Generación / generation

By: Jane Kirkpatrick

Artificial intelligence has become the newest vessel for an age-old human emotion: paranoia. AI technocrats have hinged marketing strategies on the promise of “progress.” But this phrasing gives me pause. What are we progressing towards? What goals do we have in mind? Where is an articulable policy outcome from any of these companies? 

I am worried that these questions do not have answers. Which leaves me with one slightly paranoid question: if we cannot explain where we are going, why are we moving so quickly to get there? It’s in this question that I feel forced to confront timeless anxieties about purpose, mortality, control, feminism, and the directionlessness of humanity. 

Before getting there, however, it is worth acknowledging that AI has become nearly impossible to escape.

Believe me, there is no shortage of AI commentary making its rounds on the Internet. Everywhere we turn, there is a new think piece about the dawning of this new-age technology. Every scroll leads to another AI slop video about a pregnant seahorse or apple or peach — or, perhaps, a rotten banana discovering their partner has been sleeping with their best friend. (But seriously, what is going on with the pregnant seahorse content? Anyone else?) Technological advancements seem to be being made just as quickly as commentary can catch up. There is no doubt that there is an entire AI data center somewhere completely dedicated to content on itself. Very meta. And here is my humble contribution to the ever-expanding conversation.

What distinguishes this moment from previous technological shifts is not merely the technology itself, but the urgency with which we are being asked to embrace it. AI and its staunch advocates insist that AI development is now or never. These companies’ anxieties regarding control and market dominance are palpable as they deploy increasingly creative tactics to garner public support. Here in New Mexico, AI companies have hired influencers and canvassers collecting signatures to show community support for proposed AI data centers. Their urgency for expansion, however, is profoundly unsettling. Worse, it has all been packaged to us as an advancement for human society.

At the center of this sales pitch sits a single word that appears almost everywhere — in the hundreds of articles, advertisements, and proposals on this topic: progress.

The advent of AI is no different than the reasoning that was used for the industrial revolution, telephones, bicycles, or writing. In fact, almost everything in American history can be distilled in some way to the pursuit of progress and all of these being a source of human anxiety.
Progress is a brilliant campaign, because it is one that never ends. If one observes these advertisement campaigns, you will see that there is no actual articulable end goal to this acceleration — no developed theories for what this technology can (or should) do for us. Just that it is here, and we need to get with the program. But progress with no articulable end goal is just manipulation. I don’t care how pretty the girl on the phone is telling me to use it!

The success of this rhetoric stems from the fact that “progress” sounds self-evidently good.

The CEOs and marketing strategists of these institutions have pitched the idea of “progress” remarkably well. It’s a tough argument to combat. Afterall, who doesn’t want to move forward, to press on, to rage against the dying of the light? Who wouldn’t want to find the limits of human intelligence and then yearn for more? However, progress has fallen into semantic satiation, repeated so many times it no longer carries any inherent meaning. Progress is a spire on top of a mountain that only technology can climb, but as we build, the mountain only grows taller, leaving behind the plebeians it swore to be working on behalf of.

Once «progress» becomes detached from any concrete social goal, it begins to resemble something else entirely.

Truthfully, AI has not been the bastion of human excellence and instead has become a political project  — focused on market dominance, greed, and control. Even questioning AI has become polarizing. It seems that if we even begin to wonder about the influx of AI into our daily lives, we might as well be the single bulwark in the way of curing disease, ending world hunger, or solving income inequality.

Yet the contradictions become difficult to ignore.While AI is packaged as a tool to fix societal issues and provide monumental leaps in human learning, the leaders of the software industry also stand in opposition to solving some of those problems by prioritizing profit over all else. Moreover, all of this is happening in the backdrop of historic budget cuts to Medicaid and reductions in investments to research institutions. One must wonder what medical advancements are worth when those who need them cannot afford to access them. This all leads to a simple conclusion: these companies do not actually believe in their mission for “human progress.”

The disconnect between rhetoric and reality becomes even more troubling when viewed alongside government inaction.

AI’s mission has been severely undermined by the current United States regime. The rise of this technology has been accompanied with the perfect storm of incompetency —creating a massive contradiction. One of the biggest sources of paranoia also comes from the lack of government urgency (and ability) to regulate these companies and resources.

