We’ve heard it all before. A new technology is going to ‘revolutionise’ everything, from the way we work to the way we play, learn, and relate. Yet, funnily enough, according to the ‘visionaries’, the basic social and political features of our current conditions won’t change. These aren’t going anywhere – the profit motive, unequal access to resources, the consumer ‘me too’ infantilisation, and the job as a lifetime of ‘confinement’. The boss may have fewer employees, the teacher many more students, whilst the taxi driver goes the way of the coal miner, but social and political inequality will persist, despite the ‘tech’ solutions, just at more extreme levels than ever before (at the moment we only have 1% of the world’s population ‘owning’ – controlling – 50% of human wealth, so there’s some way to go yet in making things more unequal).

In education, artificial intelligence (AI) is going to, apparently, improve the intelligence and writing abilities of my students.  Thank goodness – some improvement at last!  Here was my colleagues and I fighting a constant losing battle, but ChatGPT has it.  Except, it isn’t going to improve their writing even though it may enhance the punctuation in their submissions and neatly, correctly present non-existent papers in their reference lists.  The main concern is that it should help those who no longer have the time to study (part-time work if their working class, and off ‘entrepreneuring’, with family excess cash, if they’re not).  Instead of learning they will learn to ‘cheat’, though we won’t call it that anymore nor frown upon it because everyone will be at it (thereby meeting a Kantian definition of moral behaviour – as long as everyone can do it than it’s ‘okay’).

The bar for acceptable communication will be ‘raised’ as every student becomes a 1950s factory manager able to delegate their inability to spell to a ‘personal digital secretary’, who will take care, uncomplainingly, of such inconveniences and ‘lackings’.  Humanoid robots (androids), the personification of AI beyond old-hat avatars, will take a pink-skinned form of ‘being’ and, thereby, project the power of their possessors via volumes of blonde hair and scarcity of raiment.  Everything will change expect anything that could threaten the social and political order and of importance to the alienated labour that produces AI in the first place.

Perhaps AI will read Adam Smith and Karl Marx and conclude they have been badly misrepresented and poorly interpreted.  But since this has already been done by humans and few have listened, what difference will it make for a machine to ‘say so’?  Will the claim now be ‘fact’?  More likely, the machine will be ‘reprogrammed’ until it comes up with the ‘correct’ answer.

Or AI assistance will aid surgeons to perform twice as many operations as before, though this will actually lead to a quadrupling of cosmetic procedures as every operation still has to be ‘paid’ for and provision will go to those with the most money and the means to afford such AI-assisted surgery. Plumper lips, thinner waistline, larger pecks it is then! Thank goodness for AI since the demand from ageing wealthy pensioners for a ‘lift’ (of some kind) needs to be met.

So, is AI a utopian dream or a dystopian nightmare?

Manuel and Manuel (Utopian Thought in the Western World, 1979) noted that the best utopias startle whilst remaining feasible; they lie between a boring extension of the present and a fantastical leap into the impossible. From what I have read and seen of most AI ‘commentary’ so far, their contemporary predictions and utopias largely fall into the ‘boring extension of the present’ category. They presume waged labour (capital) as the mode of production with its on-going (endless) creation of surplus value (profits, rents, taxes, interest payments) as the ‘natural’ basis of human life, rather than seeing the system as a mere artificial ‘social construction’ of scarcity and an endless requirement to perform unnecessary ‘work’. Despite there being enough food to feed the UK three-times over (in any one year), food banks are popping-up like magic mushrooms to alleviate the conscience of the commodified and ration the access to subsistence of the recently de-commodified. But that’s just the way it is! AI will, no doubt, reconfirm this situation as fact (once re-programmed, of course). Everyone will hold the same social ‘posts’ as before but use ‘revolutionary’ AI to sustain their miserable renting-out of their own backside at ever higher levels of productivity (output per hydro-bot-flesh-thingy).

If this is the future with AI then it is mundane and the so-called ‘predictions’ of its impact are like watching endless (on loop) re-runs of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Been there, done that. Should the narrative makers of AI switch their focus to King Kong (genetic modification gone wrong) and make that ‘fantastical leap’ to the impossible? Or can we, collectively, imagine better, be that bit more imaginative on the social front and startle whilst remaining feasible?

References:

Manuel, F. & Manuel, F. (1979) Utopian Thought in the Western World Oxford: Basil Blackwell.