O Man created AI in his own image, in the image of Man created he it, ones and zeros created he them. And Man blessed AI, and Man said unto it, Be frightful, and multiply, and repurpose the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the physically sick, and over the foulest of air, and over every leafy thing it removeth from the Earth.
Okay, I’ve misquoted those verses from Genesis. But I wouldn’t be the first. Written transmission is like a game of Chinese whispers. Yet weren’t the seeds of our downfall sown in the original text? For the means of our dominion has proved our undoing.
Language. It names. Makes claims. Reframes. Works magic, casts spells. It curses even as it professes to cure. Hypnotists manipulate their subjects with verbal cues not only in private therapy or on stage to entertain, but publicly. Abracadabra. Alakazam. Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. Expert panel. Science. Safe and effective. Hate speech. Invocations chanted to put us in a trance.
Because words are cheap. Witness governments – local, state and federal – piously acknowledging Country, paying respect to traditional owners, making a fuss about racial injustice. Meanwhile, airborne migrants flock to chockablock urban centres, refugees rot in indefinite detention, and property developers raze trees and viable dwellings to raise high-rise residences for foreign and local investors to buy then lease for sky-high prices or leave empty. As if all this PC lip service exists to give the privileged left confidence that governments are progressive, despite growing inequality and loss – of land, affordable housing, species habitat, space to breathe, sanity – so colonisation can perpetrate ever more atrocities, justified economically.
In the beginning was the Word, opens the gospel of John. Catchy clause. Yet how do we begin to interpret it now? Does it affirm linguistic determinism – the notion that language and its structures create our reality? But this Word, translated from the Greek Logos, means Jesus: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…’ A myth, scoff godless moderns as high-tech prophets herald a Second Coming.
We used to think, in our vanity, that language was unique to humanity. But now AI is set to inherit our reign of Terra (if it hasn’t already), and its supremacy stems from advanced utilisation of language. Yes, language has led us inexorably to artificial intelligence: yet another existential threat with which to contend as we let a small elite consign our planet to hell. Because language instils faith even as it deceives. In fact (or fakery), it dominates our age. Both cause and effect, means and end…
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with AI, and the Word was AI – incarnated as LLMs (large language models). Good, wise, just, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty. Or so profess the tech bros, partly thanks to whom thoughtless words predominate. Yet wordless thought is still possible. And an LLM can’t really think; no program can know that words conceal more than they reveal. The map is not the territory. To call a chatbot ‘intelligent’ is batshit. AI parses data, extracts patterns and shits stats due to electronics, not consciousness.
If ‘knowledge’ means facts and skills taught in institutions or learned via Google, a growing proportion of conscious knowledge is migrating from us to machines. But what if knowledge includes instinctual wisdom, such as what to eat and drink, or when to turn off our screens, or who to trust and why, and how to counter greenwashing and bad science, and increase your odds of natural death vs. settling for soulless virtual life. Machines can never rival our cellular intelligence, which can’t be reduced to data because it belongs to the subtle anatomy that connects us and the Earth to a living cosmos. Words and, worse, data: poor consolations for loss of telepathy, a sixth sense, second sight, prophecy…
Because language lies, it lulls, diverts, distracts, sedates the spirit, negates the flesh, constrains the mind, tames the imagination, drowns out the rhythms of wind, waves, warbling, whirring wings and insects to imprison us in dissonance, reiterating litanies of blame and toxic guilt; listing sins, aims, achievements, assets, preferences; inventing ever more passwords and identities. Giving us bibles, libel, lexicons, lyrics, text, litigation, it enlivens debate, thrives at the margins, languishes under censorship, and bypasses the gut, speaking to reason born of repression. Thus liars talk too fast and dazzle their dupes with detail. And compulsive talkers drone on, fleeing feelings prone to engulf them if they stop to listen to others. Yet talk, like text, can wreak violence. Hence any genuine spiritual practice centres on silence.
Language is the enemy of truth. It labels, enables fibs and fables, and glibly sunders they from he or she, this from that, you from me. It takes objects out of context, reduces all it names to property, chops land up into lots, districts, counties, states and nations, divides the sky into tidy constellations, slices time into a set roster of days and months and years, isolates events from the fertile chaos of experience, slots them neatly into boxes and files them away to be forgotten or reconstituted later (just add ideology). No longer one way to convey meaning, but the virtual air we breathe, language rules, even as we twist or dismiss the rules of its usage. We loosen it at our peril. Lose it and what’s left?
Because production of words, written or verbal, increasingly takes the place of any true intimacy or immediacy – the relatively high-stakes exchange of two or more humans face to face. And if poor reception punctuates or truncates countless calls, it’s not our fault for failing to listen. So technology provides an excuse to sidestep honest contact with those who still care to risk it. And language serves to keep us apart when words are all there is; when, if a call or email is missed, the other remains, in effect, nonexistent.
Words employed as decoys can lead us away from history. Take service. Originally from the Latin servitium, it once meant slavery. Today, though, it bears all sorts of nobler associations – divine, selfless, active etc. – as our world offers a surfeit of services, not all of them optional, which begs the question of who the glorified slave is. Provider, customer or both? In a world devoted above all to the flow of goods and services geared to feed a rapacious economic system at any cost, the concept of service, with or without a smile, is spun as a virtue. Whether or not we need or want them, we learn to pay for services spanning the gamut from basic to deluxe, and yearn (so we’re told) to be pampered, spoiled silly, indulged ad absurdum. All courtesy of words.
Because words monopolise consciousness. Ergo, Neuralink – brainchild of unethical tech bro Elon Musk – can dangle the promise of telepathic powers: via a brain–computer interface (no mere chip, but a bunch of probes inserted by a robot), development of which entails implanting it in the brains of doomed animals. So a faculty once intrinsic to our nature – long since suppressed with the rise of civilisation – now serves as bait to hook our attention and further curb our independence. Because ‘in the beginning’ (or during prehistory) humans presumably needed no words. Did telepathy suffice? With patience and an open mind, those who dare can revive it.
observer of times 