Has AI Brought Us To The Doorstep Of Huxley’s Brave New World?
A society managed with the help of machines will eventually lose its freedoms
Set in the year 2540 — a measure of how far off into the future the author imagined his vision to be — Aldous Huxley’s novel A Brave New World, published in 1932 as the interwar powers accelerated their industrial and scientific development, was, like George Orwell’s work 1984 decades later, a warning. Huxley’s admonition — in addition to concerns about state power over the individual similar to Orwell’s — was a pushback to his era’s rampant enthusiasm for advances in technology.
Huxley’s prescient warning
There is an obvious connection between Huxley’s concerns and the current fear of losing control over the rapidly accelerating capabilities of Artificial Intelligence. The coming massive displacement by AI of jobs based on document handling, information processing, content creation, legal work, accounting, and similar white-collar services may lead to societies forced to put tens of millions of formerly productive people on universal basic income, thus making them entirely dependent on the state. Similar employment-related effects related to the rapid advance of robotics in industry and logistics, drones used for deliveries, and the switch to autonomous vehicles may lead to the same need for a vastly expanded welfare state, and the dependency that goes with it.
A more subtle danger
There is however a more subtle danger of the sort envisaged by Huxley that is forming, and hiding, in plain sight: the steady increase in state (and corporate) technology-assisted monitoring and control of society. Huxley was in fact not only sounding an alarm about the perils of an over-reliance on technology: he was alerting his contemporaries as to the dangers of a society structured around it.
Today’s canary in the coal mine is China. Having started down the path of state control over society decades ago with its state-imposed one-child policy (since abandoned), China has more recently — and even more ominously — doubled down on societal control via its “Social Credit System,” a nationwide algorithm-and-surveillance-driven program designed to shape citizens’ behavior with automated rewards and sanctions. The latter can include forms of blacklisting, making it more difficult, if not impossible, for non-compliant citizens to obtain jobs, education, housing and other benefits.
Americans may feel that they are sufficiently protected, via their democratic form of government, their constitution, and their legal system, from such state-imposed societal control. Yet a part of China’s control framework — that governing the creditworthiness of individuals — is already very much present in American life with the all-pervasive, computerized, algorithm-driven “credit score,” which can very much complicate the life of citizens not corresponding to the ideal credit profile, even if they have no debt at all or are otherwise on solid financial footing.
Credit scores are merely the visible part of the iceberg of slowly expanding technology-driven practices serving to loosen the human connections and bonds that have heretofore constituted “society,” replacing them with state and/or corporate structures and digital platforms and services.
Elements of Huxley’s nightmarish vision of the future are happening today
Standing back and comparing how our current society and way of living have evolved in just the past, say, three decades, and comparing these developments with how Huxley describes life in the World State, the parallels are both numerous and disturbing.
In the book, the use of a state-approved opiate, soma, is encouraged to help people relax and escape worry or stress: a foreshadowing of Americans’ now-widespread use of similar drugs, notably marijuana, tranquilizers, and other forms of medicinal or narcotic pain or stress relief, both legal and illegal.
Today’s economy, in which both parents of children must work, in most cases, to make ends meet, in conjunction with the resulting need for outsourced childcare and the trend for pre-K schooling at ever-earlier ages, can be considered an edging towards the World State’s sole responsibility for the raising and indoctrination of babies and children.
World State children are conditioned from birth to belong to one of five hierarchically descending castes: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon. This broadly reflects, in our modern society, how a family’s socioeconomic status is the key factor in a child’s future education, environment, diet, standard of living, and social connections. These in turn strongly influence or even determine the child’s health (and resulting body shape), professional options, choices about tattoos and piercings, manner of dress, and general bearing, even to the extent that someone’s social class can today often be accurately guessed simply on the basis of their appearance.
This modern version of the World State’s caste system is further reinforced by the widespread popularity of filter-powered online dating platforms, enabling higher-status individuals — in particular women — to automatically exclude the possibility of connecting with (and eventually procreating with) less attractive and lower-status ones.
Entertainment: more than ever the opiate of the masses
The World State focus on keeping citizens entertained, and fully engaged in consumerism, is one of the most obvious parallels with modern culture. Yet even Huxley could not imagine the extent to which people today have and enjoy unlimited anytime, anywhere access to algorithmically served-up movies, television series, music, sports, pornography, memes, shopping, animation, partisan political propaganda, and every hybrid and variant thereof.
