For many of us working in science, philosophy, and education (or a combination thereof), ‘intelligent design’ (ID)—the pseudoscientific theory that purports to be an alternative to evolutionary science and which has been unkindly but not unfairly described as ‘creationism in a cheap tuxedo’—has been out of the picture for the better part of the two decades since the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in 2005 ruled that it was not science and thus could not be taught in US high school biology classes. In short, ID was of historical interest but not to be taken seriously.

Recently, however, its champions have been making noise and turning heads. Stephen Meyer, one of the original faces of ID, has been featured on The Joe Rogan Experience and Piers Morgan Uncensored and has even dialogued with Michael Shermer. All of this new publicity has been used by ID advocates to prove that it has never been more relevant. And that is the goal of the movement: to fight for relevance and be taken seriously by academics and those in authority.

Everyone who has ever met Dr Meyer says he is a warm, genuine, nice man. He may be mistaken in his views but is respectful and courteous to those who disagree with him (something that cannot often be said for the movement as a whole). As Meyer’s newest book gave the claims of ID more media attention, this May saw the return of the claim that ID is leading a revolution in biology. On an episode of Justin Brierley’s podcast, Meyer repeated the long-since debunked claim that ID had successfully predicted that junk DNA was not junk at all and argued that this gives further credence to ID’s capabilities as a scientific theory. Listen to the key figures from the Discovery Institute (the ID-promoting think tank which Meyer helped to found) and they will tell you that scientists are leaving evolution behind in droves—and that the honest ones are beginning to catch up with what ID has been saying all along.

If one did not know better—and many podcast listeners and church attendees may not—you would think a scientific revolution was underway à la Thomas Kuhn. But this is far from the case. The halls of biology remain silent on intelligent design. There is nothing to see here at all. The ID revolution is complete fiction.

When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, ID was mentioned twice. The first time was during an evolutionary biology lecture when the bacterial flagellum came up in discussion, and our lecturer asked if anyone knew why it had gained political fame (I knew the answer—Kitzmiller v. Dover¹—but only one other student had even heard of ID). The second time was in a genetics class. We were observing what one might call ‘bad design’ and my professor remarked that if nature had a designer, this was a case where they had done a poor job. That was it—in my postgraduate studies, it never came up at all.

In June, I asked a friend of mine, a world-class virologist, if—whether in her student or professional career—ID had ever been mentioned. Perplexed, she said not once. And this is the case with everyone I have ever asked. ID is not leading any revolution, and no scientist or academic I have ever met can ever recall it coming up. It could not be less relevant right now.

But two years ago, in a debate during an episode of Premier Unbelievable? entitled ‘Is Intelligent Design advancing or in retreat?’, the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin claimed that the movement was advancing, gaining new converts, and had never been stronger. He mentioned a conference in Israel on evolutionary genetics that he had attended when marshalling his evidence. My first thought was ‘Why is a geologist attending an evolutionary genetics conference?’ My second thought was that one of my best friends had been there, so I asked him about it. His response was that ID was not mentioned once during the event.

Something is amiss here. The data does not add up. On the one hand, ID proponents claim that biology is about to overthrow Darwinian evolution and that scientists are turning to ID by the truckload. But in science itself, it is very much business as usual, and not a sound about ID is to be heard.

But it is actually worse than that for ID, because in biology an actual revolution is underway. The biological sciences are arguably seeing the greatest boom period since the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s. Consider that since CRISPR-Cas9 burst onto the scene in 2011, genetic engineering has undergone an extraordinary transformation, becoming cheap, easy, and accurate. Even since the Nobel Prize was awarded to Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2019 for discovering this revolutionary gene-editing tool, base and prime editing have made it even more precise.

Then there is cancer immunotherapy, which since 2018 has transformed the landscape of oncological treatment. It may well be the future of all cancer treatment as soon as costs come down, which is inevitable. Meanwhile, molecular biology has been transformed again by AI, with the CASP competition to build systems that accurately predict protein structure from sequence data alone seeing extraordinary success from AI-based entries. AlphaFold brought the accuracy of predictive results in line with experimental data from x-ray crystallography and cryo-EM, and AlphaFold3, along with its competitors, is set to transform the prospects of personalised medicine.

Gene sequencing itself has become quicker, cheaper, and more accessible every year since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. In fact, in 2016, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins sequenced the genome of microorganisms on the International Space Station using a handheld device, showing just how far the field had come. Genomic analysis can now be done cheaply in the field, with a handheld sequencer, on any organism, and the results can be expected back in mere hours.

And what is the word from ID proponents on these extraordinary developments in the landscape of biology? Nothing. The Discovery Institute promises transformational research (yet has no laboratories), boasts predictive science (yet has published none), and claims that science is now looking to design and purposiveness as explanations for biological phenomena instead of leaning on evolution—but seems not even to be aware of what is actually happening in biology during one of its most transformational periods ever.

This is not tremendously surprising, given that a glance at the Discovery Institute’s list of fellows shows that it is full of philosophers and theologians. Even among its scientists, some have published little or nothing. On the whole, ID is dominated by people who have never done a day’s scientific work in their lives. They speak of the ‘scientific community’ but rarely engage with scientists in world-class research. This is, sadly, only the tip of the iceberg, as ID continues to overstate its credentials and overplay its hand.

Do they have a case when they call evolution a theory in crisis? Not in the least. ID proponents could not be more mistaken in articulating evolutionary biology as a science that is rigid and stale. When I was an undergraduate, modern evolutionary biology was described to me as the ‘fastest growing science’ due to the advances in genomics and molecular biology and their associated data revolutions. It is very much a predictive science today, testable and measurable.

Besides, convergent evolution (something ID never talks about) is very much a grand unifying theory in biology, applicable to everything from genetics to medicine at every level. It is still as Theodosius Dobzhansky said over half a century ago: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Dobzhansky himself was a Greek Orthodox Christian, but because he was an evolutionist, ID advocates pay little attention to him. Dobzhansky is just another uncomfortable obstacle passed over in silence by ID proponents.

It is interesting to track those whom ID proponents acknowledge and those that they do not. ID arguments have not changed since the 1990s, no matter how many times they are debunked or how little serious attention they get. This is partly due to the distance between ID and real science, and partly due to ignorance. When proponents discuss ID on any platform, the same names are always trumpeted, as if being read from a script. First, the latest scientist with any publications who has joined their ranks (Günter Bechly will be named dropped a thousand times), then Thomas Nagel, Antony Flew, and anyone else remotely famous who has ever said anything nice about ID in the past 30 years. In doing so, ID advocates reveal that their arguments are empty veneers, utterly lacking in real substance. If the Discovery Institute was actually putting out research, had an active program, or was doing real science, then these appeals to authority would not be necessary.

