Conq writes: The only two future jobs are hipster and heroin addict. A flashy title, to be sure, but sadly lacking in substance. Cutting through the fluff, the thrust of the piece (as I understand it) is something like:
“Once all human productive effort (industrial, intellectual, aesthetic, moral) is eclipsed by artificial intelligence, the only role left for humanity is as consumers. However, consumers still determine what is produced through taste, and thus the human project is now to cultivate good taste in others.”
There’s an old joke. Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes — “What the hell is water?”
Perhaps you’ve heard the idea of “LLM psychosis” sweeping the interwebs, where prolonged conversations with AI (especially on subjects such as consciousness, spirituality, synchronicity, simulations, conspiracies, persecution, and romance) lead to paranoid or grandiose delusions. What else is like this?
Well, Don Quixote reads so many stories about knights and chivalry that he starts believing himself a knight-errant and goes off to tilt at windmills. Madame Bovary gorges herself on novels and — trapped by dull rustic living — ruins her life with romantic fantasies, extramarital affairs, and reckless spending. The Sorrows of Young Werther inspires sensitive young men across Europe to commit suicide.
What is this other than book psychosis?
It’s easy to dismiss it all as merely a moral panic, but imagine actually witnessing mass literature sweep across the world for the first time. Before, your only models for life came from religious doctrine, folk tales, and real human beings. But now a new and alien source of scripts arrives — and scripts that are memetically selected to exploit quirks in human narrative processing to be more appealing. It’s a total invasion of the mind.
People gorge themselves on novels, preferring them to reality, and soon their models of life from fiction outnumber their models of life from life. They grow confused. They gain the urge to live romantically. They arrange their life to be aesthetic. They start performing, perhaps unknowingly, for an imaginary audience. Rather than actually live their life, they consume it as art. Sound familiar?
This is water.
Conq’s solution to human obsolescence is book psychosis.
(Perhaps “narrative psychosis” is the better term — it certainly spread by opera and theatre as well, and these days more people watch television and movies than read — but fine. We’re stuck with it.)
It feels unsporting, somehow, to resort to psychoanalysis, but I think it’s crucial in understanding his framing. Conq has written before about his past:
The happiest time of my life was when I devoted every waking hour to reading. It was, in retrospect, sublimated suicide: taken far enough, immersion is something like decapitation. To me, writing is a way to indulge the death drive — tinged with the same annihilatory power, but tempered with enough friction to self-regulate.
Any addiction, whether to reading or anything else, is obsessive consumption. Conq, in his escape, has constructed an internal mythology demonizing consumption and sacralizing creation, with himself as the author of his life and his life as the ultimate novel. He is one of the most book psychotic people I’ve ever seen.
Confronted, then, with the obsolescence of human effort in his lifetime, he feels most threatened in his identity as someone who produces things. He can only see the inevitable future as a regression to his addiction. The only solace is being a better class of consumer.
But I have greater faith for humanity. I have hope we’ll be more than just consumers. Why? Because we’re thieves and plagiarists.
Sorry. I mean we’re cyborgs.
Conq notes this himself, so I won’t bother running through the whole argument. If you’re curious, see tool assimilation in what neurologists call the “body schema,” read Walter Ong on written language, and try to live alone in the woods for a year. The human being is very porous.1
But cybernetics is a trivial science, and it’s a trivial observation that you’re cyborg. With language, with literacy, with post-Christian morality and all the rest of human civilization. With the ten thousand screaming voices in your phone. Sure. Fine.
The point is, we identify so closely with our technologies that it’s difficult, sometimes, to see the seams. Often in conversation I recall something relevant I’ve read and repeat it. For some reason this makes me proud of my intelligence, even though all the work was done by the writer and their influences, the book in preserving the thoughts, and my naturally good memory (which I did nothing to earn). As far as I can tell, the essential human trait is taking credit for things.2
Given long enough, identity always expands to engulf new tools. And indeed: if you speak with AI artists today, they really do identify sincerely and heavily with the output artifacts as their work. The future is not mindless consumption, but omnipotent production! Rather than hipsters and heroin addicts, everyone will be an artist.
(Or rather, all three. Once all desires can be satisfied, there is no difference between consuming something and producing it — the distinction is an artifact of low-tech civilizations.)
Conq foresees his identity as “producer” being eroded by advancing technology and imagines it will be a torturous process. In truth, it will likely be painless. (Oh, let’s leave aside piddling “economic concerns.” We’re concerned with the fate of the human soul, here, folks!)
We’re already just operators and conduits for far vaster things. Our brains are already single layers in the posthuman stack, and that’s OK! It already feels primitive to code by hand, or consult a textbook, or visit a print library. We’ll progressively supplement and replace more of ourselves — as we have already — and we’re so good at adapting we probably won’t even notice.
Probably.