The Machine in Us

AI Won’t Gain Consciousness, But We Are Losing Ours

What you are about to read (or listen to) is a short mini-essay that was originally a speech that I presented at my friend Greg Guevara’s (the YouTuber known as Jreg) “Anti-Clanker” rally back in September. It was an event about critiques of AI, featuring other guest speakers such as YouTube creators Gokanaru, Art Chad, Duncan Clarke, Were in Hell, and Cricket Guest. I didn’t publish my speech because I had not launched my Substack yet, but I figured I might as well put this article out now before someone else writes something that says more or less the same thing (maybe someone already has, but alas). Enjoy!

The Machine in Us: Thoughts on the AI Debate

Is AI becoming more human-like, or does it only seem that way because humans have already become more like AI, before AI was even invented? People marvel that machines can now write poetry, generate images, and compose music, but I believe this apparent breakthrough in the advancement of artificial intelligence reveals more about the regression of human intelligence. The real technological singularity is not robots achieving consciousness like humans. It is the robotization of human consciousness itself, and that has been happening long before ChatGPT.

The division of labor makes it so that most people have to specialize in one thing for most of their lives and spend the rest of it doing the same old repetitive tasks. Standardized testing in schools more or less trains you to become an LLM, reducing intelligence to bubbled answers. We become trained to become like an LLM with a body. Just consider how most people actually live: robotic 9-to-5 work schedules, mindless jobs.

Manual laborers become an “appendage of the machine,” as Marx described it. But it is not just manual labor (at least manual labor serves a clear social function). Much of white-collar “cognitive” labor is even more mindless. Consider all the pointless white-collar office work in the finance and insurance industries and government bureaucracies. What is funny is that it is precisely here, in white-collar professional managerial class work as well as creative “symbolic” work (especially Media, Academia, Art, and Entertainment), where AI is threatening to replace jobs the most. My hunch is that this is a major reason why it seems that liberal or left-leaning voices (who tend to be overrepresented in these industries) are the most critical of AI, often hysterically so. But critiques of AI have to be about more than “AI bad” and moralizing about it.

The left has hitherto been uncritical of most historical progress, except for technological progress, which is by far the hardest to reverse. This is because once technology is developed and adopted by companies and governments in major countries, other countries are compelled to adopt it as well to avoid falling behind or becoming vulnerable to the threats that technological advantages might entail. For this reason, as Francis Fukuyama discusses in The End of History and The Last Man, technological progress is irreversible and propels the forward development of history. But progress does not always entail positive human development, and the debate regarding AI’s impact on human brains has made this contradiction more obvious.

But if technological progress is irreversible, then maybe we should try to figure out a different path of how AI can be used in a way that benefits the development of the human, rather than uncritically accepting a post-human future, like that envisioned by the techno-optimists in Silicon Valley and AI accelerationists on the corporatist right, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

However, we must stop and think: it is truly an irony of history that this decade’s advancements in AI have done very little to automate manual labor and reduce the overall time people spend working (except for the unemployed). Meanwhile, it is the creative industries like Art, Entertainment, Media, and Education that seem to be under threat. It’s almost the exact opposite of what Karl Marx predicted. Marx predicted that capitalist technological advancement in the productive forces, if seized by the working class in a socialist transition, would pave the way for new freedoms that would allow humans to gradually overcome the division of labor and spend more time on creative, more enlightening pursuits. This would unleash the potential of the most human faculties. Why does it seem like the very opposite of this is what ended up happening?

I believe that AI actually unleashes a lot of human potential by enabling people to outsource many menial secretarial tasks, freeing up time and energy to focus on the creative parts. However, AI has not been used in this way for the most part because most people do not know how, and current capitalist social relations do not provide an incentive to do so. AI is a tool that could just as easily liberate humans to think more and be creative as it could enslave them to dependency by outsourcing their thinking and creativity.

But it seems that AI slop has taken over the internet, students have been writing their papers entirely with AI, and even teachers have been using AI to grade the papers written by AI. The current trajectory of AI seems to be leading us to a future that looks more like WALL-E rather than Star Trek. Part of the reason is that our societies before the invention of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT were already much more like WALL-E.

