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Writer's pictureLuke DeRoy

With What Will AI Fill Our Spiritual and Moral Gaps?



I find myself this morning a bit concerned. My worry is two-tiered.


First, I look at the developments in technology, and I ogle at our capacity for innovation. I’ve always marveled at the way a car’s key would turn the whole engine over in an explosive rumble, or the way that a small button’s glow would bring a computer’s motor to life, with the whir of the fans signaling the startup of a machine as complex and perplexing to my eight-year-old mind as an alien spacecraft. As a kid I wondered to myself how the maps were made that led to the ones that hung on the wall of my school. I spent time lost in thought about the different possible ways that things were discovered or invented, and if the great advancements of time had been intentionally sought out, worked over, trialed, errored, over years of blood and tears, or if they were rather happened upon, by accident, like turning over a shiny crystal while digging in the dirt.


And I worry, as I come to understand the making of a country, of a so-called democracy, how so much of our innovation has come about. I’ve learned that the USA possesses a state of mind that is fundamentally based in domination and exploitation. I fear that hundreds of years of stolen labor, thousands of square miles of stolen land, the families split up, the millions of humans abducted and trafficked, sexually assaulted, and physically and emotionally tortured, the brutal, full-stop psychopathic means through which our culture has acquired its “wealth”, all make impossible the spiritual growth and understanding that would have needed to take place in order for our innovations to have come about through the moral integrity that could carry us into the future. 


Are we missing something important, as humans, that would allow us to utilize this new technology so as not to destroy ourselves? This is the first level of my worry. 


The second level of my worry is made of my fear that we are unable or unwilling to come to terms with the severity of our ignorance, and that the sadism which sits so subtly under the surface is still too easily revealed, yet all too easily ignored. The truth surrounds us, yet we think we can be separate from it. We are coming to terms with the facts of history, but we’re not doing it quickly or fully enough. To agree that certain things have happened is a start, but to see the connections between those things and what is happening now is another story, and it is that story that needs to be elevated and authorized. 


Our cultural foundation is morally unstable. This is shown in the hypocrisy of our wars for peace and the way that we target the most vulnerable people and take them away from their families in bondage. It is borne of the systematic subjugation that is the heart of our history. Our unwillingness to deal with the contradiction between our stated morals and the way we treat our people sends the message that we are not morally prepared to deal with the coming wave of Artificial Intelligence. If we proceed with the expectation that a system which unabashedly revolves in a vicious circle around the unfair gratification of greed does not need to be checked, many will not like it when the tides are turned.


“I never owned slaves.” The point is moot and actually a clear indication that history and its consequences are gravely misunderstood. Our system today remains a dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all situation, and the winner is still who’s greed is cruelest and who’s heart is blackest. At the same time as we claim to be above and beyond violence, we have constant war abroad and at home we have the largest prison population in the world. Our current system which allocates resources is controlled by the wealthiest investors and corporations—this goes to show the extent of the power of law enforcement. The only laws that are enforced are the ones that protect the wealthy. These are the results of slavery, and of our complicity in such a system.


Our current setup has it so that resources are distributed based on who already has resources, not who most needs them. Access to education, healthcare, good jobs, these pathways paved with money have been created and solidified over time, and those who are locked out are often the poor. That some people can make it out of poverty is another distraction, a scapegoat, an exception to prove the rule. There should be no such place from where people need to escape. If there were enforcement arms strong enough to deal effectively with white-collar crime and tax evasion, if there were real protections to humans’ rights and the environment, it might subvert oligarchy and tyranny enough so that we could stop telling the stories and passing laws that victimize the vulnerable and imprison the impoverished.


A War on Drugs, indeed a Drug Enforcement Agency (which Nixon created in 1973 after declaring an “all-out war on the drug menace”), seems to me a very strange thing. How does one “enforce drugs”? To create such a policy seems an embarrassing show of infantilism and archaic barbarity, with devastating consequences. Waging a “war on drugs” equated to waging a war on people, rather than on drugs themselves. The whole thing has since been declared a failure. Yet the ideas, as well as the inhumane policies and organizations supporting the ideas, live on. 


Especially harmed are those who cannot afford to adequately defend themselves in court. People are taken from their families based on pen strokes. Countless children grow up without parents because of harsh “legal” penalties. We now know that punishing people doesn’t rid communities of the factors that produce addiction. Yet the propaganda lives on as social programs are lambasted as the impetus for lazy and felonious behavior, while the police who agitate violence and terrorize the poor are heralded as public servants.


Violence is ubiquitous when it comes to our system today. But social control is also achieved through the ideas we proliferate. As long as we condone state violence, we are at the mercy of a power much greater than ourselves, and not a benevolent one. What do we want to teach our children? Our behavior must follow our knowledge. We need to stand and speak out for peace if we truly believe it is right. 


We know that our system has never been morally upright. To assume that the way things are is the only way things could be, and more, are actually the way things ought to be, is to ignore a blind-spot in what we choose to know and to not know. Our history is one of violence, and today the level of violence that exists is skillfully hidden from view. Peace has not been magically attained. 


And we should be outraged.

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