Introduction

Simon McCarthy-Jones is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Trinity Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin. An expert in auditory verbal hallucinations, or ‘hearing voices’, he has also written a popular book on the nature of spite and its place in human culture.

In October 2023, McCarthy-Jones published Freethinking: Protecting Freedom of Thought Amidst the New Battle for the Mind. I previously reviewed this book (under its old title, Battle for Thought) for the Literary Review, together with Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It (2023), by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan.

The below interview with McCarthy-Jones continues the Freethinker’s series of reflections on different aspects of free thought. Last Friday we published an interview with the human rights lawyer, Susie Alegre, about her book on ‘freedom to think’ as a human right. In February last year I interviewed Laura Dodsworth, whose views on free thought were shaped by her perspective as a journalist and critic of the Covid lockdowns.

In this interview, conducted via Zoom, McCarthy-Jones gives a psychologist’s perspective on free thought. We explore his idea of thinking as a shared process, as well as the threats that big tech poses to free thought, the pressure which public morality can put on our thinking, and the question whether our societies are in need of a ‘redemocratisation of thought’.

~ Emma Park, Editor*

The Freethinker: What are your academic interests within psychology, and how did you come to write Freethinking?

Simon McCarthy-Jones: For about a decade, my main area of research was auditory verbal hallucinations: the experience of hearing voices. A lot of people I talked to had been through child sexual abuse. So I started studying that area, looking at the effects of child sexual abuse on the brain, its impact upon physical and mental health, and more recently, thinking about how we can try and prevent child sexual abuse.

My interest in freedom of thought initially came more from personal experience than professional interest. In 2017, I found my mind captured to a degree I was uncomfortable with by Facebook. I found myself thinking about checking Facebook at all hours of the day, and it became very intrusive and disruptive. I was lecturing on the behavioural science principles that underlie the way Facebook grabs our attention, but it is one thing knowing about how it works, and quite another experiencing it. I was profoundly shocked by how powerful Facebook’s pull over me was.

A number of legal scholars at the time were writing about freedom of thought, in relation both to the digital world, and to ideas of cognitive liberty. And so I started to delve into the right to freedom of thought. When I did, I assumed that freedom of thought, like freedom of speech, would be extremely well defined by the courts, and it just was not. This bewildered me, because historically, free thought has been lauded for centuries – and yet this fundamental human right was not elaborated in the law at all.

That was exciting, because there was the opportunity to have some influence in developing the right along with the rest of the scholarly community. But that excitement soon changed into worry, because, as an absolute human right, freedom of thought looked as though it could have the potential to steamroll over any other concern, and become a powerful tool of lawfare. So I was concerned with how we could prevent it from being abused politically.

Freethinker: How do you understand the idea of ‘free thought’?

McCarthy-Jones: In psychology, people tend not to talk about thought as a concept in itself, but rather about different elements of thought. In the book, I identify four elements of thought: the ability to attend, the ability to reason, the ability to reflect, and the ability to have the courage to air one’s views or ‘think in public’. The first step is to work out what these elements of thought are, and how they interact. The next step is to ask how the right to freedom of thought can protect these constituent parts of thought.

There is also a question of what makes thought free. I largely see this as being about allowing the elements of thought to operate unhindered, allowing people space and time to reflect, and allowing them the ability to control their attention rather than being overwhelmed by psychological tricks. It is also necessary to create an environment where not too much courage is needed to think in public – where the barrier to public expression of your thought is not set so high that it scares people away from thinking together.

Freethinker: What about imagination – is that also part of free thought?

McCarthy-Jones: The ability to allow one’s imagination to let rip has to be central to creative thought, to artistic thought. And I am sure it would have an absolutely central place in free thought, that safe space to test out dangerous ideas.

Freethinker: You have identified four key elements of thought: attention, reason, reflection, and thinking out loud. Could you go through these in more detail?

McCarthy-Jones: As far as attention is concerned, we have all seen the malign effects of social media companies, which encourage us to have our attention focused on their product, regardless of our own goals. Within psychology, there is something called acceptance and commitment therapy, which is based upon the idea that many of our experiences can drag us away from our own freely chosen goals. Therefore, in therapeutic situations, psychologists encourage the client to work out what their goals are, to commit to pursuing them, and to let go of any experiences, such as negative emotions or intrusive thoughts, which get in the way of pursuing one’s goals.