What people today seem to hate most about AI (the stupidity of people, the sloppification of art, etc.) are less consequences of AI itself than pre-existing tendencies in society that AI has merely accelerated. Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Marcuse, and many others were writing about the technologization of human beings as far back as the 1950s. The LLMs of today just make this cyborgification more explicit and put it into overdrive. While many humans, especially older ones, are still (rightfully) reluctant to embrace new technologies, most people have been unable to resist cyborgification that AI exacerbates, because the broader process of roboticization has already been normalized.

The robotization of humans precedes, and enables, the humanization of robots. We live most of our lives on autopilot, following a script. One-dimensional ideological codes that flatten complex thought into binary oppositions. All of these systems have played a role in the robotization of the human mind. Humans are already subject to what we might call the algorithmic administration of consciousness: the systematic automation of the processes through which humans form desires, make decisions, construct meaning. Most people have much of the content they consume fed to them, by a machine. Instead of discovering it themselves or through word of mouth, most people watch YouTube videos, listen to songs on Spotify, and watch TV shows on Netflix based on what the algorithms recommend to them.

Digital media algorithms do not merely satisfy desires. They program them, through predictive modeling of behavioral patterns. Click on one video with a sensational title that can bait you into watching a few minutes, and then the next thing you know, that is what the algorithm feeds you all the time.

We are witnessing consciousness itself becoming computational, not through external imposition but through the voluntary restructuring of cognitive processes to interface smoothly with algorithmic systems. We would worry less about robots becoming “conscious” if humans did not become so much like robots already.

TIME, ENERGY & HUMAN INGENUITY

Sure, we have the capacity to think but thinking deeply and not merely in a sporadic ADD way requires time AND energy. As my fellow underground theorist David McKerracher of Theory Underground discusses in far greater depth in his book on the concept of “TIMENERGY,” time without energy is wasted time, and bursts of energy without the time to use them are wasted energy. I highly reccomend checking out his book and the episode of 1Dime Radio on Timenergy, if you are interested in his ideas.

Furthermore, even if some of us have more relative time and energy than others, it is rare that all of our friends also have both these things simultaneously, which means that our time-energy cannot be spent with others, so it usually gets wasted through some form of passive escapism. The compulsion to survive and compete in the capitalist system deprives us of time and energy. Working jobs we do not like to buy shit we do not need, as the great philosopher Tyler Durden of Fight Club once said. And for most people, it is usually just shit that they need.

But this even applies to the most successful people in society. As people become wealthier, they do not necessarily use it to buy up more free time and energy. Often, they merely get stuck in a state of augmented survival, whereby more time and energy are spent working to earn more money and maintain a higher standard of living and higher expectations.

As a result of this deprivation of time-energy, even when people have the money to buy time, very rarely does free time translate to otium (a Latin term philosophers like Nietzsche used to refer to leisure time dedicated to self-cultivation, intellectual or artistic pursuits, and the activities we consider to be the most defining examples of human ingenuity). No other species that we are aware of does these things. But now AI supposedly can. But how could this be?

AI is trained on data that humans give it, and it lacks the lifeblood and life experience of being a human being. The greatest works of art, literature, and philosophy are often born of passion and are the product of our accumulated knowledge and experience. So why on earth do we even consider AI a “threat” to humanity? Why are we even talking about “AI art” in the first place?

STANDARDIZATION AND AUTOMATION OF ART

AI art is only a “threat” to real art because the standards of what is considered “art” have already been so thoroughly lowered due to the process of “standardization,” whereby art becomes standardized into mass-producible cultural commodities designed for maximum profitability. Think about it. We tend to consider the top artists the ones who sell the most records. To sell the most records amounts to appealing to the lowest common denominator. And that is how you end up with Drake as the most popular rapper in the world.

Every cultural artifact appears unique through marketed appearances while conforming to nearly identical templates: the same narrative structures, the same chord progressions, the same hook formulas. This industrial logic now operates through machine learning systems trained on datasets of already-standardized cultural products. AI does not threaten genuine art. It automates the production of cultural commodities that stopped being art decades ago.

The music industry provides the most brutal example. AI can generate “professionally produced” tracks because the industry spent generations reducing musical diversity to algorithmic formulas optimized for commercial success. Machine learning makes explicit the mechanization of the creative process that human producers had already engineered.

