Cabinet of Horrors

Rise of the machines and the seizure of power by artificial intelligence. A world of total surveillance and social control. Nuclear war and the degeneration of civilization. Many dark visions of the future, drawn many years ago, should have happened today. And meanwhile we look back and it seems that they were not there. Are you sure?

There is a fairly stereotypical repertoire of popular dystopian prophecies (about the black vision of the future). In addition to the most common ones associated with the destruction of the natural environment and resources, it is widely believed that the latest technologies are damaging interpersonal communication, relationships and society.

Virtual space will deceptively replace real participation in the world. Other dystopian views see technological development as a way of increasing social inequality, concentrating power and wealth in the hands of small groups. The high demands of modern technology concentrate knowledge and skills in narrow circles of privileged individuals, increase surveillance of people and destroy privacy.

According to many futurists, higher productivity and greater visible choice can harm the quality of human life by causing stress, endangering jobs, and making us increasingly materialistic about the world.

One of the famous technological "dystopians", James Gleick, gives a seemingly trivial example of a TV remote control as a classic invention that does not solve a single significant problem, giving rise to many new ones. Gleick, quoting a technical historian Edward Tenner, writes that the ability and ease of switching channels using the remote control primarily serves to distract the viewer more and more.

Instead of satisfaction, people are increasingly dissatisfied with the channels they watch. Instead of meeting the needs, there is a feeling of endless disappointment.

Will cars keep us on reservations?

Will we be able to control this thing that is inevitable and probably coming soon? Over artificial intelligence? If this is to be the case, as many dystopian visions proclaim, then no. (1)

It is difficult to control something that is many times stronger than us. with an increase in the number of tasks. Twenty years ago, no one would have believed that they could read emotions in a person's voice and face much more accurately than we can do it ourselves. Meanwhile, the currently trained algorithms are already capable of doing this, analyzing facial expressions, timbre and the way we speak.

Computers draw pictures, compose music, and one of them even won a poetry contest in Japan. They have been beating people at chess for a long time, learning the game from scratch. The same applies to the much more complex game of Go.

it obeys the laws of ever faster acceleration. What AI has achieved - with the help of humans - over the past decades will double in the next few years, maybe just months, and then it will take only weeks, days, seconds ...

As it turned out recently, the algorithms used in smartphones or at airports to analyze photos from ubiquitous cameras can not only recognize someone in different frames, but also determine exclusively intimate psychological features. To say that this is a huge privacy risk is like saying nothing. This is not about simple surveillance, watching every step, but about information that arises as a result of the very appearance of a person, about his hidden desires and personal preferences. 

Algorithms can learn this relatively quickly by analyzing hundreds of thousands of cases, which is far more than even the most astute person can see in a lifetime. Armed with such a wealth of experience, they are able to scan a person more accurately than even the most experienced psychologist, body language and gesture analyst.

So the real chilling dystopia is not that computers play chess or go against us, but that they can see our soul deeper than anyone other than ourselves, full of prohibitions and blocks in recognizing those or other inclinations.

Elon Mask believes that as AI systems begin to learn and reason on an ever-increasing scale, “intelligence” may develop somewhere deep in web layers, imperceptible to us.

According to an American study published in 2016, in the next 45 years, artificial intelligence has a 50 percent chance of surpassing humans in all tasks. Forecasters say that yes, AI will solve the problem of cancer, improve and speed up the economy, provide entertainment, improve the quality and duration of life, educate us so that we cannot live without it, but it is possible that one day, without hatred, only for based on logical calculation, it just removes us. Maybe it will not work physically, because in each system it is worth saving, archiving and storing resources that “might come in handy someday”. Yes, this is the resource we can be for AI. Protected manpower?

Optimists console themselves with the fact that there is always the opportunity to pull the plug out of the socket. However, everything is not so simple. Already, human life has become so dependent on computers that a radical step against them would be a disaster for us.

After all, we are increasingly creating AI-based decision-making systems, giving them the right to fly planes, set interest rates, run power plants - we know that algorithms will do it much better than us. At the same time, we do not fully understand how these digital decisions are made.

There are fears that super-intelligent command systems such as "Reduce Congestion" may lead them to conclude that the only effective way to get the job done is to... reduce the population by a third or even half.

Yes, it is worth giving the machine the most important instruction like “First of all, save a human life!”. However, who knows whether then digital logic will lead to the imprisonment of mankind or under the barn, where we may be safe, but certainly not free.