As opposed to the social, participative pastimes of, well, the past — card, parlor and board games, knitting circles, bowling teams, and the like — modern entertainment is largely passive and solitary. Its addictive enjoyment weakens social bonds and personal agency rather than strengthening them. It is, in a way, another type of opiate, a digitally transmitted soma.
A Brave and New World … but only for the young?
In Huxley’s novel, at a certain point two of the protagonists, Bernard and Lenina, receive permission to visit a remote “uncivilized” territory called The Reservation. Among other things, they are shocked to see actual elderly people, aging naturally as opposed to the artificially maintained youthful looks — achieved with chemicals and hormones — of people in the World State’s London. For England’s capital city in the book, we can substitute today’s Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, or pretty much any other major city, where Botox, fillers, plastic surgery, and other techniques are widely used to hold back the signs of aging.
Similar to what fictionally happens in Huxley’s Reservation, today those past a certain age are increasingly banished to “care homes” or “retirement communities,” removing them from the mainstream social mix. The result is the by-now nearly vanished concept of the extended family living together or in geographical proximity, in which grandparents contributed to the upbringing of their grandchildren, transmitting along the way family traditions, social norms and cultural identity.
At what price societal stability?
For all its focus on the dangers of a state-controlled, technology-driven structuring of society, there is an even more sinister aspect of the World State as described by Huxley: the state’s conviction that a stable, peaceful society is one in which personal autonomy must be suppressed; one in which all forms of pain have been banished; and one in which consumerism and the pursuit of pleasure are the population’s main activities and raison d’être.
Worse, Huxley’s novel described the World State’s goal of societal happiness as incompatible with the search for truth and meaning.
Huxley’s “World Controller” character, Mustapha Mond, posits that the irrelevance of truth and the engineered absence of suffering promote happiness in society. This, he explains, is the only way to achieve societal stability. And that this stability in turn guarantees the permanence of happiness.
Orwell’s imagined state imposition of societal stability was harsher and grimmer than Huxley’s, but both have their equivalents today. In places like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, a totalitarian and, where necessary, brutal enforcement of political and societal control is imposed by the ruling regime and, in Iran’s case, by religious authorities. In the West, by contrast, governments are excessively acquiescent to the lobbying of corporations and complicit in the latter’s “soft” control of a population rendered docile by consumerism, solitude, gluttony, opiates, and endless entertainment options.
In both cases, truth has become a casualty of the achieved stability: repressed through draconian control of the media and the education system in the world’s dictatorial regimes, and rendered irrelevant in the West via the general preference for comforts, palliatives and distractions.
Speaking truth to power results in prison or worse in the world’s totalitarian states. In the West, truth is being diluted to near-meaninglessness: its former definition as objective, definitive, incontrovertible and fact-based giving way to the idea of subjective, feelings-driven, and personal “lived truths.”
Sleepwalking into the World State
But we are perhaps only at the beginning of our path towards a Brave New World. Bricks in the technology-driven wall of control continue to be piled one upon the other, but in an almost imperceptibly gradual way that allows these measures to meet little if any resistance.
Examples include governments’ drive to discourage or even eliminate the use of cash in favor of purely digital (and therefore infinitely traceable) means of payment; the plans being incubated by central banks to issue their own cryptocurrencies, insulated from conventional measures of money supply, inflation and fiscal probity; the forced phasing out of internal combustion engines in favor of electric vehicles connected to the grid, allowing for the centralized digital monitoring of vehicle use and location; and the storing of citizens’ DNA in digital databases, opening the way for exploitation by marketers and making possible genetics-based discrimination by employers and insurance companies.
In Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with building out his “Metaverse” virtual world, we have perhaps the clearest signal that those today with real power — the owners of the digital platforms that we increasingly use to access our information, carry out our consumption, enjoy our entertainment and interact with our social connections — seek to attract us to a simulation of the kind of centrally organized, “happy” and “stable” society that Huxley cautioned against.
Lest the accusation of neo-luddite thinking be leveled against these concerns, it is undeniable that technology has made, and continues to make, our lives easier, healthier, more productive and more interesting. We can employ it to carry on the best we can, both individually and as a society, to reach for happiness as we strive to diminish suffering. We can always choose to seek the truth, even if it is an uncomfortable or inconvenient one, amidst the swirling disinformation and manipulation. But we can do these things only if we resist the temptation to use technology for the purposes of societal control.
