Utopia, technology, and the nebulous borderlands of truth

 

In the past few months, I have tried to keep up with the ongoing discourse concerning the phenomenon inaccurately labelled ‘Artificial Intelligence’, and its potential for warping our sense of reality and further obscuring the already-nebulous boundaries between reality and fantasy. Whenever I have come across an article or news report related to this issue, I have bookmarked it in a folder in my browser, hoping against historically attested practice that I will some day return to these texts and have some intelligent thoughts about them. The folder in which I put these bookmarks is labelled ‘Utopia’, and the folder was created as a way to collect materials related to my current teaching. I thought it fitting at the time, but did not take the time to articulate why I thought so, and so I continued to use this folder while the justification for using this particular folder continued to grow in the back of my mind. In this blogpost, I will try to formulate some of the ideas that have crystallized in the course of this week.            

The connection between Artificial Intelligence and utopian thinking seemed at first intuitive, obvious, and so I did not bother to formulate it properly. However, as I am now reading David Fausett’s 1993 monograph on utopian literature in the seventeenth century – Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopians of the Great Southern Land – a few aspects have become much clearer to me. Fausett makes a compelling point about how utopian literature of the 1600s came to employ textual elements belonging to news reports, pamphlets and broadsides, causing readers to often confuse texts of prose fiction with texts claiming to present factual content. Naturally, the motif of authenticating elements has a long history in fiction, perhaps best illustrated by the topos of the found manuscript (as in Don Quijote), or the now-lost written report translated from another language (as in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain). What was new about this obfuscation of the boundaries between true reports and novels in the seventeenth century, was the changing media landscape. As knowledge of the wider world expanded through journeys of exploration and the growing networks of trade that brought European powers into contact with cultures across the globe, increased literacy and a broadening market for literature gave rise to a greater circulation of information about the distant regions of the world. Since there was an expectation of new encounters and new discoveries, audiences were better disposed to accept fantastical tales as either true or at least based on true events. The knowledge that there was new information to be had, conditioned readers and listeners to blunt their scepticism and become more receptive to the claims of authenticity utilized by authors of utopian fiction.  

 

The confusion about truth and fiction in seventeenth-century Europe is not unique to that time or that place, and it is not an indication of people being stupid or less critical in their thinking. The more I research historical matters, the more convinced I am that humanity has neither become more intelligent nor more stupid as time as passed, only that intelligence and stupidity have played out in different ways and through different means. What is crucial about the confusion described by David Fausett is that the confusion came about through developments in mass media. The confusion, I believe, was a consequence of rapid technological development that did not fit with the slow maturation and the incremental adaptation to novelty that humanity as a species requires in order to understand things. It is this contrast between humanity’s need for slowness and the rapidity of technological innovation that highlights the utopian aspect of the contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence.  

 

Those who champion the virtues of Artificial Intelligence and the use of AI in writing, journalism, research and so on, are themselves proponents of a utopian vision, one in which humanity has released themselves of the drudgery of knowing and thinking to the machines. Not all these champions view the future in this framework, but even the more restrained and reasonable among the AI enthusiasts still tend to demonstrate attitudes towards art, critical thinking and factual knowledge that lean very strongly in this direction.  This utopian attitude towards technology is nothing new. One of the hallmarks of utopian thinking is exactly the high levels of technology that are available in utopian societies. Perhaps the most famous example of this idea is Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), which lists a long range of technological advances, including artificial meat and laboratories for all kinds of different research. The motif goes further back in the history of utopian thinking, however. In the Middle Ages – a period not widely accepted as one of utopian thinking, yet nonetheless rife with examples of it – the idea of technologically advanced societies in faraway places appear in several texts. In the Letter of Prester John, a hoax from the 1160s that purported to describe the realms of a Christian ruler in distant India, the technological marvels of this imaginary kingdom are expounded in great detail. Similarly, the Alexander tradition – a collection of texts claiming to narrate the life and deeds of Alexander the Great – contains several descriptions of technological marvels, such as Alexander’s submersible for exploring the depths of the ocean. Other medieval texts that were less fantastical and which had a stronger claim to truth, similarly spent much detail in recording the technological marvels of distant, exotic places. Liutprand of Cremona (d.972), in his chronicle Antapodosis, describes a mechanical throne in the court of the Byzantine emperor. William of Rubruck, who travelled to the court of the Mongol khan in Karakorum in the 1250s and wrote an account of his experiences, tells about a fountain of marvellous ingenuity, built by a French smith who had lived among the Mongols for some time. Similarly, Marco Polo’s famous account of Kubilai Khan’s empire contains a number of examples of advanced technology. There is, in other words, a long-standing expectation that utopian societies – whether they are ideal or just simply better than the point of comparison – are technologically advanced. The presumption is perhaps strengthened by changes in the media landscape, and the idea that technological improvement is the same as social improvement is easily accepted when one is condition to connect technology and utopian thinking, and also when one is living through a changing media landscape that one does not have the time to properly adjust to.    