Cybercrime as a service

In the past, dystopias and images of the post-apocalyptic world in literature and cinema were usually set in the post-nuclear era. Today, nuclear annihilation does not seem necessary for the catastrophe and destruction of the world as we know it, although not in the way we imagine it to be. , it is unlikely to destroy the world as in "Terminator", where it was combined with nuclear annihilation. If she did, she would not be a superintelligence, but a primitive force. After all, even mankind has not yet realized the global scenario of a devastating nuclear conflict.

A real machine apocalypse can be much less impressive.

Cyber ​​warfare, virus attacks, system hacking and ransomware, ransomware (2) paralyze and destroy our world no less effectively than bombs. If their scale expands, we may enter a phase of all-out total war in which we will become victims and hostages of machines, although they are not required to act autonomously, and it is possible that people will still be behind everything.

Last summer, the U.S. Cyber ​​Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) named ransomware attacks "the most visible cybersecurity threat."

CISA claims that many activities where a cybercriminal intercepts and encrypts a person's or organization's data and then extorts a ransom are never reported because the victim pays the cybercriminals and is unwilling to publicize problems with their insecure systems. On a micro level, cybercriminals often target older people who have trouble distinguishing between honest and dishonest content on the Internet. They do this with malware embedded in an email attachment or a pop-up on an infected website. At the same time, attacks on large corporations, hospitals, government agencies and governments are on the rise.

The latter were especially targeted because of the sensitive data they held and the ability to pay large ransoms.

Some information, such as health information, is much more valuable to the owner than others and can make criminals more money. Thieves can intercept or quarantine large blocks of clinical data important to patient care, such as test results or drug information. When life is at stake, there is no room for negotiation in the hospital. One of the American hospitals was closed permanently in November last year after the August terrorist attack.

It will probably only get worse over time. In 2017, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that cyberattacks could target critical infrastructure such as water utilities. And the tools needed to carry out such actions are increasingly available to smaller operators, to whom they sell ransomware bundles such as Cerber and Petya software and charge a ransom fee after successful attacks. Based on cybercrime as a service.

Dangerous disorder in the genome

One of the popular topics of dystopia is genetics, DNA manipulation and breeding of people - in addition, "programmed" in the right way (authorities, corporations, military).

The modern embodiment of these anxieties is a method of popularization CRISPR gene editing (3). The mechanisms it contains are primarily of concern. forcing desired functions in subsequent generations and their potential spread to the entire population. One of the inventors of this technique, Jennifer Doudna, even recently called for a moratorium on such "germ-line" editing techniques due to potentially disastrous consequences.

Recall that a few months ago, a Chinese scientist He Jiankui has been widely criticized for editing the genes of human embryos in order to immunize them against the AIDS virus. The reason was that the changes he made could be passed down from generation to generation with unpredictable consequences.

Of particular concern are the so-called d (gene rewriting, gene drive), i.e. a genetically engineered mechanism that encodes an editing system in the DNA of a given individual CRISPR/CAS9 genome with setting it to edit this variant of the unwanted gene. Due to this, the descendants automatically (without the participation of geneticists) overwrite the unwanted gene variant with the desired one.

However, an undesirable gene variant can be received by offspring "as a gift" from an unmodified other parent. So gene drive let's break Mendelian laws of hereditywhich say that half of the dominant genes goes to the offspring from one parent. In short, this will eventually lead to the spread of the gene variant in question to the entire population.

Biologist at Stanford University Christina Smolke, back at a panel on genetic engineering in 2016, warned that this mechanism could have harmful and, in extreme cases, horrifying consequences. The gene drive is able to mutate as it passes through the generations and cause genetic disorders such as hemophilia or hemophilia.

As we read in an article published in Nature Reviews by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, even if a drive works as intended in one population of an organism, the same hereditary trait can be harmful if it is somehow introduced into another. population. the same look.

There is also a danger that scientists create gene drives behind closed doors and without peer review. If someone intentionally or unintentionally introduces a harmful gene drive into the human genome, such as one that destroys our resistance to influenza, it could even mean the end of the homo sapiens species…

Surveillance capitalism

A version of dystopia that former science fiction writers could hardly have imagined is the reality of the Internet, and especially social media, with all its widely described ramifications that destroy people's privacy, relationships, and psychological integrity.

This world is only painted in newer art performances, such as what we could see in the Black Mirror series in the 2016 episode "The Diving" (4). Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard economist, calls this reality completely dependent on social self-affirmation and completely "deprivatized". surveillance capitalism (), and at the same time the crowning work of Google and Facebook.

4. Scene from "Black Mirror" - episode "Diving"

According to Zuboff, Google is the first inventor. In addition, it is constantly expanding its surveillance activities, for example through seemingly innocent "smart city" projects. An example is the World's Most Innovative Neighborhood project by Sidewalk Labs, a Google subsidiary. pier in Toronto.

