(Don't Fire) The Reaper

Why are tech bros so afraid of dying? Is it because they know they're going to hell?

NB: I talk a lot about death of loved ones and of grief in this rough note — a heads up in case you’re going through it at the moment.

I recently found myself chuckling at a YouTube clip from last week’s Question Time, in which political commentator and journalist Ash Sarkar brands the people behind OpenAI and other companies slopping out generative AI solutions to human problems as “emotionally maladapted psychopaths.” Drag them, I thought, smirking along with Sarkar. These Silicon Valley tech bros, as she calls them, are trying to create a world in which human to human connection is devalued over short-cut methods of artificial sociability. They probably all have terrible chat and no functional relationships.

I’ve been thinking about the papers I read while I was researching social robotics for my PhD, and the postdoc advertisements I’ve come across on the job hunt. Could pensioners be taken care of by robots in retirement homes, as a way to address loneliness because no one can be bothered to visit them? Could education be revolutionised by swapping out exhausted teachers for avatars? Then there are the recent reports of people struggling with their mental health heading over to ChatGPT for advice, because their government has failed to provide adequate and affordable pathways towards real therapy. So what if the chatbot told you to kill yourself, at least someone (okay, something) is finally paying attention to you.

New Scientist posted a reel today with pseudovampire and wrinklephobic Bryan Johnson opining about how his many attempts to prolong his life and cheat death, including getting plasma transfusions from his teenage son, are nothing compared to the ability for AI to make us live forever. They unironically name him a “longevity pioneer” — whether this is his own descriptor or theirs is unclear — despite the fact that his research is steeped in an egotistical obsession with looking young forever and hints at some worrying mental health issues of his own. Yeah, I’ll say it, I think sapping on your kid’s blood so you can feel youthful is kind of a weirdo thing to do! Not very well-adjusted, not very demure.

“Most religions offer immortality as their prize,” Johnson says. “Right now is the first time we’re seeing actual immortality being born,” he claims, before describing an algorithm spitting out artefacts about a person. So not exactly “actual immortality” since this would imply a human being actually living forever. People often say that when you are an artist you are immortalised through your work, but this is obviously a metaphor. And here is reason number 27567 why devaluing reading and writing skills is so detrimental to society — it appears that Silicon Valley tech bros cannot tell the difference between metaphor (an algorithmic representation of a person that models their living behaviour) and reality (a living human person). Maybe if they had paid more attention in their English classes, we wouldn’t be hurtling towards social Armageddon.

Death can be destabilising and corrosive. It can reshape a person in mourning from full-bodied to a shell of themselves. Death is also an inevitability and, many people have expressed this more poetically and carefully, is a core part of life. Grief is its lonely companion. When Sarkar called these people out for being pathologically antisocial, I immediately thought of the tech bros who give their companies dystopian names like “GriefTech” and claim their mission is to put an end to grieving. Why develop the capacity to mourn — the crushing, eternal process that it is — when you could call up AI Granny on the phone and pretend she’s still around? Why share your daily troubles and sorrows with another person who can see, touch, and empathise with you when you can recreate what sounds and maybe looks mostly like your deceased partner, and offload on that instead? This would be a one-way relationship, with the artificially resurrected getting absolutely nothing out of these interactions aside from a bit of a data feast. Cognitive psychologists are arguing over whether something akin to writing in a diary counts as “social interaction” but I think they’ve maybe missed the point.

I have decided that, at least for today, I’m going to eschew the impulse for generosity (these people have probably suffered such huge loss in their lives that they’ve decided this is the only way they can possibly cope) and determine that tech bros will stop at nothing to harness the spending power of our rawest vulnerabilities. They heard people saying things like “I would give anything to be able to talk to him again” and thought “but how much, exactly?” with dollar signs in their eye holes and an Executive Summary where their hearts should be. The notion that grief is something that should be eradicated could only come from the soulless husk of the Western world, where popular funeral practices bleed toxic embalming chemicals into the groundwater and ancestry is nothing more than a neat summary of countries and percentages that can be sent to you for the price of your permanent and tradable DNA records.

I always end up coming back to this sickening confusion, that someone could accrue so much wealth, power, and knowledge and not decide to use it to create a more equitable and safe world. Why should a company emulate the deceased when the processing power to do so speeds up the deterioration of a community’s health (I’m thinking of the impact AI data centres are having on local populations who no longer have access to clean drinking water and are spontaneously developing COPD)? Why should Bryan Johnson get to (try to) live forever, when the average life expectancy in Gaza is around 40 years? When flash floods are wiping out entire villages and towns around the world? When thousands of children are dying from literally wasting away in Darfur?

These people operate from a place of death, in that the ideas they have and the technology they are creating hinders on the exploitation and disintegration of actual communities and is often so readily harnessed by the war-mongering death machine (for example, Microsoft and Spotify allegedly making sure Israel can use AI to kill as many Palestinians as possible). And yet, they seem pointedly terrified of death itself. Maybe if they’d paid more attention to learning about irony in class we wouldn’t be… oh never mind.

“Will the human race survive giving birth to artificial general intelligence” posits Johnson, wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “DON’T DIE.” Frankly, Bryan, I don’t know. But if we do all perish, at least the robots will know how not to grieve us.

Cover photo by Hoite Prins on Unsplash.