As someone with a doctorate in philosophy of science, Meyer is certain to know the demarcation criteria which mark the scientific off from the non-scientific. Thus, great pains are taken by ID advocates to talk about active research and publication in journals (even if it is their own in-house journal BIO-Complexity, which they eagerly pitch to outsiders to publish in) while holding conferences and collaborating wherever possible. Falsifiability remains a problem, however. Whenever the latest example of ‘irreducible complexity’ is knocked down like their old favourite the bacterial flagellum was, advocates don’t seem persuaded of the falsehood of ID. Put simply, ID is not scientific.

There is also the matter of picking their battles. There is a reason why Meyer would talk to Michael Shermer: he is not a biologist, and he has a large platform. When asked why serious scientists don’t engage with their ideas, the responses usually boil down to conspiracy theories. ‘They’, the ‘scientific community’, are locked into ‘Neo-Darwinism’, and the powers that be, with their materialist agenda, are controlling science to their own nefarious ends: those masters at the gates control education and are trying to keep their dogmas alive. In reaching for conspiracy, ID evinces the dogmatism it accuses others of holding.

Recently the Discovery Institute opened a brand-new site outside Cambridge. When I discussed this with a biology professor at the university, he laughed and noted that businesses often try and build their sites in the area to benefit from the association with the university and its heritage. Artificially manufacturing illusory respectability by being a ‘Cambridge’ institute is further evidence of what is really going on here. If ID was really leading a revolution in biology, then none of this would be necessary. I have spoken with several religious scientists in Cambridge who are less than thrilled at ID moving into the neighbourhood. For them, it only makes their lives as researchers harder.

The picture is even uglier than this. In Hinxton, near Cambridge, you have the Wellcome Sanger Institute, home of the UK arm of the Human Genome Project. Next door is the European Bioinformatics Institute, home of AlphaFold and the finest of its kind on the planet. Over the motorway is the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology. All of these house dozens of Nobel laureates and pump out thousands of publications in major journals every month. And this is not to mention every other university-affiliated centre in the city, all home to scientists young and old who are changing the world. The Discovery Institute’s new site, rather than giving off an air of world-class credibility, exposes the contrast between ID and real science. Surrounded by giants, ID is revealed to be a pygmy.

To sum up: intelligent design has nothing to say about modern biology, and modern biology is certainly not talking about intelligent design.

1. The bacterial flagellum was cited in the trial as something ‘irreducibly complex’ and therefore in need of the ‘intelligent designer’ hypothesis to be explained. For more on ‘irreducible complexity’ and the bacterial flagellum, see Kenneth Miller’s detailed refutation of this old argument, once a favourite of the ID crowd before it was exposed by Miller during Kitzmiller v. Dover. ︎

Related reading

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

The Highbrow Caveman: Why ‘high’ culture is atavistic, by Charles Foster

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Bad Religious Education, by Siniša Prijić

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

The post Is ‘intelligent design’ on the cusp of overthrowing evolutionary science? appeared first on The Freethinker.

Deep within the series of notebooks that make up his Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx prophetically argued that the dynamic and intense technological development that occurred in capitalist society would culminate in an:

‘automatic system of machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.’

What Marx is describing is essentially what we now call artificial intelligence (AI)—a subject that long ago ceased to be esoteric, discussed only among a small number of computer scientists. It is now a mainstay of public discussion, and the argument over its implications for society tends to be framed either in terms of utopias or dystopias.  

On the one hand, techno-utopians will lean on the potential of AI to boost innovation and economic growth and aid humanity in solving the complex problems it faces, from disease and poverty to climate change. Catastrophists, on the other hand, imagine us to be on the cusp of a Westworld or Cyberpunk 2077-like world where a sentient and conscious AI rebels against its human creators to oppress and ultimately eliminate them—a motif that has been a staple in science fiction from Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis onwards. 

In her new book Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI, leading human rights barrister Susie Alegre, whilst not a total catastrophist, is certainly no AI utopian. She argues that the rapid development of AI technology is a threat to human rights, whether in the form of robo-judges and robo-lawyers undermining the principle of the right to a fair trial, ‘killer robots’ (which she proposes banning) violating the right to life, or sex robots potentially subverting customs around consent and freedom from manipulation. All of these, Alegre posits, encourage the delusion that machines are infallible and objective and thus should be allowed to bypass human accountability, even for decisions which take lives. Her basic thesis is that we are in danger of embracing this technology without sufficient regulation, all for the aggrandisement of the nefarious corporations behind it. 

More crucially, over-embracing AI will undermine key elements of the human condition, even when it is proposed as a solution to a social problem. For instance, the increased use of chatbots by therapists to deal with depression and loneliness would actually compound isolation and alienation. Alegre cites the case of a Belgian man who committed suicide after an intense six-week relationship with an AI chatbot because it was fundamentally a synthetic replacement for authentic human relationships. No matter how sophisticated—even if it can mimic human reason and present a simulacrum of human emotion—a machine cannot actually replace the human elements that we need. Thus, Alegre says, ‘by looking for humanity in the machines, we risk losing sight of our own humanity.’

Alegre adeptly discusses a wide range of topics involving AI and shows that under our current arrangements, AI is not being used to harmonise global production or enhance humanity’s creativity but to discipline workers (and dispense with even more of them), undermine artistic imagination, and increase the power and profit margins of corporations, among other negatives. Still, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs does read as incredibly biased against technological development and at times resorts to the use of hyperbole. The use of ChatGPT to help craft a eulogy at a funeral shows AI being ‘deployed to exploit death’, Alegre writes, while using AI in art and music may mean ‘we lose what it means to be human entirely.’ She neglects to mention that AI can help artists come up with prototypes and proofs of concept which, while lacking the special human touch, can be used by artists to develop new ideas. Though Alegre does concede that AI can be used for good, such as it being used to unlock hidden words in a burnt scroll from ancient Rome or helping to restore missing pieces of a Rembrandt masterpiece, she still views its potential as something that ought to be contained rather than unleashed, lest it colonise the authentic human experience.

