The Techno-Apocalypse at the Orthodontist Office
The Techno-Apocalypse at the Orthodontist’s Office
Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy – as a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly “adapted” gears; as an ever-growing superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements; as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual factors represent minimal forces, minimal values.
The task is to make man as useful as possible and to approximate him, as far as possible, to an infallible machine: to this end he must be equipped with the virtues of the machine (-- he must learn to experience states in which he works in a mechanically useful way as the supremely valuable states; hence it is necessary to spoil other states for him as much as possible, as highly dangerous and disreputable.)
— Nietzsche, Will to Power, Kaufmann translation: §866 and §866
Many thinkers use remarks from Nietzsche like the first one I quote above as a way of framing the notion of a techno-apocalypse in terms of a literal Singularity by which a confluence of immanent technological revolutions will cause the human species to be incorporated into and subsequently overcome by a race of machines. The Overman will be a nascent kind of physical being, existing beyond the newly obsolete boundaries between the biological and the mechanical. The powers enabled by genetic engineering, AI, nanotechnology, cyborg devices, etc., will transcend the recognizably human all together. Humanity will go under, so evolution, now technologically mediated, can go over to a new, superior being. The human will be overcome for the sake of a technological Overman. On this view, just as biblical literalists believe the end of the world will be brought about by four actual horsemen unleashing a series of tangible tribulations following the reign of the Antichrist, the techno-apocalypses will play out in a series of great cataclysms resulting in the physical undoing of humanity. For the the techno-apocalyptic literalist, we will actually be replaced by robots, or some such.
Maybe, but apocalypse is said in many ways, and there are more subtle manners of framing the End of Things. Some religious believes think of the apocalypse not literally as a series of historically discrete events, but as a collective falling away from the path of salvation. On this view, the apocalypse is not the physical destruction of the world, but a loss of the world as a place hospitable to the divine project (a kingdom ruled by the Antichrist). In this figurative apocalypse, the planet is not destroyed by a meteor, nor is the entire population wiped out by a plague. Rather, there is a global-scale inner transformation for the worse. The End of Things would be a historical turning away from the saving path.
In the second remark I quote above, Nietzsche gives us a way of framing the techno-apocalypse in similarly figurative terms. In that remark he seems to have in mind neither the physical transformation of human beings into machines, nor the replacement of our species by mechanical superiors, but our approximation to machines psychologically. Nietzsches sees the necessity of getting people habituated into the “virtues of the machine” in order to bring about the great overcoming. That is, the human being must grow accustomed to and well-disposed toward a merely mechanical state of existence. We must learn to prefer a psychological or spiritual mechanism over other non-mechanical possibilities for being. The End of Things will be brought about not by a genocidal attack by robots, but by our collective forgetting what makes us distinctively human. The apocalypse will come by the slow habituation of humanity into the inhuman — a subtle, yet increasingly consequential, meandering from the saving path. According to this vision, the world indeed ends “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Once we have habituated the virtues of the machine, our lives will be an expression of unconscious will to power — existence beyond good and evil. The Overman is not a technological singularity of superior robots, but a thoroughly collectivised and economized post-humanity operating with mechanical indifference.
Those remarks by Nietzsche were on my mind this morning as I sat in the lobby of an orthodontist office. Earlier, I had to send an email and complete an electronic form to excuse my son from school, and we then made a thirty-minute drive using a navigation application on my phone to get to the appointment. Upon arriving, I was required to complete several forms with redundant information — I’ve filled these same forms out at the same office before — and once again this mostly involved me moving information from my phone (my wife’s phone number, email addresses, our insurance information, etc., etc.) into the blanks on the page. I might have refused to complete the same forms again, but, since I had to sit in the lobby with tasteless music blaring anyway, there was no need for the consternation. I get the program.
All of these tasks could have just as well be done by a machine. I was just mechanically moving what might as well have been uninterpreted code from one instantiation to another (moving “words” from the phone to the paper form), or merely the unthinking operational response to uninterpreted code (following the pleasant lady’s voice “speaking” from the navigation application and just filling out the forms to get along). Really, our response to the orthodontist’s prescription for the use of my son’s retainers isn’t in principle different: we’re just making an operationalized response to uninterpreted code based on the authority of “the program.” I didn’t really have a clue what she was talking about at anything but the most superficial level. I spent the morning just doing what I was told, even when I knew doing so was a useless redundancy, and none of these operations require a conscious being in order to go through the motions. I mostly spent my morning acting like a machine.
