Log in
The story of last week, which will certainly return, is the threat to the survival of humanity (and maybe all life on Earth) from artificial intelligence. I don’t know how real that threat is and find it hard to think about, but I am worried that even if humanity survives, AI will be a means of endless tyranny, with all hopes of human freedom extinguished.
Much of political philosophy over the past three centuries or so has consisted in elaborating a picture of what it means for a society to be one of free and equal human beings, and the implicit self-understanding of most of our societies has been to have that as our imagined collective destination, perhaps delayed by practical concerns and by deep and unresolved questions about what it would mean, about who is included in the scope of freedom and equality (and who not). When John Rawls wrote about an overlapping consensus or when Joseph Carens discussed shared democratic values or even when Habermas outlined the conditions of an ideal speech situation, they were pointing to possibilities unrealized in our actual societies but implicitly acknowledged as the promise of the future. And radical critique of our societies, such as articulated by Marxists or anarchists, did not so much renounce the aspiration to freedom and equality but argued that the desire for it that capitalism and modernity called forth would inevitably be frustrated within an actual society that reproduced domination and exploitation: that liberal society failed to keep its own promises, which would instead be realised by a socialist alternative.
But now we find ourselves on the edge, or perhaps over the edge, of a descent into a world where such visions of freedom and equality are unimaginable and where, to borrow a cliché, resistance is simply futile. The herald of this predicament was Edward Snowden, who revealed how comprehensive a monitoring of individual thought and action was possible in the world of the internet. Anyway it has turned out that, for most of the population, privacy is something they are perfectly happy to sacrifice, just so long as the algorithms end up being better tuned to the satisfaction of our wants and desires. And progress is no long measured in terms of our liberation from various forms of oppressions but rather in the ever increased abilities we have to acquire and consume, even if that comes at the expense of the natural and physical basis of our very survival.
Benjamin Constant thought that a private sphere was one of the constituent parts of the “liberty of the moderns”, and if he was right then Snowden’s revelations and, subsequently, the panopticon of the tech oligarchs have put an end to freedom already. But it is one thing, perhaps, to have all that information about us and to put it to effective use beyond the satisfaction and shaping of our consumer choice. Well, a first step in politics is to tailor our information environments so as to manipulate us, or enough of us, to cast our votes in favour of the preferred candidates of crypto billionaires, and we are already beyond that stage thanks to the likes of Palantir. It turns out that enough of us can be scared by the threat of “illegal immigrants”, “fighting-age males”, “grooming gangs” or simply brown people standing up for their rights, to make it likely that far-right populists will take power in parts of Europe as they already have in the United States. And when they are in power they will benefit from the fact that our conventional and sensible politicians have already weakened or removed the guardrails that limit state power, undermining human rights and criminalising those who have been active in protesting the climate emergence, the Gaza genocide or the tens of thousands of migrant deaths.
When Le Pen, or Farage or the AfD are in power, as Meloni is in power in Italy, Trump in the US, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and, indeed Xi in China, what makes us think that it will ever be possible to remove them? Well perhaps that thought is too soon, for now, because there are still a few institutional obstacles in the paths of some of them, and ageing and death will at least deal with some individuals eventually.
But this only puts off the day when states, armed with vast amounts of information about every single on of us, are able to interrogate that data using artificial intelligence and able to thwart or anticipate any organized political resistance. States are already criminalizing people, such as Just Stop Oil protesters in the UK, for discussing online how to resist. For people to resist they need to co-ordinate with one another, to plan, to argue, to locate their fellow thinkers. Good luck with that if all that planning, co-ordination and chat is analysed in real time by AI, which can dispatch law enforcement to arrest the putative conspirators forthwith.
More than that, we can we even hope that if political resistance is impossible we, or at least a few brave individuals, might maintain a faint light by acts such as harbouring the regime’s victims, as people did in Nazi Germany? For such acts would likely be quickly detected by AIs questioning the vast pool of data generated by our moving around, shopping, adjusting our central heating and all the mundane actions that interact with “smart” devices of various kinds. The “illegal immigrants” hiding in your basement will, almost inevitably, generate changes to the digital readings from your building that will distinguish it from the other buildings in the neighbourhood. Again, the police, of ICE, can be sent to investigate on the basis of the data.
It is tempting, in the face of such thoughts, to advocate that people who wish to live as free and equal individuals should simply find somewhere to live off-grid, perhaps practising some form of subsistence agriculture to meet basic needs. But such an option is unattractive for those of us who have been negligent enought to allow our wants to be irremediably shaped by living in a consumer society and we would, of course, also be depriving ourselves of many of the benefits of modern science and in particular of medical technology without which many of us could not survive. Moreover, there is no land in which we could live beyond the boundaries of states, as once there was, so we cannot escape to form Maroon communities or their latter-day equivalents. Insofar as any such experiment were successful, it would likely be suppressed as a threat by the incumbents of state power who would perhaps dress up their intervention as the humanitarian rescue of, for example, children, deprived by their parents of the benefits of modern civilization, including artificial intelligence. Again the “terrorists” or the “separatists” can be led away.
Of course, I’d like to believe that my fears are unfounded, that approximations to freedom and equality can still be attempted and that resistance to tyranny can still be viable, perhaps using the Master’s tools. But for now I’m gripped by a deep pessimism, sometimes relieved by the thought that I will probably not see the worst, a thought that is immediately undermined by reflection on what my children and my children’s children will have to live under.
