Algorithms of Despair: A Warning to the AI Generation.
Historically, generational divides have been defined by geopolitical, social and economic changes within societies. Today, however, advances in technology seem to define the lines between generations. The advent of the iPhone spawned Generation I, and it appears that artificial intelligence (AI) is birthing the next generation -Generation AI — currently in diapers.
This generation will be surrounded, immersed and plugged into all kinds of interfaces that attempt to anticipate their every need, want, desire and wish, or in Andy Clark’s words: “Our minds and identities will become ever more deeply enmeshed in a non-biological matrix of machines, tools, props, codes, and semi-intelligent daily objects” (2004). This invasive and adulterated anticipatory attention will help form their relationship to themselves, others and the world around them.
AI will also structure their needs, wants, desires and wishes in ways that bypass the mystery of trial and error, the empty spaces of uncertainty, and the lonely moments of solitude that open a portal to creative reflection and play, which are necessary for developing a cohesive sense of self. Like tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears, the AI generation will be encapsulated and enframed within the digital hum defining both the experience and the narrative of the emerging self.
Porn, violence, and the death of the imagination
The proliferation of online porn has devitalized the creative sexual imagination of Millenials and Z’s, by structuring both the content and form of sexual desire and reducing it to mechanical templates of rigid, regressive, impersonal and alienating disembodied roles and scripts. And AI, in the hands of such questionable players as Facebook and Google, is destined to eviscerate the creative imagination of self.
The increase of violence and sadism in online porn over the years has compounded the uncoupling of creative desire from sex, further paving the way for an aesthetic of violence permeating today’s popular culture. Tarantino’s movies are the most obvious example of this new narrative, where his movies are devoid of any creative sexual content but are deemed incredibly sexy.
It is no surprise that today, the gaming and sex-bot industries are the most voracious incubators of brain-computer interface (BCI) assisted AI technologies.
The invasiveness of AI, like the neurotically anxious overbearing parent (i.e. helicopter parent), risks short-circuiting the messy and necessary struggles inherent in life, including tolerating the void of the unknown, whereas, for children, this unknown is the evolving sense of self.
Our obsession with immersive technology
In the past year, with brain-computer interfaces (BCI), researchers have shown that it is possible to translate directly from brain activity into synthetic speech or text by recording and decoding a person’s neural signals, using sophisticated AI algorithms.
Facebook is primed and ready to exploit your neural activity to help you type with your thoughts, hear with your skin, and enhance your reality to magic mushroom levels. But to “help you” reach such psychedelic levels of experience, Facebook will need to have access to all your neural data.
Considering the incredible malleability of children’s evolving brains, do we really want the Zuckerbergs of the world mucking around in our kids’ neural networks creating conditions for the next Cambridge Neurologica? Furthermore, giving the source code of our children’s neural networks to potentially unethical players opens the door to the iniquitous manipulation of these networks via immersive BCI technologies.
What is our obsession with technological immersion if not an attempt to fill the gaps or fragmentations of present-day existence? At the heart of the empty spaces technology is trying to fill, may simply be a calling forth to a return to being-in-the-world with our minds and bodies fully engaged in uncodified and free collisions with our immediate surroundings. A world wherein our senses, gone numb and atrophied via sedentary, algorithmically structured passive consumption are thirsting for a Joycean awakening that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake offered the fragmented mechanical age of the early 20th century.
In a way, our human malaise may very well be a technological constant irrespective of the kind of technology enframing our epoch, as Joyce (mechanical) and Foster Wallace (digital) harmoniously echo in their insightful novels. As for Foster-Wallace, he proposes as an antidote to our solipsistic despair, the cultivation of empathy via real human connections as a bridge to a more authentic and ethical life. However, the pervasiveness and invasiveness that current technologies foster risk short-circuiting this invitation for future generations.
The Paradox of BCI assisted AI
The paradox of BCI technology infiltrating the minds and bodies of children is that even though it can prove helpful for people suffering from “locked-in” conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or brain stroke, where the patient is conscious but cannot voluntarily move the muscles that correspond to speech, it can also create a “locked-in” generational condition. A generation for who the boring and demanding constraints of reality are an escapable option, hence depriving them of the necessary free collisions with the real world inherent in growing up and finding their own voice.
Also, the evolving BCI ecosystem does not operate in a value-free vacuum; it is imbued with intention, and it is the intention that defines the human experience. Intention is soaked in meaning, and meaning is more circular and symbolic than linear and binary.
And what defines one’s experiences as unique, is the meaning emerging from the billions of neural connections within the brain as one collides with others and the real world around them. Furthermore, as meaning-making machines, we humans are burdened with the unique task of writing our place in the world, and BCI assisted AI risks hijacking the pen of both the individual and collective narratives for this generation.
Finally, as the guiding relational algorithm for helicopter parenting is structured around controlling and stifling the child’s inherent will-to-meaning in order to assuage their unresolved fears and unactualized lives, questionable BCI players’ monetization algorithms will further entrap children within an inauthentic narrative of AI-generated selfhood.
