AI and Capitalism's Crimes Against Humanity
The rise of AI in education has made clear the cruel irony of making everything about capitalist productivity and performance. Students are in an arms race to use AI to boost their grades. At the same time, Silicon Valley has quietly released AI tutors. But if everything is about productivity, why not just replace kids with AI? When can kids and adults enjoy a thing called life rather than living like machines obsessing over productivity and performance?
It was only a matter of time before machines got better than humans at being machines because this is their game. Our game is being human beings, be-ing, to be and experience. We've forgotten that life is an experience to be lived rather than tracked, quantified, surveilled, and judged.
Under capitalism's hegemony, everyone can be replaced, including you—the parent, kid, lover, friend, worker, and person.
Capitalism has been a continuous assault on humanity and a destroyer of worlds. Perhaps the reason space is not teeming with alien life is because no civilization ever makes it past capitalism. Capitalism is here. Do not pass go.
Capitalism turns life into an arms race for profit, and brooks no human flourishing. It does not seek celebration but instead results in crisis.
Even if we haven't physically perished, we're already dead inside because capitalism devoids life of meaning—of human experience—making it a number, a quota—a calculable, medical, labor statistic.
So of course humans lash out, sometimes in violent eruptions. This is not how we were meant to live. Where is the living? We're just alive as a technicality. Americans buy guns and tell themselves it's to protect life, but more often than not end up using them on themselves or others because of despair and the feeling that life is not worthy of protection or living. What's the point of a weapon when we no longer value the thing it was meant to protect? What happens to that firepower?
Capitalism subsumes weapons, social media, schools that train productivity, parents who push performance, and a society that values productivity above all else, while compounded by massive energy and resource usage and now AI, but for what?
The US often boasts about its freedom, but what freedom is there when people do not have the opportunity to enjoy life? Yes, people are alive, the ones who didn't die from a lack of healthcare and putting businesses over people during the significant part of the pandemic, but where is the life? What is the US always flexing about? To extract more from the world for US interests to do what?
Even the wealthiest among us are not truly living; they are just rotting zombies who do not know why they do what they do. They do what they do as a default of their programming, but AI can do that even better. Even under capitalism, the rich are also unnecessary.
Ever since capitalism, humans have existed to serve capitalism (and not the other way around) because it needed people to do stuff, humans became a function, but that function is less and less necessary. Humans are already seen as a costly drawback.
After all, capitalism is just about numbers and profits, not about human experience or enjoyment. We only get in the way of its calculus, as our living, breathing existence impedes the efficient processing of cold, digital inputs. In the eyes of capitalism, we humans are increasingly becoming mere trivial obstacles to its relentless pursuit of productivity and profit.
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Right on.