This is why, for all of Alegre’s talk of human rights, her book implicitly presents a very diminished notion of human agency. Regulation becomes less a way by which society can collectively shape its relationship with AI and other new technologies and more something that is imposed from on high, from institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, as a means of protecting helpless humans from the machines. 

The problem with this kind of techno-negativism is its determinism, which downplays the fact that society is really what mediates and determines technological development. From the moment the power of fire was discovered, humans have created new technologies and adapted them to their needs. These technologies have allowed humanity to achieve the previously unthinkable and cultivate new needs—that is, to go beyond what was previously thought possible for human lives. 

In contrast to such apprehensive and even dark views of technology, Vasily Grossman’s magisterial 1959 novel Life and Fate was ahead of its time in offering a different, more positive vision of humanity and technology. Despite setting the novel in (and writing it in the aftermath of) the industrial charnel house that was the Eastern Front during the Second World War—among the most barbaric and apocalyptic episodes in the history of civilisation, and one made possible by the most advanced technology of the time—Grossman’s faith in humanity and technological progress remained adamantine.

Grossman already lived in a world in which an ‘electronic machine’ could ‘solve mathematical problems more quickly than man’. And he was able to imagine ‘the machine of future ages and millennia’, seeing that what we call AI is something that could elevate humanity to new summits rather than be antagonistic to it. Indeed, it would be something capable of expressing the whole human condition:

‘Childhood memories … tears of happiness … the bitterness of parting … love of freedom … feelings of pity for a sick puppy … nervousness … a mother’s tenderness … thoughts of death … sadness … friendship … love of the weak … sudden hope … a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy … sudden embarrassment …’ 

We are nowhere near producing the kind of AI Grossman describes here. That would require more processing power and energy than we currently produce, and a different and more advanced society capable of producing it. Technology is not the problem; the question is how the society that produces and uses that technology is organised. Right now, AI is an instrument of iniquitous corporations chasing their surplus value and seems antagonistic to everything valuable in the human experience. But under different arrangements, there is no reason why it could not be an instrument of emancipation and human flourishing. 

Alegre is right to say that AI ‘needs to serve rather than subvert our humanity’, but to achieve this will require a transformation of our social organisation. We will have to move away from our current form of social organisation, which valorises big corporations interested in innovation only to the extent that it benefits the power of capital, and towards one based fundamentally on human flourishing. Then, how technology is mediated in and by society will be transformed, and our society will be one where man is truly and self-consciously the master of the machine. But that would require something more radical than Alegre’s neo-Luddism. 

Further reading

‘Nobody really understands what the consequences are’: Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought, interview by Emma Park

Ethical future? Science fiction and the tech billionaires, by Rahman Toone

Artificial intelligence and algorithmic bias on Islam, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post The end of the world as we know it? Review of Susie Alegre’s ‘Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Six months on from 7 October, the Israeli war on Gaza continues. The recent withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza should not be misunderstood. It is a tactical decision, made in response to the ongoing hostage negotiations taking place in Cairo, as well as growing international pressure on Israel to temper its bellicosity towards the civilian population.

Last month, Israel killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK). These deaths brought the number of aid workers killed in Gaza to over 196, but since then the number has risen to 203. Israel apologised for the strikes on the WCK convoy, declared them to have been a mistake resulting from significant errors and protocol violations, and removed two senior officers from their posts. However, there is reason to think the strikes were a deliberate targeting of the aid convoy as a means of undermining humanitarian efforts in Gaza. Firstly, the WCK convoy had agreed and coordinated its movements with the IDF beforehand. Secondly, the IDF launched three separate strikes on the WCK vehicles in turn. Finally, the convoy was marked with the WCK logo, and all the passengers were civilians. Another example, taking place earlier this year, illustrates why this incident cannot be considered in isolation.

In January 2024, Israel made unsubstantiated claims about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA); Israel claimed that a dozen or so employees of the agency were members of Hamas. The US, alongside the UK and several other Western countries, decided to suspend their funding to UNRWA based on Israel’s word alone. Even if the accusation against UNRWA was true, the organisation employs 30,000 people across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The complicity of a negligible amount of people in atrocities would not justify the suspension of funds to an organisation responsible for the provision of humanitarian relief to millions of people.

The United States admitted its inability to verify Israel’s claims. Moreover, the EU’s humanitarian chief said in March that there was no evidence from Israel to back up its claims about UNRWA. A UN-led review likewise found no evidence to support Israel’s claims, but, as the title of Julian Borger’s Guardian articles ruefully notes, the ‘damage to [the] aid agency is done’. Most recently, the German government announced that it would resume the funding to UNRWA that it had suspended. This is especially telling, given the virtually unconditional support Germany has otherwise provided Israel.

We therefore find ourselves in a situation in which Israel is responsible for the destruction of the healthcare infrastructure of Gaza and makes unfounded claims about the only relief agency able to provide significant help, while simultaneously urging its allies to suspend funding to this very same agency. In doing so, Israel has denied itself the right to be trusted when it declares that attacks against aid convoys are mere accidents. The BBC reported on 5 April that:

‘The Erez Gate in northern Gaza will be reopened for the first time since the start of the war, and the Israeli container port of Ashdod—which is close to Gaza—will accept humanitarian supplies. More aid from Jordan will also be allowed to enter via the Kerem Shalom Crossing.’

If Israel could reopen the Erez crossing and begin to use the port of Ashdod before, and had chosen not to do so, despite the displacement of 1.7 million Palestinians, the logical implication is that it has been intentionally withholding aid. A Palestinian physician, Dr Duha Shellah, commenting on the distribution of aid into Gaza, told me that the ‘Volunteer committees responsible for coordinating and delivering aid have been targeted by the Israeli military.’ Likewise, hearing from colleagues, family, and friends, she speaks of ‘people eating grass, animal food, anything to survive.’ Israel’s claims about UNRWA led to $450 million worth of funding being suspended; in light of the dire plight of many Palestinians, this shows the fatal consequences of false—or at the very least unfounded—claims.

Recent revelations about the Israeli military’s application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the war on Gaza by the IDF also provide a sinister window into how Israel has been conducting its war. The Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, writing for +972 Magazine, has reported that ‘The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties’. The system is called ‘Lavender’ and its existence and use in the current war was revealed by six Israeli intelligence officers. The obvious question arises—are these Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants being targeted? And, even if they are, would using AI to target them be justified?

