Never Make the Nerd King
Keep the nerd in the basement
This is the first of a series of three essays critiquing some specific perspectives on how our society has been viewing AI. Look for the next one in a week. -J. H. Guy
These last five years with Artificial Intelligence has felt a bit to me like when you’re at a party and someone’s nerdy or homeschooled cousin shows up and starts talking incessantly about their specific interest. And this specific interest is how they figured out how to make a program that fulfills their need for friends, so they don’t even have the need of being at this party with all of us. He looks you in the eye when he says this. For some reason he seems very interested in “helping” all of us get our own programs. You can tell this is the only path this poorly socialized little weirdo knows of to build friendships with others. You all politely hold your silence even though you’re all thinking this and hoping the host will bring up some positive quality about his relative to divert the conversation.
But then the nerd continues saying how one day he is gonna put the program in some robots and have it be a bunch of little slaves for him, doing all of his chores. Most of you privately thank God that a childishly tyrannical, lazily domineering, and power hungry little soul like this should be kept mostly harmless in this skinny-fat body type with low respiratory strength due to poor nasal construction. He’s still monologuing about the chores he would have his robot slaves do like cleaning the orange color off the toilet, getting stains out of tighty-whiteys, and vacuuming those annoying cereal dust pieces out of his nice recliner. And no one needs to say out loud why it’s funny he gave those specific examples. Ya’ll just have to stifle your laughs into your drinks with covert cough-splutters and pity the poor sap for having neither friends nor discipline.
In fact, this lonely nerdy wannabe dictator is so confident in this program that he has struck up a relationship with it. He says he is no longer on the dating market any more.
No one has the heart to tell him he never was.
He starts to say something about eighty percent of intimacy being verbal rather than- and it’s at that point the host takes him to the side, probably to ask him if he’s okay. More likely it is to beg him to go back to the guest room and keep his specific interest in there, instead of making the rest of the party deal with it.
This is how the Tech Bros, the Tech Overlords, the CEOs of our various corporate monopolies have come off to me for the past five years. I really wish someone would take them aside and help them do something useful with their specific interest, but since they won’t be reading this, I will address ya’ll, my dear readers, instead.
The problem with products that say it can be anything you dream of is usually that it is too good to be true. This is how the AI companies are marketing AI to the average individual, as a pill that will remove your need for dieting and working out. We know how those go don’t we?
AI is not being advertised to the individual. It is propaganda for the individual. It is advertising for corporations. It is a B2B product, not a B2C product.1 Its creators propound AI will create efficiency, discovery, and innovation, anything a CEO desires for his company, but most especially… it will increase profits. It will also allow the CEO to “let go” of current employees allowing him to keep even more of those profits in his adorable little dragon claws2 (not that he intended to really raise wages/salaries anyway, but by cutting those positions he can keep prices the same and absorb said salaries).
This is the purpose of the wide-scale social media and podcast marketing and otherwise: to sell a poorly thought out product to other businesses in the pursuit of monetary gain. Like the poorly socialized nerd at the party, the AI Developers and Transhumanists are championing AI as the next great invention of humanity, as a tool for all. Remember when we didn’t have fire? Now we have AI.
Excepting that AI will be controlled by its creators and governments. It’s really a service that we may have access to if they so desire to let us have it. And then when AI replaces all of us at our jobs they will take the surplus income generated and give all of us Universal Basic Income. Except the problem there… is that UBI is just that same arrangement under another form, that you may have access to if the distributors of it so desire to let you have it. They are taking away your responsibility for yourself as a cover for taking away resources and any chance at self-sufficiency and agency.
They wrongly fantasize about giving AI agency as they take away yours.
Just because they aren’t directly taking away the general populace’s resources under the name of “progress”, does not mean they aren’t indirectly securing them for themselves at a later date through a careful business strategy.
I do not believe that AI and its basement brat begetters are a new problem in and of themselves, but rather a symptom of an old Modern World problem. That problem is the loose amalgamation of ills known as materialism, capitalism, and the pus-excreting toad they birthed together: GDP Worship.
“GDP Go Up” has been worshipped for the economy at the expense of the country. It has been pursued for individual shareholders at the expense of individuals trying to share and hold this land with each other, at this point just to survive in 2026 Year of Our Lord.
This problem runs deep in any Modern Country, certainly in the Western World, but for the purpose of speaking to my own people I will center this essay on the Americans. The aforementioned ills have come together to create a specific problem we have been dealing with at least since the industrial revolution: viewing people as a resource to use when needed, instead of viewing people as valuable because of their God-given dignity and as necessary individuals of your community that are to be guided through their development to be useful and resource producing members of it. Put plainly, just because the work that needs to be done changes, does not mean your community changes.
