The Post-Human Future

 The economist and Substack blogger Noah Smith penned a disturbing piece the other week declaring the dawn of the "post-human age." He suggests that the combination of generative AI (able to mimic convincingly the various outputs of human intelligence), declining birthrates, and our increasing immersion in digital worlds—in preference to real-life human relationships and communication—seems to be paving the way for a future in which flesh and blood human beings are ever less needed and ever more redundant. 

So far, of course, we have merely a recapitulation of the kind of techno-pessimism that we've been hearing for decades—if not centuries. We are all disturbed by the ways in which our species' technological achievements both underline our power and yet increasingly render us otiose and unnecessary. It's the fundamental paradox of the industrial age—the age of the "demon of Mechanism," as Carlyle once called it—in which a growing set of human tasks have been automated—and we begin to fear that a future may come in which the machines' own creators are no longer needed. 

But what I thought was particularly interesting and insightful about Smith's piece was the way he ends it. Because he doesn't just devote himself to prophesying against this technological doom—he also admits that, part of the reason we keep moving closer toward it, despite our fears, is because, on some level, it also appeals to us. We kind of want it. 

The idea of a post-human future may "sound terrifying," he writes—"And yet, day by day, watching the latest TikTok trend, or making bad jokes on X, or asking ChatGPT to teach me about Mongol history, the slide into posthumanity feels pleasant and warm."

If we didn't like all this stuff, after all—it would be easy to disclaim the post-human future. But the reason we seem to keep meandering ever closer to it—despite our protestations and alarm—is because it's fun. We are drawn by the possibility that the virtual, digital worlds in which we spend an ever-growing share of our time are actually better and more enjoyable than the familiar world we see around us. We want to keep interacting with generative AI bots because they are faster than us—trained on a larger data set—quicker on the draw. And so we climb voluntarily into our Matrix-style amniotic sack. 

I'm sure the humans in the gooey Matrix bubbles felt it was "pleasant and warm" there too. 

I've been reading Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's early science fiction novel Tomorrow's Eve (1886) this week—in part because it seemed like a timely foretaste of the post-human future. It's a provocative novel of ideas that has lost none of its power—indeed, it has probably gained a great deal of it; since it is concerned with many of the questions that currently obsess our cultural moment—such as: is an artificial consciousness possible? Could humans be replaced by an improved Android version of themselves? Would an immortal duplicate not actually be an improvement on the original? 

Noah Smith confesses, as we've seen—that the gradual process of being replaced by machines—of slipping in oozily to the warm and damp post-human future—has a certain allure. And this is precisely Villiers's theme as well. Far from offering a straightforward denunciation of "posthumanity" and automation—Villiers shares all of Noah Smith's ambivalence about the "Android" future he describes. Indeed, the book can be read—among other things—as a vindication of the "Artificial" against the arrogant claims of the "Real"—of the superiority of "Illusion" to the disappointing world of the mundane and actual. 

This was a big theme for the Decadents in general—not just Villiers. Once finds it in Huysmans too—particularly in his À rebours—the urge to immerse oneself in a dream, an illusion—a virtual reality—an escape—a simulacrum—in preference to physical reality. When Noah Smith talks about dipping into the post-human future like stepping into a bath—pleasant and warm—one feels he is channeling a sentiment that Huysmans's Des Esseintes would understand perfectly well—and all the other Decadents too. It is the allure of the "Artificial Paradise"—to borrow Baudelaire's phrase. 

It was also, of course, a theme of Villiers's famous closet drama Axël, as well—in which the troubled hero and heroine ultimately decide to kill themselves—in the very moment of realizing all of their hopes and dreams—because they convince themselves that the concrete fulfillment of their wishes can never live up to the joy they derived from anticipating them. 

Compared to the heavens they were able to sketch out in imagination merely by dreaming of the glorious future about to be unlocked to them—the genuine article could only ever be a sordid, paltry disappointment. 

