The War of Gods and Men
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/That has such people in't!"
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest
If anyone has read the darkly fascinating novel The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut, based on real people and events, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest speaks of "a spectre haunting the soul of science... both logic-driven and utterly irrational... preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control".
Ehrenfest's warning - speaking as he is from the depths of a breakdown - reminded me of a surreal web animation, which began its genesis as an AI-powered Seinfeld spoof called "Nothing, Forever" on the gaming platform Twitch. Simultaneously logical and utterly irrational, it streams live 24 hours a day, and is an eerie experiment in digital creativity and in the future of humanity and its relationship with Ehrenfest's spectre.
The Maniac, too, is presented as fiction based on fact, and reading one while watching the other makes me feel that Ehrenfest's spectre is here to stay: They say it's a strange world, and it always has been, but it's only going to get more technologically weird. The spectre that looms large will be both comic and terrifying in unequal parts, no doubt.
I am, of course, talking about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), whose promises enrapture its developers even as they fret over its apocalyptic potential. For the simple reason that AI will enhance not just our lives, but amplify our very natures. So while a Twitch channel like WatchMeForever may highlight our fixation on the absurdity of the minutiae of daily life, an AI programme that controls drones for warfare may amplify - with complete logic and irrationality - our fixation with killing humanity.
In asking why today's AI pioneers are so eager to push forward despite the risks, Benjamín Labatut's book explores with impressive dexterity how clever men and women (though mostly men) have set about unleashing that spectre with dazzling and devastating consequences. Interestingly, too, whilst dealing with great minds that uniformly succumb to madness. The advancements made in science are most certainly because we are standing on the shoulders of these giants, but rarely in real life do we question how mad those giants were - haunted by the spectres they helped to unleash on the world.
In Labatut's The Maniac there is a short, riveting account of Ehrenfest's breakdown and demise; he killed himself and his son in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power. It made me think that from his viewpoint to ours, from the Nazis and their Third Reich - and the rise of the idea of the Superman from a misappropriation of another genius who went mad, Friedrich Nietzsche - to the world of today and something called transhumanism, Ehrenfest's fears feel manifest.
Arguably, all technological progress has had a dramatic effect on the future of humanity, but transhumanism deals with upgrading humanity itself, and thus what it means to be human. The spectre no longer looms, we are the spectre: In this sense, transhumanism is a philosophical and scientific (and quasi-medical) movement that advocates the use of current and emerging technologies - such as genetic engineering, cryonics, AI, and nanotechnology - to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition.
The ties between Nietzsche's ideas, of the "death of God" and "Man's evolution" into a superman, and transhumanism goes beyond the superficial, however. The German philosopher believed modern European thought and the reformation of Christianity - a rational approach to life with an emphasis on individual rights, or a spiritual one where a person accepted their fate - was weak. It had arrested mankind's development and suffocated its ambition. Standing in the latter half of the 19th Century, Nietzsche believed the only way to pull them out of this bog of European enlightenment was through the pursuit of power.
He believed that in his era, unlike in ancient civilisations, mankind was no longer hell-bent on the accumulation of power, and thus human progress had stalled. For that he blamed religious coda reformed by European enlightenment in favour of the common individual. But the drive for power and the ambition of the intellectual elite could push them out of their stagnation to allow mankind to fulfill its true potential in the 20th Century.
In the second decade of the 20th Century, fourteen years after Nietzche's descent into madness and death, came the First World War, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. The German philosopher was thought so relevant at the time that some academics called the war "Nietzsche in Action".
And thirty nine years after the death of Nietzsche, with the backing of the philosopher's sister, the Nazis adopted his writings into a manifesto of racial purity. Six million Jewish people, and other minorities considered inferior by the Nazis, were driven from their homes and persecuted in a mass drive of ethnic cleansing that has never really been surpassed since the Second World War.
In England, during the fight against Hitler's Third Reich that ensued, mothers left home for work; men went to the front; children in London were evacuated. All across the European continent cities were decimated. Dislocation is a theme of all wars, but the dislocation of people and power after the Second World War, and the trauma from this dislocation, can still be found in our technological advancements and the continuing clash between the generations and ideologies today.
Once upon our time,
(before there was a Second)
the First World War was closely
connected with a German philosopher--
who had died fourteen years before
the barbarity of his brethren--
for he had espoused in prophetic fashion
how the slave mentality of Christianity
had stymied Man's development,
and suffocated His ambition;
and how the achievement of power
was infinitely more important than
the surivival of men.