Why does our nerd at the party, our silicon valley neighbors, put forward AI as a person replacement tool? Why do corporations view this not as an opportunity to free up their community from monotonous work, and use the extra resources to train said community, to take on the new emerging tasks, the changing work?3
All of my answers to that would just be aspersions on the character of AI true-believers and Corporate types.4
That being said we must continue diagnosing this problem: The desire for complete subsistence on technology to reach self-reliance is the pride of thinking as a human you don’t need community. It also ignores that you are in a community whether you like it or not. I doubt Mark Zuckerberg would be able to fulfill his life’s dream of making spyware for his fellows on a deserted island. I doubt Bill Gates would be able to fulfill his life’s dream of creating viruses and delivering the cure to them if he didn’t have anyone to give them to, (computers I mean, computers). I doubt Elon Musk would be able to fulfill his life’s dream of being Noah in space without a gaggle of girlies and subsequent community safety-net structures to jettison them and their offspring into with care packages. I doubt any of them will be able to do this from their bunkers. I doubt any of these Tech Lords will be able to do this with each other after they crawl out from their bunkers and are left… with only each other. If you want to have fun on the playground, you have to learn how to play nice with others. You need willing participants.
Another aspect to this issue is the obsession with specialization. This can be seen in how many doctors think they could heal the whole body merely by healing the organ they specialize in, or removing the one that causes their beloved one problems. Specialists expecting the future to always cater and conform to their need for their trade is another symptom of this problem of how Americans view work and community.
The tech bros are this at large. None of them have considered that we could just… not make AI, or not make it in the way that gives them steady reliable profits from corporations. Or only make it as a defense weapon against other countries.
They have made a product and they are going to sell it.
They have to have a return on their investment, regardless of whether AI benefits the good of the American people. GDP Go Up, profits go up, the primary concern is the shareholder. If you look at it too closely, of if you take a far enough step back, you can see that this situation takes on the form of a Corporations and their Shareholders living in community together, a community distinctly separate from the people that work for them. The direction our American society has been going has been dancing around the line of another slave class. No Christian can believe that is good.
Unemployment itself is a sign of a hostile society. So many vagrants are created specifically because of the isolating nature of our American society; that one is only valued because he works, rather than that because one has value, he is given work. I understand that the counter to this, is that most vagrants are certainly unemployable due to mental conditions, vice and character, and I agree. But the problem was created further up the chain with their fathers and grandfathers. The aristocracy in America failed them a long time ago, by slowly cutting them out of prosperity and opportunity, instead of looking at them and their children as brothers in Christ. It was their responsibility at least to protect, if not to contribute directly5 toward their development toward a fellow contributor and wealth generator in society. I dare say if we continue with this spirit only more people will be isolated from society.
American society is now at a very dangerous turning point; the loan from the industrial revolution may finally come due. The amount of people being disenfranchised by individualistic profiteering “inventors”, shareholders and corporate monopolies is growing to a staggering number. That number may not put up with this soft genocide forever. They may be content with slavery, UBI, impotent democracy, that’s certainly a good bet, although a morally reprehensible one. But this is what happens when you make the poorly socialized nerd from the basement King. He hasn’t been shown that his very bunker is protected by the very house above he is trying to dismantle.
The next essay in this series critiquing AI will deal with AI and the performing arts. Will place a button for it here.
In the meantime you could share with a friend, or maybe a Nerd who would be King:
Or you could
And you also might be interested in this fiction novel I wrote about AI. “In a future where androids running on an A.I. algorithm have been given citizenship, one human man realizes he doesn’t know a single other human being, and sets off to find one.”
If you would like to see what other films, novels, short stories and essays Statia Studio has to offer, please check us out here:
B2B=Business to Business, B2C=Business to Consumer
“adorable little Sméagol hands” also feels fitting
For that matter, why have they been so eager to fire employees just at the prospect of what they have been told AI will do? Were most of these corporations losing income? I don’t know, but I would guess most likely not.
Of course, aspersions can be true.
Faceless charity programs is not contributing directly. Face to face helping our neighbors is.
Brilliantly written. We need to get back to Christian roots and seeing our fellow man as our fellow man.
Currently, the AI tech bros and their handlers are less surgeons and more like hospital administrators who keep someone on life support to keep collecting bills.