A new insurmountable
I have a major AI problem and it’s multi-faceted.
It feels to me that humanity is sliding into a new age of stupid. This obsession with smart phones was bad enough before the developed world woke up sweating in the night and vomited AI all over itself. It was already upsetting enough to see teenagers hunched over screens, rows of them on park benches, next to each other in the physical realm, but each off in some virtual brain soup sludge swamp, alone in spirit. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation spells out a damning account of why it’s caused a mental health crisis, and what we can start to do about it. But now… fuck me… NOW.
I can’t fucking move without someone smacking the word ‘AI’ against the side of my head. Not only has it shrunk the work pool for illustrators and other professional creators, it’s just everywhere. People are asking the likes of ChatGPT stupid, basic things, that their brains should be processing to stop them turning to grey mush. There are people making videos of rows with ‘AI partners.’
The genie is out of the bottle, and as a father and professional artist, it’s causing me all kinds of anger to manage.
The energy/resource consumption of the technology, just like blockchain technology, is apocalyptic. With each unseasonably wet, hot, or cold day, I’m convinced climate breakdown is being accelerated by our unfettered data gluttony. We sleep with the sounds of birdsong, or rivers streamed. We add our absent cousin into photos. We try to make a Google search but without any say in the matter, spend 10 x the energy because Google also routes our query through AI.
Darkest of all, I see a video of a ‘humanoid robot’ demonstration as it works away tirelessly at a Mercedes Benz car manufacturing plant, triggering very real waking nightmares akin to The Animatrix and Terminator.
Don’t get me wrong, there are astounding uses of AI, including the tracking of illegal loggers in rainforests and study of the gut microbiome in medical science, but why oh why was this powerful technology every lumped into the lap of every Tom, Dick, and Harry?
I haven’t touched it yet (aside from clumsy uses of Google Chrome, forgetting their ugly default) on moral grounds. Freshwater is already in short supply out there. I have to look my children in the eye, knowing that one day, they’ll want to know why society is collapsing around them.
Needless to say, all of this pushes me close to, and often, deep into fight, flight, freeze, into perplexed rage and a sense of alienation from my fellow humans as I see mass idiocy flirting with ecological disasters that we cannot yet imagine.
But what am I to do? Sit here stewing, fucking up my body and energy, jeopardising my ability to find work where AI has left a commission-shaped hole? Being a shit dad chewing at his nails and snapping at his kids? No. I’ll continue the assemblage of my go-bag, and my slow attempt to learn basic survival skills, and protesting and refraining where possible. Last week at Paradiso, I listened as artist Tala Schlossberg spoke of her beautiful writing, explaining that yes, there’s heaviness out there, and the future might hold dark things, but right here, in this present, the only bit we can control, the only bit that exists, there is beauty. Beauty in the sounds around us, beauty in the shape of shadows. So I breathe and try to shut down the whirring visions of mechanic robots before I suffer another overheated fan because Tala is right, and if the rest of my clever apes are going to blow it all up for the silliest of reasons, then I’ll at least try to go down cherishing what is right here before it’s gone.