“How dare you!” exclaimed the passenger….People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.
E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909.
When the SARS-CoV-2 virus swept across world in February/March of 2020, millions were encouraged to stay indoors and do nothing. The homebound masses found themselves binge-watching Netflix and struggling to come up with new home-based hobbies. What began as a promised two weeks of “flattening the curve” soon shaded into an indefinite global state of emergency. Students and working adults began to familiarize or reaquaint themselves with programs for teleconferencing, telecommuting, distance education, and social connection.
Sex, of both the casual and monogamous variety, was one of the early casualties of the pandemic. A number of mainstream media outlets responded to Eros’ retreat by championing pornography. Porn has long represented a massive fraction of Internet traffic and entertainment dollars, but media outlets have generally handled the topic diffidently and with ambivalence. Yet upbeat news items about online porn kept popping up in mainstream portals, extolling its virtues for lonely singles and homebound couples.
The decline of sex was one of the earliest and most obvious markers for the change in interpersonal relations over the past year. Of course, late-era capitalism is all about making the consumer feel alone and inadequate through marketing, so he or she can be sold on more goods and services. This isn’t new. What began in 2020 is the massive amplification of electronically mediated living in isolation. The tech monopolies and new upstarts like Zoom gave “atomization” a shot in the arm, so to speak.
You may say, “well, it’s all very unfortunate, but social distancing was needed and necessary to stem the spread of a deadly virus.” While I don’t disagree, I also won’t open the jagged can of worms involving the effectiveness of once-size-fits-all lockdown measures. (I’ll just note the peculiar performance of Sweden, that outlier for social distancing, compared to other nations that adopted stricter guidelines. )
A documented rise in alcoholism, suicides, overdose deaths, and domestic abuse in many jurisdictions throughout the lockdown periods, as well as the harder-to-quantify deaths resulting from fear or inability to access COVID-deflected medical services, have yet to be fully quantified and measured against the ravages from the virus itself, including the spectre of “long COVID” for recovering cases. Yet there is no denying life opportunities for younger people have shrunk dramatically over the past year, in a surreal economy where real estate climbs upward even as retail outlets stagger on.
Disaster Capitalism…again?
So what does this have to do with Artificial Intelligence? Well, in an interesting historical confluence of events, the pandemic handed a blank cheque to Silicon Valley and the surveillance state, by rationalizing and normalizing distance learning, contact tracing, fifth-generation (5G) telecommunications networking, smart cities, cashless payments, and the like. These are all elements of a much-ballyhooed “fourth industrial revolution,” which is intended to remake capital and labour globally. It’s a revolution that might have met some resistance from activists, public interest groups and politicians prior to the pandemic.
Erich Schmidt is the former head of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. In February 2019 he penned an editorial for The New York Times in which he called for a partnership between U.S. government and industry to counter the great gains made by China in Artificial Intelligence.
“A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority,” Schmidt wrote, citing the threat from China’s significant and growing investment in R&D, with the nation expected to surpass the US within 10 years. “Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world’s leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win,” he warns.
Schmidt stands astride the private and public worlds of infotech. He’s chair of the Defense Innovation Board, which advises the Department of Defense on implementation of AI in the armed services. He’s also chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). The official purpose of this organization is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.”
The memberships of the latter are heavily represented by Silicon Valley behemoths, including Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google owner Alphabet. There are representatives from the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon as well.
Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) obtained an FOIA document that reveals both the mindset and wish list of the NSCAI. Not surprisingly, the Asian threat is a recurring theme in slides from the May 2019 presentation. Unlike the U.S., China has been able to effect social transformations by virtue of nonexistent democratic institutions.
Privacy laws restricting the collection and use of personal data is one limitation facing the United States, whereas China does not have “the same restraints that we do around collecting it and using it.”
There’s also the domestic resistance represented by what the slides call “legacy systems” in the United States, which include cash and credit payments, individual car ownership and person-to-person medical attention. Again, their Asian opponent has no problem with such hurdles. Chinese companies “have the authority to quickly clear regulatory barriers while American initiatives are mired in HIPPA compliance and FDA approval.”
