There is No Such Thing as Inevitable

By Nada Faris
Special to The Times Kuwait

Advocates of unregulated AI usage often tell me that these services are “inevitable.” They say, “Look at history. This is progress. We can’t stop it. It’s the future.”

I just finished reading a book that tackles the subject of human progress and its impact on our lives. In Human Race: 10 Centuries of Change on Earth, Ian Mortimer highlights the three most pivotal transformations in each century from the eleventh to the twentieth. In retrospect, these evolutions seem inevitable. The truth, rather, is that each moment provides people with choices, and the accumulation of their decisions finally tips the scale of change in one direction or another.

For example, today it is inconceivable for us to imagine a life that isn’t governed by our watches, but before the popularization of clocks in the fifteenth century, humans related to time differently: they talked about the crowing of the crow; or when the shadow of the sun cast its mass on a particular monument; or even after singing a recognizable song 12 times.

For a large part of human history, time was relative. Yet, neither the invention of the clock nor the popularization of its uses was inevitable. In fact, the secularization and standardization of time directly confronted humans’ core beliefs about the creation of the world and humanity’s place within it, for people used to relate to duration as only a gift from God. Everything was deemed as sacred from the division of the day into light and dark, or the week into times of rest and times of work, and so on.

But the popularization of clocks made it possible to universalize our perceptions of time and our experiences within it. Hence, one small invention helped to rewrite what it means to be human and catalyze our understanding of humanity in profane terms, which became the building block for more secular transformations in the future.

Our adoption of AI technology will undergo a similarly major transformation of human perception and experiences, and it will forcibly unravel centuries-old ideas and beliefs that we’ve treated as untouchable for most of human history. However, neither the trajectory nor the speed of this transformation is “inevitable,” because nothing ever is. All our individual choices, whether conscious or unconscious, reinforce belief systems that positively impact some of us while negatively impacting others. There are, in other words, no entirely “good” choices, only those that align with our values at a particular stage in the cycle of our human evolution.

So, instead of apathetically conceding that AI is a technology of our human future, it might be more beneficial for us to ask who gains and who loses from today’s unfettered technology. Perhaps, more importantly, we can actively lend our voices and effort toward regulating this technology and revising the place of middle—and lower-class humans in the digital World to Come.

Because, unlike the clock, AI is not a unit of standardization that merely challenges our relationship to our ancient mythologies. To stay with this metaphor, I’d say that AI is Moloch, a suprahuman entity demanding boundless sacrifices. Earlier this year, the former CEO of Google spoke to the American Congress about AI’s demands for electricity.

Eric Schmidt claimed that AI-powered companies are currently consuming about 3% of America’s electricity, yet by 2030, AI supercomputers will have consumed 99% of all of America’s current power grids. And rather than discussing the importance of pacing this technology, regulations to ensure safe usage, or even revising the value of human lives and their relationship to needed resources, he demanded that Congress provide AI companies with “energy in all forms. Renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there. And it needs to be there quickly.”

If American lawmakers concede and prioritize AI’s leviathan demands over human beings’ essential needs, it is not because this outcome was inevitable. Tech billionaires know this; thus, they lobby, they speak to Congress, and some even resort to illegal means just to power their voracious machines. The Guardian, for example, broke a news story about how Elon Musk is using illegal generators to supercharge xAI that houses Grok (Twitter or X’s artificial language model).

Tech billionaires know that nothing is inevitable, and if they want to actualize their vision for The World to Come (a world that rewrites what it means to be human and redraws the map of the world) then they will need to keep applying constant pressure on lawmakers and distracting the voting public with shiny new toys (like here, try taking a selfie and transforming it into Ghibli style art! Ooh! Shiny!).

Meanwhile, they are siphoning necessary resources, changing laws, laying off droves of people without any consideration as to how they would make a living or provide for their families, and speeding up the rate of their technological innovations despite all the warning signs pointing to human and ecological disasters. They’re doing all this in a world that is seeing more deaths from combat, more legal dispossession, more refugees, and climate crises.

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff writes, “Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the merely human.”

AI tycoons know where to invest their effort. What about us? Are the stakes clear enough to spur us into collective action and protect the world for our children?

Nada Faris is a writer and literary translator. Her latest work is a translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s novel Lost in Mecca, which was shortlisted for The 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and named a notable translation by “World Literature Today.”
Website: www.nadafaris.com
Instagram: @thenadafaris