Most food you can get is mass-produced in factories, or constructed on assembly lines. But people will still pay more to cook from scratch with good ingredients, or pay someone to do so for them.
Most furniture these days is factory-made or flat-pack. But if you pay enough, you can get something of lasting quality, made by a craftsman either now or centuries past.
Most clothes are fast fashion, made in Asian sweatshops, and fall apart or fade after a few washes. But for enough money, you can get tailored clothes which will last decades.
And if it doesn’t murder us all or melt the planet, this is possibly where AI is taking us. To a future where most words, most images, most music, most entertainment will be algorithm-generated.
But if you’re prepared to pay, humans will still be around to make you a quality product.
Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. In his Jerry Cornelius series of novels, Michael Moorcock subverted this to the mass media age, suggesting that all art aspires instead to the condition of muzak.
We now know of course that it is not ALL art which thus aspires. But certainly all algorithmically-generated content does, by definition.
Capitalism is using algorithms to enforce industrialisation upon creativity, that having been resisted by humanity until now, despite the concerns of generations before us, from the Luddites to William Morris.
But at the fringes, where the poor and the hyperrich almost meet in a kind of horseshoe of behavioural patterns, human-created art, without any AI involvement, will be the art of choice for those who cannot afford the mass-produced option, as well as those who can afford to pay extra for its status symbolism, quality and the longevity.
Well, it has been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been neglecting this blog because the internet isn’t real life and I’ve had rather a lot of life to be living in the past while. All will become clear anon. Or, at least some of it might. In a world busy throwing privacy away, I’d like to preserve a little for nostalgia’s sake.
John Lennon famously quipped that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Or, as the old Jewish saying has it, man plans and God laughs. These days we might say life is what happens when you’re not online, but of course so many of us are online, some almost perpetually.
Life does now happen online, or at least a simulacrum of it. An entire generation has met partners online at this point. People do business with one another entirely via electronic comms and screens. I’ve even seen funeral notices where it was stated that the deceased would be greatly missed by his Twitter followers. Seriously. Even death occurs online now.
Anyhow, that brings me to the brief point I wanted to make somewhat circuitously. The metaphors of the online world have long since infiltrated what we might, in a binary mode, call the real world, or at least tangible and palpable world. Even as a kid, I recall hearing the GIGO phrase – garbage in, garbage out – which originated with the computer programmers of the Seventies, complete with their punched cards.
Fifty year on, and the metastasis of such metaphors is ubiquitous. So much so that the UK even now has an official government department for ‘Leveling Up’, which is not, disappointingly, helping gamers to beat their high scores, but in fact relates to the latest attempt to resolve or in minor ways at least mitigate the outrageous inequity in that nation.
But it does all rather leave a strange taste in my mouth, like that of slowly smouldering silicon chips. Marriage or kids are not ‘achievement unlocked’. Getting a new job is not ‘leveling up’. I entirely understand that the gamification of so many aspects of modern existence would lend its baleful influence to the very language we speak of course. But the concepts simply do not map across.
Why? Because we are human. And when we game, those of us who do, we are not human. In fact I’d go as far as to say we’re not fully human when we attempt to filter our human functions through this electronic portal at all. We’re cyborgised, both enabled and constricted by the facilities and limitations of the internet and its penumbra of pervasive techno-enhancements.
Do you look at your phone or out the window to check the weather? Do you tell someone happy birthday in person or simply click a like on social media instead (which kindly reminds us)? How many people have driven down the wrong road or even into a canal because they listened to Google Maps rather than watch their environment? (And how many more once Elon’s self-driving cars become the norm?)
At the risk of sounding like the Luddite I am, human life encompasses more than the electronic bottlenecks our techno-cages impose upon us. If Divorce (or marriage for that matter) is ‘Game Over’, then what are we actually saying about our view of relationships?
Am I being too literal or serious? Perhaps. But unlike in a game, where one can respawn, try again with a new strategy, life is both linear (no spawn points) and picaresque (no reassuring story arc).
Sometimes we level down. Or sideways. Or into an entirely new mode of being. We shouldn’t allow the metaphors of gamification to erode and dissolve and mask the glorious unpredictable muddiness of our human existence.
We are animals, sometimes even thinking ones. We should remember that more. We are not automata grinding out levels in a game called life. Or, at least those of us who don’t work as loot farmers in China for American World of Warcraft players are not.