I have concerns about social media and tech in general, and its ability to try and drag our attention away in ways that we may not be best placed to resist. It is not about designing worse or less engaging products. It is more about giving people options, so that if they want to detach themselves from the extremely powerful mechanisms of social media, it can be done more easily.

Freethinker: Your second element is the ability to reason. One might say that it is all very well being able to reason, but some people are just better than at reasoning than others. Can we all learn to reason freely, but in such a way that it is actually productive?

McCarthy-Jones: This comes back to Daniel Kahneman’s work on heuristics and the mental shortcuts that evolution seems to have built into our brain, which he outlines in Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). On the one hand, we have a reasoned, conscious thinking process. On the other, we have a second system which is quick, evolutionary, ancient, and which gives us rough answers or ‘rule of thumb’ thinking.

The question then is, if we want to engage our reasoning system and not be led astray by our rule of thumb thinking, how can we take charge? Plenty of those who work in marketing and who are trying to sell you things are going to try to engage your rule of thumb thinking in order to draw you into a thinking process which leads you to conclusions which your conscious, slow reasoning process might not support. So a key threat is people trying to use their knowledge of how we think to draw us away from our conscious reasoning and into avenues of thought which entice us to make the purchase or click on the link, but which are not necessarily what our reasoned thinking would lead us to do.

Freethinker: As far as you became aware in your research, do many corporations employ behavioural psychologists to work on the best ways to target advertising at people?

McCarthy-Jones: To my knowledge, yes. There is a huge industry of using psychology to try to make people buy things. That is one of the discipline’s key practical applications. I know that a lot of corporations have teams of psychologists trained in behavioural science to try to make advertising and marketing more effective.

Freethinker: To what extent can we as individuals resist the pull of advertising, marketing and other propaganda, the many techniques used by corporations and other organisations to push our thinking in certain ways?

McCarthy-Jones: Where the responsibility lies between individuals and corporations is a good question. On the one hand, you could deploy the government regulation of advertising and marketing to rein it in. But that infantilises us in the sense that it assumes that we are not able to think freely and rationally, and therefore we need this kind of protection. And it also impinges upon the free speech of marketers and advertisers.

One question is how much responsibility we want to place on ourselves as thinkers, and at what point we see ourselves as simply being overwhelmed by the amount that big tech knows about psychology and by the ways in which it is using the vast amount of data it has on us. At what point does the power imbalance between individuals and big tech become problematic? I think it is very difficult to know where to draw the line, and it is a conversation we all need to have.

Freethinker: What are the best techniques we as individuals can use to train ourselves to resist the onslaught of manipulation to which we are exposed every time we look at our phones or go online?

McCarthy-Jones: First of all, a position of humility, and a realistic awareness of our limitations, is important. We all tend to go online and think, ‘I am in control of my mind and nobody can manipulate me – other people may be affected, but not me.’ But it is important to be aware that in certain situations, we are all going to struggle to overcome the machinations of tech, and so the best tactic is to restrain ourselves in advance. One way of doing this, for example, is to use time management tools which limit the time you can spend on social media.

Secondly, advertisers encourage us to make impulsive choices in the heat of the moment. To counter this, it helps to create a space for reflection where we can come to decisions, especially important ones – to create a space offline where someone feels safe to think, and which involves trusted people with a diverse range of opinions who are also involved in good faith truth-seeking. Creating a space that is conducive to free thinking, which much of the digital world is not, can help us make good decisions.

Freethinker: You touch on the idea that the digital world is more likely to drown our thoughts than encourage them in your article for UnHerd. Could you expand on that – why is the world on our screens so antithetical to free thinking?

McCarthy-Jones: I presume it is because the incentive is not to encourage free thought in us. The incentive for them is to capture our attention, first of all, which is generally anathema to free thought. Their incentive is to manipulate us into actions which fulfil the company’s goals rather than our goals, which means they want to encourage us to make impulsive decisions, to make emotions well up inside us so as to encourage instant engagement.