All the realities, Axël tells his mistress, what would they be tomorrow, compared with the mirages we have just lived? [...] Just now, you were speaking of Bagdad, Palmyra, and—where else?—Jerusalem. If you but knew what a heap of uninhabitable stones, what a barren and burning soil, what dens of loathsome beasts those paltry villages in reality are [....] (Guicharnaud trans. throughout)

For Villiers—then—the illusion—the virtual world, the AI simulacrum, the "Android"—is indeed superior to the real thing. (And before we get too upset about this—or the other offensive stuff in Villiers's book—of which there is a great deal—let us not make the mistake of taking him too seriously. It would be an error to miss (as Edmund Wilson apparently did—see below) the note of monstrous comic exaggeration in Villiers's style—the "black humor" of which André Breton spoke, and which he saw as a thread interlinking almost all of French literature—from Sade to Baudelaire.)

Villiers, then, was pro-Illusion and anti-Reality. (At least if we are to take him as endorsing his protagonist Axël's position on the matter; there is some debate on that point—as apparently in one draft he intended Axël to eventually awaken from his pessimism and convert to Christianity. Although—for Villiers—Christianity may have been preferable precisely because he saw it as the ultimate Illusion—the beautiful dream that was far better than the mere world. What right [...] has the world to be so arrogant when it merely pleased us to prefer, knowingly, the sublime dream of God to the mortal lies of the earth? asks another of Villiers's characters.)

This overtly anti-life, anti-Reality stance on Villiers's part was plainly enough to disturb Edmund Wilson, who wrote a whole book—Axel's Castle—as a protest against the anti-life, anti-Reality teachings of the Decadents and the Symbolists and the Parnassians, etc.—the sort of aversion to and flight from reality that led Proust to wall himself up in a cork-lined sound-proof room, or Valéry to take his twenty-year hiatus from literature, etc. 

Wilson was, officially, against this life-denying "religion of Art"—as Malcolm Cowley called it in his Exile's Return (a book with quite similar themes and perspective to Wilson's). But he must have also sensed the allure of it—too—just as Noah Smith does; just as Villiers does. Why else write a whole book about it? Why immerse himself in the Decadent literature—just to denounce it? No one is so disciplined. 

Wilson too must have felt a desire to step into the warm bath of the "post-human future." He too must have heard the siren song of the "Artificial Paradises"—the "Underground Eden" inhabited by beautiful Androids and chittering animatronic birds that Villiers conjures in a section of Tomorrow's Eve (a kind of creepy prophecy of the coming Walt Disney World Tiki Room)—and longed to go there. 

For decades, the psychoanalysts have been telling us that—as part of growing up—we must learn to replace the "Pleasure Principle" with the "Reality Principle." But what the Decadents were suggesting—and this is a theme of Hoffmann's tales as well—is that it is perhaps not only possible, but preferable to opt for Pleasure over Reality—to immerse oneself in a realm of fantasy wish-fulfillment, and let Reality go hang. 

This is essentially what the beckoning allure of the "post-human future" is saying as well. For centuries—indeed, millennia—human wisdom has taught: accept limitation. Accept suffering. Accept the frustration of one's desires. To live without suffering would be to try to live as the gods do—it would be the ultimate hubris. But now—here comes technology to crook a finger and tempt us with the possibility of transcendence. It says: maybe you can escape. Maybe all the limitations and finitudes of human nature are not in fact inevitable aspects of our plight—but merely relics of a prior age of barbarism—much as uncured leprosy and a world without penicillin seem to us today. 

That, surely, is part of why we are tempted by it—even if we publicly disclaim it (just as Wilson did). 

But—we protest—isn't Reality preferable, not because it is more pleasant than illusion, but simply because it is real? After all, if we want to realize any of our hopes and dreams—we have to find some way, in the end, of settling scores with reality. If we don't just want our hopes to hang forever in the realm of illusion—outside our concrete grasp—we have to try to bend Reality in accordance with our desires. For this self-interested reason, if for no other—we cannot leave Reality wholly out of account. 

To this—Villiers had an answer as well. He says: but what is this "Reality" of which you boast, other than just another tissue of illusions? 

When the Thomas Edison of Villiers's novel (and yes, Thomas Edison himself is indeed the central character of the novel, except blown up to mythological, Faustian proportions (as Villiers states was his conscious intention in a preface))—when Villiers's Edison, I say, presents to the baffled eyes of Lord Ewald the "Android" of his invention—Ewald exclaims—but she can't really think; she can't really have a soul; she can't really reason!—Edison replies, in so many words: what is this "real" reasoning and speaking of which you speak? And in what way is it superior to what you see before you? 