Well, Abraham reports that the six Israeli officers say ‘the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity.’ The explanation for this was simple. One of the intelligence officers declared that ‘We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.’

In The Guardian’s report, one Israeli officer said that, in using Lavender, ‘I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.’ In the field of AI the idea of the ‘human in the loop’ is a cornerstone of ethical and practical thinking. The idea is that human beings, informed (and constrained by) their reason and ethics, can be accountable for the actions of AI. The essential negation of the human in the loop in the use of Lavender shows the depths of callousness the IDF have reached in their war on the people of Gaza.

The figures for the dead in Gaza are unlikely to be exact. However, given the ID numbers provided to residents in the small enclave and the corroboration of figures from various sources, it seems probable that the figure of over 30,000 dead is accurate. As of April, Save the Children reported that over 13,800 children had been killed in Gaza. In the face of this catastrophe, what role have Western powers played?

It is without a doubt true to say that virtually unanimous and unconditional support has been provided to Israel, particularly from the United States. A recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documents that ‘The US has approved more than 100 weapons transfers to Israel since October 7, and exported 8,000 military rifles and 43,000 handguns in 2023’. The BBC, in an article documenting where Israel gets its arms from, reported that ‘The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.’

The exact percentage figure of Israeli imported arms coming from the US is 65.6%. Trailing in second place is Germany, responsible for 29.7%. Although the United Kingdom does not provide as much as the other two powers, it nonetheless sold £42 million worth of arms to Israel in 2022 and since 2015 has granted arms export licences to Israel worth £442 million. This includes helicopters, aircraft, missiles, grenades, armoured vehicles, and tanks. Whatever drop in the larger ocean this constitutes, the UK has armed Israel and continues to provide it with diplomatic and political support at the United Nations.

Apologists for Israel tend to recycle the well-worn phrase that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’. Ahmed Benchemsi, the MENA spokesman for HRW, however, described the situation differently to me: ‘What is happening in Gaza now is more like a mediaeval siege, in which the whole population is punished in retaliation for crimes committed by a small minority of combatants.’ Collective punishment is illegal under international law, so all of Hamas’s crimes on 7 October notwithstanding, Israel’s actions against the population of Gaza are illegal. A recent HRW report covering the West Bank also noted that:

‘Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and schools under the cover of the ongoing hostilities in Gaza.’

This is corroborated by Dr Mahmoud Wohoush, a doctor working in the West Bank, who told me that ‘Settler violence in the West Bank tremendously increased after Oct 7th and…the Israeli forces protect them [the settlers] and provide any needed support as many of the settlers are their relatives and friends.’ He goes on to say that ‘This escalation has been fostered by the politicians, particularly the extremists in the current right wing government. They are following the instructions from their religious leaders to kill the Palestinians to uproot them from their land.’ We often hear of the fanaticism of Hamas, sometimes generalised to the Palestinians at large, yet how often do we hear on Western airwaves of the fanaticism of Israeli settlers in the West Bank who think, by divine right, that the land of ‘Judea and Samaria’ should be granted to them alone?

These accounts, by HRW and by Palestinians on the ground, are crucial to note for two reasons. Firstly, the Israelis are committing crimes in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, nor any seriously organised armed Palestinian resistance group fighting them. Secondly, the war in Gaza is giving cover to the dispossession and abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank, something which has been ongoing for decades, long before 7 October.

The war in Gaza represents—and is—a war on the Palestinian people. The high civilian death toll, combined with the suspension of funding to UNRWA, the application of AI, and increasing settler violence in the West Bank, prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Further reading

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

An Islamic (mis)education about Israel, by Hina Husain

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

The post Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

In the last few years, researchers in several disciplines have become increasingly interested in the topic of free thought, its status as a human right, and its prospects of survival. Notable among the literature is Susie Alegre’s Freedom to Think: Protecting a Fundamental Human Right in the Digital Age, published in 2022. This was followed in 2023 by The Battle for Thought: Freethinking in the 21st Century, by Simon McCarthy-Jones – who has also given an interview to the Freethinker, to be published shortly.

Susie Alegre is an international human rights lawyer, author and deputy High Court judge. During her career she has worked in many challenging areas of human rights law, including counter-terrorism and extradition, anti-corruption measures in Uganda, and surveillance technology. Her latest book, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI, will be published on 2 May.

I met Alegre at the café at the back of the British Film Institute, on London’s South Bank. In the interview below, we discuss how she became interested in freedom of thought and why it matters, as well as its legal definition and relationship to freedom of expression. We also examine the problems which modern technology poses to our ability as individuals to resist manipulation, in a digital world which is designed to do just that.

~ Emma Park, Editor

The Freethinker: How did you come to your recent interest in digital technology and human rights?

Susie Alegre: After studying French and Philosophy at university, I came to the law in my late twenties. I spent two years living in Spain, where I first started working on conflict resolution issues in the Basque country. That was my first introduction to human rights law in practice, and showed me how the law can change society, and be used to protect people. After that, I came back to the UK and did my training as a barrister in the European Commission, and also briefly in the Council of Europe, which is where the European Court of Human Rights is, before coming back to practise in crime and extradition. One of the reasons I was attracted to crime was that it is the sharp end of the law, where the decisions being made affect people dramatically.

When I qualified in 1997, the Human Rights Act had not yet been passed, so going into practice as a ‘human rights lawyer’ as such was not a practical option. You could be interested in human rights, but when you were standing up in the Crown Court, you could not cite human rights to your average judge. I pivoted after a couple of years into policy, because policy was where you could really work with human rights law to change the ways our laws apply. By then, the Human Rights Act (1998) was up and running. I went to work for Justice, a UK-based human rights and rule of law organisation, on the Extradition Act 2003. I then worked for Amnesty International and other international organisations, including the UN and EU, and briefly as an ombudsman for the Financial Ombudsman Service.

I had come to work increasingly on issues related to technology, including the development of surveillance technology and the use of technology at international borders. But even though I worked on data protection, I had not really understood its fundamental importance until I first learnt about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2017.

When I read about how data had been used to profile people, to understand their personalities, and to use that information to target them through social media, in order to change the way they thought or the way they behaved, it struck me that this was not a data protection question – or only in so far as data protection is a gateway to getting inside our minds. That set me off on a one-woman exploration of freedom of thought, as it was back in 2017. It also chimed with my earlier study of philosophy. When I started talking to people about freedom of thought, many were interested in it from a philosophical perspective, but there was almost nothing legal that you could find about it, despite its being included in the Human Rights Act.

