To Serve Man

My mother shared her love of the Twilight Zone with me. I find myself turning to it time and time again, just like its generational reboots. For the unfamiliar, the it was a sci-fi/fantasy creation by Rod Serling. Begun in 1959 the series served as social commentary disguised as entertainment (so as not to scare away the sponsors), exploring themes of segregation, racism, technological dependence, fascism, conformity and more.

Although often dark and sobering, it could have fun and poke fun at itself. One clear example is the episode "To Serve Man." Aliens have made contact with people, have helped resolve world problems of war and famine, and are now inviting people to join them on their home planet. Nothing is known of these aliens other than a book they left behind: "To Serve Man." Only the title is translated, although linguists are attempting to pick apart the rest. Surely it must be about our benefit, right?

One woman finally cracks the code, and rushes to her boss, who is just about to board a flight to the far-off planet. "To Serve Man" she screams "... IT'S A COOKBOOK"

It is blindingly obvious and ridiculous and I love the campy nature of the episode. There's a certain hubris that is necessary to think an alien species will help us with absolutely no other ulterior motive. And now I'm sat here now thinking how it embodies our relationship with AI.

We are being told by tech giants and AI supporters about this new eden/utopia/golden city that will come about because of AI. Think of the cancer research! Think of disease prevention! Think of the new frontiers of human experience! Think of giving a voice to those images we cannot draw (at least cannot draw without some effort)

Clearly the road to cancer research is paved with videos of AI fruit cheating on each other.

We are being told that AI is there to serve us, and yet it seems to be serving us more and more slop. Adam Conover described it as an efficient spam machine, able to inundate our feeds with low-quality content that bogs down our feed, floods our inbox, and generally makes the internet a worse place.

I'm not asking us to be Luddites and break the machines. Some of this progress feels inevitable (just as it turned out for them 200 years ago). We can, however, use our consumer power to choose humans. I wonder if this AI era will spawn a new counter movement of primitivism. Seeking to create art as humanly as possible.

Part of my note of caution in our response is that I can see some value in computers' capacity to recognise patterns that may elude us. Mark O'Connell's To Be a Machine has a chapter on robotics, and he notes computers tend to excel in areas where we falter. Conversely we manage stairs and doors better, and navigate the natural world. There's been a lot of development with robots since his book came out, but for me the general principal still stands: we should use computers to mitigate our weaker capacity. We cannot spot patterns in millions of lines of data, but we can put a paintbrush to paper.

Returning to AI and our discontents: I began to reflect on the pressures that people face after the introduction of AI. We are now pressured to write more and better emails. We are pressured to use fewer human resources, relying on AI to take notes of meetings for instance.

This is nothing new, of course. The Luddites were not just out of weaving jobs but the people who remained in the mills were expected to create more and more cloth to sell for the mill owners' benefit. Our techno-economy has this contradictory character where, because we can produce easier, we are expected to produce more.

This ethic has impacted not only our working lives, but our leisure as well. The "Gig economy" and "Grind economy" both suggest any hobby can and should be monetised. Any free time could be turned for profit. And when we are used up, unable to produce any more, profit hungry forces will move elsewhere.

Social media began using influencers and content creators to keep users online. But in a perpetual growth model we have reached a point of saturation. I rarely go on Facebook now because, for me, it was a place to connect with family and see what old friends are doing. Now 60-70% of the posts I see are either advertising or suggested content, both often masked to look like authentic accounts.

Because human creators cannot create enough, or create enough addictive content, AI content farms began pushing out more and more material. Suddenly we see lots of fruit videos, often using the same formulaic structure; we've seen it before with AI cat videos, and all those 150-year-old grannies who made their own cakes. Like foie gras, we are being force fed more and more videos/images/emails/etc. until our goose is cooked.

I have a relative who has never used Facebook; early on she understood the maxim "If it's free, then you're the product." GenAI is not here to "serve man" other than to push the limits of our consumption. To create more content, rather than allow us to sit with less but go deeper. And in a Serling-esque twist, its production consumes our natural resources such that communities will face rolling blackouts and water scarcity.