by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
Your rulers want you to depend on machines to do your thinking for you.
They want you relying on AI to do your reasoning, researching, analysis, and writing.
They want you to require easily controllable software to form your understanding of the world, and to express that understanding to others.
They can control the machines, but they can’t control the human mind. So they want you to abandon your mind for the machines.
They want you relying on artificial intelligence so you stop using your organic intelligence.
They want your critical thinking skills to atrophy.
They want your ability to locate and parse inconvenient pieces of information to deteriorate.
They want your inspiration and intuition to decay.
They want your sense of morality to waste and wither away.
They want you to perceive reality through interpretive lenses controlled by plutocratic tech companies, which are inextricably intertwined with the power structure of the Western Empire.
Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It’s the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge, which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats.
They want us to abandon our humanity for technology.
They don’t want us making our own art.
They don’t want us making our own music.
They don’t want us writing our own poetry.
They don’t want us contemplating philosophy for ourselves.
They don’t want us turning inwards and getting in touch with an authentic spirituality.
They want to replace the dynamic human spirit with predictable lines of code.
Our brains are conditioned to select for cognitive ease, and that’s what the AI merchants are selling us. The sales pitch is, “You don’t have to exert all that mental effort thinking new thoughts, learning new things, and expressing yourself creatively! This product will do it for you!”
But it comes at a cost. We have to trade in our ability to do those things for ourselves.
Historically, when a new technology has emerged, that kind of trade-off has been worth it. Not many people know how to start a fire with a bow drill anymore, but it rarely matters because modern technology has given us much more efficient ways of starting fires and keeping warm. It didn’t make sense to spend all the time and effort necessary to maintain our respective bow-drill skills once that technology showed up.
But this isn’t like that. We’re not talking about some obsolete skill we won’t need anymore thanks to modern technological development; we’re talking about our minds. Our creative expression. Our inspiration. Our very humanness.
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