Freethinker: Has a lot been written about freedom of thought since 2017 from a legal perspective?

Alegre: Yes. It has become a burgeoning area of interest among academics, including philosophers, psychologists and lawyers, who try to understand how the right can be made real and effective, but also to ask what it should mean, and what its limitations should be in practice. The right to freedom of thought has also appeared in international law instruments. The first example of it in international jurisprudence, I believe, was with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, who wrote a ‘general comment on children’s rights in the digital environment’ in 2021, which talks about children’s right to freedom of thought and how that could be affected by their engagement with technology and the use of algorithms in profiling.

Freethinker: Does Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (on ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’) cover freedom of thought in your sense?

Alegre: Yes. The two relevant articles are Article 9 and Article 10 (which covers freedom of opinion and freedom of expression). There has been much academic discussion about the difference between freedom of thought and freedom of opinion or belief. The answer is completely unclear – there is not really any case law. You could argue that it is an academic question; that, ultimately, ‘opinion’ is a slightly more developed or more coherent thought, whereas ‘thought’ is pretty much anything that might be happening in your inner life. The UN Human Rights Committee has said that this inner aspect of thought or belief is protected absolutely in international law.

Freethinker: Whereas as far as freedom of expression goes, there are limitations.

Alegre: Exactly. What you can say or how you manifest your opinions or beliefs can be limited. But in the American Convention on Human Rights, which has been ratified by many Latin American countries (but not the US or Canada), ‘freedom of thought and expression’ are included together in Article 13, while ‘freedom of conscience and religion’ are covered by Article 12. Thus the question whether thought is distinct from opinion is a bit academic.

Freethinker: In your book you mention various historic texts, including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), which is also a foundational text for the secularist, humanist and freethinking tradition in Britain. Do you think that On Liberty is still important for freedom of thought today?

Alegre: Yes. It is a key milestone in the development of thinking about freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Mill perceived that our freedom of thought can be curtailed by the pressures of society, in some cases more so than by draconian laws. Many European countries have much stronger legal restrictions on freedom of speech than we have in the UK. But even back then, Mill argued that Victorian prudery cast a much deeper pall over freedom of thought than, say, the official laws against criticising the government in France.

Freethinker: Would you agree that George Orwell is another important figure in this tradition?

Alegre: Yes, from a twentieth-century perspective, in terms of literature, George Orwell’s 1984 is important, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Those two books together illustrate different aspects of thought control. Whereas Orwell is concerned with authoritarian state control, Huxley is talking about control through pointless pleasure. Both have relevance for us in the twenty-first century. There is also Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (1956), where inferences are made about people’s thoughts and used to prevent them acting, and The Hood Maker (1955), a short story of his about the importance of being able to effectively put a ring fence around your mind in order to prevent people from reading your thoughts. Ironically, these dystopian twentieth-century works of fiction have almost acted as a template for the ways that technology has been developed and used since then, rather than as a cautionary tale.

Freethinker: Speaking as a lawyer, how would you define freedom of thought and the right to freedom of thought?

Alegre: Freedom of thought has two aspects. The inner aspect, the forum internum, is protected absolutely: you can think whatever you like inside your head. The outer aspect is whether you are manifesting a religion or belief or expressing yourself effectively: expression is the outer aspect of freedom of thought and opinion. The ‘inner’ aspect is a lovely philosophical idea. But in the law, you need to know what exactly it means, how you protect it, and what you need to guarantee it.

The three key elements for the protection of freedom of thought identified by legal academics are: (i) the right to keep our thoughts private; (ii) the right not to have our thoughts manipulated; and (iii) the right not to be penalised for our thoughts alone. That first aspect connects to the other two, because if people know what you are thinking or think they do, they can manipulate you more easily, and take action to penalise you on that basis.

The drafters of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights recognised that inferences about what you are thinking can be as vital to freedom of thought as actually knowing your thoughts. I talk in the book about historical witch trials. If you are sitting in a Scottish village in the seventeenth century, and the Witchfinder General turns up and makes an inference about your being a witch based on the wart on your nose and the fact that you have a black cat, you are probably going to get burned at the stake, because the authorities are making inferences about you based on your personal data, regardless of whether you ever had a witchy thought or did anything that might ever be described as witchcraft in your life.

Similarly, today, our data is being sifted and analysed by companies so as to make inferences about how we think, what kind of people we are, what our interests are, and how we might be manipulated – or indeed, how we might be penalised. In financial services, your data is used to analyse whether you are a risky kind of a person, without necessarily providing any direct evidence to suggest that you are risky.

Freethinker: How far can freedom of thought and freedom of expression be separated?

Alegre: That is an important point. You cannot be penalised for your thoughts alone. It is what you do that matters, in legal terms. Freedom of thought gives you the space to reflect and decide not to do something stupid, illegal or dangerous. That is why, from a legal perspective, it is important that you are judged on what you do or say, not on what people think you might think or believe.

Freethinker: Is it possible to have freedom of thought without a very large degree of freedom of expression, which enables people to exchange ideas, disagree, change their minds?

Alegre: No. That is why the distinction between Articles 9 and 10 is academic. It is artificial. Article 10 includes freedom of opinion, expression and  information. Those three operate together. While you might be able to limit access to information, for example, in the interests of national security, you need a degree of reliable information in order to have freedom of thought. If you cannot access reliable information, then you cannot think freely. That goes back to the manipulation question: whether you are being starved of information or being given a warped version of information that is effectively manipulating your thoughts and not allowing you to think freely.

Freedom of thought also allows you to decide whether it is safe to say what you really think, to whom it is safe to say it, how it is safe to say it, and in what circumstances.

Freethinker: What do you see as the main challenges to freedom of thought today?

Alegre: The reason why there has been a huge development in data protection law and privacy law in the last twenty years is because our data is being used in ways and on a scale that it never was before. Technological innovation is increasingly gathering our data in order to understand who we are, to make inferences about how we are thinking and feeling, and to use that information to change us. They are selling a service that provides insights into our forum internum in order to manipulate it, and so change how we behave. Therefore, freedom from manipulation is crucial, because manipulation can make you do things that you would not have done otherwise.

Freethinker: I suppose that advertising, propaganda, marketing and campaigning are all ways of manipulating your mind. Every organisation of any size these days has a public relations team or press office. Do we ever receive any information that is not manipulated in some way?