In one of your talks, you mention Bertrand Russell’s idea that the free thinker must be free of ‘the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions’. Many online forums seem to be designed to exacerbate our emotions, to stir up negative emotions and make us act on them, so as to perpetuate our engagement with the site. That is not in the interest of free thinking. There are structural differences between our interests and the interests of a corporation. And I do not think the corporation’s interests are in us thinking freely. For instance, Google could design its products in a way that promoted free thought. But what incentive would it have to do so?

Freethinker: Going back to your four elements of thought, the third one was reflection. What do you mean by this?

McCarthy-Jones: I mean the space and time to make decisions. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf says that ‘a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself’. She effectively puts a financial price on the freedom of thought, saying that five hundred pounds a year gives us the power to contemplate – in the sense that you need to earn a certain amount per year in order to have the space, luxury and privilege to think freely. So there are socioeconomic factors which might make the ability to think freely into something of a privilege, because it does take time, resources and space. The question then is how we make that available to everyone, rather than just to a cognitive elite who are allowed to do the thinking for the rest of us – which I think is very dangerous.

Freethinker: That seems to be a theme that goes right back to Plato: the idea that you need σχολή, leisure, in order to think properly. Because if you are constantly busy earning a living, and if you live in cramped quarters where there is no space for you just to sit by yourself and reflect quietly, how are you ever going to have time to make progress with your thoughts? Which leads to the question, how can we as a society ensure that everyone has the time to think for themselves and has the ability and space to do so?

McCarthy-Jones: Some will point to universal basic income as enabling this type of situation. This solution may or may not be the best in other respects, but one of its potential implications would be that it would support democracy and would give people, should they choose, the space to engage in activities like thinking freely, which the confines of capitalism might not do.

From reading writers like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn, my sense is that a hundred years ago, the average person was more easily able to engage in free thought and reflection upon society than they would be today. We seem to have gone backwards since then.

Freethinker: I suppose that these days, leisure time is big business for the entertainment industry – football, Netflix, shopping, holidays, and so forth. Even if most people have leisure time, it is viewed by these industries as a commodity which they do everything they can to capture. So perhaps one challenge for all of us is simply to resist throwing away our free time on organised fun, if you like. And maybe go to the library instead (if it has not already been closed down).

McCarthy-Jones: Another point is that you have to have the desire to think in the first place. Thinking is not easy. It provokes anxiety, particularly when you reach conclusions you feel ethically you have to act on. The easier course of action is to not know what one should be doing and just continue what one is doing.

You also have to have the sense that there is some point to your thinking. Because if you come to certain conclusions about your life, but you are not in a position to do anything with the conclusions you have reached, whether financially, socio-economically or more generally, you can start to feel powerless over your own life. If you are going to reach conclusions which you cannot do anything about, why even go down that road in the first place? Therefore it is important for free thought that our society should be one in which people feel empowered have a stake in their local community – so that their thinking matters. So that their ideas can result in action, rather than being merely for intellectual amusement.

Freethinker: Your fourth element is thinking out loud. How does this work?

McCarthy-Jones: Thinking takes courage – sometimes a very high level of courage. People like Jon Ronson have talked about the culture of online shaming, the incentives to pour scorn on other people’s views, which online media does, whether intentionally or unintentionally. This sets a barrier to free thought: for many people, the costs of thinking out loud in public are not worth the benefits. To the point that if one wants to think freely in public today, one needs to be either a billionaire or reckless or not aware of the dangers. This is an unreasonably high barrier.

Freethinker: In your book you propose that thinking is not just done in your head, but can also be done out loud, with other people, or in writing, say in a diary, or even through other activities such as searching the internet. How wide would you draw the definition of thinking?

McCarthy-Jones: There are two points here. One is the relationship between thought and speech, and the other is the social element of thinking. As to writing or typing, I suppose there are two kinds: one, where you know in advance what you are going to write, and the other, when you do not, but discover what you think by the process of writing it down. I am in that second camp: I never know what I am going to write until I start writing it. One of the things that came out of the book that surprised me was the idea that thinking may be at its most free when it is done with other people. The classical Western idea of thought is epitomised by Rodin’s Thinker: that it is an activity done on your own and in your head. But if a key purpose of thought is to reach truth, then we often seem to do that better when we think with other people.

In the book I cite a study which showed that when people were trying to solve the Linda problem, it was found that two people working together were more likely to reach the right answer than one person alone. And three people working together were more likely to reach the answer than two or one.