The German philosopher was right about human progression, just not in the way he imagined it. The decade that truly ushered in the anti-establishment was the so-called counter culture of the swinging sixties. This was the era of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, miniskirts, the Beatles, sit-ins, women's lib, and protests all vying for a voice in opposition to violence and its patriarchal manifestations.
Civil rights, the anti-authoritarian, liberal, permissive (though not as permissive as the myths have it) attitudes that heralded the sixties were rooted in the experiences of war, the affluence of the fifties and (thanks to war production) full employment. In a way, the children of the sixties were as much the children of violence as previous generations before them. The offshoots of violent ends had allowed them the freedom to protest against it.
Yet, sixty years after the death of Nietzsche, the desire for power and control remained stronger than ever: The US of the sixties saw a different type of war, the Vietnam War, highlight the ever growing dislocation between the American people, while two decades later, Britain was being shaped by its own race riots, militant feminism, and the collapse of heavy industry and trade unionism. If walking your own line in the sixties was about the freedom to express yourself, when combined with eighties' consumerism that expression of self became a narcissistic dictat for the ensuing decades. Working-class solidarity appeared to fracture, and the rise of what is now known as identity politics began.
The "rage against the machine" of the establishment in the eighties, and the sense of nihilism that nothing really mattered that followed in the nineties, turned that anger towards not the individual's politics, but to the individual themselves. Individualism and austerity in the early 21st Century shifted blame from a profoundly unequal and unjust society, widely acknowledged after the Second World War, to a person's (i.e., a politician's) character failings instead. It was a move away from criticism of the systemic to the personal. It didn't matter if the oppression or injustice or political manifesto was real - what mattered was that the rage was real. The fear was real.
At the same time, freedom of expression suddenly turned ugly; it became the excessive admiration of oneself and one's physical appearance. From a creative force, it became a destructive one. It was a dislocation of self; it was an inflation of the ego, driving a feeling of superiority over others, a need for attention aginst repressed insecurities, creating a vacuum of empathy with very few boundaries of moral responsibility or culpability. The Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche's writings had finally infected European enlightenment and beyond.
Now, well over a century after the death of Nietzsche, today's generation is no longer raging against the system, but against differing identities. People have made their views personal, and the dislocation of previous years has spread its tendrils out further. Humans are warring with each other, but this time it's for their identities, and not simply for hierarchical ideologies. For instance, when people began to personally identify with their political preferences, anyone who did not accept or share those preferences immediately became unacceptable to them, and they became unacceptable to those people. Swap political for sexual. Swap it for religious. You get the picture.
The only problem is that the picture we get is now a digital one, prone to alteration, even a deepfake of the real thing. We don't know who to believe, or who to trust. Seeing is no longer believing - unless what we've seen has been verified first. We need to be aware that Google does not fact-check and that fact-checking is no longer the tribulation of editors; it is a way to stem TikTok frenzies.
And our technological advancements have created a human machine of violence that is more capable than ever before of destroying the planet and the very fabric of life as we know it.
You don't have to be a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination to feel concern, and new technologies and the exciting changes they herald will always fascinate us regardless.
It's also true that - now more than ever - we need to embrace what we fear. For instance, songwriters who use AI as a tool for inspiration believe their industry shouldn't be afraid of embracing new technology. Art and what it means to the audience must come from inside, after all. AI is a technically advanced tool that is unable to imitate the artistry and human emotion necessary to replicate the mastery of their craft.
It is, arguably, already a slight form of transhumanism, using tools to help enhance an artist's talent. One could argue, too, that artists need to be authentic, and using tools might be considered cheating (ignoring the fact that all inspiration steals from something). One could further argue that this future was foretold by Nietzche. The philosopher's strongly aesthetic vision perceived life as a work of art and all of us our own artists, and here is the outcome, one might say. We are moulding our minds and bodies into creative expressions of ourselves, but it is not akin to using your skin as a canvas for a tattoo. Not unless the inked image has a sensory sat nav implanted in it to guide you in the dark, say, adding an extra sensory perception to your human arsenal.
On the other hand, a day might come when the tools used to augment humanity may replace it altogether. What will it mean, when artists have documented enough from their explorations of experience and humanity to be drawn upon by AI creativity (as terrible and eerie as it looks and sounds now) for it to be indiscernible from the real thing? And will AI be able to discern plagiarism, or understand (or morally care) where mimicry ends and the theft of intelligent property begins?