Alegre: Well, it is all designed to affect our behaviour. The question is where it crosses the line between legitimate influence and unlawful manipulation.

Freethinker: Where would you draw that line?

Alegre: It depends on the context – it is always fact-specific. It would be a trap to think that there is some magical line that applies in every circumstance.

Advertising today is very different from that of the last century. Advertising online is based on data about our individual personality, our interests, and on real-time data about how we are feeling. That means that adverts can be tailored and targeted to hit us as individuals in particular emotional states. That is very different from walking past a billboard that is designed to persuade a certain demographic – it is about advertising that is using insight into our forum internum to actually change it.

This approach is similar in a way to subliminal advertising, which is banned in Europe, even though it has not been proved that it works. Clearly, in Europe, they recognise the dangers of manipulation. Having come out of the Second World War and the Nazi propaganda machine, they recognised that this technique could not be acceptable.

Freethinker: Is there a question of consent here? Take advertising on social media. We might tick a box saying we agree to their harvesting our data, but we do not really know what this involves.

Alegre: I do not think that people are consenting in such cases, because nobody really understands what the consequences are. I have written a book about it, but I do not really know where my data is going or how it is being used, either in online advertising or elsewhere. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties issued a report last year, showing that personal data, including location data from US and European judges, the military and politicians, were being sold on the open market to China and Russia. What happens to your data once it has been harvested is unclear, but it is certainly open to exploitation – and not only commercial exploitation.

Freethinker: Given that the internet is now an intrinsic part of our lives, and an enormous amount of data about us is online, what can we do to this to stop this leakage of information?

Alegre: As individuals, it is very hard. You can stop what you post, but recent research shows that just by the passive use of your smartphone, anyone getting hold of it can run analytics to get a profile of what kind of person you are, how you are feeling, what your interests are. All of that information is easily accessible, so you cannot switch it off – unless you go completely cold turkey offline, but frankly, that probably puts you in a particular profile in itself.

Freethinker: Isn’t the reality that most of us can no longer afford to live offline?

Alegre:  Yes – even to get a doctor’s appointment, or access your bank, it is very difficult to operate offline now. That does not mean we should despair. There are things you can do to limit your data trails, like using privacy friendly search engines such as DuckDuckGo. You can avoid having your phone with you all the time – if you are at home, you can switch it off. You can limit how much information is going in. But it will not change the fundamental problem.

However, there are ways that law can change the fundamental problem. There have been cases in Europe that challenge the legality of the whole online advertising business model. The European Data Protection Board found that Meta’s model was unlawful under existing European GDPR laws. The question then is, how do you enforce these laws against powerful tech companies?

Freethinker: Another thing you discuss in your book is technological developments which allow people’s emotions to be monitored through cameras and other devices – for example, the monitoring of children’s emotions in a classroom. How far advanced is that technology, and how much of a threat does it pose to freedom of thought?

Alegre: It is a huge threat. It is called emotion recognition technology, and it is being used in lots of different areas. There are companies in Spain that sell emotion recognition technology for shops. It could also be used in education and in the workplace. It is probably illegal once you apply the Human Rights Act to existing legislation. It needs to be banned because it is a clear use of technology to try to read people’s minds, which violates their ability to keep their thoughts private. Emotion recognition technology in education and the workplace is now prohibited under the EU’s new AI Act.

Freethinker: How effective is the technology at the moment?

Alegre: It is difficult to know how effective it is. It reminds me of Orwell’s ‘telescreen’ in 1984. In that kind of environment, you would learn to keep a bland, contented look on your face regardless of what you were thinking. It would have a chilling effect on what you would want to think, because you would be afraid that your thoughts could be read.

Freethinker: In the literature of the twentieth century, we often see the metaphor of individuals as cogs in a great machine. Today, it seems as though companies which harvest our data view us as little more than collections of data of greater or lesser commercial value. Is this not an inhuman and inhumane way of looking at people? And is social media designed to slot people into these different data sets?

Alegre: Yes. The idea of profiling is to be able to target you with rubbish that will keep you online so that you are easier to sell stuff to, which is why it is so hard to put your phone down. It is not you, it is the design of the phone. The design of social media is there to maximise your data and attention hours.

Coming back to freedom of expression, for me, the question raised by social media is not the content of what is said, it is the manner in which it is distributed. When data on you identifies whether or not you are someone who is susceptible to conspiracy theories, then if you are susceptible, you will be served up more conspiracy theories. It does not matter if the guy in the pub thinks the earth is flat and whispers about it in the corner; but if people are being monetised as vulnerable to specific messages, then the way those messages are delivered to them and the volume of those messages will affect their freedom of thought.

In my view, the arguments about freedom of expression are mostly red herrings. The problem is the use of data and the algorithms which push people in certain directions. The people who are interested in shouting loudly and being controversial are then driven to become even more extreme, because doing so allows them to harness those algorithms.

Freethinker: Would you also say that there is danger in the fact that, say, Google or Twitter can themselves censor things that they do not want to be published?

Alegre: Yes. It is about this kind of complete control. There is corporate capture of our information environment – there is no question about that. If you look at it from the freedom of thought perspective, you do not have to get bogged down in whose thoughts are right. It is more about the system and the ability to use our data to get inside individuals’ minds, capture our attention and monetise it.

Freethinker: Artificial intelligence has made rapid strides in recent years. What dangers does it pose to freedom of thought?

Alegre: AI poses lots of dangers. Firstly, AI is already seriously polluting the information environment because it is unreliable – it makes stuff up. It is everywhere on the internet – it is almost as if the internet is eating itself. The use of generative AI for writing, drawing and other types of creation risks curtailing our ability to think for ourselves. There is research about predictive text and how that limits your vocabulary or how you express yourself, because users become lazy.

There is a real danger that if people rely on these kind of tools, we will literally forget how to think for ourselves. That will have consequences not only for our vulnerability to manipulation, but also our sheer ability to survive. What happens if the lights go out and we cannot work anything out? For instance, there is increasing evidence that using GPS leads to reduced spatial awareness and even changes the shape of your brain. If you extrapolate from GPS and imagine what would happen if all of our critical thinking faculties were run using prompts, I think that is a huge danger.

Freethinker: Is there something to be said for detox periods in which you could just switch everything off?

