Whose Side Are You On?
A Short Note on Jeff Bezos, the "needs" of AI vs. the needs of living beings, and the coming struggle.
Lex Luthor clone Jeff Bezos—whose AI startup is aptly called “Prometheus”—says this about water use and the “needs” of AI vs. the needs of human beings ( or biological beings generally):
Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritize the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down.
AI is going to solve biological limits, is it? So let’s sacrifice the needs of human beings and creaturely life in the present to AI’s future “solution”: a blood tribute for our new artificial gods and their techno-capitalist high priests.
But there is no hack for finite biological life and its limits—or “flaws” according to Bezos and Musk and Thiel and the rest of these cartoon overlords, delusional and self-loathing both. How to buy immortality and perfection? Perhaps—after Günther Anders—Bezos should call his startup “Promethean shame.”
These would-be Eternals are nonetheless building a high tech Vortex, to be founded in the further immiseration and extermination of the human majority, on the even more radical despoliation of Earth and all her creatures: a Zardoz scenario. Envision something like the ontologization, or sci-fi radicalization, of all the old Marxist conflicts and categories*, from class war to uneven development.
*Such a translation undermines one, arguably central, element of orthodox Marxism (there are of course other, better, ways of using Marx’s work) that orthodox Marxists share with their bourgeois liberal opponents: an abiding belief—inaugurated by those late eighteenth-century British capitalists who dreamt they were surmounting limits of land, labor, and resource inputs rather than shuffling them out of view by way of “the machine”—in a neutral technology, or “forces of production,” and its centrality to an equally chimerical Progress. We can all imagine Bezos as some Stalin-era Soviet official, furtively drunk on Cosmism and preaching Prometheus as he demands some glorious quasi-genocidal sacrifice of the working masses for the sake of a “workers’” AI deity to come.
“Progress” and technology have functioned as so much camouflage and magic in the capitalist—or is it productivist?—center, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, according to Alf Hornborg:
Technological innovations have been contingent on asymmetric flows of resources in the colonial and neo-colonial world-system—that is, ecologically unequal exchange. Such asymmetric physical flows are the result of global differences in the prices of labor, land, materials, energy, and other resources, but to this day remain invisible to mainstream economics. In not acknowledging the reliance of modern technologies on such flows, we tend to think that their only social implications are in terms of downstream consequences, while ignoring that the very existence of those technologies is a manifestation of an abysmally unequal world order.
In a moment when our biosphere is collapsing under the weight of “progress” and growth, it is telling that Bezos and his transhumanist oligarch comrades are already asking the (as yet) relatively privileged consumer-denizens of the global north, i-Phones in hand, to forego the rudiments of life—now or in a glorious future full of artificial gods. “AI” and its needs represent the dramatic last stage of a process inaugurated centuries ago.
(Any convivial ecosocial order must dismantle so much more than data centers and the digital technosphere. But more on this soon.)
A technologically augmented biopolitics is now the terrain of a class struggle turned existential: the great conflict of the twenty first century will pit the human majority as vanguard for “proletarianized” life and biosphere against a cyborg and “transhumanist” ruling class whose Promethean accumulation strategy is the death drive.
(“We, the high tech elect, need water for things more important than mere life!”)
Whose side are you on?
