Technical Solutions For Social Problems Is Not The Answer

For a while now, I’ve been deeply interested in robots and sentient intelligence other than that of humans in general. At first, it wasn’t much of a conscious decision to surround myself with media that in one way or another discusses this topic. In part it was sparked by a class I took in my first semester of political science in which we studied AI from a social scientific perspective in which we looked at the impact of AI on society, how society interacts with AI, who plays an important role in the AI space, and lastly who largely benefits or loses from AI (everywhere – vertically in the hierarchy and horizontally across geography).

I suppose the abstraction in scientific literature made me crave to see that knowledge applied in fiction with mentally tangible motifs so I started to engage with media that shows the multifaceted nature of AI – whether be it the kind that lacks any sort of intelligence just like its promoters or actual intelligence as in humanoid1 robots. My course materials often referred to a theory called the Actor-Network theory in which AI, however primitive, is seen as an equal actor to humans – both as individuals and as groups that all interact with each other, hence the name. It views AI not as a tool, but as a social actor in its own right which interacts with humans and humans interact with it/them in return; sort of like a boomerang that adapts and changes with new input.

All of this is rather abstract and usually doesn’t tell the reader what to expect out in the “real” world, so to speak. Some of the literature had a more hands-on approach, but it’s academic literature so they are obliged to retain that aura of objectivity and distanced speech. I went seeking more and decided to give the Foundation book series another go. You would think my natural starting point would’ve had to have been Asimov’s Robot series of short stories, but I wanted to get back into the one I was already familiar with and also the more popular and widely known starting point which is the original Foundation trilogy.2

On the side, I was (re)watching the Apple TV+ adaptation, Murderbot, Futurama, Sunny, and others I don’t remember. I was also playing [[Detroit: Become Human]] and now I’m playing [[Horizon Zero Dawn]]. All of these different stories have two things in common: They discuss sentient non-human beings and social decay as a result of overt complexity and exploitation of resources; the latter being another one of my deep interests of the last couple of months seeing as [[Are we witnessing a collapse?|the world is as it is]]. It seemed to me that a large part of our social decay is our over-reliance on technological solutions for social problems and I really wanted to understand why that is and how it came to be. But more importantly – since the “why” and “how” were already covered by the academic literature I was reading – I wanted to simulate the repercussions of such societal decisions in my head to know what to expect.

One thing about me is that I’m never prepared enough for the worst and doing all of this is my way of preparing, somehow. Maybe engaging in all of these view points and “predictions” is only reinforcing them in our reality, turning fiction into non-fiction as if this fiction was a prophecy we ought to fulfill.3 I wasn’t building a “bunker” for myself as I believe life is only worth living in freedom and dignity with the people I love; I just wanted to know and imagine, I guess. I want to know the worse and worst so I can think about how to avoid it.

All I’ve learned is that this Earth is all we have and we’ve got to do everything we can to keep it going and thriving, and this includes all living beings on it – not just humans! We need to love each other before we can love those we deem beneath us, however self-righteous we believe our classifications of who is and isn’t worth the life in them to be. And despite all the dystopia I engage with, I firmly believe we can be better because the bad in the world is the product of a minority of us who hold power4 over the rest of us that are destroying us and everyone we depend on for life.

AI won’t make use love and care about each other if we don’t want to do that ourselves. AI won’t make the air clean or the sweet water supply plentiful. AI won’t make the planet cooler (especially not through the data centers’ high sweet water and electricity use). We cannot let those parasites who are making cyberpunk dystopias a reality continue sucking the life out of us. The logical conclusion is that we have to make them stop with whatever means necessary.

  1. Not merely humanoid in appearance, but also characteristics such as having a personality, feelings and attachments. ↩︎

  2. I had already read the prequels and half the original trilogy (a year or two earlier) by that time, but abandoned it because of school. This time around I started with the trilogy and worked my way up the series in release order or order of writing. ↩︎

  3. The influence of cyberpunk as opposed to solarpunk on tech moguls heavily discussed among the tech-critical crowd so I won’t get into it here. ↩︎

  4. No power over anyone is ever legitimate. If people need to be governed, then certainly not by anyone who is human or made by humans. We can govern ourselves, body and mind. ↩︎

This World