Capitalism’s Failure Of The Flesh: The Rise
Of The Robots
By Phil Rockstroh
December 09, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Humankind, being an inherently tool-making
species, has always been in a relationship
with technology. Our tools, weapons,
machines, and appliances are crucial to
forging the cultural criteria of human life.
At present, amid the technology created
phantomscape of mass media’s lurid — yet
somehow sterile — imagery, one can feel as
if one’s mind is in danger of being churned
to spittle.
On a
personal note, an informal consensus has
formed among my friends who share a passion
for reading: We read far fewer books since
the time we became enmeshed with the
internet. Worse, we find the feelings of
isolation that we have attempted to mitigate
by an immersion in online activity, at best,
provides only a palliative effect. Yet, in
the manner of addiction — or a hopeless love
affair — we are prone to trudge deeper into
the psychical morass by further immersion
into the very source that is exacerbating
our feelings of unease and ennui.
Yet we
insist on remaining mentally epoxied to
electronic appliances, as the oceans of our
technology besieged planet die, as the
atmosphere is choked with heat-holding
greenhouse gas emissions, and, as a result,
exquisite, living things disappear forever.
Therefore, it is crucial to explore why we
are so isolated from each other but so
connected to our devices, and are married to
the belief system that misinforms us,
technology can and will lift us from our
increasingly perilous predicament. When
reality dictates, if the past remains
prologue, a fetishising of technology will
further enslave us in a de facto
techno-dystopia. A reassessment, for
numerous reasons, of the relationship
between humankind and technology must come
to pass.
Moreover, the reevaluation must include
machines, at present and in the future, we
have created in our own image. For example,
those such as IA technologies, that on an
increasing basis, will cause a significant
number of the workforce to be rendered
idle.
Of
course, it is a given, bottomline obsessives
that they are, capitalists crave to replace
workers with an automated labor force. The
parasitic breed has always viewed workers as
flesh machines, of whom, they were
inconvenienced by having to pay wages.
Capitalism is, by its very nature,
dehumanising. From the advent of the
industrial/capitalist epoch, the system has
inflicted mass alienation, societal
atomisation, and anomie. Moreover, the vast
wealth inequity inherent to the system
allows the capitalist elite to own the
political class — a mindless clutch of
flunkies who might as well be robots
programmed by the capitalist order to serve
their agendas.
The
question is, what effect will the nature of
being rendered superfluous to the prevailing
order have on the powerless masses — who
have, up until now, been kept in line by
economic coercion, by meretricious,
debt-incurring consumer bribes, and by mass
media indoctrination and pop culture
anaesthesia? Will consumers continue to
insist that their mental chains are the very
wings of freedom?
Yet
the Age Of Mass Mechanisation carries the
potential to bestow an era of liberty,
artistic exploration, scientific inquiry,
intellectual fervour, the pursuit of
soul-making, and inspired leisure. Or the
polar shift in cultural raison d'etre might
inflict a crisis of identity so harrowing
that demagogues rise and despots promise to
seed a new order but harvest the corpses of
dissidents and outsiders.
A
couple of weeks back, during a visit to a
neighbourhood playground with my four year
old, I had a conversation with an executive
on voluntary leave from her management
position at BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke).
She was grousing about a infestation of
seaweed choking the beaches of the Florida
Keys she had encountered on a recent
excursion to the US. When I averred the
phenomenon of the warming oceans of the
planet, the progenitor of the exponential
growth of the sea flora she had been
troubled by, was caused, in large measure,
by the very socio-economic-cultural dynamic
that financed her trip to Florida in the
first place…well, it put a crimp in the
conversation.
It can
be unsettling to be confronted with one’s
complicity in the ills of a system that, by
its very nature, provides camouflage to its
perpetrators — the big bosses, down to its
functionaries, and foot soldiers. Soon, she,
by a series of subtle moves, extricated
herself from the conversation — and I cannot
say I blame her. I myself experienced
discomfort by the thought of the discomfort
I inflicted on her. Therefore, as a general
rule, under the tyranny of amiability, which
is the rule of the day of the present order,
one is tempted to avoid trespassing into the
comfort zones that aid in enabling the
status quo.
