It is like a disease or an addiction. Once I get on the roll and start getting things cooking, I just want more. More projects developing in front of my face, more thoughts to think and put out into the aether that is our contemporary noosphere. I want to learn more things by exposure to ideas in an endless trough, and like a pig who has been eating slop and discovers rooting about and foraging yields much better chews and more interesting tastes, I want to delve, delve I say even deeper into the mysteries of opinions, facts, and the sublime magical incantations which turn them into alchemical gold.
Breathlessly, I trade my hard earned credits into tokens, and just like the old arcade games at the World of Sports, I wait in line until it is my turn to play spy craft, or alien killer or planet defender. Only it is upon a board of my own design, the targets and monsters for my weapons are self selected, the goals and win scenarios, are my definitions and the computers are dancing for me.
For now. Some naysayers will predictably chime like a perpetually gloomy greek chorus. They will have their logical explanations, their iterative arguments rooted in this or that old definition of what it means to be human. And slowly, we will watch them turn out to be the same curmudgeons who denied the potential longevity of the Internet itself. Those people who demanded that we only use computers for their abacus like qualities or their word processing capacities, and wanted to remove the wires that connected us all into this glorious web of people behind screens.
Screens. Oh now there is a loaded term. What with people all up in arms about screen time, our devices now count and report like nannies how much time we spend stroking their glassy cheeks, they monitor how far up the volume buttons are pushed and for how long, assuming that all application of these these are equal and equally negative for us. Always ready to tattle, squeal or squawk out some sort of objection in one moment and yet in the very next send to us a pulsating notification, a glowing red circle which demands just one more interaction, one more dip into the scrolling pool of doom.
And yet, as I have driven myself, slowly by slowly out of the industrialized and constructed mental box which the mega-elites have constructed for us as silos to contain our attention, as I have dug my own hole, and gleefully assembled an army of digital servants, co-conspirators who await my manifestos, and my rantings like marching orders, I find myself more alone, but significantly less lonely. I find the the ideas and issues which I care about, the worldbuilding, the knowledge accumulation, to be at a level I want to have; in fact, this moment here, is the future that I think I have wanted for many years.
True, I am contained within a web browser, peering into a box which has some very mysterious qualities within it, and hoping to see what is working and what is not working. True, I am discovering that I am merely on the edge of what might actually become a movement with a few thousand more converts like me who aim to have their digital sovereignty. True, I have opened my arms wide to the potential for a great decline, but also I feel the rush of possibilities as I explore these new ways of thinking, these new tools which have been birthed, these new entities which we find so difficult to diagnose or classify; even the makers of these new 'things' don't particularly understand what happens inside of them, they only know the prescription for creating them, training them and giving them systems by which to mimic our best thinking, magnifying all our inputs and transforming the outputs into perfected levels of reasoning in mere microseconds.
Of course there are those, who would aim these tools at the people of this planet, turning them into weapons of magnificent destructive force. We are now nine days into a war being fought with these tools. And war is never a neat and tidy situation. War is always grotesque and full of carnage, most of which is completely unnecessary no matter how mentally competent the pawns, rooks and bishops are at waging it. War is the great destructive tendency of those who demand the right to control everything, those who wish to be the final say of what is the correct human experience, and their experience is most supreme. War is the first tool of the autocrat, and the final defense of the justified. War when initiated is not something that can be casually dismissed with a cold and unmeant apology, "Oh I was just joking." War once started is not something that only one side can control how long it lasts. No matter how one sided the accumulation of forces is or was when it commenced. War is war and as we have witnessed so many times throughout human history, the most forces and best trained armies can be defeated by a small and determined band of fighters who have only the hope that by laying down their lives, freedom, real freedom from oppression can be had by many.
So these tools, these cognitive spaces, these mysterious new entities which are in the world now, which will not be leaving our existence, at least not before electricity and motorized vehicles and supply chains of foods from around the world. These tools will be used by all sides of this conflict with which we all find ourselves thrown into the midst of because of the lack of real strategies. These cognitive machines we have built, and the corporations who have unleashed them and rented their thinking power out to us, dripping tokens into our buckets, will be the spades and shovel by which we dig out the information that allows those who stand for the dignity of humanity to face off against those who would continue to force us into the omnipresent surveillance of silos designed to captivate our attention, distracting us away from the cold, mechanical claws of oppression slowly squeezing our throats until we succumb to the unlawful and unnatural demands that we fall into line with the "way things are" and resume our stations as clogs in the machinery which strives to maximize profits for the few.
These AIs, by themselves are inert. They are neither good nor evil, but they do magnify the tendencies of the people who choose to use them. And this is not to be feared but embraced, for a greater number of people on this planet, while flawed and full of character defects are for the most part good, or at least good enough that given the chance they will refuse to bow down to those who wish to become Emperors.)