It's Time to Reevaluate Our Technological & Economic Worldview

The world is accelerating into a post-human future. This won't be too bad for the "relevant" parts of humanity... at least at first ("relevant" being those who contribute to technological and economic progress). Humanity will continue as a species, but most of us will be relegated to the fringes of a prosperous relevant core (I imagine that a subconscious realization of this might explain the recent explosion of interest in cyberpunk).

Everyone has been talking about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence after the release of Chat-GPT, and I recently encountered some AI art posted on a Chinese social media platform. Intrigued, I discovered that it was generated with a new program called Midjourney which is capable of producing photo-realistic art out of just a couple keywords. The reaction to these new developments has been swift. Artists are trying to organize against publishing AI creations on various boards. After scrolling through many of these new machine generated artworks, and even using one of the platforms myself, I came to the conclusion that most human artistic work is doomed. There's simply no way to compete with this stuff. Why would anyone go through the trouble of commissioning an artist instead of just typing in a couple of keywords and generating a hundred different versions of exactly what they want?

I remember reading several years ago that there's nothing productive that anyone with an IQ lower than 85 can do in the modern economy. The military won't hire anyone with an IQ lower than that. It's not that someone with an 85 IQ is incapable of flipping burgers at McDonald's, but they can't do it well enough to be worthy of a decent salary. They can't provide long-term value to their company. Now, in 2023, I'm pretty sure the usefulness IQ cutoff has risen to 90. This is huge, because all of the countries with growing populations are below this threshold. Shockingly, there's not a single country on the African continent with an average IQ above 82. India's 1.4 billion people allegedly average in at 77, and Pakistan is barely better at 80. Saudi Arabian's average is 76, and Iraqis are the Middle East's smartest at 89. 

The average human being is no longer economically useful, and more and more of us are becoming less and less useful with every passing year. I was almost completely unaware that the art profession was about to be rocked a few months ago. I had a vague impression that creative jobs would be among the least effected by the rise of artificial intelligence. In about a year, AI came out of nowhere and gained the capacity to replace graphic design. Who's next on the chopping block? A good deal of writing is already being automated.

One of my students asked me in class today whether I believed AI should be welcomed or not. I responded that it didn't matter because AI was inevitable. It's no longer a question of whether humans welcome AI or not, it's here to stay. Whoever uses AI will out compete anyone who doesn't use it. The logic of market capitalism and military competition renders the use of AI inevitable. We're accelerating into a future we no longer control.

As Christians, we're increasingly confronted with a world that needs to spiritually reevaluate the human condition. The technological and economic interpretation of humanity is no longer sufficient for human flourishing (it never was). It's now becoming widely acknowledged that the logic of unbridled technological and economic expansion has led to the functional irrelevance of most of the human species on a societal level. 

We now have the opportunity to choose something else. Humanity has become materially "rich", but now we need to start revisiting questions about the meaning of life. Why are we here? What are we doing? What is the telos of human existence? No amount of software or money is going to make these questions go away. Half the world's population is already "useless" according to our dominant secular worldview. When will we start thinking, as a society, about what people mean from a higher perspective?

It simply can't be true from a religious perspective that nearly the entire continent of Africa is "useless". If we're forced to judge half the human species in this way then we know we've gone down the wrong ideological path. It's time for a new way of thinking and organizing our societies.