Google plans to collect all the smallest data about the life of the inhabitants of the waterfront, their movement and even breathing with the help of ubiquitous monitoring sensors.

It's also hard to pick an internet dystopia that's out of the question on Facebook. Surveillance capitalism may have been invented by Google, but it was Facebook that took it to a whole new level. This was done through social and emotional viral mechanisms and ruthless persecution of even those who are not users of the Zuckerberg platform.

Guarded AI, immersed in virtual reality, living with UBI

According to many futurists, the future of the world and technology is designated by five abbreviations - AI, AR, VR, BC and UBI.

Readers of "MT" probably know well what they are and what the first three consist of. The familiar also turns out to be the fourth, "BC", when we understand what it is about. And the fifth? UBD is an abbreviation of the concept, meaning "universal basic income » (5). This is a public benefit, postulated from time to time, that will be given to every person released from work as other technologies develop, especially AI.

5. Universal Basic Income - UBI

Switzerland even put the idea to a referendum last year, but its citizens rejected it, fearing that the introduction of a guaranteed income would lead to a flood of immigrants. UBI also carries with it a number of other dangers, including the risk of perpetuating existing social inequalities.

Each of the technological revolutions behind the acronym (see also:) - if it spreads and develops in the expected direction - has huge consequences for humanity and our world, including, of course, a huge dose of dystopia. For example, it is believed that it could replace four-year electoral cycles and lead to referendums on a myriad of issues.

Virtual reality, in turn, is able to "exclude" part of humanity from the real world. As happened, for example, with Korean Jang Ji-sun, who, after the death of her daughter in 2016 from a terminal illness, has since met her avatar in VR. The virtual space also creates new kinds of problems, or actually transfers all the old known problems to the "new" world, or even to many other worlds. To some extent, we can already see this in social networks, where it happens that too little likes on posts leads to depression and suicide.

Prophetic tales more or less

After all, the history of the creation of dystopian visions also teaches caution in formulating predictions.

6. Cover of "Islands in the Net"

Filmed last year was Ridley Scott's famous sci-fi masterpieceandroid hunter» Since 1982. It is possible to discuss the fulfillment or not of many specific elements, but it is indisputable that the most important prophecy regarding the existence in our time of intelligent, humanoid androids, in many ways superior to humans, has not yet become a reality.

We would be ready to tolerate many more prophetic hits."Neuromancers»i.e. novels William Gibson since 1984, who popularized the concept of "cyberspace".

However, in that decade, a slightly less well-known book appeared (in our country, almost completely, because it was not translated into Polish), which predicted today's time much more accurately. I'm talking about romanceIslands on the Web"(6) Bruce Sterling since 1988, set in 2023. It presents a world immersed in something similar to the Internet, known as the "web". It is controlled by large international corporations. "Islands on the Net" are remarkable in that they provide control, surveillance and monopolization of the supposedly free Internet.

It is also interesting to foresee combat operations carried out using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) against online pirates/terrorists. Operators thousands of miles away with secure desktops - how do we know that? The book is not about the endless conflict with Islamic terrorism, but about the struggle against the forces that oppose globalization. The world of Islands in the Net is also filled with consumer devices that look a lot like smartwatches and smart sports shoes.

There is another book from the 80s that, although some of the events seem more fantastical, does a good job of illustrating our modern-day dystopian fears. This "Georadar software", History Rudy Rookerset in 2020. The world, the state of society and its conflicts seem incredibly similar to what we are dealing with today. There are also robots known as boppers that have gained self-awareness and escaped to cities on the moon. This element has not yet materialized, but the revolt of the machines is becoming a constant refrain of black predictions.

The visions of our time in the books are also strikingly accurate in many ways. Octavia Butler, especially inParables of the Sower» (1993). The action begins in 2024 in Los Angeles and takes place in California, devastated by floods, storms and droughts caused by climate change. Middle and working class families meet in gated communities as they try to escape the outside world with addictive drugs and virtual reality kits. New religions and conspiracy theories are emerging. The refugee caravan heads north to avoid ecological and social collapse. A president comes to power who uses the campaign slogan "Make America Great Again" (this is the slogan of Donald Trump) ...

Butler's second book, "Parable of the Talentstells how members of a new religious cult leave Earth in a spaceship to colonize Alpha Centauri.

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What is the lesson of this extensive survey of predictions and visions made several decades ago concerning our daily lives?

Probably, the fact is that dystopias happen often, but most often only partially.