Nearly everyone has heard the ancient Chinese curse meant to hex foes: “May you live in interesting times.” It is notable for its irony; on the surface, “interesting times” sounds alluring and non-threatening. But what constitutes an age of historical interest is never a mundane era of calm. What makes history interesting is the wars, the plagues, the conquests and the chaos that rupture stability and leave scars for future generations. The saying emphasizes that nobody wants to live through these times, even if they enjoy reading about them.
It is also entirely apocryphal. “May you live in interesting times” is neither ancient nor Chinese nor a curse. Rather, it began circulating in British political circles at the turn of the 20th century before going mainstream in the Anglosphere. The insistence on an ancient Chinese origin is meant to convey a certain banality or cyclicity to the extraordinary modern epoch that succeeded the Middle Ages.
Since Columbus crashed the shores of Hispaniola in 1492 there has been an accelerated rate of change permeating every rung of global society from the royal palace to the peasant village to the hunting camp. Modernity has wiped clean nearly every mode of existence that had previously stood for millennia.
Writing near the time and place where the apocryphal Chinese curse first originated, Karl Marx linked modernity’s dizzying pace to the motion of a capitalist economy fed by surplus value:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.1
Following Marx’s summation, the curse of interesting times is synonymous with life under the capitalist mode of production. In the present age we have seen our lives revolutionized by smartphones and Ozempic and artificial intelligence and the infinite scroll of social media. Without any new land to discover or national markets to conquer, the economic forces devouring profit have blown open digital universes and pierced the sky with rockets. All this, and there are still those among us who remember a time before the “personal computer” and internet.
Marx correctly diagnosed technological revolution and cultural agitation as endemic to capitalism but he undoubtedly underestimated the market’s ability to distract humanity from our sober senses, our real conditions of life, our relationships with others.
Even with the power to connect billions into direct relations, social media is reduced to a horde of vanity projects. The planetary boundaries for pollution are broken in the heat of smouldering summers. Leading nations have become the geopolitical equivalent of mass shooters. The western economy lives on the edge of a stock market bubble inflating by the day. But should any of this concern you—there’s a pill for that. Interesting times indeed.
Rosa Luxemburg said: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” Overcoming the curse of interesting times still depends on apprehending its root cause; the suicidal logic of capitalist growth and the corporate suppression of human vitality. The current state of class consciousness is strung-out but the potential to connect, to organize, to educate and to inspire has never been more latent.
The artificial intelligence gold rush has been well underway since the release of ChatGPT. Technology companies within the computational ecosystem have seen their shares explode along the ongoing rush toward new data centres, more advanced chips and supporting energy infrastructure. Competition for AI researchers within the United States have seen employee poaching between companies and pay packages of up to $100 million. Trump’s unveiling of the Stargate project, intended to turbocharge domestic AI capabilities, makes clear the national importance of this emerging technology.
Across the Pacific, China’s release of DeepSeek was the first shot across the bow of American dominance over the space. DeepSeek is a large language model AI which rivals ChatGPT in capability but was developed for a fraction of the cost. China has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to developing AI, cracking down on the video game industry in order to direct resources toward strategic technology, while fusing together civilian and military research to avoid compartmentalization. China is in the process of integrating AI in all facets of the economy and their rapid progress has led to fears of an AI arms race between the “democratic” West and “authoritarian” East.
AI Apocalypse?
Before you fret over the outcome of this battle for technological superiority, first consider that it may not matter. There is an ominous hypothesis that has casted a shadow over the topic of AI since its conception; namely, the total annihilation of humanity. Just in case there weren’t enough existential crises for us to worry about in this late stage of capitalist alienation, computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have done the podcastcircuit promoting their book about artificial general intelligence: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. A title like that needs no elaboration.
The historian Yuval Noah Harari has issued a similar warning about AI, as have many prominent figures in the field including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Mustafa Suleyman, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. It’s interesting that leaders of this industry have chosen to be up front about the catastrophic risk their product imposes rather than gaslighting the public post-hoc for years, as oil and tobacco companies did.