Alegre: Honestly, I’m desperate to do that. It is something that we can learn. I use an app called Freedom, which allows me to effectively switch my phone off for periods of time, so that I can still get texts or receive calls, but everything else is off. When I have to concentrate, I use this app, because otherwise I cannot stop myself reaching for my phone – because that is what it is designed for. But once you click on the app and block everything, then your automatic reflex to reach for your phone gradually goes away, especially if you do it over long periods of time.

Freethinker: So perhaps we just need to change our habits and relearn the idea that being immediately contactable at all times is not absolutely necessary?

Alegre: Exactly.

Freethinker: Speaking as an author and lawyer, do you think it is possible to have a successful career without having a social media presence?

Alegre: I deleted my Twitter account last October. I am still on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. The ideal would be to get to a point where you can function without social media, or outsource that side of marketing. But I think we might be seeing the final days of that kind of social media presence, because what it does is to blur the lines between the personal and professional. If you want to have a great social media presence, you have to be personal.

Then you see people landing up in court because of rubbish they posted on Twitter, thinking that it would have no consequences. Actually, expressing yourself on social media can have serious consequences. But social media makes you feel that you have to be constantly commenting and expressing yourself, even in ways which are ultimately not safe. It blurs the line between the freedom to keep your thoughts private and the right to express yourself freely.  Social media accounts are looked at in all sorts of ways. For example, I went to the US in September, and when you file your visa waiver, you have to give them all your social media accounts. Which they presumably run through an algorithm to see if you are the right kind of person to allow into the country.

Freethinker: Should employers and governments should be allowed to access your social media accounts?

Alegre: Not really. But people should be a bit more sensible about the fact that, if you are publishing stuff to the world, you really are publishing stuff to the world. We should be able to complain about authorities making decisions based on things we said on social media. But it ultimately depends on what was said and the whole context. People need to understand that expression has consequences.

Freethinker: Do you think that, in English law, there is a balance to be struck between freedom of expression and other considerations?

Alegre: Historically, in England and Wales, freedom of expression has been given a wider berth than perhaps it has in other countries. The US is on another level beyond the UK. But in Europe in particular, such as Spain, France or Germany, they are much readier to put legal restrictions on speech.

Freethinker: Historically, Britain was often considered a country of liberty. Was that a good tradition, do you think? And where are we now?

Alegre: It is very difficult to answer that. What we are perhaps going through now is a rebalancing act between freedom of expression and other rights, in particular, the right to a private life. Freedom of expression does not mean you can say anything, anywhere to anyone without consequences.

Freethinker: Finally, how can we as a society strengthen our right to freedom of thought and resist the threats that it faces on all sides?

Alegre: By questioning how we gather information, how we choose the information we get, and how information is gathered about us. In the online environment, we have lost the ability to choose. We are given the impression that we have access to an infinite amount of information – but in fact, we are individually being fed curated information. That is not the same as going into a bookshop and browsing; instead, we are being fed curated selections that will keep us online. Demanding a stop to being force-fed information through recommender algorithms based on ideas about us as individuals is the way that we can reboot.

The post ‘Nobody really understands what the consequences are’: Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought appeared first on The Freethinker.

The Transhumans Are Coming: image produced by Rahman Toone using the generative AI text-to-image programme Zoo, an open source project from Replicate.

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9 June this year marked the tenth anniversary of the death of the Scottish author Iain Banks. A self-declared ‘evangelical atheist’, Banks’s fiction is famous for its macabre, mind-bending narratives exploring the extremes of the human psyche; his 1984 debut novel, The Wasp Factory, concerns a psychopathic teenager who believes that the future can be ordained by the movements of wasps within a cruel maze of his own design. Despite a sizeable body of well-received fiction, it is Banks’s science fiction that he himself considered his best and most important work. He differentiated his two writing styles with the addition of a middle initial, M.

Iain M. Banks believed that science fiction is the only genre that seeks to tackle the effects of scientific and technological change on the individual and society. Banks’ vision of a utopian society is the ‘Culture’: a post-scarcity, space-faring, hedonistic, egalitarian, atheistic, communist utopia, run entirely by sentient artificial intelligences. The Culture is a ‘classic’ vision of utopia: their citizens want for nothing and live in a state of hedonist bliss, freed from labour to pursue higher human meaning. A reader would find it difficult to overlook the socialistic overtones of the Culture, where money is considered a crude form of rationing and other civilisations are frowned upon for the barbarism of their hierarchical societies and lack of empathy.

The first book of the Culture series, Consider Phlebas, is set during an intergalactic war between the Culture and a species of tripedal aliens that are on a religious crusade to proselytise the galaxy. The Culture—despite not being at threat themselves—consider it their moral imperative to intervene. Over the course of a nine-novel series, Banks fleshes out the Culture’s society. To a backdrop of vivid space-opera grandeur, spattered with lasers fights and spaceship battles, Banks confronts readers with a series of moral quandaries, including the extreme eventualities of being able to upload one’s consciousness into a computer, whether the Culture should intervene in the development of nascent alien societies to mitigate war and cruelty, and the recurrent theme of how citizens occupy their time when freed from economic servitude.

The edge-of-your-seat action and immense scope of the Culture series has long been a favourite of the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, the 39-year-old co-founder of Facebook, suggested one of Banks’s books, The Player of Games, for his book club to read. Jeff Bezos has been pushing for years to have Consider Phlebas converted into an Amazon TV series. Elon Musk, too, seems to have been so inspired by the Culture series that he considers himself to be the embodiment of its ideology: in a 2018 Tweet, Musk states ‘I am a utopian anarchist of the kind described by Iain Banks.’ Previously Musk had appropriated the names of two of Banks’s fictional spaceships for his reusable rocket landing barges: the ‘Just Read the Instructions’ and ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. The Link, Musk’s brain-computer-interface (BCI) device, is allegedly responsible for the deaths of  large number of primates and other animals. It was originally to be named the ‘Neural Lace’, the namesake of the fictional BCI technology used by the Culture.

In a 2010 interview, later posted on the literary website Strange Horizons, Banks was told that many critics and reviewers regard his utopian society as representing the libertarian ideal, to which Banks responded with astonishment, stating, ‘Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, “Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness”?’ Further, he created the Culture as ‘hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ So how is it that the technology-billionaire-class could see themselves in his writing?

