sometimes i worry about my essence. i have concerns about handing over everything i perceive to be human about me to the network and there being nothing genuine left of me at the end.
we willingly feed the internet the bits that make up our Selves: our habits, our gps locations, our photographs, our videos, our voice notes, and even our DNA. our physical forms can already be reproduced, mimicked, and forged. today's well-executed deepfake is indistinguishable from "reality."
what will this technology be like five years from now? ten? is this a plateauing or an exponential situation?
with the advent of the clever AI assistant, we are already feeling significant shifts in our approaches to problem-solving and creative thought. we might not readily admit it, but our brains are changing. i can't be the only one finding myself more frequently blanking on words, concepts, and simple mathematics. what once could be recalled with relative ease now swims tantalizingly just out of reach. let me google/chatgpt/perplexity that real quick.
i'm as guilty as most — tasks i don't care for too much are outsourced to the network brain, and thereby i contribute to this changing world order. still, i draw somewhat-arbitrary rules for myself when it comes to my art, to my writing, to my "genuine" expressions of self — at least for now, for as long as i can hold out. for as long as i can still remember all the words i'm looking for.
"i've made up so many rules for myself, but why should i bother with them at all?"
people will say things to me like, "why don't you digitize and upload all your journals! feed them to an LLM, and see what happens!" as if it's a game to hand over your soul like that. i'm not ready. i'm not ready to let go of what is holy to me, what feels like my core. i'm not ready to bare myself, defiantly lay it all on the table and declare, "now tell me exactly who you think i am!"
then i wonder what gave me the right to feel like i matter that much.
my efforts to hold on to some outdated version of the way the world could have worked makes me slowly weary. i never saw myself as a luddite. all of this feels like a wave, a wave i can pretend to fight for a while, until the energy saps out of my body and i'm tired, so tired, and i give up, i let it take me. sweet release.
i remember that convenience always wins for the masses, because since the dawn of time man has sought ways to expend less effort, to make lighter his burden. then i also remember that artisans always remain, though usually as a curiosity of a bygone time.
maybe i can be an artisan of words.
i follow the threads of my thoughts. my thoughts, which chatter incessantly and hardly leave me alone. even though i am trying to practice mindfulness and meditation, i have not yet learned how to silence the noise. i tie one thread to another, wondering if maybe thoughts are the problem, after all. realizing that thought is the barrier between myself and my ability to live in the present moment. thought is hesitation; by its very nature it disconnects us from presence.
if we were to remove the chains of thought, to fully submit to the network mind, would we be free? would handing over everything we are to the internet be the ultimate dissolution of our egos, the loss of individuality and memory, the merging of our spirits as one?
“If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it ... What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself ... The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical - and no doubt also a mental cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eyeglasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implanted prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought. Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena, 1990
baudrillard called it evil, 35 years ago. yet i wonder if it's even a bad thing, at the end. after all, the differences we built around ourselves have caused so much suffering. is this the timeline where humanity, bit by bit, loses its capacity for individuation and merges with the network itself? when we are relieved of the burden of thought, can we finally ascend?
maybe we've found the way to save ourselves, after all.
mint the accompanying artwork (24h only):
