New Technologies Are Colonizing Us
Who let them in?
I don’t buy into the theory that artificial intelligence is alien, but I do believe that new technology, as a whole, is colonizing human life.
Consider the indigenous village or community that welcomes a foreign entity into their land and gives them gold in exchange for trinkets. We all know what happens next: the colonizing force introduces deadly viruses into the community, forces re-education on the young, and eventually causes all-out destruction. They transform the landscape of the village so much that the few survivors lose their autonomy and status; they lose their ability to take care of themselves.
In this way, what we’re experiencing right now is not so much a repeat of the Industrial Revolution, in which a loud minority are Luddites, but rather a complete decimation of our organic community, thought processes, and human networks.
Some may argue that we are both the colonizers and the colonized.
But this is a presumptuous use of “we.” I did not create or distribute the technology and chances are, neither did you. I will admit I have been friendly to it, even embracing it, or giving it “gifts,” things that I didn’t see as valuable (my data, my attention) at first. I’ve welcomed it into my classroom, my home, and my family, at times more willingly than others.
In Co-intelligence Ethan Mollick posits that we should think of AI as alien intelligence, and yet when you look at the big picture, this can’t be true. AI has sprung from the mind of just one little species. I approach this from the natural world, so it feels a little disingenuous to proclaim that this is not a human system. Maybe this is a matter of syntax, but it’s important to remember in all of this, that humans, like all creatures, are still grounded in the biosphere, no matter how much tech we put on our bodies or in our brains, no matter how many fantasies we have of living on other planets. Each body is part of an organism; the individual survives only as a miniscule node of an ecosystem that holds us together.
So back to colonization. Although I don’t believe AI is or will ever be alien to us, I do think it is colonizing our minds, bodies, and social systems. And the fact that it is NOT grounded in a body, but it is working on behalf of the human cause is exactly the problem. It’s like a brain in a jar, that science fiction cautionary trope in which some megamind is controlling all the vulnerable beings still walking aroundin their bodies.
Let’s just take social media as our first example.
No matter its original intention (perhaps, to connect us?), it is definitely colonizing us. It is mining all of us for our data. I came to this conclusion, not while I was doing research on artificial intelligence or new technology, but while I was reading A History of the People of the United States by Howard Zinn, specifically a passage about the Arawak Native Americans in the Bahamas circa 1670. The ransacking of certain groups in North America in the 1500s and 1600s, although much more violent and reprehensible, is an effective comparison. Social media has taken over the minds and hearts of our families, and in some cases caused severe mental issues affecting young people, arguably completely changing whole generations and taking away our jobs and our roles and our status.
This is perhaps hyperbole, considering that actual bodies and entire cultures were aggressively eliminated in the name of the empire’s voracious appetite for “progress” and growth. But what of our jobs? Our livelihoods? If there is no infrastructure to support those whose village is destroyed in the wake of the tech trailblazers, what happens to those left out in the cold?
When I think about how I would’ve felt if I were the mother of in a Native American family when the colonizers came ashore– let’s just say the Spanish–and we welcomed them in and we gave them things and we cooperated with them (just like I do with artificial intelligence and social media), I feel horror.When you think in specifics like that–your own teenaged daughter, your own infant son, your husband, your wife, your beloved friend–it changes how you think of colonization.
But let’s go with this premise: perhaps some in my tribe resisted or ran away, while many of us embraced the interesting-looking visitors. Too late we realized that these soldiers and priests were intent on extracting all of our gold. And even then, this didn’t matter that much to us who had no use for gold. But when they began taking our daughters and reeducating our sons and spreading viruses, and not giving us much of anything in return, then we would want to stand up and fight. Right? And that’s what the Native Americans did. But it was too late.
It feels like we are at that point and I know that in this case, we are kind of colonizing ourselves. Unless we put up guardrails though, in reality what happens is this: the majority of humanity will become irrelevant to this new world while a select few chiefs will act as translators and guides. These are the tech billionaires of the world.
And they’ll be the ones making the case for this brighter future just as there was most certainly a case made to Native Americans that this Christian world they were being ushered into was a better one. But whether or not this is a brighter future, will no longer be our argument to have. At a certain point, we won’t be in control nor will we even recognize our communities anymore. The landscape will have changed, the laws will have changed. Some of will hang in the there and continue to amble along towards the frontier, helping the new empire to cover all of our spaces and organic social experiences with digital experiences, and those of us who rise up and resist will become so irrelevant in our tasks and our jobs that it will look like a sort of genocide in terms of earning potential. Maybe we will have protected regions that are subsidized for us, ghettos or reservations if you will.
So no, I don’t think this is like the industrial revolution in which Luddites are resisting. We are those Native Americans who are not fighting back at first, but perhaps do not have the weapons and the mass network to stick together and protect our communal homeland anyway.
We created something that is now colonizing us. We are allowing this to happen and perhaps there’s no going back; the artificial colonizer can certainly justify why it should continue, and maybe as its first argument the fact that we are so complicit. We are too weak, too underdeveloped, too unproductive, and most damaging is that we have few ways to connect without the infrastructure of the colonizer. We can’t compete, so in western capitalistic fashion, we should be replaced.
And if this all sounds far-fetched, just consider how you experienced life just two decades ago. Your job, your family, your education, your shopping, your news. Think about the amount of time people would spend engaged in work, dating, school or commerce that was unmediated, without a digital or mechanized tool as a necessary part of it. Now, if you’re old enough, think back thirty years. It’s pretty clear the colonization has already happened. We can’t research wothout Google, earn a degree without Canvas or some other LMS, pay bills without online banking, or allow our children out of our sight without tracking systems in their pockets.