Yet we
are faced with the following imperative: The
system and its machines must begin to serve
humanity, as opposed to what has been the
case since the advent of the
industrial/technological age: the mass of
humanity serving the machine. Therefore,
there must arrive a paradigmatic shift in
metaphors and the ethos of the era e.g., a
renunciation of the soul-decimating concept
of human beings as flesh machines — who
must, for the sake of monomaniacal
profiteering, divorce themselves from human
feeling, as well as, must forgo exploration,
enthusiasm, and craft in the pursuit of
expediency.
We do
have a choice in the matter, all indications
to the contrary. Yet, in the prevailing
confusion regarding what ethos should guide
our relationship to technology, we are
confronted with phenomenon such as the
situation chronicled in a recent article in
The Guardian. Headlined: “The Sex Robots Are
Coming: seedy, sordid – but mainly just
sad"
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/nov/25/sex-robots-are-coming-seedy-sordid-sad?CMP=fb_gu
Regarding the supercilious nature of the
headline, wouldn’t it be more propitious for
all concerned to ask and explore why, under
the present order, men are so alienated,
socially awkward and lonely, as opposed to
lapsing into all the predictable moral
panic, wit-deficient snark, and supercilious
value judgements these sorts of stories
evoke?
Isn’t being attracted to consumer goods what it is all about, identity-wise, under the present order? Don’t customers demand that the de facto slaves of the service industry evince the demeanour of compliant androids? Isn’t it a given that the underclass workforce, holders of service industry jobs, will soon be replaced by robots? Do we not worship and are ruled by the gospel of the cult of efficiency?
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Withal, for the present order to be
maintained, it is crucial for the general
public to remain both alienated thus using
consumerism as a palliative, and that
includes the production and retailing of
sexualised, simulacrum appliances that mimic
sex partners and the psychical release valve
of finger-wagging, easy virtue and shallow
vitriol aimed at the poor sods who seek
comfort from them.
Addendum: I'm much more mortified by
robotics designed for surveillance and war
than for one's designed for simulacrumatic
sex. I'm simply beastly that way.
Robots can be programmed to simulate copulation but it is doubtful that machines can be tuned and tweaked to experience the manifold, complex states of being that define human consciousness and its innate ability for self expression, for example, the ability to express themselves by means of spontaneous generated metaphors. While it is true, AI technologies can mimic forms of poetic and artistic expression but, in any honest account of the processes they utilise, machines engage in the activity sans a depth of feeling, the facility to evince empathy and the ability to access imagination i.e., the phenomenon we human beings term soulfulness. Sans the ineffable quality of soul, AI entities, as is the case with our present information technology, will contribute the palliative, yet inherently alienating, effects inherent to our hyper-commodified era.
In
contrast, writers/artists/activists must
proceed to dangerous places. It is
imperative that they descend into the danger
zone known as the soul. The soul is not a
realm inhabited by weightless beings
radiating beatific light. Rather, it is a
landscape of broken, wounded wanderers;
inchoate longing; searing lamentation; the
confabulations of imperfect memory; of
rutting and rage; transgression; depression;
fragmented language; and devouring darkness.
The
reductionist metaphors inherent to the age
of mechanisation — which limn human beings
in mechanised, commodified terms — as
opposed to the organic, unfolding pantheon
composed of needs, longings and desires we
are — inflicts not only alienation from our
fellow human beings but from our essential
natures. In our misery and confusion, we
have bloated our bodies, maimed and poisoned
the earth, and scoured the hours of our
lives of meaning by the compulsive
commodification of all things. Therefore it
should not come as a surprise when
alienated, lonely men become enamoured of
glambots.
We
have delivered insult after insult to the
soul of the world, and yet it loves us with
an abiding and bitter grace. The question
remains, do we love it in turn, and deeply
enough, to mount a resistance to the present
order thus turn the tide against the
love-bereft forces responsible for the
wholesale destruction of both landscape and
soulscape.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living, now, in Munich, Germany. He may be contacted: philrockstroh.scribe@gmail.com and at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh
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