Staying Human In The Future

One of the hardest things to do in the future will be to stay human.

The social, technological and economic prompts to abandon our humanity will come thick and fast.

These prods and prompts, these entreaties, won’t, for the most part, be labelled as such. Most will come wrapped in the language of progress and will spill forth from the mouths of the neoliberalised and the technologified.

They will come from the mouths of the elite, and, sadly, the ordinary, who will have bought into the scheme, into the grand illusion.

Artificial intelligence, the insidious evils of which I have written about a couple of times recently, is an obvious example.

The evangelical swill spilling forth from the mouths of the technological and political high-ups about our AI future would make a pig choke.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai says AI “has the potential to be more transformative than electricity or fire.” Melinda Gates says it will solve poverty, climate change and disease. The details on this, alas, are scarce. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer thinks the problem won’t be staying human, because AI will in fact, “make us more human.”

More human?

Than what?

What is it that has made us less human, Keir? What’s the dehumanising element of our current arrangement, Keir?

The idea that saturating our world with technology will unleash our buried or supressed humanity is, (sorry to employ such an over-used word), god-level gaslighting. It’s an affront to our basic intelligence to suggest the essence of our humanity can be found, or freed, by machines, rather than by us.

AI is not coming to save us.

AI is coming to blur every boundary we’ve ever known between the real and the fake, the true and the false. And as you’ve probably noticed, people were finding that tough before the AI revolution onslaught.

You may also have noticed that despite all the evangelising, no one is very clear on any of the details. On the how of it all.

Cutting through the evangelising and the bullshit, the bottom line is that we can’t be made more human by technologies run by capitalists within capitalism.

We can’t be made more human by an inhuman system of economic relations whose source code is extraction and exploitation.

Because this, Keir, is what makes us less human.

AI is not an alternative model of economic relations. It’s just another tool to be embedded within capitalist hegemony and utilised by the owners of capital.

It might take your job but it won’t shorten your workday. It will though be used as a stick to beat you with. Why aren’t you more productive, Nate, given you have this fabulous AI assistant? I’ve already heard from a white-collar friend that AI is great but “only works if you know how to prompt it.”

The machine exists to optimise and augment your labour. If it’s not doing that, you are not doing it right.

The machine won’t be blamed, you will.

Staying human under these conditions will take effort, is taking effort. And many people, in their embrace of an AI future, won’t even know their humanity is being eroded.

Staying human in the future will require vigilance.

It will require a fine-tuned bullshit detector.

Having watched a genocide be denied at the elite level and labelled a war of defence, we’ve had some practice with this already.

The future will be replete with opportunities for tuning that detector.

The future is now.

In Gaza, a slower-burn genocide has been labelled a ceasefire. Israel’s annexation of territory is called a ‘security line.’ The reduction to rubble of entire cities is called anti-terrorism. Schools and hospitals are terror bases.

In the Caribbean and the Pacific, fishermen, men without names or faces, men who have been denied any presumption of innocence, have been labelled “narco-terrorists” and extrajudicially executed.

Narco-terrorist. Well that’s new. A rhetorical invention. A political fiction designed only to manufacture consent for murder.

The term has, therefore, been seamlessly adopted by mainstream imperial discourse.

And when, in the future, the language isn’t backwards and the entreaties to abandon humanity don’t talk specifically about progress, they will come wrapped in the language of necessary evil.

A Twitter user tracked down a document NHS England, the body which governs England’s health service, wrote last year about how to handle future pandemics. The document says “it will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.” It says there is no point modelling scenarios, because, meh, who knows what’ll actually happen.

This is an entreaty to abandon our humanity if ever I’ve seen one.

This is the total collapse of the idea, let alone the institutions, of public health.

“A waste of public health resources” is barely disguised code for ‘we ain’t spending money keeping people alive next time.’

The truth is, the lesson most countries have learnt from covid is that letting the old and weak die is better for capitalism.

The lesson we, the lumpen proles, should have drawn from covid is that we are expendable. It should in turn have expanded a class consciousness.

Sad to say, many people, prompted by and indoctrinated by capital, drew the opposite conclusions. Many concluded that we are islands of individual libertarian autonomy responsible for no one but ourselves. That we don’t live in a society. That survival of the fittest should rule.

I’ve written about this before, too. Many times.

We are seeing the poisoned fruits of these lessons right now. One of the worst flu seasons in decades is ripping through the northern hemisphere. A generally more severe strain of flu A anyway mutated in June. This has rendered both vaccines (manufactured pre-mutation, in spring), and our antibodies from previous flu infections, far less effective. In response, some health authorities in the UK and Europe are recommending (not mandating) masks in hospitals and health centres. Across social media, the outrage at the idea anyone should wear a mask to protect someone else is incandescent. The most common react emoji is the laughing face.

Whether it’s flu or the next pandemic, covid has helped embed eugenics as public health policy into the consciousness. The inconveniences in the face of a health crisis were too inconvenient. You’ll live or you’ll die by virus, but there’s no point protecting yourself or anyone else. What will be will be. The show of capitalism, with a dollop of nihilism, must go on.

Staying human in the future will mean rejecting this anti-socialism. Staying human will require the rejection of eugenics-inspired policies, whether on public health or on migration.

Because if a viral free-for-all is internal eugenics, ever-harder and more militarised borders are a form of eugenics for the other. Bombed, starved, sanctioned, or climate changed to the point of fleeing your own country? How’s your fitness? If you manage the 2,000 mile walk, good luck scaling our AI-powered, quadcopter-surveilled, thirty-foot sniper rifle-adorned wall when you arrive.

The demands to see X or Y group as expendable will be unceasing.

Staying human will require putting the pieces together.

It will involve knowing when you are being sacrificed for capitalism, and when the external other is being sacrificed for the same reason.

It will demand that we understand everything is connected.

And it will also require joy, beauty, justice and love.

Because while the future will be full of bullshit, gaslighting, and demands to abandon our humanity, it can still be ours to make.

It can still be human.

On that note, here are a few video stills I took this week of the most amazing starling murmuration I’ve ever seen

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It would be far too cheesy to say that in the future, with our humanity under assault, we’re going to need to look up more.

But I’ve just said it anyway.

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