Class Fears

I've heard in Silicon Valley there's a race right now to accumulate wealth before the singularity eliminates all opportunity for upward mobility. This is the last chance, so the thinking goes. In a few years AI will end social mobility forever, and whatever position you happen to occupy when AI matures and is built out is the one you'll occupy forever, and your family, too.

Ever since I flipped through Aion, I've been fascinated by Jung's idea that we will the future into being through the collective unconscious. You could also say that a civilization does its long-range planning in fiction. So I think that we can get a pretty good picture of what's coming by looking for clues in our collective fantasies. Here are some clues about the potential future intersection of technology and class.

Take Vonnegut's Player Piano. Here America has two classes: the engineers and everyone else, who do make-work on roads, an everlasting WPA. These workers are housed, fed and have medical care. And they are humilated, until they revolt and destroy the automated systems, whereupon they immediately fix them up again. The challenge here is spiritual, and Vonnegut predicts that we cannot avoid it. We will always build these systems. We cannot help it.

That seems to be the case. Human beings are deeply defined by technology, and have been since our earliest days of making flint axes, arrowheads, pottery and fire. We are hardwired for it. So Vonnegut thinks we must accept this material state of affairs, and in that case, what do we do with our lives?

In Brave New World, the Epsilons are conditioned in their sleep to be glad they are Epsilons. So that's one solution: the spiritual conflict is solved from above and is hypnotized away through drugs and brainwashing. Contentment is a stronger lock than deprivation. Of course, this is our situation now. We are deprived in a hundred ways we don't realize: our lack of community, our transactional relationships, our being cut off from the natural and spiritual world, hence our addictions and obsessions despite our plenty.

Some versions of this type of story have no elite at all. In EM Forster's 1909 The Machine Stops, there are no rulers, and the ship in Wall-E has no oppressors, only a very good autopilot, and a permanent underclass with nobody standing above it. Here we're not subject to the control of "someone" else but subect to the control of "something" else, which has been our state of affairs since the dawn of time, as we have always been subject to the control of nature. So this outcome seems more tolerable.

Personally, I would prefer to be under the control of an LLM, given an independence from any person or corporation's control, than to be under the control of an individual human being.

And then there is Dune. Ban the intelligent machines. But I don't think this can be done preemptively, because our fantasies about all of these scenarios are so strong and omnipresent that it does seem like a future we are collectively willing into reality, for good or ill.