Our believed protections are illusory
Our legal system won’t protect us from Huxley’s nightmarish vision: laws can be changed, whereby the unthinkable becomes the obligatory. Religion won’t save us: history has shown well enough how its leaders can use their influence to corral us just as easily as to inspire us. Art, although it is tempting to think so, is not the bulwark: it can be politically manipulated and can thus serve as an instrument of power… and furthermore can today be created by machines in truly impressive ways unimaginable a scant five years ago.
Technology itself most certainly isn’t the answer: Kubrick and Cameron gave a sneak preview of that with, respectively, their HAL 9000 in A Space Odyssey and Skynet in the Terminator films. It is today not alarmist to predict, as many leading technologists have, that one day Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and advanced networked drones, robots and similar machines will inevitably learn to connect and combine in some way to achieve, at some point perhaps not too far in the future, the capacity to override the safeguards we think we are able to program into them.
We are not quite yet in the Matrix. So how do we make sure we can still escape the fate described by Huxley? What is the equivalent of having the courage, while there is still time, to take the awareness-enabling red pill offered to Neo in the Wachowskis’ science fiction classic, rather than swallowing another mind-numbing blue one as we “Netflix and chill?”
Rejecting dangerous controls
What is needed is a defensive reflex: one whereby we reject, instinctively as a collective survival mechanism, any technology-driven measure capable of enabling yet more intrusive monitoring and remote influencing of our individual actions, opinions, and ways of life. And to be ready — this is the most difficult part — to trade some degree of safety, health, and, yes, even happiness for the right to live subject to as few centralized and digitally organized controls as possible.
There will always be strong and even fully valid arguments for an ever more complex lattice of data upon which our lives are organized, measured and managed. Finding the right balance between what is good for society versus what infringes upon the rights of the individual is, and will always be, an inexact science.
But while we keep a wary eye on technology, vigilant that microchip-powered tools never evolve into digital yokes, we must keep in mind and guard against slipping imperceptibly into other facets of Huxley’s vision: a world where the concepts of family, friendship, and community have been obliterated. One in which deep emotions have been suppressed, and replaced by superficiality and amusing distractions. One in which — similar to Orwell’s 1984 — historical knowledge and cultural heritage have been re-written, condemned, or erased. And one in which spirituality — meant as the pursuit of higher truths or personal growth — is discouraged.
That list resonates very uncomfortably with societal patterns we see emerging and consolidating today before our very eyes.
Forward to the past to Fight The Power
Contrary to what politicians and tech billionaires would have us believe, “change” and “progress” don’t always perform as advertised. In our increasingly digital, virtual, algorithm-run world, to stave off serfdom to circuits we must start to give preference, whenever possible, to the human connection. To real conversations and even clashes of viewpoint — both those external with others, and those internal within ourselves.
We must struggle to retain freedom, autonomy and — perhaps most crucially, anonymity where desired — in matters financial, religious, political, and lifestyle. We must provide our children with sound moral grounding and education basics while also fostering in them a fierce love of independence and self-reliance, and a healthy distrust of power. We must rediscover the ability of religion not to create certainties, but rather to question those that blind us to self-reflection.
In other words, ultimately the best counterweight to Huxley’s portent is simply to quite literally “get back in touch” with our fellow Man. This is all the more important now that AI-powered digital “personae” are increasingly able to pass the famous Turing Test, capable of fooling humans into thinking they are engaged in a dialogue with another actual human, or even — via eerily accurate voice emulation and digital video rendering — a trusted friend, family member, classmate or colleague.
Faced with the prospect of such powerful digital trickery, we must start to eschew, as much as possible, digital communication interfaces in favor of face-to-face “IRL” (in real life) contact. We must trade in our emojis and “likes” and comments on social platforms for actual in-the-flesh conversations, lunches, dinners, and chess games in the park. Switch off our scrolling and streaming and instead organize and attend parties, sports events, concerts, game nights and comedy hours. We must rediscover the ancestral human comfort of being surrounded by our human brethren, even if it is just sitting and having a coffee or a drink in physical proximity with other people in a bar, café or restaurant.
Heed the warning
Over tens of thousands of years, a sense of shared community, and the everyday casual and random person-to-person interactions that go with it, is perhaps the most important collective feeling that has made us more than animals, and what makes us different to machines.
There are foundations, basic building blocks, and structures of humanity that have developed over time for a reason. To allow them to corrode and fall into disuse, traded in for the dehumanised logic of “systems’ and the uncompromising perfection of circuits in the quest for ever greater comfort, efficiency and stability, is civilizational suicide. Huxley imagined it. We have been forewarned.
