Launched with little fanfare during the early days of the pandemic, the eight-part series DEVS is one of the fictions of recent years most likely to become a future cult classic. Set in a deeply melancholic twilight Silicon Valley, this story by British filmmaker Alex Garland is not directly about artificial intelligence: its plot traces a fable about quantum computing, destiny versus free will, and the possibility of reconstructing each unique moment of life. the human experience. Jorge Luis Borges probably would have been excited about it.
I have thought about DEVS again because a newly visible idea floats over its characters and its atmosphere. If the political and economic project of Silicon Valley has to do with the concentration of power and control, in its discourse there has also always been an almost spiritual component, a metaphysical longing that sometimes borders on the religious.
The story has been told a thousand times. If we had to explain the origins of the intellectual ideology of the technology industry – of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called “the Californian ideology” – its fundamental components are the improbable meeting six decades ago south of San Francisco between hippies and computer engineers; between a technocratic vision inherited from the military-industrial complex of the Cold War, and the desires for collective emancipation and liberation of consciousness of the counterculture. The legendary Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand (the seminal publication of digital culture), the proposals of the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, the coexistence experiments proposed in communes such as Drop City... were a breeding ground for entrepreneurs who, like Steve Jobs, imagined a near future in which the PC was both an efficiency accelerator and a tool for personal fulfillment and creative autonomy. An intellectual prosthesis, a “bicycle of the mind” that would allow us to go where we would not be able to as an exclusively biological species.
Jumping forward in time to 2023 we arrive at a present in which the leading artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, declares that its business mission is to achieve the goal of the so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a digital application whose intellectual capabilities equal those of the brain. human.
The concept of AGI is not synonymous with “singularity”, an openly mystical term that anticipates an awakening in which AIs will become aware of their existence and reveal themselves as minds as subjective as human ones. But the AGI echoes the ideas of this Californian tradition for which computers are not only a mind-altering tool on a par with LSD but a door to the emergence of a new consciousness. And perhaps the way to prolong human consciousness.
The technology industry today is at its most existential moment since at least the 90s, with the emergence of the commercial Internet. The pro-ethics AI movement believes that the possible risks of Deep Learning and neural networks require controlled and careful development that allows their gradual introduction into all aspects of daily life. Accelerationists argue that these fears are conservative and that the inevitable development of AI will bring about a new era of human prosperity and growth, solutions to climate change and incurable diseases. It is possible that these tensions occurred within OpenAI in the unexplained power struggle that begins with the dismissal of its founder, Sam Altman, and concludes with his return just five days later.
There is no doubt that some of the richest men in the world, at the center of the most extreme intellectual ecosystem of contemporary capitalism, believe that their historical mission is to ensure a future for humanity beyond the limits of the body. But before being a tool of spiritual transcendence, AI will be another system of concentration of power in a world of growing inequality, if we do not change some of its fundamental rules.
