Of Frankenstein, AI, and Endzeit

Humans' obsession with the endzeit, or end times, goes back millenniums. Classical pre-christians were on the whole carpe-diem types, interested in not tomorrow but today. For example, when Odysseus travels to the underworld in the epic named after him, he meets the great hero, Akhilleus, in Hades; when he flatters him by saying that everyone above ground sings his praises, the Myrmidon scolds him, remarking, "Let's hear no smooth talk/of death from you. . . ./Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand/for some country man, on iron rations/than lord it over all the exhausted dead" (Bk XI, ll. 577-581)*. It's about as powerful an affirmation of everyday life in this world––and against the lure of power and status––as you'll ever hope to find. When christians came on the scene, by contrast, they were haters of this world, opting instead for some realm to come. Although such disdain for the gift of life is already problematic enough, added to it has been an obsession with endzeit. Christians, and western culture generally, has been looking for, predicting, and marking agents for our demise all along. AI is merely the latest culprit. 

It's not that AI doesn't have the potential to be a real danger––on the contrary––but I'll get to that. What I'd like to suggest first is that the current hysteria fits the periodic pattern in the West of certainty that we're all toast. And pronto. Early christians were so doom-obsessed they stopped living and sat on their roofs waiting for the end, for the second coming. They had to be talked down from the ledge and told to get a life. Since then an almost gleeful preoccupation with armageddon has cropped up regularly. Calvinists in particular, and their nondenom american progeny, with their sense of a sure seat in paradise, often speak fondly of the end. Jehovah's Witnesses even more so. In the early seventies when I was a born-again factory worker, some of my colleagues used to write on the public bulletin board something along the lines of, "June 23, 1973: The End of the World!" When the date passed without incident they scratched out the 3 and wrote 4 next to it, and that repeated yearly, though the precise day varied. 

In the eighteenth century with the dawn of the age of science, the fear among old-school christians grew that empiricism was replacing faith and god and would be the death of us all. In the early nineteenth century as the fear grew Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, gave voice to that panic. Subtitled The New Prometheus, the work is about the ability of science to create life, i.e. supplant the creator; an ability allegorized in the person of the eponymous doctor. It's his knowledge that gets cast as the imminent danger. Dr. Frankenstein creates a perfectly gentle creature and then turns it into a monster by rejecting it, a human-made thing with sentience; which is to say quasi-human. He's so threatened by his creation that he opts to destroy it and the partner he fashioned for it. All that rather than teach and live peaceably with it, with him; which is to say with the Other; with difference; with a human reflection. 

Y2K came along in 2000 as we all know, and there was a genuine, global hysteria––lest we forget. It passed without incident. AI seems to be the most recent agent of our demise, a real-world Frankenstein with powers we can only imagine. The threat may be genuine, potentially life altering for the planet, and not in a good way––although like Shelley's monster it also has the potential solely for good.

What troubles me about the current hysteria is, well, the hysteria; the unbridled fear. It reminds me of a cancer diagnosis. There's a real threat the thing could be deadly, and that leaves options. One is cry and catastrophize––and do nothing. Another would be to avoid all that and do something. If one is concerned about AI then one might call or write their congresspeople and demand regulation of the industry; we still are a representative democracy after all. Or if one is a true optimist they might contact the CEOs of tech companies; demand they self-regulate. Demonstrate, or start a movement. Take to social media––if one is worried, do anything but nothing.

It remains to be seen if AI is another Y2K or a genuine threat. All that, though, is apart from the hysteria, which only muddles things. In a country like the U.S. with all its global sway, where a full sixty percent of the voting population never bothers to cast a ballot in the midterms, I'm led to believe that we're in for more whining than regulation. We're a nation of do-nothings, even though you can't have a democracy without citizen participation, without taking responsibility for one's own part in the direction of the whole. It's how we ended up with Trump; millions chose to sit out the last election rather than act in good faith. 

Therefore if the armageddon scenario that doomsayers are predicting actually occurs it'll be because of our own laziness. I admit I like AI, or much of it; I want to preserve the best parts of it and even grow them. The window for enacting guardrails that would maintain it as an agent for good, for anyone concerned, is now. Carpe diem.

*Homer, The Odyssey. New York: FSG, 1998.