Acceptance is what they want you to feel.

I recently watched Lauren Celenza’s talk, Living Through an AI Takeover Without Losing Your Soul from Beyond Tellerrand conference. The title hooked me, mainly because the soul is precisely the thing I fear we’re in danger of losing from the things that many of us hold dear — music, art, hobbies, learning, meaningful work, human relationships. “Grief” is a word that increasingly comes up when talking about AI, and that resonates with me. To be clear, I am not grieving for an imagined, improbable future when super-intelligent machines wipe out humanity. I am grieving for the very real harms being caused by AI right now: harms to our planet, our creative industries, our shared notions of reality, our childrens’ brains. An insightful quote from Lauren’s presentation:

Can we call it intelligence if it’s built to ignore its own consequences?

The talk examines how we can bring human experience, creativity and meaning to this new AI-augmented world. It takes a pragmatic position that as humans all that we really have is the “here, now”, and describes several roles that humans can play that still demand creativity and human agency, that AI cannot (currently) do. This is good advice, and empowering in many ways. If we cannot change the here and now, perhaps we can at least carve out a place for ourselves within it where our human values mean something, where we have agency. As I was watching, however, I was struck by the conclusion that inevitably follows from this idea: that we need to accept this new reality as it is, to fit ourselves around it, slot neatly into its cracks. No doubt, this is the pragmatic view. Perhaps those of us still grieving what we’ve lost, what we’re still losing, do need to hasten ourselves into the “acceptance” stage, for the sake of our own sanity.

But acceptance is what they want you to feel.

Acceptance means you’ve stopped resisting. Accepting this new paradigm—this destructive, extractive, predatory paradigm—as inevitable is a dangerous position to be in. It puts the onus on you, the worker, the compliant member of society to fit into the box that capitalism has built for you so that a few billionaires can continue to accumulate wealth and power, increase inequality and destroy the planet. No one asked for this.

I am not at the acceptance stage yet. I am not willing to accept the crumbs offered by capitalism, by these rich men’s visions of the future. I don’t know exactly what resistance looks like, but it begins by refusing to accept their terms, and their tools. I will continue to resist as best I can, even if it may be ultimately futile. I agree with the premise of the talk: we need human values, human connections more than ever. But we need them on our own terms, not those of the billionaires.