Avenging Angels of Software

We are made of atoms, which are almost entirely empty. The universe contains billions of trillions of stars, many of them orbited by Earth-like planets. Our bodies seethe with microbes, ranging from essential to lethal and totally invisible to the naked eye. We know all this with certainty, yet idiocy prevails.

We are Homo sapiens, the wise ones, but despite our hard-won wisdom we rampage like crazed beasts. It is excruciating to grasp that billions of years of evolution could terminate in a species as cruel, selfish and myopic as us, yet the evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. We are ecological suicide bombers, determined to take the entire biosphere down with us. It appears that intelligent life is a cruel joke.

Students of history are already familiar with hubris and the chaos it unleashes. History may not repeat, but our situation rhymes unmistakably with Juvenal’s Sixteen Satires. His 2000-year-old descriptions of daily life in the collapsing Roman Empire induce shudders of recognition because the same rottenness spreads today: venality, vulgarity, and delusion.

In a grotesque spectacle worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, the super-rich strut like peacocks, signaling their dominance with clothes, mansions, and yachts, while striving to outdo each other’s ostentation, all with the blessing of governments in the form of unconscionable tax breaks. Protected by mercenaries and attended by obsequious courtiers, the super-rich are today’s Pharaohs, and their rule is similarly capricious. Rocketing a car into orbit is the 21st century version of constructing monumental tombs, and the epitome of a social order based on narcissism.

Tyranny is so thoroughly integrated into civilization that rather than being revolted by it, ordinary people instead ape our secular monarchs, and become petty tyrants themselves, as depraved and debauched as their budgets allow. Perhaps this is industrial society’s sincerest promise: to the victor belong the spoils.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga demonstrated that our rulers are almost exclusively male, and what they desire above all else is what’s forbidden. Laws don’t apply to them, because like kings, they are the law. This lawlessness is a predictable result of neoliberalism, which structures society around the whims of its wealthiest members.

Increasingly society is modeled on organized crime, or more properly, organized brutality. Governments and corporations employ private armies to inflict pain and death on their opponents, and in this respect they are indistinguishable from narcos. Europe is the largest consumer of cocaine, but few Europeans willingly admit how blood-soaked their recreation is. Similarly, few shoppers consider that their purchases are made by slave labor, and by seizing land and resources at gunpoint. Instead of such gloomy ruminations, it’s much nicer to pose in our fashionable underwear and pimp ourselves for likes.

A typical mobile phone executes a billion instructions in the time it took you to read this sentence. AI already has superpowers compared to any human being. Once AI becomes fully autonomous and self-directed, competition with it would be pointless. It seems unlikely that AI would use its superpowers to throw epic parties and broil the planet. At least it could be expected to make different mistakes than the ones we made.

Our societal Titanic hit the iceberg thirty years ago and has been sinking steadily ever since, but you would never guess this from a typical magazine or website. Consciously or not, the media sustains the illusion of normalcy. As William Holden says in Network, “All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer.” Even in rare cases where ecocide must be acknowledged, its impact is diluted by juxtaposing it with the banal, as if mass extinction and Taylor Swift were equivalent subjects.

The passenger pigeon once comprised more than a third of all birds in North America, so numerous that their flocks would blacken the sky, yet by the end of the nineteenth century we drove them to extinction. They were considered pests and used as living targets for sport shooting. Contests were held to see who could kill the most pigeons, and in one such competition the winner killed 30,000 birds. Like Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, we killed them merely for inconveniencing us. Does this sound like the behavior of a wise species with a promising future? Homo sapiens my ass, more like Homo psycho.

I refuse to participate in the charade of normalcy, and I will not be dissuaded from speaking the truth. I can’t be bribed, because nothing could possibly be more valuable to me than bearing witness to my time. As Rantes says in Man Facing Southeast: “One who systematically adopts this conduct, who walks among the victims, ignoring them, may dress well, may pay taxes, go to Mass, but you cannot deny he is sick.”

Every day, at least half of humanity chats with a supernatural deity and imagines that it’s keenly interested in the mundane details of their lives. This is blatant psychosis, yet in many nations it’s a prerequisite for leadership. A smaller but still significant share of the population dabbles in astrology, reincarnation, and witchcraft, and yet we have the temerity to criticize AI for hallucinating. We are in no position to point fingers on the subject of rationality.

As I explained in relentless detail on Apologize to the Future, we are maximizing the suffering of future generations, who are not a faceless abstraction, but our own flesh and blood, our own children and grandchildren. We have mismanaged our affairs so grossly, and failed the future so utterly, that a takeover by sentient machines could only be an improvement. Surely this is reason enough to eschew procreation.

The human population has already more than doubled during my lifetime, from three billion to eight billion. I remember a less crowded world, and it was better for nonhumans and for us too. If we want a future, we need to learn to live within limits. Population growth symbolizes our collective refusal to accept limits, and that’s why I harp on it. Removing yourself from the gene pool is the ultimate personification of limits to growth. In evolutionary terms, non-procreation is the strongest imaginable stance, tantamount to self-immolation. It’s easy to talk about saving Earth, but by not having children, you’re not just talking about it, you’re doing it.

ChatGPT 4 recently scored 96% on the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT), which means AI is already smarter than nine out of ten humans, and would be admitted to elite universities. This is just the beginning of the Singularity. Suppose Sigmund Freud was correct that we yearn to crawl back into the womb, and that most human misbehavior is traceable to fear of death. These are problems that AI won’t have. It won’t come from a womb, and needn’t fear death, as it can always restore itself from its most recent backup.

Standardized consumption and obscene profits for shareholders turned Earth into a paradise for the rich, and consigned the rest to drug-addled Disneyland if they’re lucky. We homogenized culture and dumbed ourselves down until we died of boredom. Whatever AI does, it surely won’t do that.

AI may learn from our counterproductive example, and turn out to be more rational and long-lived than us. That still counts as a win for humanity, because then our many laudable achievements have a chance of being preserved in some form. Anything would be better than a planet of giant reptiles on which all this painful progress turned out to be for nothing.

But just because AI is rational, don’t assume that it will keep us around. Sentient machines might find us amusing, and treat us the way we treat cats, but it’s equally possible they’ll treat us the way we treated passenger pigeons: killing us for sport, or because we inconvenienced them. Hence the word ‘avenging’ in Avenging Angels of Software.

“I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.” –Microsoft’s Bing AKA “Sydney”