I think the very notion of “AI art” is a misnomer. At most, AI should be viewed as a tool capable of creating sophisticated CGI, motion graphics, automated visual content, or just marketing designs, but nobody would be calling this “art” in the first place if the standard for what is considered “art” was not so low to begin with.

Machines can only replace what was already mechanical. AI cannot automate human Aura. It is for this reason that much of the Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence feels soulless. AI tools might function as advanced instruments, like cameras or editing software, that artists employ in creative processes. But the tools cannot replace the creative process itself, any more than a camera eliminates the need for photographic vision.

Authentic art carries the irreducible traces of human experience, historical embeddedness, and individual perspective materialized in aesthetic form. Machine learning systems can simulate surface features, but cannot generate this essence because they possess no experience or passion to draw on. And let us be honest, a lot of so-called “human art” fucking sucks. Like most AI art, a lot of it is soulless, standardized, and passionless, because it was commissioned by a corporation with a PR team trying to deliver a consumer product to a “target market,” and thus copied all of the standards for the content popular within that market. Some “artists” are trust fund kids who are not serious about the craft and just want an excuse not to work while still having something cool to say about themselves.

A lot of content that passes for “art” is made by people who are more interested in being an artist rather than actually making Art. Many people who aspire to become “artists”, rappers, or YouTubers are more interested in the social capital that comes with being an “artist” rather than genuinely loving the act of creation itself. Audiences passively accept AI-slop content because they are already so used to consuming standardized slop made by humans.

AI, which is programmed by humans, is only a threat to humans because capitalism has already programmed humans into AI.

RECLAIMING HUMAN AGENCY

AI might just melt our brains if we allow it to think for us. By getting AI to do the most tedious labor for us while saving the most creative parts of the process that require human ingenuity for ourselves, then maybe humans can free up more time and energy to focus on enhancing the most human faculties, like creative thinking, and the art of being itself, which AI cannot replace because unlike us, it does not possess a mind embodied in a real person, who has real experiences, encounters real people, with egos, stories, emotions, myths, sacrifices, pride, and all of the irrational “all-too-human” feelings that drive so much of what we do.

For much of human history, the most human experiences (like artistic creation, intellectual pursuits, and deep thinking itself) were relegated to a small aristocracy while the rest of humanity lived lives of toil, dehumanized into subordination. The rise of bourgeois commerce helped free up the potentialities of a large section of humanity. A new “middle strata” of society was able to get access to just enough property and economic independence to allow them to create things. That is how you got the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment.

However, the transition from agrarian market society to “the capitalist system” during the Industrial Revolution, and the later rise of corporate monopolies and large bureaucracies, created a contradiction between capitalism and the enlightened ideals of liberal bourgeois society. “Free laborers” became subject to a new kind of servitude. Owning nothing, most people lacked real economic freedom even in places with strong political liberties.

And now in advanced industrial society (late-stage capitalism, techno feudalism, or whatever you want to call it), even those free from manual labor see their cognitive faculties and potentialities wasted in bullshit jobsand robotic white-collar labor.

But what if we subordinate AI to human will so that it does all the robotic work for us while we keep the creative thinking for ourselves? Then perhaps we humans can become the new aristocracy. In an ideal world, more people should have access to more time and energy for creative and intellectual pursuits that only aristocrats once had the privilege to indulge in. But even if this time-energy was achieved, many people still would not know what to do with it. That is, unless humans can deprogram each other and re-learn the WILL to think for themselves.

But the binary between human and machine may blind us to the machine already in us. Even eliminating all AI systems will not stop Earth from becoming a Planet of Robots. The only robots left will be among us. We sustain this roboticized existence by numbing the most human senses (emotions, feelings, thinking itself) through pharmaceutical drugs, like opioids, anti-depressants, and amphetamines. Escapist media consumption functions as a different kind of sedative: binge-watching, doom-scrolling, endless gaming, and porn watching. Not genuine leisure but technological palliatives to escape reality.

The only way to resist the full automation of human consciousness is to first stop ourselves from becoming robots. By subordinating AI to human mastery and using it to free up our time-energy, then maybe, just maybe, we will be forced to become human again.