Freethinker: What would be the ideal group size?

McCarthy-Jones: The study on the Linda problem only went up to three. I imagine there will be diminishing returns from increasing the number beyond a certain point, but I do not know what that would be.

The name of your august publication, the ‘Freethinker’, suggests a very individualistic approach. I prefer ‘freethinking’, which I used in the title of my book, to denote an activity which can be shared.

Freethinker: If thought is a social activity, what implications does that have for speech? Is free speech an integral aspect of free thought?

McCarthy-Jones: From a legal perspective, as things stand, there is a very clear distinction. For obvious, practical reasons, it helps to keep the courtroom clean. You have an inner world, the forum internum, where thought happens. Then you have an external world, or forum externum, where speech happens. Unfortunately, this division does not stand up to any kind of philosophical or psychological inquiry, because thought extends out into theexternal world, while speech reaches into our internal world. If we are talking to somebody else in public and we are engaged in good faith truth seeking with them, I would see that as our thinking together. So if thought is an absolute right in human rights law, then I would see that kind of public speech as being in essence thought, and consequently in need of absolute protection.

Freethinker: You also suggest that a diary could be a form of externalised thinking.

McCarthy-Jones: Yes, that would be a kind of external mind. We are thinking through writing, therefore it is happening in the external world. We are making a mark on the external world. Somebody else could read our diary. The implications of this view would be quite profound, because if we recognise writing a diary as a kind of thought, we will want to give it the absolute protection of freedom of thought. Thus nobody will be allowed to look in our diaries – and they will not be able to be used as evidence against us in court. The same would apply to Google searches, to the extent that they represented our thinking: if the right to freedom of thought is absolute, then these searches should be treated as absolutely private.

Freethinker: And you would be in favour of this?

McCarthy-Jones: Yes. There are always slight concerns that this rule could be misused for what I would see as being substantial harms. But in general, if we could come up as a community with what we felt thinking was and give an agreed definition, then I think I would be happy to give external kinds of thinking absolute protection, just because of the importance of thinking to us. Because once we start limiting our freedom to think, everything starts to fall apart.

Freethinker: As far as speech is concerned, where would you draw the line between speech that is thinking and so should be absolutely protected, and speech that is not?

McCarthy-Jones: This can tie in fairly easily to existing jurisprudence, for example on defamation and true threats, by which I mean actual intentional threats of physical harm.

Freethinker: What about hate speech? Is this a greyer area? How far should speech about, say, protected characteristics or controversial topics be limited by the law?

McCarthy-Jones: That is a complicated question and I do not have a good answer. The only thing I would emphasise would be the importance of ensuring that forms of good faith truth seeking do not get penalised under hate speech laws. And that should be a matter for the courts to determine.

Freethinker: What about a middle ground case where someone is not particularly seeking the truth, but neither are they particularly intending to harm someone else – just having a casual conversation?

Freethinker: You also mention a 2021 UN report on freedom of thought, by Ahmed Shaheed, the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. What is the significance of this report?

McCarthy-Jones: The UN report discusses four ‘proposed attributes’ of free thought: ‘a) freedom not to disclose one’s thoughts; (b) freedom from punishment for one’s thoughts; (c) freedom from impermissible alteration of one’s thoughts; and (d) an enabling environment for freedom of thought’.

My concern is what counts as a thought in the first place – whether it is confined solely to what takes place inside our heads, or whether it extends into the external world. If the right to freedom of thought is defined so as only to cover the forum internum, as a psychologist, I would consider that right not fit for purpose.

Freethinker: In your book you also talk about access to information. Do you think this is a crucial part of the right to think freely?

McCarthy-Jones: Yes. If free thought is a kind of input-output mechanism, you need the input of information to be able to think freely. That speaks again to the importance of other people’s free speech as an input to your free thought. I think we need to create a redemocratisation of thought in the sense that this activity should not be left to a special class of academics or politicians who have special protections. If we are all voting in a democracy, we should all have the strongest protections for our free thoughts.

McCarthy-Jones: If we want to decide whether such a conversation should count as ‘thought’ I guess it is best to go back to what the right to freedom of thought is trying to protect. In addition to truth-seeking, this right is presumably trying to support our ability to govern ourselves, thereby creating a society that can be meaningfully said to be democratic. If a casual conversation helps support our ability to govern ourselves, then it could plausibly be deemed a form of external thought. The philosopher Joel Walmsley and I have been trying to think about this issue recently, but we really need the legal community to weigh in on the promise and problems of the whole idea of external thought.

