Is
Dystopian Science Fiction Becoming a Reality?
TOM VALOVIC for Common
Dreams
Have you ever felt like you’re living in a badly produced
B science fiction movie? I know I do. When I started writing about the dark
side of emerging technologies 30 years ago in Digital Mythologies, I called out
some of the “mad science” being done at MIT. This included the work of Marvin
Minsky and Hans Moravec --- fringe thinking that, at the time, seemed
fortunately contained in a fairly narrow segment of the scientific community. I
never dreamed that their bizarre and unsettling ideas about merging humans with
computers and creating hybrid humans would actually become widely accepted in
technology circles or that powerful corporations would engage in making these
ideas a reality.
Alarmingly, this is now happening and it’s deeply disturbing.
It was the poet Allen Ginsberg who said that we’re
“living in science fiction”. His statement was deeply prophetic. We’re now in
the midst of a Technology Takeover, pointing toward a world of technocratic
governance and complete dependency on tech giants and the systems they control.
The corporations behind it are the most powerful ones on the planet. You know
the names: Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Tesla/SpaceX and others.
Among the individuals behind some of these companies are the four richest and
most powerful people on the planet: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark
Zuckerberg.
In a more generous frame of mind, we might call them the masters of
the universe but perhaps a more apt description might be the four horsemen of
the apocalypse.
There are a plethora of sanguine articles oozing out of
the mainstream press about the “promise of AI.” Many of them follow the same
basic template as if scripted from talking points.
The semantic parsing is
something like this: “AI has the potential to radically change our lives for
the better but we have to be careful to use it well as it has some potential
for negative use.”
This is the self-same template that has been used for many
other high-profile technology advances including the development of nuclear and
genetic engineering capabilities.
Let’s be clear about what’s happening here as there’s no
room for equivocation. Robots and AI are taking over our culture, our politics,
our way of life and our relationships to each other as social beings.
They’re
becoming the front guard for a new and unprecedented technocratic form of
governance which represents the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism.
Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected
officials operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated
society well out of public view.
The reality is that technocratic governance is
fundamentally anti-democratic and lays the groundwork for a kind of
authoritarianism that many of our experts in political science are unequipped
to recognize and explain.
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