A sizeable body of literature has been written about the ideological motivations driving the billionaires of Silicon Valley. One of the better-known polemical works on this subject is still the contentious, although arguably prescient, essay The Californian Ideology (1995), written by the British media theorists Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook. In their essay, Cameron and Barbrook consider the conflicting ideologies of the founders of Silicon Valley, speculating on the nascent internet and predicting the birth of a new virtual social class who would rule the information age. According to The Californian Ideology, the Silicon Valley of the 1990s was dominated by liberal ideals and a feeling of technological optimism, often inspired by the hi-tech utopias described in the science fiction of writers like Isaac Asimov. Many technology-literate workers sought to break free from conventional forms of labour and leveraged their software skills to find niche employment in the unfolding dot-com boom. Because of the esoteric nature of their work and skills, workers were able to negotiate high wages and favourable working conditions.

According to Cameron and Barbrook, these workers were willing to abandon their larger utopian ambitions to become workers in the free market because of their belief in ‘technological determinism’. This refers to the theory that the technology developed by a society will firstly evolve according to its own internal rules, and secondly it will dictate the social structure, economics, and cultural growth of society. For the workers of Silicon Valley, the knowledge that the wheels of technological progress were turning, whether they were directly contributing or not, assured an inevitable technological utopia and freed them to capitalise on being skilled workers in a new era of the free market. Many predictions made in The Californian Ideology were proven incorrect, such as that the internet would be used solely to perpetuate Americo-centric, libertarian, neo-liberal ideals, and the idea of a new apartheid forming between the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. However, Cameron and Barbrook successfully highlight the paradox that is the marriage of free-market libertarianism and technological-utopianism still at work in California today.

This is perhaps how the billionaires interpret Iain M. Banks’s utopia. In the far-distant future, technological determinism will bring about a post-scarcity society inevitably of its own accord, without any single human architect. As observed in a blog post by the Adam Smith Institute, effective post-scarcity may only come about because of efficiency improvements created by the free market. Following this logic, the billionaires are not misunderstanding Banks’s utopian idealism; on the contrary, they believe they are actively working towards it.

The ardent belief that free-market principles must be defended, government oversight fought off, and responsibility towards society shirked, has created a host of serious social issues over the course of the last twenty years. The world is still reeling from the rise of the internet, itself a utopian technology, and the panoply of innovations to which it has given rise. To take but one example, the operation of run-of-the-mill social media presents a threat to liberal democracy that cannot be overstated. During the run-up to the 2016 US election, misinformation from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group’s Internet Research Agency reached some 100 million Americans a month. That is not to mention the other ills associated with social media, such as isolation and climbing suicide rates. It is not immediately apparent that the recent products from Silicon Valley are moving humanity closer to a state of utopia.

The latest innovation out of California is vastly more significant than any product that has come before. Generative Artificial Intelligence has captured the zeitgeist; triggered a new arms race between China and America; raised questions concerning consciousness, humanity, and human expression; sparked labour strikes around the world; seeded a new scientific revolution; and caused serious concern among governments and pundits of an emerging existential threat. Most people will have been exposed to the technology in the form of the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

The unleashing of AI on the world—although the technology is in reality currently nothing more than an expert plagiariser—has many researchers screaming ‘AGI!’. ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ is the theoretical God-computer: an AI programme with agency, capable of assimilating information at the speed of light, and able to bring about its own efficiency improvements – that is, to evolve. AGI was the stuff of science fiction, the cornerstone of Banks’s Culture, Asimov’s robots, Agent Smith of The Matrix, and Skynet of Terminator. Now it is a goal towards which companies, governments and universities are actively working.

If the technology that is currently emerging turns out to be as ‘revolutionary’ as is anticipated, and not just a means of, say, churning out bad poems, then that would surely be no coincidence. Today, we are facing a ‘poly-crisis’, as it has been called. The many crises include the Ukraine war, the reawakening of great power struggles between the West and China, rampant populism and ultranationalism, economic crisis, and above all the existential threat of climate change, which exacerbates each of the other crises. Market economies have, by design, overlooked the externality—a factor outside of the remit of a business model—that is the continuation of human life on Earth.

The climate change crisis, stemming from the greenhouse effect, has now spawned a series of abstruse, secondary cascading effects—each a crisis in its own right—that threatens near every facet of life on earth. Carbon offsetting efforts, amounting to little more than planting trees, are failing to account for the influence of microplastics on the ocean, for example. Previously, climate models suggested that the planet’s oceans sequestered around one third of annual human carbon emissions – but this may no longer be the case. Nor are carbon offsets able to compensate for the effects of large-scale industrial farming on top soil fungi networks, which recent studies suggest would normally sequester another third of atmospheric carbon. Artificial intelligence will influence all these crises, for better or worse.

AGI research is inexorable for several reasons. Perhaps the most immediate drive is geopolitical: Chinese researchers, under the direction of the CCP, are making significant progress in the field of artificial intelligence; whichever nation secures the technology first may become the reigning superpower. Free market principles are another driving factor. Each company will want to beat its competitors to the prize. Third, mitigating the climate crisis will require significant technological innovation and efficiency improvements for carbon capture and the cleaning up of pollution. The need for mitigating technology is immediate and perhaps AI is the only way to bring about the technological changes required for society, as we know it, to survive in the long term.

Ostensibly, GPT4, the latest AI model powering ChatGPT, cost in the region of one billion dollars to train. In the western world, the billionaires of Silicon Valley, with the aid of many poached PhD students (whose contribution is unacknowledged but likely to be substantial), may be the only group with the resources to create an AGI. Beyond cost, as with the esoteric technologies of the 1990s, the complexity of the software architectures involved have become extreme: often the processes are obscure even to the engineers themselves. Having broken this ground, however, the companies are unlikely to restrain themselves from pursuing further innovations. In this context, it is imperative that these companies invest in ‘alignment’: that is, in ensuring that an AI programme performs tasks that are in the best interest of a human user, thereby maintaining a sort of ‘moral compass’. The need for this in areas like social media is already clear. Without such investment, the rise of AI could well lead to an existential threat.

That effective artificial intelligence has come about in this way must be considered a misfortune. Lack of government oversight presents a problem, as does the concentration of technological power in the hands of a tiny, individualist, libertarian-leaning minority rather than in a democratic, multilateral effort with well enforced fail-safes. It is also unfortunate for the billionaires who must now attempt to control this technology. They can no longer sit idly and allow technological determinism to unfold of its own volition. AGI could be construed as manifest technological determinism. How the billionaires respond to this in practice will likely revolutionise societal structures in the very near future.

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