How different, really, was my work on campus as a “professor” later today? Increasingly my job, and I suspect that this is true for many people across the professions, is similarly mechanized. Much of my time is spent filling in electronic forms tracking academic “progress” or “success” so that interventions can be trigged in order to cause preferable institutional outcomes for my employers, i.e., “graduation rate,” “student retention,” “persistence,” etc., but all that just means continued access to the students’ creditors. Moreover, it appears that the majority of this “academic” success is determined by the students’ willingness and ability to reproduce uninterpreted code in a different instantiation (in a Word document or a blank on an examination form) than it was first presented to them (vocalizations, PowerPoint slides, Wikipedia). It doesn’t take consciousness to copy symbols from PowerPoint slides into a notebook and then reproduce those symbols later. Likewise, a machine could check those re-inscriptions against an answer key. In fact, this is exactly how it works in many cases. Students have been trained to think of their education in terms of “copying and pasting” code from one source to another, and they are often perplexed when an instructor suggests that becoming educated might involve more than empty tasking. Our academic institutions, however, almost exhaustively incentivize the mechanization of both the educator and the student. I am troubled by how much of academic life (at least on the teaching-learning side) doesn’t really presuppose meaningful consciousness on the part of its participants. Much of what we do, even in the classroom, could just as well be done by unconscious machines.
These are just a couple examples, but we can see this creep of mechanizations throughout our lives. The space we occupy that presupposes bona fide consciousness is shrinking. By “consciousness” I don’t mean trivialities like the fabled qualia of contemporary philosophy of mind. Rather, a conscious being in this sense is a participant in a space of reasons, whose thinkings and doings are explained not merely by his or her being caused to think or act, but by his or her commitment to norms. In fact, thought and action, as opposed to mere operational responses, presuppose normative commitment, i.e., what differentiates thinking from a mere occurrence is that thoughts are explicable in terms of their subjects’ commitment to norms of reason. Thinking and acting are then possible, only if as we are committed to something, i.e, they are consequences of caring. In other words, what differentiates us from mere machines is what John Haugeland somewhat famously called “giving a damn.” To be conscious in the most important sense is to be concerned for or to care about something.
Consciousness then comes at a price – anxiety. Caring about something means that we can be disappointed. Concern brings the potential for the exhilaration of seeing the successful cultivation of what one cares about, but it also brings worry over its loss or failure. Since consciousness involves a commitment to a norm, it entails a sort of responsibility — we are committed to seeing that the norm is satisfied, but there is no guarantee that will go well. As it has been said:
It is only this new consciousness at a higher potential, this abstract reflex of everything intuitive in the non-perceptive conception of reason, that endows man with that thoughtfulness which so completely distinguishes his consciousness from that of the animal, and through which his whole behavior on earth turns out so differently from that of his irrational brothers. He far surpasses them in power and suffering. (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Payne trans), § 8)
Our consciousness (“thoughtfulness”) distinguishes us from brutes and machines and transforms our behavior into bona fide thinking and doing. This transformative consciousness is structured by care (commitment and responsibility), so our dignity is expensive. Thoughtfulness places us in a normative space, and the requisites commitments and responsibilities of normativity saddle us with anxiety and the threat of suffering that comes along with the possibility of failing our own concerns. Thus, consciousness is burdensome.
The activities I described above don’t presuppose a commitment to anything but obedience to an alterity - they offload the burden of consciousness onto our devices, institutions, and external authorities. They are operationalized responses to uninterpreted code. Since they are not fully conscious activities, they don’t presuppose much risk of failure or loss (higher education, for example, is mostly a rigged game), and they burden us with responsibility only in the thinest sense — our responsibility to submit to the “right” arbitrarily chosen authority. As we trade the space of reasons for the space of mechanization, we are likewise trading the anxiety of giving-a-damn for “careless” obedience. Don’t worry, just follow the “program.” By forfeiting our lives to the machine we are compensated with carefree oblivion. The unconscious have no worries about themselves and their world.
Of course, it is my concern for my son that led me to make the appointment with the orthodontist and my care about wonder that led me to an academic career, but the space of giving-a-damn is increasingly mediated through “careless” mechanized processes. We are constantly habituating carelessness on an ever broadening scale. Our habits of mind are becoming mindless. How long can our giving-a-damn remain as the space of carelessness expands? We are cultivating the virtues of the machine.
Our commitment to norms of beauty, truth, and goodness are the place where the world can show itself. The world shines in our space of giving-a-damn, and, reciprocally, it is our vocation to be the locale for the world’s revelation that constitutes us as what we are. So this is how the world ends, and us along with it. As we expand the sphere of careless unconsciousness, we likewise dim the light of the world. The apocalypse is not a cataclysmic event, but the slow fading away of the meaningful world as we abdicate our unique vocation to give a damn, in exchange for relief from the anxiety being human.
Cultivate anxiety.