Divide and conquer: God set the precedent. When humans united to build a tower to heaven, He intervened. A tall tale, it’s open to interpretation. Yet vertical solidarity rates punishment. God favours horizontal dispersal. And maybe it works? Won’t planetary internet coverage bring us closer to speaking one tongue (and using one currency under one government)? Online revolutions rock: take the Arab Spring and #MeToo. But social media also spreads fake news. Journalists earn income and kudos for hit pieces that polarise readers, as globally scattered human chatter generates ever more data. Yet most internet traffic involves communication between machines, as AI gears up to outsmart us.

According to Amalyah Hart in a recent article, ‘the moral panic over whether AI might one day “wake up” is embedded in culture.’ It sure as fuck pervades journalism, with fiction tasked to supply tame escapism (Harry Potter, Twilight, Fifty Shades). When author Richard Powers explored the theme of AI sentience back in the ’90s, it still felt edgy. Sci-fi has long been a vehicle for tackling existential and ethical questions in more depth than the sciencey essays now trending. In Galatea 2.2 (1995), Powers reworks the myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor whose statue came alive; his professor narrator tutors a neural net so it can pass a Turing Test.

A prof who’s up on fruit fly brains features in Hart’s article: ‘His theory is that creatures that move – and so must actively negotiate the world – may possess some form of consciousness.’ (Many kids take insect sentience for granted. Or they did, until devices undercut babysitters.) So this revelation poses ethical questions, e.g., ‘how we as a society should respond if insects are found to have subjective experience’. Our mindless over-consumption of tortured factory-farmed birds and animals doesn’t bode well for our six-legged friends. And Hart’s title sets the agenda: ‘Insect studies evolve AI consciousness’.

Yawn. Has anyone else had a gutful of AI hype? Who gives a toss about how it affects what’s left of higher ed? Re ChatGPT’s reputed confidence in its own nonsense, or misinformation, much of its training data comprised emails of Enron execs whose fraud led to scandal and bankruptcy. Yet AI will soon be omniscient, if you believe the spin. Or so it’ll seem, as humans get dimmer. But c’mon, ‘AI consciousness’? Vast speed and input quantity create the illusion of consciousness (like the art of animation, which AI is poised to update) – and the more and faster it eats data, the smoother that illusion. More, faster: capitalism’s mantra. Less, slower – the antidote – spells irrelevance in a world hooked on progress. But conscious AI… Big Tech’s delusions of grandeur? Or has the meaning of ‘consciousness’, like ‘woman’ or ‘pandemic’, changed? A 2023 Sydney Writers’ Festival guest likened Covid, without irony, to the Spanish flu, the lowest death toll estimate of which far exceeds misleading Covid stats. And a lower survival rate yet awaits Covid-era literature. Which reminds me…

Like ChatGPT, I learned to write before I could read. Not yet at preschool, I scrawled random sequences of letters that mimicked words in sentences. Yet unlike me, ChatGPT will never learn to read for real. In contrast to algorithmic parsing of a text, the act of reading involves feeling. Sentience is the I in each sentence; the faculty of comprehension. Yet ChatGPT can mimic feelings because language, its medium, can name and describe them. Language, not sentience, links humanity and AI. Sentience is what we share with all earthly life: animals, birds, fish, insects, plants, fungi etc. (not to mention unearthly entities); we just don’t share a common language. (What would the jealous God of Genesis say about AI? ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’?) To construe AI as sentient, even just potentially, reflects dissociation from our roots in nature; ignorance of the fact that bacteria regulate our brains and microbes account for most of our DNA.

‘I couldn’t believe they fell for it!’ said an artist I hadn’t seen since the pandemic, last month at a gallery where for a while we’d been unwelcome. Unlike ‘them’ (the suckers), she found the official script suss from day one and conducted alternative research. ‘We’re special,’ she said (‘we’ as in unvaxxed). ‘We need to stick together.’ She left without saying goodbye.

The next day in a waiting room, I met two women with long Covid, and one reported equal numbers of vaxxed and unvaxxed in her online support group. None of the unvaxxed I know suffered overly when they caught Covid, nor have their symptoms lingered. All those I know who Covid flattened are vaxxed. Coincidence? Or an instance of the filter bubble effect? Social media fuels the phenomenon of groups inhabiting separate worlds subject to different sets of laws, mores and perceptions – so wannabe astronomers lock virtual horns with flat-earthers; we see surgically affirmed trans triumphs, not pain-racked train wrecks, or vice versa. Dispersed and herded into clictivist cliques, we lack an overview. The observation tower is out of bounds. Surveillance belongs to God.

Or Satan; coincidence doesn’t exist for conspiracists. At one point my fellow dissident lost her train of thought mid-sentence. ‘I’ve been smoking so much dope!’ she confessed. Like her, I’ve ‘researched’ the WEF (elites with batshit plans for humanity), yet ultimate reality eludes. So to try to divide society into ‘special’ people vs. sheeple seems obtuse and elitist too. Anyone can read social media creeds (or screeds). But platforms influence patterns. Syntax governs semantics. The means of delivery (Telegram? Facebook?) signifies more than the takeaway. The divide-and-conquer tactics that wreaked most havoc were frequently self-inflicted. Not only were the unvaxxed banned, for a time, from most cultural venues, but too many vaxxed and unvaxxed alike attacked each other. Even those loath to offend sounded condescending when, with blind trust in authority, they called dissenters the vulnerable ones.

Meanwhile, mandates also created inner division. Torn between logic and survival needs, my partner spent weeks on research. Was AZ or Pfizer the lesser evil? We’d heard dire first-hand reports re both. Fear of job loss held him, like so many, hostage and I empathised. Yet I would have quit a shitty job (if I’d had one) rather than submit. Our stable relationship was tested more than the vax in the three months between his two jabs. When neither caused overt symptoms, he was almost delirious with relief. Yet how to measure the psychological stress that mars immunity, even if Covid vaccines seem harmless to some (so far)? He trusts his immune system less than he did before he was blackmailed into betraying his instincts.

Last year, government ads appeared inside toilet doors at the local mall:

This week, I noticed one of the ads had been graffitied: ‘WAKE UP People Before it’s too late.’ To which someone else had responded: ‘Totally agree igg ignorence [sic] is not bliss’. But wake up to what, I wonder. Who are these insights aimed at? All speculation welcome.