Villiers's description of how such a robot might "think" and "communicate" is in many ways eerily prescient—and his argument with Ewald on the subject resembles in multiple ways the debates we have today over the possibility of genuine artificial intelligence. 

Edison explains that he has encoded in his Android a library of golden disks engraved with phonograph recordings—prepared by the greatest authors of the age (a kind of dim forecast, we might say, of the way in which today's LLMs are trained on the written work of prior human creators—except that the authors in Villiers's case were actually compensated for their work. Edison explains that he paid the authors "at extravagant cost." If OpenAI had done the same—they might not be facing so many lawsuits.)

To this—Ewald objects—but how could mere phonographic recordings provide such a perfect imitation of apparent responsiveness—apparent fluidity—above all, apparent "freedom of will"—in responding to Ewald's prompts? Edison replies that part of the effect is achieved by mental projection: Ewald's own mind ascribes meaning to the responses he receives from the machine. 

And indeed, this is part of what happens with AI today—we perceive it as "thinking" and "talking" to us—as being conscious—in part because our own minds anthropomorphize the machine—we attribute greater meaning and subjectivity to the patterns the machine emits than are actually there. 

But then again—as Alan Turing would point out—in what way is this "projection" of consciousness onto the machine any different from what we do with other minds in general—including human minds? 

And this is in part Edison's point as well: is "human consciousness" really doing anything so much more impressive or irreplaceable than what the machine is churning out, via its golden cylinders? 

In our contemporary debates over generative AI, we often say: "but it could not possibly replace human creativity. Even if it can mimic the output of human speech and thought—it is just a 'stochastic parrot.' It is limited to rendering a probabilistic impression of what human beings would say in such a situation. It is just engaged in statistical guesswork—a mere extension (particularly sophisticated, but a mere extension nonetheless) of the "autocomplete" feature we've all come to know and recognize from ordinary word processors and texting apps. 

But the rejoinder to this argument—from the advocates of the possibility of AGI—is often not so much to deny it—but simply to question whether human intelligence is doing anything so very different from that. The machines may be "stochastic parrots"—but are we something other than stochastic parrots in turn? 

And this, in substance, is how Edison answers Lord Ewald's point as well: how much of human speech or "creativity" do you think is truly "original"? How much of it is anything other than a web of clichés, reproduced through memory and probabilistic guesswork happening on a substrate of our consciousness? As he puts it: "Reality herself is not so rich in alterations, variations, or novelties as you are trying to make yourself believe. [...] In actual truth, there's not a single word that isn't a repetition [....] What do you expect anyone to improvise, alas! which hasn't already passed through a million mumbling mouths? We mutilate, we adjust, we reduce to commonplaces, we babble, and that's all." (Martin Adams trans.)

So—Edison concludes—if our interactions with other people are founded on illusions already—projections of our own minds—and if our belief in our own free will and originality and creativity are likewise illusions—then, is this "Reality" of which you speak any more "real" than Illusion? Is it not just a particularly paltry and ugly Illusion—and therefore, do we lose anything at all by replacing it with the more preferable illusion of our dreams? 

Should we not simply dip our feet into the warm and pleasant bath of the post-human future, and be done fretting about it? Should we not simply stop trying to fight it and embrace our new emerging digital reality?—to live in the Simulacrum, which is after all no more false than so-called Reality—and which may after all be more real than Real—be hyper-real—to borrow a concept from Umberto Eco—or at the very least a marked improvement on Reality as we have always known it? 

Again—I say—let us not fall into the mistake of taking Villiers too literally and seriously on these points. There is, after all, another way to read his novel. Indeed, there are multiple other ways to read it. 

One could read it simply as a nasty anti-feminist screed—a scornful refrain on the theme of women's artifices, according to which—as Villiers puts it—women have been "part-Android" all along—using contrived enhancements and mechanical charms to lure married men from the path of virtue—and so—there is nothing to be lost from replacing womankind with lifeless mannequins. 

There are certainly many passages in the novel that lend themselves to such a violently misogynistic interpretation—and no one is obliged to like them or agree; I certainly don't. But here again—I can only plead in extenuation of the author—we should not remain altogether oblivious to the presence of "black humor" lurking on every page. It is always there, winking at us; reminding us that Villiers's tongue was always somewhere near his cheek. 