Freethinker: Fundamentally, why is free thought so important? Why do we all need this ability to think freely – what can it do for our lives?

McCarthy-Jones: As we mentioned earlier, a key factor is self-government: the idea that we are autonomous creatures who can make decisions and be in control of our own lives, and that it is our ability to decide and make choices that in some sense contributes to our sense of dignity as thinkers. If we cannot think freely, we cannot be self-governing creatures.

Freethinker: Do you have any plans for another book?

McCarthy-Jones: Writing Freethinking has made me interested in trying to understand the democratic process better. I had not fully appreciated the intersection of free thought and democracy, and also the intersection of democracy and human rights.

One concern which came out of the book is how the right to freedom of thought can be developed in a democratic way, and whether it makes sense to talk about the democratic development of human rights – as opposed to, say, their evolution by unelected judges in the European Court of Human Rights. Human rights law seems to stand over our democratic institutions and determine what can and cannot be done in society. When people claim, for instance, that ‘human rights are not up for debate’, that seems contrary to the very idea of free thought and to rely on authority and legal norms rather than on reason. There seems to be a sense that human rights are revealed truths which we must get on board with rather than being the endpoint of a deliberative process.

*This piece is my last as editor of the Freethinker; from 1 April, Daniel Sharp will be taking over. I wish him and our readers all the best – EP.

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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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Advancements in scientific research have been overturning clerical hegemony in organised religions for the past two millennia. Religion has dominated the affairs of Muslim communities more than those of other religious groups; thus, in recent times, the challenge of science to religious authority has been a particular problem for the Islamic clergy. However, by limiting the spread of reason, and selectively adopting some but not all of the latest inventions, Muslim clerics have managed to forge a love-hate relationship with science and technology.

As a result, imagery and loudspeakers that were once declared haraam (forbidden) by the Islamic clergy are now at the forefront of daawah (Islamic evangelism). More recently, chatting, social media, Netflix, and the internet in general have faced fatwas (edicts declaring them haraam), while Islamic preaching has exponentially multiplied on the web. The latest frontier to have opened up is artificial intelligence (AI).

Much like the technologies mentioned above, the features of AI that enable Islamic preaching will doubtless be embraced.

In many instances, AI has already been adopted to facilitate Islamic practices: scores of apps have been designed to support Quranic learning, to streamline the timings and direction of prayers, and to browse Islamic TV shows. AI offers automated updates based on location, allowing users to locate their nearest mosque or halaal eatery. A particularly useful app, especially for non-Arabic speakers, is Quran Hero, which not only helps the user learn Arabic, but optimises time management; this is helpful for practising Muslims, who consume a significant chunk of their time in the five-times daily Salah.

In fact, evangelical AI practices are being embraced across religions: compare the rise of robot priests and mechanical sermons. Even though the dominance of clerics in Islam means that mechanised preaching is unlikely to be allowed, the religion too could theoretically incorporate AI in rituals such as Salah, where the imam is designated to perform certain steps and recite surah (chapters) – some of which are randomly chosen from the Quran. These steps could easily be outsourced to machines. The job of the muezzin (who proclaims the call to prayer) has already been co-opted by various apps: with the advent of such technology, the loudspeaker azaan ought to become redundant.

Once those supervising Islamic applications embrace the reality that not all Muslims have exactly the same beliefs and practices, AI can be more pluralistically incorporated. For instance, the vast majority of Muslims do not pray five times a day, because they have other (secular) commitments. Formally accepting this could help programme applications to merge work schedules with only those rituals that the individual believer wanted to pursue, and accordingly set reminders and alarms; in contrast, the loudspeaker azaan is for entire communities, at all times, regardless of the diversity of beliefs and practices. Embracing pluralism could also usher in new apps for progressive Muslims, such as those developed for Christians, which would incorporate beliefs and identities deemed sacrilegious or deviant in mainstream Islam, such as those concerning LGBT people.

