Ghosts in the Machine: Shoveling the Shit with Pluto in Aquarius
AI is feeding us back parts of our lives that are the equivalent of a modern-day ghost story. AI is not the future. It's the end of the past.
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“Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.” —John Gray
BIG TECH IS DETERMINED THAT you will engage with AI and allow it to become intimately entwined with your life. And you will like it, goddammit.
Every single facet of the internet is thrusting AI into whatever activity you’re attempting to accomplish. Chat with a friend? Allow the AI assistant to recompose your message. Send a photo to someone? AI can recreate the image as a novelty. Writing a novel? Prompt AI with some basic plot points, and it will generate the narrative for you. Have a catchy chorus for a song? AI will bookend it with a verse and a bridge. And these are the more innocuous, titillating options. But all of this is the equivalent of an epic hustle.
As Ted Goia points out in The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public, the majority of individuals do not want this shit. I mean, look at the numbers:
All con jobs follow a checklist of identifiable stages. The mark must be led through a series of steps that “soften them up” and make them more pliable to suggestion. More critical, the essence of all con jobs requires a ‘secret’ of some kind to ignite magical thinking and diminish suspicion. You see this in its most idiotic form in the scores of ads that start off any YouTube video you want to watch: “This one secret trick with apple cider vinegar can change your life.”
AI knows things that you don’t know, and you’ll want to engage with and access them because, well, I dunno—I suppose because people are becoming more and more bored and exhausted from what’s left for them to explore that isn’t locked behind a website’s paywall. That leaves us with cat videos, celebrity scandals, Trumpian dystopia, and porn. Since its inception, the internet has thrived on people’s curiosity about their world. Websites used to offer us a sort of ‘hunter-gatherer’ approach to knowledge, but now AI can do all of that for you. All that’s required is your awe at its omnipotence. And never mind that it’s decimated the very containers that fed its initial foraging.
Like all secrets in a con game, we don’t notice the toxic fallout that occurs until once the jig is up. The promised breakthrough is more akin to a breakdown. And yet another time drain. Whenever I’ve experimented with AI, for, say, research of this or that. I often doubt the results I’ve been given. I’m aware of AI’s tendency to hallucinate when it can’t cough up the goods. This taints the engagement. And so I’m back to rummaging through websites or Wikipedia to be safe with what I’ve been ‘told.’
Science and technology evolve; human beings do not—except in their imagination. If Darwin taught us anything, it is that evolution is a drifty, unreliable thing; some species make wild leaps and ‘improve,’ while others inexplicably disappear. There are no favorites, no predesigned order—chaos is the bottom line, although humans have found novel ways to prevent themselves from seeing this truth. AI partakes of chaos as well, and in brand new ways—sometimes provoking psychotic breaks or other versions of hallucinations in individuals who have fallen under its spell.
So AI is the latest version of the techno-con. But as it’s poised today, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. It is a leviathan that’s about to breach the waters. This marks a stretch of time that corresponds to Pluto’s twenty-year transit through Aquarius. This Roto Rooter effect will expose the nefarious ways reality is being refashioned by Wall Street’s demand that tech provide the big payouts. And when the means (the new robots) fail to deliver, a more aggressive type of harvesting of personal data will follow. As will new ways of behavior modification and omnipresent spying. In that sense, AI is a sort of front to cover up the deeper, darker criminal activity.
Pluto’s transit through Aquarius is slowly excavating back into the culture the detritus of our past and offering it to us as something newfangled and shiny. Astrologers have been treating this transit as if it is the herald of the Aquarian Age, when really it is the opposite. The meat of the transit will manifest in areas that Pluto excels: those murky realms where big business, the dark web, organized crime, and the covert parts of government vie for control. This is hardly the enlightened part of the Aquarian vision.
The other night I was listening to a podcast with my favorite culture commentator and provocateur, Adam Curtis. At one point, while discussing AI, he said the quiet part out loud. I immediately replayed his comment because it mirrored in many ways my astrological thinking on the subject. Speaking about the ongoing invasion, Curtis noted that AI is:
“…the ghost of our time. Because what it does is it goes back and scrapes all of our past… it takes that up and it mashes it up into this complex thing, which then feeds itself back to us. They are actually taking our own past and haunting us with it in a strange way…telling us it’s new, but actually maybe [it’s] keeping us stuck in the past.”
With Neptune’s long transit, over the past fifteen years, through Pisces, the global culture was steeped in outworn motifs—politics, art, cinema, music, and fashion—all sorts of nostalgic narratives—through remakes, repeats, retreads, sequels, and prequels that never allowed our imagination to step into untried territory. Our cultural past (Pisces) had been commodified by media (Neptune) to suck dry whatever the ‘sure bets’ could (almost always) guarantee. “You liked this in the past, so you’ll like this reconfiguration into the present.”
And then, with Pluto’s entry into Aquarius, along came AI to recapitulate all of this over again, but in a much more personal and exhaustive way. Curtis continues:
“What AI is doing is taking it much further. It's actually going back to our own past. It's going back to our own images, our own language, the words we wrote, the phrases we wrote. Because out there in [social media’s] server farms are our feelings, written down in fragmentary form, little images, little moments—intense moments of fear and love. [AI is] scraping it all, putting it all together in some strange, almost cubist-like form, and playing back to us a world built out of that. And if I were to write a ghost story now, I would do it about that. We are haunted. It's the haunting. Which makes me suspect…that AI is not the future. It's the final end of the past. It’s the moment the past came for us and we will have to escape from it.”
As one commenter put it, “If the algorithm is a ghost built from our collective past, how do you perform an exorcism on a machine that knows you better than you know yourself?”