You Are Valuable Because You Exist. The Machine Is Not.
Distinguishing between humans and machines might be the first step in freeing ourselves from the machines.
Blinded By The Light – a “banger” in zoomer parlance – had just played on the local classic rock station when I heard it for the first time: Assurance that a robot was not determining what was being played for this radio audience, that an algorithm was not in charge.
“Big 100,” the voice-over boomed, announcing the name of the D.C.-area station formerly known as Oldies 100, before Nirvana became classic rock for some reason. “One hundred percent human.”
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I’ve since heard variations of this anti-AI pronouncement on other local radio stations. Even the easy listening station is doing it. One station told listeners they could tell people were in charge of the music because there were still mistakes being made by imperfect deejays. “We still fuck up and that’s good” was the message. Another said something about a machine being unable to rock out. The message was clear in any case: The communal experience of listening to music over the radio had not been ceded to machines that don’t know shit about Manfred Mann's Earth Band or what it’s like to be revved up like a deuce, things of that nature.
The backlash to the AI industry’s assault on humanity – and the dominance of internet-connected life – isn’t tough to spot today. The radio is rejecting AI control; subway ads are offering ways to listen to music without the nuisance of your phone and all its dopamine-drenched distractions; there are bars and restaurants in every major American city that ban phones for patrons and staff alike ("Life needs to be more like this."); YouTube videos are showing folks how to get along with a humble flip phone; and social media users are staging online riots against AI-fueled tools.
Denny Carter
It’s hardly a stunning development. People are exhausted from years and years of a phone-dictated life, of being yanked this way and that way by the machine’s beeping and booping and notifications from friends and family and corporations and news outlets and apps, all of which seem important, even critical. It feels, after however many years we’ve lived this way, like a hundred steel funnels have been gouged into your brain, all of them sucking up your attention until you have none left to observe the chirping bird in the tree or the the purple of a sunrise or the look in your kid’s eye when all they want is your attention, which of course you have already given away to the machine.
Think of what it’s like to be a child in this cursed, tech-heavy age. Every moment of every day is a competition with the machine. You compete for your parents’ attention and you compete for your friends’ attention and maybe you compete for the attention of your teachers and coaches and everyone else trained by Silicon Valley tech-fascists to respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the buzzing or beeping in their pocket. You get tired of this eternal competition so you give in and you offer up your attention to the machine-god with all its colorful avenues to wasted time and resources and life.
A child realizes sooner or later that there really is no competition; they understand that they never really had a chance against the robot designed to wreck the human brain, to soak it with dopamine until it belonged to the company that made the robot. No human can be as compelling as the machine, the child realized. Real life stands no chance against the fake life offered by the machine.
Denny Carter
The BFT readers know I’m speaking from experience as a tragically-online elder millennial who has decided to sell pieces of himself on the internet in exchange for money. It’s an arrangement many of us have accepted as justifiable, even normal, maybe even good. I convert chunks of my life into online content – via microblogging, via video, via picture, via podcast, via blog post – and I get some money for it. As long as I don't give everything away, I think this can work. I think I can live with this arrangement.
This means, of course, that I’m tethered to my fucking phone in ways that, upon reflection, make me sick. I’ve seen the look in my children’s eyes when they know they’re locked in battle with the machine for their dad’s attention. It doesn’t really matter what I’m doing with my phone at that moment, whether it’s scrolling through the doom of fascist resurgence or watching a sports highlight or ordering groceries for pick-up or arranging a Sunday dinner with my parents. The kid can see my attention (love?) is flowing elsewhere at the moment.
Sometimes my kids will say something about the phone and the attention I pay it. Sometimes they’ll use the word “addiction” in a half-joking way and I’ll bristle and kick into defensive mode because I know they’re right and I hate it. I hate that this is the example I’m setting while banning YouTube and TikTok and smartphones for them in hopes they can experience childhood before being taken in by the machines. It’s when I’m called out like this that I set down my phone in another room and try to function without it for a while. Then my wife will ask why I wasn’t answering my texts. She had a question about the kids’ schedules or about dinner plans and I was nowhere to be found. I can almost hear the machine snickering.
You can’t live without me, it says. Fuck you, I respond because I know it’s correct.
We Are Not Stochastic Parrots, Actually
This week I was unfortunate to come across an old Twitter/X post from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and one of the many trillionaire tech freaks who want to replace humanity with machines, in which he said he is "stochastic parrot."
You, he added, are also a stochastic parrot.
