“A.I.” as an evil super-bureaucracy
“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” – Franz Kafka, “The Trial”
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries. – Theodore Kaczynski, “The Industrial Society and its Future”
This story starts with a forgotten password. I wanted to log into the portal of my former university, in a country I no longer live, to obtain a record of my old academic transcript. But I didn’t remember my password. So I clicked on the “I forgot my password” thing below.
A message appeared informing me that they would send a new password to my email address — except that the address associated with the account was a very old one from many years ago that I no longer had access to.
I called the university, and after several minutes of recordings telling me to press such or such number for such or such thing, a human finally answered on the other line. I explained my problem, and here’s when things start to get interesting.
In order to change my email address, I had to provide a formal signed declaration requesting it, to prove that I was really me and not someone pretending to be me. (Why someone else would want to access my old academic transcript was never explained).
The signature needed to be notarized, or otherwise I could do a “digital signature” through a new government app that had been created to “simplify” things.
The first option was not possible since I no longer lived in that country and could not go to a local notary’s office, so I decided to try the digital option.
However, when I logged in to the government site, I found out that also there I needed to prove that I was really myself, and in order to do that I needed to allow myself to be photographed to be matched with the government’s facial recognition database and then provide the “QR-code” from my identity document.
Of course, since I hadn’t lived in that country for more than twenty years, my old ID is a paper card that doesn’t have any “QR-code”, and I doubt I am in their “facial recognition database” (or, if I am, it must be from a very old photograph, with much more hair and barely recognizable).
I called again and said that all I wanted was to change my password, not to be a volunteer in a reenactment of “1984”. But I was informed that because of the new “Data Privacy Law” of such and such year, that was the only possibility.
Then I searched into a dusty folder and found an old printed copy of my academic transcript, which solved the immediate problem. But I am still unable to log into the university’s site.
And my problems didn’t end there, because the very next day I received a letter informing me of yet another even worse bureaucratic nightmare, this time in the country where I currently live in. And that nightmare is still ongoing.
I hate bureaucracy. It is evil. In fact, I agree with the blogger Bruce Charlton that it is positively demonic.
One of the things I hate about political discussions is that everything is like cheering for a soccer team. You have to support your side on everything, you can’t pick and choose. If you’re on the left, you have to agree with them about abortion, euthanasia, migration, feminism, etc etc. If you’re on the right, the same thing, just on the opposite side.
But if you’re someone like me, who’s usually more to the right but who occasionally thinks, “hey, maybe this idea from the left is not completely bad”, you’ll end up hated by everyone.
Because I foolishly made a few videos questioning the conventional wisdom about the war in the Ukraine, a country which seems to me very corrupt, some viewers seem to have thought that this could only mean that I considered Russia the pinnacle of human civilization, or worse, that I was wishing for a return of the Soviet Union.
Let me explain my political philosophy to you in a way that even an autistic child can understand:
1. I am not a Nazi.
2. I am not a Communist.
3. The best government is the one that LEAVES ME ALONE the most.
Nazis were evil because they created a huge, inhuman bureaucracy where masses of people were treated, not as individuals, but as mere numbers in a classification system, some destined to live, some to go to prison or die.
Communists were evil because they did exactly the same thing.
That one did it based on ethnicity or race, and the other did it based on social class is a mere detail. It is the bureaucracy itself that is evil. Why can’t more people understand that?
I fear that the new A.I. panopticon system that is coming will make such things even worse than Nazism, Communism, and the fictional words of “1984” and Brave New World together. We had already an inkling of that during the “Covid” era with its “vaccine passports”, but I fear that what is coming is going to be even more drastic.
First of all, the phenomenon is already global. There is no escape. It’s not just my old country. Almost all countries now have some sort of giant government digital database where all your information will be stored, from your face to your tax records to your medical history to your genetic information. The whole thing will be soon automated and managed by “A.I.”.
Which, contrary to the propaganda and to what most people think, has nothing to do with “intelligence”. It is all about gathering huge amounts of data and automating the responses to it.
It simply means that when things go wrong and thousands are sent to the gulags or to the extermination camps, there will no longer be some unlucky civil servant to be blamed or to say “I was just following orders”.
They will simply blame the bots, and that will be it.
The nascent techno-totalitarian bureaucratic society must be destroyed, or we’ll all be slaves.
Death to bureaucracy!
