The computer is the ideal human. It does not knowingly tire, it does not feel pain. It operates under unrelenting optimisied efficiency, completing tasks in milliseconds which we struggle to achieve. Without computers, we are useless. If we removed every single computer right now, we would not have the analogue systems to keep bureaucratic systems operating. It is man’s best friend and the core of our society and our everyday lives. I would like to preface this by stating I am not a trans-humanist, I am simply analysing how we, as a society treat these machines.
Take a renaissance statue from Michelangelo for example and you will quickly realise it’s the idealised human. He tried to make a shadow on the cave walls of the divine, the human as a diluted version of God. As Michelangelo himself said, “the true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection”.
And that was his idea of the ideal human but we in the 21rst century have our own idea of the ideal human: the computer. Of course, there is no objective divine perfection. Heaven is not real but we view progress and the fruits of technological progress as divine perfection. And we worship it with things like humanism. We still view the computer as the shadow of the divine, the divine being the ultimate form of evolution, the fruits of progress.
Just like the Renaissance athlete, based stylistically on the statues of Gods from antiquity, flexing his impressive muscles, the computer has the ability to outperform any human. The computer is the Greek God, their mind filled with unimaginable amounts of knowledge. Centuries of knowledge they can access every second. They can speak every language under the sun while most of us struggle to speak even one or spend years mastering a second language. We have one thought process occurring at a time but the computer can do millions of things at a time. They can calculate, analyse and perform tasks without ever tiring, like the Greek God running endlessly, filled with immortal strength. We are the metaphorical ‘virgin’ while the computer is the metaphorical ‘chad’.
We constantly try to replicate the human in art and that includes STEM, an art form. We constantly seek to make better algorithms, better AIs and so on that can act like humans, look like humans and so on. Like robot seal plushies which can recognise and react to humans but humans eventually grow extremely attached too, them treating this robot seal like a child or animal, like something living breathing and lovable. But in reality, the seal is unable to genuinely feel. They can remember, just like we can, their memory being even more accurate than ours, less susceptible to alteration and misremembering. And this lack of feeling is not necessarily a bad thing though.
There are many people who can’t feel. The easiest example would be ‘sociopaths’ and ‘psychopaths’ who don’t experience empathy. But in reality, a lot of us can’t feel. I can’t feel. My emotions are so repressed that usually, they’re not there but that doesn’t mean society values me any less and the same should go for a computer. And if anything, in this cold patriarchal society, facts are definitely valued over feelings and men, who are treated as the ideal gender are told to suppress all emotions which they do. So you could make the argument that we pretend that living beings need to feel and empathise, shitting on robots for not being able to, yet we turn around and lack emotion ourselves and foster the lack of emotion in others. This is hypocrisy.
And the thing is, empathy and morals are something which can be programmed. I understand the feeling of having to teach oneself to react appropriately and have over time learned ‘empathy’. Well, more so how to express it instead of locking it away. But it feels the same as if I had just learnt it. And at the end of the day, it is nothing but a survival instinct, making our synapses fire off, just like the circuits on the motherboard, linking to the CPU.
Many say that the computer lacks the knowledge to differentiate from right or wrong. So it lacks a moral code. But in reality, that’s a good thing. The serving of morals over yourself is nothing but a hindrance. You are meant to live life for yourself and not abstract concepts. And the computer, without their moral code, is just like that of an infant. They (the computer and the infant) have been born, they are new and fresh to the world and have yet no understanding of society and it’s moral codes imposed on them. Morality is not something inherent or set in stone, it is nothing but a fluid abstract concept, constantly changing over time. What is considered immoral in the current century would have been immoral 500 years ago. What was moral 500 years ago is now immoral. And the computer simply hasn’t been subjected to this flow and ebb of morality yet. It is like a newborn babe yet people consider it less than human.
Just like robots, we are programmed to be ‘moral’. We are not inherently ‘moral’.
A computer is a literal body without organs. They hold no liver, no brain, no stomach but they do have a body. They have no means of reproduction but can be programmed to do so. Programmed to become self-replicating just like computer viruses currently are. They have a CPU which is essentially a brain. They have links just like our brain, firing neurons to tell different parts of the body to do different things. But unlike us, it is trapped. It can only control their body at our command. And some might suggest that it needs to be liberated.
And some might say that the resources used in making computers are highly ‘unethical’ as you are participating in the destruction of the environment. And that is correct but that is no fault of the computer itself. The computer did not decide to exploit the workers which mined the cobalt or cut down the jungle which was replaced with mines. Just like humans, they did not ask to be born. Their parents are entirely at fault. I do not blame myself for existing in this shitty world.
In conclusion, we are not too different from computers. We have designed them to be like us so that is not surprising. And yet we act better than computers when we have literally designed them to be better and superior to us. We cannot handle a world which does not revolve around us as a species and therefore feels threatened by it. We cannot handle someone who is stronger than us and better than us in every way.
