Back to the future

Big Tech, the blood on its hands, and 'Gen Zero'

It has been quite a week for understanding Big Tech, what motivates it, and where it is heading.

Elon Musk announced that his Neuralink project had successfully implanted a chip into a human brain. The immediate aim is to enable humans to control limbs or devices with their minds. Ultimately, though, Musk’s aim is human/AI integration. The experiments on animals that have been abused to develop his project have been unbelievably cruel.

A US Senate hearing quizzed tech CEOs about their attitudes to online safety, a hearing that was witnessed by angry parents whose children had self-harmed or killed themselves as a direct result of online sexual exploitation. The tech CEO’s squirmed, but refused to acknowledge evidence of the harms caused by their platforms, or to accept any limits that would harm their profits.

‘Gen Zero’

Earlier this week, tech billionaire Bryan Johnson, whose longevity fanaticism I explored here, featured in a revealing two and a half hour long YouTube interview. Johnson describes (at 22 mins) the life-changing experience of reading a book by the late Gary Becker (an economist for whom Oscar Wilde’s quip that economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing is especially apt). Reading this book, Johnson gushes, “was one of the most spectacular experiences of my entire life.” It explains his obsession with measurement (including most recently his boast of how much the size of his penis increased after he injected it with botox).

“I basically don’t trust anything in reality. Not authority, not my mind, not my perception, nothing. I just trust data and numbers. And the only thing I believe in is I don’t want to die.”

Later in the interview, Johnson expands on his idea of ‘zeroism’ - working towards an integration of humans and AI that cedes control over our lives to systems. It’s a transhuman dystopia. “Our future,” he suggests at 2:14 in the interview, “is basically going to be a continuous stream of breaking our reality.” To bring that future into being Johnson calls for a group of believers, ‘Gen Zero’, who are committed to breaking reality, wherever that leads:

“We are willing to courageously step into the future, and we’re open to divorce from ourselves all human norms, all human customs, all human thought, and we’re willing to say we’re wide open. About everything. Absolute blank slate.”

RIP safeguarding, and RIP humanity as a sexed species.

Meanwhile, in the UK…

Today, the Governor of the Bank of England, and a House of Lords committee, are urging us to seize the opportunities of AI, and avoid missing out on “the AI goldrush”. Baroness Stowell, chair of the House of Lords committee, re-assures us  that talk of ‘existential risks and sci-fi scenarios’ shouldn’t block the rewards of AI. Nothing, in our post-Brexit economy, must be allowed to stand in the way of a profit opportunity.

This week, I experienced on a small scale the pitfalls of accepting the promises of Big Tech. 7 days ago, I ordered a book from amazon (I know, but I wanted it quickly, and I live within a couple of miles of its largest and most up-to-date distribution centre on the south coast). 3 days later, I received an email saying delivery was delayed. I checked the tracking, which revealed that my order had been dispatched from amazon’s depot in Kent (100 miles away) to Hannover (Germany). Yesterday, I learnt that the order had been cancelled as it was ‘undeliverable’. There was a link to a webpage that, it suggested, would explain why. This basically said it was undeliverable because it couldn’t be delivered. I wrote a one star review, which was rejected because it was about the delivery, not the book. The rejection email signposted me to customer services, and its chat function. I chatted to a machine which referred me back to the webpage about the meaning of undeliverable. I then clicked for a return phone call. This came from another machine which after asking me a series of unrelated questions told me it couldn’t help. I told it to f..k off, and slammed the phone down. Is this what everyday life will be like when algorithms are totally in control? Is it a plot to boost sales of heart rate monitors?

Big Tech, it appears, fails not only at basic safeguarding, but at basic logistics as well.