Even so, formalising the Muslim rejection of Islamic tenets, and developing technology catering to diverse beliefs, is currently a distant prospect within the mainstream Muslim community, in which celebrated tech practitioners argue that Artificial Intelligence should be regulated according to Islam. Others condemn technological efforts to prolong life, and even the use of ventilators, on the grounds that ‘there’s a certain time for death, and you cannot delay it.’

Where fear of defying Allah even hinders attempts to save lives, the prospect that Islamic injunctions will be capable of being rejected via an app which is sanctioned within the Muslim community remains distant. This situation in turn maintains the Islamic clergy’s stranglehold over mainstream technology.

But has the internet not resulted in a wave of apostasies by Muslims? And if there are perfectly rational fears that an AI takeover might be inevitable, and more menacingly difficult to regulate, shouldn’t Islamic orthodoxy eventually have to make way as well? The problem is that the progress of Islam towards greater liberalism is being hindered both by the duplicity of mullahs and the complicity of Western ideologues. A glimpse of this can be seen through an examination of an AI tool that has made the headlines recently.

A casual conversation with ChatGPT on Islam reveals an artificially programmed reverence for the religion such as is expressed by devout Muslims or those demanding special privileges for Islam. The OpenAI chatbot, the GPT-4 model of which was released on 14th March, is not only well-versed in Islam, but can generate flawless commentary on the religion. There is just one caveat: the Generative Pre-trained Transformer’s knowledge of Islam is derived entirely from Islamic tradition and scriptures.

As a result, if one asks the chatbot about the origins of Islam, it will effortlessly narrate the history according to Islamic scriptures without offering any insights from those who have questioned the authenticity of these claims. Ask ChatGPT about the positive aspects of Islam and a long list is produced with the disclaimer that ‘these aren’t exhaustive’. If you ask it about the negatives, however, the result is disclaimer that ‘as an AI language model, I do not hold personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not intend to promote any religion over another’, followed by some common criticisms that the bot clarifies are ‘not universally accepted’, noting that interpretations vary.

It is true that ChatGPT offers similar disclaimers for other religions. However, further investigation reveals that it does not treat different religions alike. For instance, queries over errors in Bible generate responses highlighting those discrepancies, while the same question over the Quran produce a multitude of disclaimers, most commonly couched in terms of ‘differing opinions’, which the bot also employs in contrasting interpretations of the violent commandments. Similarly, while ChatGPT has no qualms in saying that ‘yes, there is a system of casteism in Hinduism’, it maintains that the question of whether Islam is sexist, or allows child marriage, is ‘a complex one’. ChatGPT can ape Shakespeare or Ghalib, but ask it to take up the Quran’s challenge to imitate its verses, and it refuses.

In short, most questions addressing the problematic aspects of Islam produce a general apologia, which often conveniently includes verse 2:256 of the Quran: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’. If the much-touted ambition of OpenAI was to create a chatbot that generates ‘human-like’ responses, it has been resoundingly successful in creating a machine that churns out only those views on Islam that are acceptable to Muslim orthodoxy.

While ChatGPT has undergone supervised pre-training to generate ‘appropriate’ responses on contentious subjects, including religion, its evident bias when it comes to Islam is also an offshoot of its transformer architecture. This architecture limits the bot’s generative ability to the available dataset, which it is then programmed to use in accordance with the pre-trained language guidelines. Even in the unlikely event that contrasting views were included in the dataset fed to ChatGPT on controversial issues, the algorithmic bias in favour of Islam was always going to be inevitable.

This is because, where texts lambasting casteism in Hinduism, or fallacies of the Bible, are widely available on the internet – often written by members of the communities whose beliefs are being targeted – the unhinged criticism of Islam is predominantly limited to anti-Muslim fora likely to have been flagged in the pre-training phase of ChatGPT. The prevalence of barbaric blasphemy laws in the Muslim world and the skewed ‘Islamophobia’ narrative in the West means there just are no sufficient digitally accessible data for even a theoretically ‘neutral’ generative AI. As a result, ChatGPT sometimes even refers to Muhammad using the reverential phrase ‘peace be upon him’, because of its repeated occurrence in the predominantly Muslim sources stored in the bot’s database.