China has “explicit government support and involvement e.g. facial recognition deployment,” notes the slideshow, adding that “surveillance is one of the ‘first-and-best customers’ for AI”, and that “mass surveillance is a killer application for deep learning.”
Just two weeks before the coronavirus was pronounced a global pandemic, Eric Schmidt went on a public blitz for a fourth industrial revolution in the pages of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. This is the historical irony: with the fallout from the pandemic, notes journalist Naomi Klein, “...all of these measures (and more) are being sold to the public as our only possible hope of protecting ourselves from a novel virus that will be with us for years to come.”
In a May 2020 report in The Intercept, Klein wrote that “a Screen New Deal” is on the horizon, with our homes acting as living laboratories “for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.”
“It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration “in the community” was already booming. But in the future under hasty construction, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.”
She pointed out that the digital divide will only grow in scale, as the lithium farms, slaughterhouses and sweatshops will be serviced by unseen people who labour outside the coddled Zoomverse of the global managerial class and their sheltered leaders.
In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein outlined how rulers have historically taken advantage of crisis moments to ram through measures that would otherwise meet stiff resistance from the ruled. (The central credo of disaster capitalism was unintentionally expressed by former Chicago mayor and Obama aide Rahm Emmanuel when he advised to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.”)
The numbers of global unemployed are expected to rise as social distancing proceeds into an indefinite future. The technocratic class is pitching rolling lockdowns as the means to deal with a viral menace that has shaded from pandemic to endemic, with vaccines less a silver bullet than a pharmacological whack-a-mole.
Seinfeld, Unplugged
A friend recently told me how she felt uncomfortable watching an episode of the comedy series Seinfeld. Then she realized why: the characters were sitting close together and kibbitzing. She had internalized the message of social distancing so deeply that an old-school sitcom resembled a public safety alert.
What goes missing in most digital interactions are the sub-verbal cues, pheromones, and zero-latency effects of real-world interactions with messy, complicated human beings. Rising levels of anxiety and depression among the young, measured in multiple studies over the past decade, have only been amplified by the pandemic. It’s axiomatic among child psychologists that children require embodied interactions with peers and adults in social environments for the development of healthy identities, so what can we expect developmentally from an educational paradigm that bonds children even more tightly to screens, and teaches them to distrust or fear direct human contact, while turning parents into involuntary home schoolers?
With an indefinite “new normal,” will we be waving goodbye to hugs and other tactile expressions among all but couples and family members? Public displays of affection are pretty think on the ground already, and may soon look as antiquated as buggy whips and whalebone corsets.
As for real-world sex, in July of 2020 the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control compiled new recommendations on its COVID-19 website. Among those tips: using an opening in a wall that’s just large enough for a penis to slip through. “Use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact,” the BCDC helpfully suggests.
I laughed when I came across this item, but it was a bitter laughter. “It’s a cliché among political philosophers that, if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationship and local community,” observed the writer Judith Shulevitz in a pre-pandemic article in The Atlantic.
Alienation and atomization are features, not bugs, of late-era capitalism. And it’s obvious they were present well before the COVID pandemic. But it would be cosmically ironic if these features have been upgraded by a global war on the simplest constituents of the biosphere - viruses - those tiny machines that exist on the boundary of living and nonliving. In a global race for technocratic social engineering, are humans fated to become more affectless and machine-like, even as our machines become more animated and lifelike? Is this how the “Singularity” will shake out?
Or is there a possible light side to balance the dark? That’s for a future chapter in this series.
I hope that some of the consequences turn out to be a good thing and that when covid is over, there will be a whipsaw effect that has everyone dancing in the streets, and cheek to cheek, preferably all cheeks!
In the spirit of "never let a crisis go to waste." there is also the very real possibility that universal basic income, or UBI, will be legislated into being. Automation demands it. If not for the virus, Canadians may not endorse it in large enough numbers to push it through.
Agree that it looks like people will become more machine like and machines more human. But technology could also hasten a more elfin future, where physical aggression is tempered while play in the mental environment is emphasized. The human mind will rework itself along silicon lines but it has to drag the soul with it, and so it could result in a future that is utterly unpredictable.
I still have hope.
Nice summary of all our current and future nightmares...