There’s something considerably more terrifying than Romero’s dead shambling over the horizon.  It’s a brand new slave class, courtesy of approximately 50 years of intermittently successful research into artificial intelligence.  

Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence in the continual assessment of whether or not human beings have an inborn inclination towards morality or immorality is the fact that, despite several attempts to alter our behavior grandly, human progress until now has been more or less entirely dependant upon indentured labor and the systemic subjugation of a large subset of the population underneath some much smaller and more nefarious group.  

While literal chattel slavery has been decreasing in attractiveness in the developed world for some 400 years, those wily autocrats never fail to recreate the system by measures and by shades in the economic vacuum left by the complete dissolution of a labor force which marginally costs zero.  Even in the supposed democratic powerhouse from which this piece is being written, the wheels of commerce would grind to a halt without a powerful combination of 1) undocumented labor, 2) Outsourced sweatshop labor, and 3) labor which is paid well below living wage, creating an endemic system of need not unlike the disenfranchising practices utilized against freedmen sharecroppers during the Reconstruction Era.  Thus, it is with no small measure of fanfare that the fledgling AI revolution has been heralded as an end to menial labor.  While I lack the longitudinal perspective necessary to debate the relative morality of creating something arguably intelligent solely for the purpose of subjugating it, I have enough human experience to state–unequivocally–that ‘the end of menial labor’ will do approximately zero to alleviate human suffering unless proactive steps are taken to minimize the externalities congenital to the birth of an infinitely cheap, massively pliable slave class which can be comfortably housed in the cloud.  

If we know, for a demonstrated fact, that unemployed and unhoused human beings are not a primary concern of the wealthy oligarchs who marionette their puppet government through the legislated graft of lobbying, then it would be preposterous to expect any consideration for the remaining dregs of an erased middle class absolutely set to be cannibalized by a corporate world hungry for this mythical digital labor force incapable of collective bargaining.  The high barriers to economic independence are already made higher by a hegemonic crippling of social mobility.  Do we dare imagine a world where these new corporate gentry are no longer even  remotely beholden to the cries of ‘mere mortals’ as their indispensable workforce is made entirely of digital artiface? 

Do I dare to eat a peach?    

Without careful consideration, the rapid adoption of AI among the corporate world could be a bigger blow to democracy than the evolution and adoption of the world wide web and its subsequent dot-com boom which worked in tandem to delegitimize dreams of fiber optic freedom.  We replaced them with kitschy amusement parks for business interests.  To borrow a quote from my favorite fictional author:  “The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24-hour-a-day access to kiddie porn.”

The glib wisdom of Hank Moody aside, it’s difficult to imagine explaining to those who were there at its inception that the internet itself would grow into a tool for mass manipulation and the transmission of corporate-and-consumer messages to the masses.  As a matter of fact, it’s apparent that it didn’t occur to them, as it was released into the wild where it supplanted a natural sociological food web with a soulless internet of things in which average citizens are merely a small and inconsequential data point to be rearranged ad nauseum at the whims of daytrading masses.  How is it, in a world and a nation where the individual is continually connected to every other individual by this invisible lasso of gigs and bits, that our self-limited American democracy has become less direct, more capricious, and less involved in improving the daily individual experience of most of its populace?

Yet here we are again, at the precipice of technological change, which our species has continually failed to culturally or intellectually advance in pace with since the discovery of long-term, preserved food storage.  Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has often held the tools necessary to advance itself holistically, and chosen instead to exploit mindlessly its many gifts.  The human being, left in a moral vacuum, has the natural tendency to act as an agent of general entropy and decay.  As an electrical current follows Ohm’s Law through the path of least resistance, so too does a person follow its biological equivalent past good taste and into the depravity of selfishness.  

The central human myths, globally, share some version of a particular story that is arguably the most ubiquitous.  Pandora opens the box; someone eats an apple and puts on pants.  Our capacity to want more than we are afforded is the core component of the monomyth.  We are acutely aware of our capacity for avarice to the point of our own undoing and have been since the dawn of recorded history.  The story of the human experience is one of evolution curtailed and warped by the wilful ignorance of our fatal flaw.  Whether or not you’d like to blame how cool Michael Douglas is, personally, it’s ever apparent that the postmodern era has been beset almost entirely by a grotesque predilection towards embracing those greedy, ratlike tendencies.  

We pride ourselves on our capacity for evolution; that human beings are infinitely adaptable by virtue of whatever combination of higher order thinking aggregates to ‘sentience.’  Yet, we change precious little.  We are apes clubbing one another, championing might making right, with the only thing that really changes being the size and the shape of the weapons we use.  It would stand to reason, after centuries of being clubbed by physically stronger apes, someone would use that wily higher order thinking to redefine ‘might’ along terms wherein even the most unexceptional can flourish.  Accrual of a fiat currency is a great way to claim might without due cause or associated benefit to society.  For several centuries, that dark wrinkle of the American Experiment has been innocuous enough to be swallowed.  The dissolved Occupy Wall Street movement was an immature stroke at addressing the issue, drowned in its infancy by the powerful pro-corporate propaganda machine of Big Media and its corrupted Fourth Estate power.  Only now, as this new wave of AI implementation threatens the scattered remnants of a middle-managing middle-class, has the public become anxious and conscious of an impending reality where baseline humans are separated by an enslaved and digital middle class from the executive echelons where the American Dream takes on a corpulent bent.  I only hope it is not too late to uproot the sinister infiltration of corporate interests into the groundwater of our still-young nation.  

The executive-elite are removed enough from the work you do for them to consider anything done by anyone else ‘menial.’  There will be no liberation.  There will be a concentration of miserable millions consigned to toil away in the lowest rungs of an economy with an impermeable moat of inhumanity growing wider between them and anything besides a sisyphean struggle of building equity in someone else’s ambition.  

Rod Serling would have me submit for your consideration the following:  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/06/ai-interviews-job-applications

Right now, today, someone wasn’t hired because a mostly unsupervised AI middle-manager didn’t pass their resume on to their human boss–wherever on the back nine he may have been.  And you and I didn’t do a damned thing about it. 

From hell,

—The Strangest