JANDOS ROTHSTEIN USING VARIOUS AI HIJINKS
This article appears in the August 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
I’ve seen enough: The Future sucks. I don’t mean the future, as in our planet’s survival or America’s descent into authoritarianism. Those things also suck, but I mean The Future: that technological utopia where everything is clean and made of rounded chrome that seamlessly syncs with the natural world. A combination of Wakanda, Naboo, and Back to the Future Part II, where waterfalls cascade around high-speed railways and children race their hoverboards around a multiethnic marketplace. That only happens in Hollywood, where things are designed to give people what they want. But in today’s late-stage consumer capitalism, things are designed to give people what they never asked for, and give shareholders a boatload of cash.
Here, The Future is thrust upon us like a round of drinks from the creepy guy in the club. It may seem cool in the moment, but there are strings attached. Also, why is the drink cloudy? The Future according to Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, or Sam Altman amounts to needless technology to solve problems that don’t exist. On its face it’s not evil, until you recognize someone has to get rich and someone else has to be put out of a job while doing it.
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Take driverless cars, which are being trained in cities across America without consent from residents so we can curb climate change by ending personal car ownership … I mean end the scourge of having to strike up a conversation with your Uber driver. Or the dawn of military robotics, using titanium dogs and humans to rescue civilians caught in conflict zones … I mean kill civilians in conflict zones. And of course the AI gold rush, currently requiring megatons of fresh water to cool its energy-hogging processing centers, just so your cousin can generate an AI girlfriend with two butts. Nobody asked for AI (besides your cousin, maybe). I can’t even write this column without an AI tool popping up to ask me if I want to “change the tone” of the essay like some jacked-up Microsoft Clippy, while draining Albania’s energy grid during the hottest month ever recorded. The Future is quite literally robbing us of a future. And MY TONE IS FINE.
There couldn’t be a more perfect example of how much The Future sucks than the Tesla Cybertruck, which is as hideous as it is dysfunctional. The Cybertruck has the vibe of an apocalypse getaway car that says to the world, “I don’t need to move a sofa or do manual labor, I need to poke my way through the poors when the masses eventually rise up.” Only Tesla’s rush job has meant it keeps getting recalled for a stuck accelerator pedal, defective windshield wipers, and exterior trim that can fly off into traffic. And in a way too on-the-nose flaw, the Cybertruck’s front trunk, with its sharp adjoining body panels and no obstruction detection, is being called a “finger guillotine,” which will soon become a useful feature when that uprising of displaced workers pops off.
The Future in the hands of billionaires is a dangerous dystopia, full of dissonance and hubris.
I once saw a homeless man wearing an Oculus Rift in San Francisco and the irony was so overwhelming I had to laugh. I hope that he was at least virtually in a house? Right now in the richest country in the world, I could buy my two-year-old an AI learning robot but I can’t access an affordable preschool. Technology and innovation could play a role in helping humans with food, housing, voting, education, or climate change. But where’s the money in that? BOOOOO.
Maybe The Future has always been a massive lie, meant to only exist in movies. There were probably still homeless people in Back to the Future Part II, probably behind that clock tower, and surely Naboo had an underclass if they had a queen. (Wakanda is perfect.) The Future doesn’t magically get better because the technology is cooler, as long as it is still orchestrated by the same pig-headed power ghouls who run the present. There will be no future for us under this kind of extreme wealth hoarding, striking lack of regulation, and trash can trucks. To the finger guillotines!
