The end of human contact

A number of discussions and quotes have made me think about how the future could resemble that depicted in some rather depressing, often dystopian, SF and fantasy books. A direction we were already travelling in thanks to the internet, but which has been strengthened by the rise of AI.

People spend a lot more time inside, on devices. Even direct interaction has moved to calls and video rather than face to face, and much interaction has become indirect and people do not really know whether they are talking to a bot or a real human being. Social media interactions with strangers, using an AI to summarise ale lengthy email, that is lengthy because it was written by an AI based on a much shorter prompt. People use AI for emotional support, replacing friends, family and therapists. At the extreme people turn to AI for romance and companionship

What most closely resembles near future is the cause of the Butlerian Jihad in the background of Frank Herbet’s Dune. The quote that sums up our use of technology:

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

What can better describe the current situation? People use systems to replace people, and those systems are mostly controlled by a tiny number of companies. It is a huge concentration of power. It was enabled by an existing political and social bias towards the concentration of power, but enabled by technology. The very small number of people in charge (together with governments) decide on what people are permitted to do, and who is permitted to do what. Access to some “dangerous” features requires approval. Values are encoded in. Access to information is centrally controlled. All for our own protection, of course.

I reread CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength a few months ago and was struck by how much the ideology of those who are commanded by literal demonic forces reflects ideologies of the powerful in the world as it is. The idea that they are better than others, that “rational” dictatorship is better than democracy. That the inferior people do not really matter and do not deserve help or pity, but are rather excess to requirements and to be got rid off. However, the idea that is most relevant here are the “cold marriages”.

There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a man takes a maiden in marriage they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicate) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

That does not sound very different from a combination of technologies that are being developed. There are very fundamental physical needs for other people that we will increasingly be able to replace. This combined with the trend away from spending time with others face to face, is like to lead to this being a preferred choice, as with the “accursed people”, rather than an inferior substitute.

Where this leads to ultimately is probably most satisfyingly described in *The Machine Stops" by EM Foster, where people live in cells, with all their wants taken care of by a gigantic, world spanning, system. When it fails, that is their end. This is an older story and less realistic, but it grasps the danger of dehumanisation very well. It can be read on, or downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

A more realistic vision is that of stagnant and shrinking societies where people shun human contact, eventually retreating each to a vast estate, described in Isaac Asimov’s robot books, and eventually when the last of these societies is discovered by people from the Foundation in Foundation and Earth. It is a chilling vision to most of us, but it turns into an ideal for the people of the Spacer planet Solaria.

If this seems far fetched, think of the AI therapists. I recently saw an ad for an AI app that would monitor children’s studies and remind them what they had to do so parents could avoid the unpleasant duty of checking up on their children. The wording was

you never have to ask them “Have you revised”

I think that there is a pipeline here. Professionalisation and internet interaction lead to automation. Family is replaced by paid childcare, and that is an opening for AI to replace the expense of paying people — at the very least the number of children a single person can look after can be increased, cutting costs. Schools (which also function as childcare: I talk elsewhere about hours far longer than needed for education) have the same dynamic. Dating apps and online chats make it easier to replace a human with an AI, as does social media.

Most of all, there are costs to be cut, and money to be made. On top of that it centralises control, something politicians tend to believe is a good thing, for our own good. Maybe they should read a simpler book by CS Lewis - where the ape in The Last Battle tells the people (talking animals) of Narnia that true freedom is doing what they are told to do, not what they want to do. Regardless of the exact motives, combination of profit and good intentions leads to replacing fallible and difficult humans with compliant machines.