveillance and biopolitical control are supercharged. Human culture and the information environment are overrun with artificially generated garbage. Our cognitive faculties decline. We give up the ability to exercise critical thought and aesthetic judgement. Ethical judgement becomes irrelevant, and the possibility of politics is foreclosed completely. We lose the capacity to recognize what we’ve lost, let alone imagine alternatives.

I do also believe the people who know a lot more about this than I do when they say there’s a non-trivial possibility that runaway AI ends human civilization. Or, falling short of that, that we use it to annihilate ourselves by more conventional means. Or that AI devalues labour to an extent unparalleled in history, giving rise to unprecedented and stable forms of inequality and a new feudal order, or something worse.

Doomerism is so not in my nature, yet here we are. I would really like to be completely off base. Please, please tell me I’m delusional.

But whether you will or you won’t, I’ll try not to end this post with resignation. I’ve been thinking for months about this essay, which is about an undergraduate course at U of Chicago on existential risk. Specifically, I’ve been thinking for months about this one paragraph, describing a student in the course called Mikko:

He said that the course had made him think about people throughout time who believed that their world would soon end. “The last week of discussion, I wrote about the cathedral-building problem,” he said. How could people who faced such uncertain lives build cathedrals, the construction of which could go on for lifetimes? “The argument I made was that the people who built cathedrals were people who believed in Revelations, who were sure they were doomed… It’s a weird feeling—to be certain that the world will end,” he said. “But also not certain about the specific hour or day of when it will happen. So you think, I may as well dedicate myself to something.”

Facing the prospect of the apocalypse, the real late medieval humans built cathedrals. I realize this isn’t the perfect inspirational analogy—I imagine those labourers were more concerned with, well, annihilation by more conventional means, here on earth—but I think it’s better than nothing, and so in my anxious cloud I ask myself, what’s your cathedral?

I’ve been working on letting go of the conviction that whatever I do with my life, including my career, needs to be “useful” in a narrowly quantifiable way—another merciless face of the logic of maximization. I am going to dedicate myself to doing things that light me up inside.

A cathedral is a garden. It’s a community. It’s a book that might be irrelevant in 20 years, but hell, you write it anyway. It’s the impractical, the sentimental, the mundane, and the absurd. A cathedral is stories to tell your grandkids. It’s not denial or withdrawal; in fact, it’s just the opposite.

So here I am, writing my silly blog at the end of the world. What are you going to make?