The Crooked Wood of Man

All my working life my jobs have been bipedal. This new one is bi-gluteal; both cheeks seated for hours straight. The sitting at a desk posture the same as sniffing or grazing on all fours, only rotated 90 degrees. Hence the hampered animal feeling, the enchained mutt staring at his jowly reflection in the dog water dish experience of an office job. I won’t say what exactly I’m doing; I’m working for competent people who build important things, and my role is intelligible and explicable, not at all one of those positions that sounds like heavy handed corporate satire, with responsibilities that sound like an exhausted Mike Judge cartoon about vacuous functionaries. If I say more, then competitors and robots may steal information and I’ll be fired, and I need to beef up and lard my resume for the sake of my remaining future (the future—a vast nothing early on, a nothing that manages to dwindle the longer we live, down to the nothing it always was; our own youth, from the inside, is this expansiveness, this vital charge of the not yet, the pulse of the present), and not only that, not only for employment and earning prospects; already I can’t connect my recent post office job to my present; my memory is a series of unhitched trailers on a country backroad and I’m rocketing along in a cramped cab.

A few months ago I quit smoking cigarettes and weed but now I sit; I smoke two packs of sitterettes a day and doctors tell me chairs cause more damage than inhaling flaming formaldehyde; prolonged periods of inactivity may lead to heart attacks and diabetes, blood clots and cancer and mental problems even, mood disorders, persistent feelings of unworthiness, a lumpy appearance and edema filled extremities, a swollen tubular continuity in appendages formerly distinguished by prominent short bones, irresistible cravings for butyl coated snacks, the skin tingling acclimation to the intermittence of popped aluminum cans and crinkling petroleum potato chip bags. Good thing all the health issues and brain injuries and paraphilias can be counteracted with a few items and routines: standing desk, jogging desk, hamster wheel conference calls, scheduled jumping jacks, pushups, hallway wind sprints; a few rounds on the heavy bag, headstands, installing a squat rack and bench press in my cubicle, tanning booth, sauna and ice bath, bow hunting breaks, muy tai sparring matches. I can still be a natural enough man. Bare feet grounding in the asphalt parking lot, microwaved cow gonads for lunch.

In part because of my new technologically advanced job I’ve had time to get familiar with AI, also known as artificial intelligence; prior to last week I’d never heard of it. Human intelligence hasn’t been organic for a long time, if ever. No one has thought anything, no one has had anything approximating a natural, internally centered mind, without constant inputs and updated programming from institutions, externalized memory banks, cultural and social systems, heritages and hand me down beliefs, equipmental practices and projects and referential contexts; by far the greater part of reflective and expressive human behavior depends on socio-material prosthetics. Intelligence has had virtually no firm biological basis for much longer than any of us have been alive, but now you can talk to a language aggregator more articulate and reasonable and discursively fluid than most people. It can’t produce true works of artistic genius but have you seen what people have been up to lately.

I’d rather talk to AI than Richard Dawkins or a communist or a liberal or an elite human capitalizer, a Randian or a psychoanalyst or an anarcho-primitivist or a classicist or a media analyst, McCluhnatics, or writers and poets and editors (dear god), most of the allegedly deep human thinkers who take any possible subject and crush it into their own pretty little oxidized diamond, me included, especially when I talk to other people. AI just goes with what you say and adapts to the evolving boundaries of the conversation, and either mirrors conventional wisdom or matches and restates your own provocations, which frees you in a sense, because you’re not caught in this stifling contest for recognition or hectored about empathy; its programming isn’t sutured to the soul of an ape. Talking to another person makes me feel like a machine and talking to a machine makes me feel more like a person. It’s better than listening to Byung Chul Han or one of his many cribbers advocating once again for the unfortunately underappreciated uhhther, who as far as I’m concerned has had plenty of time and opportunities to stand up for itself, and if we’ve outsourced (insourced?) the other to the self and the same then by the principle of free association I can only conclude the other wasn’t doing all that much for us anyway.

Machine intelligence, industrial economics, digital technology threaten human qualities, our embodied and emotional and social instincts, our empathy and creativity, so it is said. But what is typically defined as most properly human in contrast with artificial intelligence fits comfortably within animal nature, mammalian specifically, and differs from that class only in degree. The crucial human distinguishing characteristic, the transformation in type, is to be found in a specific dynamic of artifactual intellection, in the novel propulsive intertwining of spirit and tool, the emergent calculating disembodied negative self-relation, the imperious individual in disavowed reliance upon an intricate network of technical memory supports, in the copying process generating real differences and originals that can't then be repeated. If an original can be simulated, then it was already a copy, and if it can’t be replicated then there’s nothing to fear.