An anti-human future?

 

In an article titled "The Great Simmering in the West", J. B. Shurk points out that the elites among us view the future in terms that can only be described as anti-human and anti-society (at least, as society exists today).  Instead, they offer a dehumanized future where the individual counts for nothing.

People all over the world are worried about the future.  While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many.  However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors.  Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders.  Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions.  Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.”  With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.  

As emerging robotics programs have demonstrated, no profession will be immune to the next generations of A.I.-equipped machines.  Robots will pick the fields, police the streets, and perform complex medical surgeries.  A.I. can already write legal briefs that pass muster and screenplays that are at least as interesting as anything Hollywood produces these days.  Engineers, architects, and chemists are competing against machines that can process a thousand lifetimes of computations before their human counterparts finish morning coffee.

Men such as Gates and Harari see this future galloping toward us and view its implications as self-evident.  As human producers are replaced, human “value” will dwindle.  No longer sustaining even a fraction of their cost through their own labor, human beings will become extraneous to the creation of wealth and permanent drains on the global State.

. . .

For much of the last century, this noxious brand of Establishment “conservatism” has infected Western politics.  Whatever monstrosity the political left constructs today, “ruling class conservatives” work breathlessly to conserve tomorrow.  The West’s collapse has been a bipartisan effort.  That’s why lowly citizens in America, Britain, Holland, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere no longer see competing political parties.  They recognize one Establishment Uniparty working against them.

That’s bad news for Western “elites.”  They have built a miserable world in which pornography, social media voyeurism, and online “likes” have replaced individual purpose, real relationships, and growing families.  National pride and cultural traditions have given way to open borders and contradictory multiculturalism.  Despite decades of technological abundance, the future still looks bleak and dangerous.  “Art” is all the same because “artists” and “intellectuals” have been conditioned to think and say the same things.

In this great simmering throughout the West, most citizens have no interest in fighting foreign wars.  Their bubbling anger faces one direction: toward domineering, destructive, and unrepentant “elites.”

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended reading, and I suggest forwarding it to your family and friends, too.

I'm far from alone in opining that, when we took God out of mainstream, everyday discussion, we effectively condemned our society to this nihilistic, self-absorbed, inward-turning navel-gazing.  The concept of the Divine, of creation and a Creator, meant that we could not see ourselves as the pinnacle of biological development on Earth.  We were as "created" as anything else:  we had not ourselves "created" anything or anyone.  With the playing down (if not outright rejection) of that concept, we've allowed ourselves to think of humanity as its own source and its own end - its own God.

Remember the Tower of Babel?  This is that tower writ large - and the cacophony around it is just as deafening, and just as pointless.  It offers no future worth living at all.

Peter