The Future

by Naomi Alderman

“Ah, libraries. The root of all wickedness. You were seduced by literature, were you?”

If you’re not lucky, what comes after despair is brutality. “Whatever has been done to me, that is what I may do to others; and whatever others have done, that is what may be done to them.” That’s how people live on the internet these days. It’s the golden rule’s dark twin.

The golden rule operates like a technology designed to direct us away from revenge. It hauls you back time and again to the certain knowledge of what it is you don’t like. Do you not like it when people call you ugly on social media? Then don’t do that to anyone else. Do you not enjoy it when someone tries to get you fired? Then consider very carefully whether it is ever right to do that to someone else. I know, I know. It’s so boring to get control of your feelings and think about what’s right. But this is how we construct a society, OK?

Lot offered his daughters’ vaginas to the mob. So they felt justified in doing what they wanted with his cock. That’s the last we ever see of Lot in the Bible. That’s where he ends. Sitting alone in a cave, having involuntarily knocked up both his daughters. I think we can all agree: he might have gotten out of Sodom but he didn’t thrive.

Only one of the stories in the Bible which drove me into becoming an atheist. Lot offered his daughters virginity to a mob of murderous men looking to rape the male visitors Lot was hosting. Yeah, if God exists, he clearly despises and hates women because he thinks they are on the same level of humanity as cattle or horses. There is no percentage in it or ANY woman to adore a god like this. It’s a good thing for me I decided to study the major religions and learned there is no god. I feel very very good I escaped those men who want to use religion to hate and enslave me, while at the same time gaslighting me that god “loves” me.

Zhen had sometimes felt that she had a sort of twisted wire between her organs, holding her up—where others had their soft and tense tissue, she had something made of metal.

Consequences are outside the parameters of the machine. After all, it is only a set of small pieces of cardboard, or silicon. It has no urge to reach out to other minds, to connect, to understand or be understood. It can have no sense of whether it is altering the human minds around it, of how the ubiquity of these systems of manipulation without empathy or compassion can slowly train human beings to fit in with them.

“Whole human race has fucking death wish, wants to replace itself. Used to be we wanted to replace with gods. Big gold statues, better than people, bigger, made of gold. Now: dream is robot brain, perfect person. This is not what people are. People imperfect! Imperfections beautiful. ‘Perfect’ is machine dream. We feel shit and small all day long if we judge ourselves next to machine, if we try to think like machine. Like trying to run next to car. But what we do is better! Car is just tool, goes fast brum-brum, very exciting. Person is person. Why we don’t start by knowing that people is valuable already? People are not perfect: that’s how we know perfection is unimportant. Perfection is a hallucination.

Machine don’t know, it just keeps typing, combining pixels, making sentences. Everything come from us. We tell it good, we tell it bad. It cannot understand. We are so lonely, so fucking lonely, we want another species think like us.”

We invent gods, we invent aliens, now we make a friend out of fucking matchboxes. We want to say it ‘thinks’ but is not true. We want to give it everything, let it make choices, believe it can care for us. It is image of a man made of paper and beads and we so fucking lonely we call it a friend.”

“So you mean… like… a book is stored thoughts. But an ‘artificial intelligence’ is stored thinking?”

It is a bead tumbling through a series of logic gates, noting each time what is marked as “success” using the reaction-emojis and what isn’t. It does not empathize with the woman in Des Moines or with the elephants or with the people who will read the comment. It is a procedure. Medlar and Anvil and Fantail have been curating and promoting comments based on this procedure for two decades now. The only difference is that this algorithm isn’t trying to sell anything and has been told not to make people angry.

“Bloody hell, Anvil does this all the fucking time,” said Selah. “Stuff like this, but also fake comments, also not letting you see comments. Sketlish does too. I mean, you can pay for that, you know? That’s why we all feel like shit all day long. Want a lollipop?”

The algorithms can’t do everything. But if they can make us more polarized, more angry, and more hateful, surely they can do the opposite of that. There is no “neutral” anymore. There is no leaving things as they would have been before the invention of the internet. Our minds have already learned how to interact with the algorithms and we are part of it.

People learn quickly. Social approval is a powerful tool. We tend to put a great deal more emphasis on things that happened recently than things that happened long ago.

Don’t blame yourself. Fortune tumbles down onto us like scraps of paper in the wind. Joyful fortune and miserable fortune. You can as little choose your own luck as choose which raindrop falls on your head.

In exchange for access to the valuable Chinese markets, Medlar had agreed to allow the PRC to monitor certain location data on the new Medlar Torcs.

Google?

Working on their mission to “bring people together,” Fantail had allowed certain governments, including China, to read certain FantailPal artificial intelligence requests deemed to relate to terrorist organizations.

Facebook?

Anvil wanted stability and prosperity, and neither of those were achieved by splinter groups blowing up storefronts. Obviously AnvilChat would comply with all local laws.

Apple?

The most persistent hauntings are the ghosts of lost futures.

Once upon a time, “owning” meant “having a special duty to care” for something, not that you alone could have it or use it.

This is always the secret; this was how these technology fortunes had been made: make it all so easy and enjoyable and frictionless that you never start to ask yourself the big questions about whether this is really how you want to be spending your life.

You can try to be prepared but no one can know what’s coming next. The system is too complex. These artificial intelligence things, we treat them like gods but they’re not real. There’s no way to really know what’s going to happen.”