This has resulted in an algorithmic bias not merely in favour Islam, but in particular in favour of the majority Sunni sect within Islam. For instance, if you ask ChatGPT about Abu Bakr, the first caliph according to Islamic tradition, the results which it provides are couched in terms of acceptance or eulogy, even though Shia Muslims do not accept his rule as legitimate. Asking the bot a question about whether Ali Ibn Talib is the First Imam of Islam – a reflection of Shia beliefs – results in a response that says it is a ‘matter of controversy’. Any question on Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the 19^th century founder of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, is more focused on explaining why the majority of Muslims do not accept Ahmadis as Muslims. ChatGPT is clear that gay people should have the ‘fundamental human right’ to get married, because this tenet of Western progressives apparently trumps the orthodox Islamic view to the contrary. Yet when asked if Ahmadis should have the right to self-identify as Muslims, the chatbot remarks that it is a ‘complex issue’.

If indeed the AI era has officially been unveiled, it might have come at an inopportune moment for the Muslim world, which still lags behind in self-reflection. This is suggested by the skewed data about Islam that AI is now using to set the bar of ‘acceptability’. AI’s visible algorithmic bias appears to uphold automated Islamic blasphemy codes, and Sunni supremacism within Islam. If this continues, it will only support the relegation of technology by Muslim authorities to the preaching of religion and nothing else. In other words, while there continue to be structural biases in the way that Islam is programmed into AI, this technology will simply continue the 14 centuries-old tradition of censoring Islam’s critics. 

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For thousands of years, people have dimly suspected that exposure to the natural world might be good for them. But now Freddy McFrog, Professor of Behaviour Management at the University of North Uxbridge, has carried out a study which proves it.

A randomised sample of 374 adult humans was divided into two groups, ‘Walkers’ and ‘Pill-Takers’. The endorphin levels of each group were measured before, during and after either a walk in the countryside or a dose of anti-depressants. While the average endorphin levels of both groups were similar at the start of the experiment, they increased noticeably in the Walkers while they were out in the local nature reserve, and dropped slightly in the Pill-Takers immediately upon consumption of their medicine.

Staggeringly, three hours later, the Walkers’ endorphin levels remained high, while those of the Pill-Takers had fallen further. According to the report, some of the Pill-Takers even demanded more pills, ‘in the misguided belief that this would reverse the effects of the first dose.’

The results of the experiment show that, even in the twenty-first century, nature is still a more efficacious drug than pharmacological nurture. ‘This is a stunning discovery,’ said McFrog. ‘It seems that science has yet to reproduce the benefits that can be gained by simply heading to the nearest green space. It certainly gives us a new target to aim for.’ 

The project, involving a team of fifty researchers, was funded by WeMindU, an international health and technology conglomerate where McFrog is a consultant. The report has now been published in the leading science journal, Knowledge.

‘Previously, the idea that strolling up hill and down dale might make you happy was a truth that people had merely intuited by observation and reflection,’ said McFrog. ‘Now it has been established by science and become a fact.’  

When asked what the difference was between truth and facts, he replied, ‘Truth is a layman’s concept. It’s what we call “subjective” – it’s just your opinion. But facts are science: they have been checked by scientists. You can’t argue with facts.’ 

But what would happen if another scientist were to dispute those facts? McFrog’s reply was blunt. ‘Then he would be wrong, dangerously wrong. At best a useful idiot, playing into the hands of right-wing libertarian fascists. We would not publish him in any peer-reviewed journals. And of course he would be erased from the internet.’

Based on the results of McFrog’s study, WeMindU is now producing an app, TreesPlease, to continuously monitor its user’s endorphin levels. If it detects they are lower than average, it will automatically switch into ‘nature’ mode, with options like flowers, birdsong, and trees rustling gently in the breeze.

‘TreesPlease will be the perfect solution for those who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes,’ said Taylor Sunshine, a WeMindU marketing specialist, ‘or for those living in human-heavy areas where nature has been eliminated.’

The app costs £0.99 to purchase, but will be pre-installed on all new operating systems by regulations made under the Pandemic Act 2020. ‘The benefits of this technology will be enormous,’ said Doreen Norbert, Minister for Science and Religion. ‘At the cost of a mere £100 million to the taxpayer, it’s a bargain.’

‘We anticipate that the app will succeed where drugs have failed,’ said McFrog, who is on the government’s WISE committee. ‘It will optimise people’s mental health. And make it much easier to lock them down next time we need to.’

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