Throughout most of human evolution, progress as well as its horizontal transmission was an extremely slow, occasional, and tedious a process. Well into the classic period of Alexander the Macedonian and his glorious Alexandrian library, the speed of our knowledge transfers – however moderate, analogue, and conservative – was still surpassing the snail-like cycles of our breakthroughs.
When our sporadic breakthroughs finally turned out to be faster than the velocity of their infrequent transmissions – that marked a point of departure. Simply, our civilizations started to significantly differentiate from each other in their respective techno-agrarian, politico-military, ethno-religious, ideological, and economic setups. In the eve of grand discoveries, that very event transformed wars and famine from the low-impact and local, into the bigger and cross-continental.
Faster cycles of technological breakthroughs, patents, and discoveries, rather than their transfers, primarily occurred on the Old continent. That occurrence, with all its reorganizational effects, radically reconfigured societies. It finally marked a birth of mighty European empires, their (liberal) schools and an overall, lasting triumph of Western civilization.
Act
For the past few centuries, we have lived fear but dreamt hope – all for the sake of modern times. Now we have moved from WWI to WWW. Is this modernity of internet age, with all the suddenly reviled breakthroughs and their instant transmission, now harboring us in a bay of fairness, harmony, and overall reconciliation? Was and will our history ever be on holiday? Thus, has our world ever been more than an idea? Shall we stop short at the Kantian word – a moral definition of imagined future, or continue to the Hobbesian realities and grasp for an objective, geopolitical definition of our common tomorrow?
The agrarian age inevitably brought up the question of economic redistribution. Industrial society culminated on the question of political participation. The AI (quantum physics, nanorobotics and bioinformatics) brings a new, yet underreported challenge: Human (physical and mental) powers might – far and wide, and rather soon – become obsolete. If/when so, the question of human irrelevance is next to be asked.
Why is AI like no technology ever before?
If you believe that the above is yet another philosophical melodrama, an anemically played alarmism, mind this:
We will soon have to redefine what we consider as life itself.
Less than a month ago (January 2020), the successful trials have been completed. The border between organic and inorganic, intrinsic and artificial is downed forever. AI is now all-in: quantum physics (along with quantum computing), nanorobotics, bioinformatics and organic tissue tailoring. Synthesis of all that is usually referred to as xenobots (sorts of living robots) – biodegradable symbiotic nanorobots that exclusively rely on evolutionary (self-navigable) algorithms. The essential building element to biotronics is now here.
React
Although life is to be lived forward (with no backward looking), human retrospection is the biggest reservoir of insights. Of what makes us human.
Hence, what does our history of technology in relation to human development tell us so far?
Elaborating on a well-known argument of ‘defensive modernization’ of Fukuyama, it is evident that throughout the entire human history a technological drive was aimed to satisfy the security (and control) objective. It was rarely (if at all) driven by a desire to (gain a knowledge outside of convention, in order to) ease human existence, and to enhance human emancipation and liberation of societies at large. Thus, unless operationalized by the system, both intellectualism (human autonomy, mastery and purpose), and technological breakthroughs were traditionally felt and perceived as a threat. As a problem, not a solution.
Ok. But what has brought us (under) AI today?
It was our acceptance. Of course, manufactured.
All cyber-social networks and related search engines are far away from what they are portrayed to be: a decentralized but unified intelligence, attracted by gravity of quality rather than navigated by force of a specific locality. (These networks were not introduced to promote and emancipate other cultures but to maintain and further strengthen supremacy of the dominant one.)
In no way do they correspond with a neuroplasticity of physics of our consciousness. They only offer an answer to our anxieties – in which the fear from free time is the largest, since free time coupled with silence is our gate to creativity and self-reflection. In fact, the cyber-tools of these data-sponges primarily serve the predictability, efficiency, calculability and control purpose, and only then they serve everything else – as to be e.g. user-friendly and en mass attractive service.
To observe the new corrosive dynamics of social phenomenology between manipulative fetishization (probability) and self-trivialization (possibility), the cyber-social platforms – these dustbins of human empathy in the muddy suburbs of consciousness – are particularly interesting.
This is how the human presence-eliminating technologies have been introduced to and accepted by us.
Packed
How did we reflect – in our past – on new social dynamics created by the deployment of new technologies?
Aegean theater of Ancient Greece was a place of astonishing revelations and intellectual excellence – a remarkable density and proximity, not surpassed up to our age. All we know about science, philosophy, sports, arts, culture and entertainment, stars and earth has been postulated, explored and examined then and there. Simply, it was a time and place of triumph of human consciousness, pure reasoning and sparkling thought. However, neither Euclid, Anaximander, Heraclites, Hippocrates (both of Chios, and of Cos), Socrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Democritus, Plato, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Aristotle, Empedocles, Conon, Eratosthenes nor any of dozens of other brilliant ancient Greek minds did ever refer by a word, by a single sentence to something which was their everyday life, something they saw literally on every corner along their entire lives. It was an immoral, unjust, notoriously brutal and oppressive slavery system that powered the state. (Slaves have not been even attributed as humans, but rather as the ‘phonic tools/tools able to speak’.) This myopia, this absence of critical reference on the obvious and omnipresent is a historic message – highly disturbing, self-telling and quite a warning.
So, finally:
Why is AI like no technology ever before?
Ask Google; I am busy messaging right now!
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com or any institutions with which the authors are associated.