This paranoia is not emerging in a vacuum. It is informed by the world immediately around us.

This is bolstered as I look to the evidence in front of my face. Nothing seems to be progressing for the better. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Rio Grande has been completely dry since the beginning of June. A historic drought the likes of which has not been seen since the 1950s. And of course, the competition for data center water usage and commission approval is rampant across the state. These companies offer to dump money into schools, Boys and Girls programs, and “prioritize training, upskilling, and hiring of country residents.”. All of this comes with a promise that water usage and electricity rates will not go up, water quality will be preserved, and the carbon emission effects are no worse than air travel. However, that these promises are gift-wrapped to local city officials, commissioners, and leaders is besides the point. These companies are often egregiously allowed to promise prosperity, but rarely articulate — nevermind work toward — a coherent social end goal.

And it is here, somewhere between the advertisements and the drought, that the feeling of paranoia begins to take shape.

All of this, of course, gives me anxiety that easily spirals into paranoia. I have tried to conceptualize my feelings and thoughts on AI into one succinct metaphor and what I continue to imagine is myself standing in the middle of the Big Bang.

AI is an explosion that has rippled throughout nothingness, creating meaning, promise, and hope — all while hurling us toward an infinity of nothingness. Nothingness born into nothingness, with us situated in the middle. Progressing into nothingness. Expanding effortlessly and infinitely into a dead universe. AI has this similar quality of expansion; one that insists upon itself with no end goal in mind. It is similarly effortless and beautiful and officially completely out of our control. 

This feeling of universal expansion, I think, brings every human being some kind of paranoia. These are questions at the very center of our being. AI’s extension mirrors humanity’s oldest existential questions: why are we here? Where are we going? How can I get there? This thing that continues to insist upon itself is hurdling towards an end no one can see. And all of it is being done in the name of progress? And I continue to query what the fuck that actually means.

But there is another dimension to this anxiety that I have been unable to shake.

We have reached the part of the blog entry where I say, “AND HERE’S THE OTHER THING ABOUT MEN…” when men were never the topic of conversation. But here is the thing, obviously I am aware that both women and men are implicated in our acceleration toward . . . (the future?)… but the entire thing does feel very male-coded. I read this piece in the New York Review of Books recently where the author postulated a brilliant question (in fact I would only use the term postulate if it was, in fact, brilliant): “Do you think that men are obsessed with artificial intelligence because they are jealous of women’s ability to create life?” Talk about a sentence that stops you dead in your tracks.

Once something like that enters your mind, it becomes difficult not to see traces of it everywhere. 95% of AI CEOs are men. Thankfully, other people are noticing and thinking about this. Stanford University recently hosted a “Gender, Power and AI” seminar where they discussed exactly this phenomena. This inevitable march of adoption and so-called progress, as Professor Noble articulates, precludes accountability, justice, and repair from AI’s harms.

Whether or not the male-centered explanation for AI is correct, it points toward another source of unease.: the lack of female perspective that leads to uncompassionate advancement. In fact, to call back to the AI slop videos, it concerns me how quickly AI creates intensely sexual content. But this makes sense when you think about how much of the internet is porn: it makes up about 10%-15% of all internet traffic. Some estimate that 80% of this contains violence against women. Alarm bells anyone?

And so I return to the question that started this essay, the source of my paranoia. What is it all for? I worry the answer is to fulfill the male ego. I worry that it’s meant to line some privileged pockets while being coded as a cherished advancement. I am worried that the pursuit of domination will rule the world, rather than the honorable quest of making things a little bit better. That the domination of the planet is at the behest of those with malintencion.

But perhaps what I am really describing is not artificial intelligence at all. Perhaps I am describing a culture that has confused motion with meaning, conflating “progress” with purposeless acceleration. Technology itself is maybe not so frightening. What is frightening, what drives my paranoia, is being told that movement alone constitutes progress; that we must accept it, love it, worship it — and above all, not deny its existence.

I am, or we are, still left with this question: if we cannot explain where we are going, why are we so certain that moving faster is an achievement?