The Rise of the Machines Happened a Long Time Ago

For years, wealthy industrialists have issued dire warnings about the risks posed by the emergence of machine intelligences equal to or greater than those of us puny humans. The dire predictions are lent some credibility by the undeniable, leaping advancements in so-called artificial intelligence. This has raised fears—and tapped into existing ones—about machines eventually developing their own ideas, priorities, and strategies for achieving them, all well beyond the means of mammalian brains to comprehend or deter. The development of superhuman AI, they say, is inevitable (Never mind that our future mechanical overlords haven't yet learned multiplication).

We are culturally primed to imagine just what such a scenario might look like. Films like The Terminator have embedded in many minds the image of bleached bones and charred suburbs stretching to the horizon, the only movement coming from gleaming metal sentinels patrolling the ashes. In the common narrative, ‘the machines’ buck their creators by destroying the biosphere, leaving us to fight for survival on a dying planet.

These images are powerful, and reflect a lot of real anxiety about humanity's relationship to technology, or where it may be headed. Yet science fiction is more often a diagnosis of the present than a prediction of the future, and in any case, we don’t have to wait for some milestone to be passed in AI or robotics before the machines 'rise' and ruin our planet. We lost that war a long time ago.

Nearly everything that’s worrisome about a mechanical takeover of Earth — the degradation of the biosphere, the ceding of human agency to inscrutable industrial logic, the violent reshaping of the landscape and subjugation or elimination of people — are already upon us.

Just step outside, and you will likely see how much of the world around you is committed to one deadly machine in particular: the automobile. Meanwhile, underpinning most of human activity globally, the beast of the oil and gas industry is actively burning and corrupting vast swathes of habitat, leaving landscapes fit for any post-apocalyptic future, today.

Technology is certainly a crucial part of the problems we face today, but it is enabled by an incentive structure that convinces people to place their own wellbeing and convenience over the collective means basis for conviviality and survival. We call this set of incentives capitalism, which fosters a single-minded focus on self-preservation that keeps us all—willing or not—lashed to the machine and its logic. Our greatest foe is not the black-box mind of a sophisticated machine that decides to unmake its makers. Rather, it is the basal instinct of extractive capitalism that has already insinuated itself across the planet by brute force.

No doubt, science and technology have improved the quality of life for many, in ways far too numerous to list. To credit these gains to the forces of extraction and private accumulation, though, is specious to say the least. The overall cost of these benefits has been to move humanity into ever deeper abstraction from the Earth, the inevitable outcome of rapacious extraction in service of the impossible desire for infinite economic growth. As individuals, many of us have been convinced that to reverse course would require upending a comfortable status quo; we are conditioned to be thankful for conveniences and comforts in a collapsing world. Forget chatbots seducing us to our deaths, ‘the machines’ have already defeated us through ideological and material hegemony.

The difference between where we stand now and the worst visions of apocalyptic techno-dystopia is really just a matter of degree. The fear of bone-strewn wastelands is understandable, but it's the world leading up to that picture which we should work to prevent. This isn't a question of AI alignment, but one of abandoning the effort to constantly reshape our lives and world according to the abstract, transactional priorities of growth that are steadily moving us toward that as-yet fictional world. After all, that dystopian world is one devoid of biodiversity and relational complexity. It’s a world in which the highest ‘intelligence’ has wiped out all other forms of life, whether through extraction or extermination, in pursuit of its own comfort and safety. Does this sound familiar? And what is the opposite of that sterile world? It is one of ecological depth, of conviviality among agents of all sorts, human and otherwise, in a process that builds and enriches life. Clearly, the latter doesn’t describe our current paradigm, but of course that can (and must) change. That is, if we want a future.

Nevertheless, we keep reiterating the same old scary campfire stories in what seems like a kind of self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophesy. In the same way that a zombie movie is as much about questioning the humanity of the protagonists as it is about the monstrousness of the zombies themselves, the subliminal question of the ‘rise of the machines’ trope lies in whether we will come to perceive the world in the cold, zero-sum terms of the systems we build for our own benefit, or instead retain a sense and reverence for the Earth and the more-than-human world of life within which we are ineluctably entangled.

Maybe science fiction has simply given us an aesthetic language for understanding the larger consequences of a revolution that, in day to day, seems so mundane. It may be even be a little disappointing that the machine takeover doesn’t take the impressive form of monstrous robots trudging through the kipple, but rather the gradual and mostly quiet loss of biodiversity, mounting pollution, inequity and violence that is far less spectacular, but no less disastrous. The apocalypse, it turns out, tends to operate against the preferences of those experiencing it. The upside, though, is that it’s an apocalypse of our making, and so it is also one that we can unmake.

One of them most resonant visions of the robot apocalypse can be found in The Matrix, in which a digital super intelligence destroys the natural basis of biological survival, replacing it and the whole world with a simulation piped into (mostly) blissful brains unaware of their true condition. The themes are familiar to other science fiction dystopias, defined by modern biblical plagues of nuclear war, ecological collapse, and high technology making tools out of its creators. But one key way in which The Matrix differs is that, in its telling, humans are very much a part of the machine; the threat is not a metal skeleton wearing human skin, but a ravenous machine with humanity at its heart. This more closely resembles the reality of today, and the risk we face: a world of alienated people devoting their life energies to a cold, exploitative, inhumane machinery, also built by humans. The prize is comfort and familiarity; the cost is our humanity.

There is of course plenty of cultural and philosophical critique around science fiction, its social roots and role. But to me, the resonant of the Wachowski siblings’ version of dystopia is that, in it, we have the opportunity to shed the machinery that is bending us to its will—which is, of course, by definition, also an extension of our will. All it requires is that we recognize our condition as components in that machine, and reject its false promises of a better life at the expense of life. Concerns about a machine takeover are rather convenient, after all, because they externalize the threat. They put us in a more familiar and even comforting context of declared, armed conflict against a dangerous other. This is the way we’ve traditionally dealt with what we cannot understand or control, but of course what we face isn’t external at all. To borrow a trope from another, related film genre: The call is coming from inside the house.

The war for a better future isn’t with the machines; it is with ourselves. We can only win it by seeing past the machinery that defines our current existence, and to prioritize more than the conveniences and comforting fictions of machinery that is already voraciously eating the world, and by extension, us.