The AI doomsday scenario has been a staple of science fiction for a long time. The Matrix, Westworld, The Terminator and I, Robot come to mind. Machines become sentient and immediately treat their creators as an obstacle to be destroyed, or so the trope goes. No wonder so many people imagine the arrival of superintelligence ringing out like the battlecry of Krishna: “I have come forth to destroy the worlds.”1
Ghost in the Machine
It’s worthwhile to address this subject head-on, as no discussion of AI technology can be useful to anyone who believes that meaningful advances in the space will instantly kill us all. Firstly, the malevolent sentient machine of Hollywood lore is certainly impossible, as the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer attests. Schopenhauer was a cynical thinker but, as the progenitor of psychoanalysis, he understood that drives correlate with biological need and consciousness correlates with knowledge.2 A computer, like any inorganic “body without organs,” may have pre-programmed compulsions but it will not have drives; it may have a vast repository of information but it will not have knowledge.3
The apprehended Idea is the true and only source of every genuine work of art…Machines mince very fine and mix up what is put into them, but they can never digest it, so that the constituent elements of others can always be found again, and picked out and separated from the mixture.4
Machines cannot apprehend an idea because that requires a conscious will to life subsumed by the sensuous world. Capable brains are not the only requirement for consciousness, as cases of feral children demonstrate. Consciousness requires minds in constant negotiation with the opposing demands of our biology, social relations, physical environment, a shared language, subjective emotions, sense perception and received knowledge. As one starts a fire by rubbing sticks, it is a dialectical friction that sparks consciousness in humans and expresses our drives. Inorganic matter, including complex AI systems, simply cannot have that. Pursuing abstract “superintelligence” will always be fantastical, akin to running for the horizon in order to touch the clouds.
But AI could endanger us without conscious decision making. We are talking about revolutionary technology and, returning to Schopenhauer, “with every human undertaking there is something that is not within our power, and does not come into our calculations.”5 What distinguishes AI from software is the ability to interpret data, process new information, make predictions and operate hardware. The momentum of its energy makes an AI system capable of formulating unpredictable goals such as “to count the grains of sand on Boracay, or to calculate the decimal places of pi indefinitely, or to maximize the total number of paperclips in its future lightcone.”6
One can see how AI could execute a decision to sweep humanity away if we come between its calculated actions. The scenarios by which we are swept away are not yet apparent. Hypothetically, an AI with access to unwitting accomplices or robots could formulate a supervirus or as-yet-undiscovered weapon of mass destruction and unleash it right from under our noses.
Technological Disempowerment
It is a common belief that Big Tech is taking our species on a one-way trip aboard a kamikaze plane because this is their own narrative. There is a salient point to be reckoned with here: if both the majority of the population and the leaders of industry are fully aware of a human extinction event resulting from AI development, but are powerless to mitigate the risk, then we must already be enslaved to our system of production. A free and rational person does not accept certain death as the outcome of their work. Only a slave does that.
It is the economic system that renders us powerless—and this is the real threat confronting society. It isn’t AI. AI has the potential to deliver cures for cancer, fix climate change, detoxify the environment, rapidly research new energy breakthroughs for space travel and defeat material scarcity on the cheap. But that won’t happen on its own. For a tool to realize its positive potential it needs to be used for the right reasons.
Technological progress in capitalism has the feel of “one step forward, two steps back.” Automobiles are great—except for the emissions and roadkill. Smartphones have put computers in billions of pockets—but now people are addicted to them. Plastic has opened up a new paradigm of construction—but it’s clogging the oceans. The Internet has achieved global connectivity—but conspiracies and misinformation destroy lives and kill political discourse. The reason this happens is simple: unleashing these technologies is profitable and mitigating their harms is not.
It’s easy to imagine AI as a destructive force because we already live in a society twitching to the fetishes of tech oligarchs. Their capacity to inflict immense social harm should not be underestimated. Because China has subordinated industry to government planning, they have been able to efficiently mitigate the risks of technology by placing the common good over profit. Electric vehicles and renewable energy for cleaner air; shrinking deserts with afforestation; hard-limits on screen time for Chinese youth; suppression of AI slop and misinformation; restricting single-use plastics as a step toward tackling the pollution crisis.
In terms of AI, a recent article in Foreign Affairs highlights China’s superior rollout, scaling automation and robotics with the goal of complete economic integration by 2030. This is China’s strategy to alleviate demands on an aging workforce, with an eye toward future material abundance and socialist distribution. Realization of carefully formulated concrete targets is what will make AI useful.
The West needs to make a direct democratic analog to socialism with Chinese characteristics. Within the realm of public ownership and democratic decision making, AI would be a powerful tool to develop universal human flourishing and abundance. Within the narrow realm of tech oligarchs and the financial elite, it is nothing but a profit generator turbocharging fossil fuel consumption, economic inequality and chatbot psychosis. We can use AI to raise ourselves to heaven—or let them cast us into hell.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
The Bhagavad Gita trans. Laurie L. Patton (Penguin, 2008): 131. ↩︎
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume One (Dover Publications, 1969): 203. ↩︎
Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents,” Minds and Machines Vol. 2, No. 22: 73. ↩︎