One can also read the book as a reactionary Catholic protest against the advent of modernity, and the process of secular disenchantment of the world. When pressed for his reasons for creating an Android with the power to replace womankind, after all—Edison cries, in effect: well, they have already killed God, haven't they? They've killed him with their steam engine—their "demon of Mechanism," as Carlyle would call it. So what right have they to protest if we now proceed to kill love; to kill Romance; to kill humanity's pretensions to "consciousness," our illusion of possessing such an irreplaceable "soul" or "intelligence," by showing that all these things can be reproduced by mechanical apparatus? 

(Of course—in the very act of making this argument—Villiers acknowledges that he regards the God of Christianity as a kind of Illusion as well—one which was indeed destroyed by modern empirical science. But one senses he would agree with de Maistre on the subject of the dogmas of religion: "If they are not true, they are good; or rather, since they are good, are they not true?" (Lebrun trans.) After all, did not Villiers put into the mouth of one his characters, in Axël, the kindred sentiment that we saw above?: What right [...] has the world to be so arrogant when it merely pleased us to prefer, knowingly, the sublime dream of God to the mortal lies of the earth?)

So those are the misogynistic and the Catholic reactionary interpretations—and Villiers would no doubt endorse both. He was not an author noted for having good politics, one must confess. 

But is there perhaps also a humanistic interpretation of the novel—buried beneath its pessimism and scorn and black humor? Did Villiers not perhaps anatomize and de-mythologize the pretensions of human consciousness so far that he came out on the other side? Did he not perhaps grind our human hubris to such a fine powder that we emerge from it with only new respect for the wonders of our human species's achievements, given what base metal it is composed of—with refreshed admiration for the fact that we have been able to construct such extraordinary intellectual edifices, when our consciousness is discovered to be made up of such absurdly mundane elements as this? 

Did Villiers not, perhaps, like Camus—find "within the limits of nihilism" a "means to proceed beyond nihilism"—as the latter put it in The Myth of Sisyphus? Did he not—with Camus—find in the very fact of absurdity a basis for renewed admiration for the human willingness to go on existing and struggling in the face of this absurdity and futility? 

So too, having realized from our confrontation with machine intelligence—that we are perhaps ourselves nothing more than "stochastic parrots" preening ourselves on the pretension of possessing a unique soul—is it not all the more extraordinary to behold what mere "stochastic parrots" have achieved—including, but not limited to, the creation of artificial stochastic parrots in our image? "Who is divine?—this bird," as Thomas Hardy once wrote in a very different context. If we are indeed stochastic parrots—we are nevertheless divine ones. 

In a recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast—devoted, without using the term—to the same topic of the "post-human age" that Noah Smith was talking about—that is, the emerging world of AI-generated "slop," digital influencers, and social media–driven "attention economy" politics that we see all around us—Klein and his guest, Kyla Scanlon, at one point note that the key emotional tone of our present cultural moment in "nihilism." Effort and struggle seem somehow meaningless—hollow—now that there are machines that can do it all for us (or will be, shortly). What, after that, is the point? 

In some ways, it's just the same old problem of absurdity that Camus was talking about. The absurd and futile struggle. In this sense, AI hasn't created anything new in this world—it has merely exacerbated the familiar dilemmas; the old existentialist "human condition." Man's fate. After all, struggle didn't just become "pointless" with the arrival of AI. It was always pointless. It was always "a naked child against a hungry wolf," as John Davidson put it. Because it's an inescapable fact that, no matter how much we struggle—as G.M. Hopkins succinctly put it—all life ends in death. So, the effort was futile long before ChatGPT arrived. "Nihilism" is nothing new. 

The point is not to reject nihilism—for there is no way out of it. There is no way to escape the existentialist plight, the human dilemma. The only way out is through—to find "within the limits of nihilism," as Camus put it, "a means to proceed beyond nihilism." (O'Brien trans.) And in Camus's brand of humanism we have it. We can realize that: it is the very fact that we have gone on struggling, creating, doing—even in the face of the horrifying consciousness that Villiers reveals to us—of the base elements and materials out of which this human intelligence is made—that makes our species worthy of respect. 

And so—for all the frightening possibilities of the post-human future—in the very confrontation with the abyss it discloses—we can find once again the basis of our species' dignity. Perhaps this is the sense in which, as Camus put it, we can imagine Sisyphus happy.