Furthermore, taken out of the context of art and entertainment, and placed in the theatre of warfare, what replications of human follies would ensue? We have turned the nature of being human - the nature of just existing - not into an artform, but into a war. Now in addition to that we have individual technologies that can enhance not just our artistic endeavours but our warring capabilities, as well. And although we have been progressing with technology for generations now (and have managed to use our weapons for mass destruction sparingly) it's only recently that we have realised the opportunity has come for new technologies to talk, play and fight back.
The War of Being Human
-Russell T Davies
It is too simple to say that human beings are still children, without the requisite responsibility to play with advanced, and very dangerous, toys. It's rather more true - though rather insensitive - to say that stupidity poses a constant threat to our existence. Collective stupidity exists, and it is a force with influence on the world. But that is not something new. In times past our cultures, traditions and religious beliefs dictated how we thought in a collective, but popular culture and the cult of celebrity and online influencers (and now possibly AIs) are also part of that equation in modern societies - especially amongst young questioning minds. When mentors used to be patrons, now they are our peers, so the pool of stupid has become a lot larger.
This isn't to say tradition and religion or peer influence makes us wholly ignorant. In contrast, Safia Elhillo's essay for the Poetry Foundation, "before/before", espouses in the most moving fashion how our earliest teachers can be those young and old who share an artistic integrity willing to explore their humanity. But we need to be informed, and need to choose wisely our mentors from all walks of life. And we need to constantly ask questions of others and ourselves. Why does the question matter? Because it means that we are constantly fact-checking our knowledge. Ultimately, we are all individually responsible for how we wish to live.
As a potential mentor, Nietzsche's ideas failed to captivate me. I neither agreed with his view that Christianity (or any religion) is simply a push to slave mentality to control free thought, or that the point of humans is not to survive, but to achieve power (his mental issues started soon after realising his world view wasn't feasible). However, he voices a universal message that is easy enough to follow: We alone can give our life meaning. We are all individually responsible for what we do, who we are, and the world we live in. But add a caveat: We are also collectively responsible. The reality is that the choices we make in that regard can affect the quality of life on the planet as a whole, as the past choices of others now affect the quality of our lives.
In addition, to understand how we've arrived at this modern chapter of regressed infancy is to be aware that the strongest antidote to ignorance is a study and respect of history. Today our lives are not merely a document for history books, they are a document about the importance of history books. The impact of history defines the future; knowing that means that we can try and lessen its negative aspects. If the analogy pleases you: A greater knowledge of our history can be a firewall, our virus protection against an uncertain future.
And yet, no virus protection can fully protect us from our own actions. Throughout, violence is an anchor, maybe even the real protagonist in our story. It has been a common theme across humanity's oeuvre: Pain might metamorphose and manifest in different ways, and in different guises, but it is often fuelled by the same fears, the same prejudices, and the same horrific desires. It is a harsh reality that the changes wrought from warfare are too deeply ingrained to be extracted by even a century of peaceful coexistence, for good or for ill.
War has always shaped our lives, whether we are aware of it or not. From the technological advancements we use today right down to the very quality of the air we breathe. War shaped the lives of our DNA descendants, our grandparents and parents, and continues to shape our lives, and will continue to shape the lives of our children and their children.
Like the heavy indented footprint we have stamped on the climate, the damage feels irrevocably done. We are the procreation of violence. We are the procreators of violence. We are both its victim and its most vocal supporter. Locked in a vicious circle of addiction, the violence that fuelled us once, now shapes us. Not merely our lives, mark you, but us. It is not merely the soundtrack to our lives, but a Wagnerian motif to our very identity.
It is that violence of our ancestors that continues to inform the majority today. We have warred with the world, with its elements and with each other for so long, that we haven't stopped to consider that we no longer need to war for our survival. And possibly, we never needed to war in the first place.
And we may have to get used to the fact that, unless one day scientists discover we all live inside a computer simulation, the point of existence may be that there is no point to being here; we are here, so the question should really be, how should we live? As people with lofty goals and singleminded ambition to attain it, or people happy with mediocrity? Well, that is up to the individual, but the question of how we should live collectively shouldn't be up for debate.
There is a reason why the First World War was called Nietzsche in action, while the Second World War was described as the people's war. Namely, there was a hope that in a collective effort, under the banner of freedom and fairness, something better could be built against a facist regime. In tribute to the memory of all who fought and died in that war, I do believe that what existed at the heart of the people’s war still continues. For any meaning to our lives, it must; and that is more paramount than our survival.
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posted by Tarkan Deluxe at 8:46 pm
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