 

That technological change requires adjustment on the part of the humans affected by that change is perhaps a fairly straightforward claim. Often, this adjustment has been a core aspect of the enthusiasm and the justification surrounding technological change. There is talk about transhumanism, of technology allowing humans to transcend their humanity, of technology ushering in a new era in the evolution of the human species. Technology is often seen as the key to unlock Utopia, and in our contemporary discourse that technology is Artificial Intelligence. Yet the utopian aspect of technological change is two-sided. On the one hand, it is absolutely indisputable that technological change has allowed a vast number of people opportunities for a better life than they would otherwise have. The best argument for our current level of technology is that it allows those who are handicapped in one way or the other to reduce that handicap, to open up new opportunities for living that would have been impossible without the technology in question. On the other hand, technology can be used to either oppress or numb the critical faculties of people, and when that technology is controlled by someone with authoritarian tendencies, the technology in question can easily be used to obscure the distinction between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between veracity and lies. The potential for abusing technology is strengthened when technology means changing how we receive information. Changes in the media landscape means that we, humans, need to reflect on how we can use our faculties to convert the information given to us through this changing landscape into knowledge. We need to learn how to distinguish between claims and facts, between lies and truth. If we do not reflect on this challenge, if we forfeit this process of critical reflection, or if we outsource it to those who control the changing technology, we become less able to understand the basis of truth and the signs of duplicity.            

 

With the current proliferation of AI programmes that can create images and texts by stealing from existing works of art and existing texts, we are becoming less well-equipped to ascertain what is true and what is false. This blurring and warping of the already nebulous borderlands between truth and falsehood can be, and is already, weaponized by various individuals and groups with authoritarian motives. The utopian scenarios presented by these would-be dictators and hobby-authoritarians might seem appealing, but we do well to remember that several works of utopian fiction have already highlighted the inherent risk of abuse in utopian societies. One example is Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Austral Connue (The Southern Land, Known, translated by David Fausett), where the novel’s narrator lives thirty-five years among the Australians, a people of highly advanced technology. However, these technologically advanced people, who consider themselves and their society perfect, tolerate no other form of human life than that of their own. Since Foigny’s Australians are giant hermaphrodites, this intolerance means that they commit genocide on their non-giant, non-hermaphrodite neighbours, and use their advanced technology to obliterate the very ground on which their neighbours sought to establish a living. In the novel, the Australians have also employed their combination of technology and force in numbers to establish an ecosystem that is devoid of insects. Such a manoeuvre stems from an idea of gardens as locus of perfection, where insects are seen as noisy intruders, and fits perfectly well within a branch of utopian thinking that equates perfection with homogeneity. While the realistic consequences of this insect-less world are not touched upon by Foigny, our twenty-first century perspective – an era of mass-disappearance of bees and other insects, and where the consequences of extensive and often unbridled use of pesticide have made themselves clear – notifies us of the impending ramifications of technologically crafted homogeneity in Foigny’s Australia.  

 

Utopian thinking and utopian literature often rely on a blurring of the border between truth and fiction, between the possible and the impossible, in order to make rhetorical points, or in order to push an agenda or proffer suggestions for how to improve society. On other occasions, utopian thinking and utopian literature showcase how illusory the perfection of utopian society actually is. Thomas More’s Utopia is a slave society, relying on prisoners of war to do the most basic tasks of a functioning commonwealth. Tommaso Campanella’s city of the sun in distant Taprobane is a eugenicist society where the individuals are governed to such an extreme degree that the leaders decide which individuals should have children together. And Foigny’s narrator, the hermaphrodite Sadeur, returns from Australia completely disillusioned with a society that believes itself to be perfect, and allows that perfection to justify horrible acts.         

 

In our contemporary discourse, the utopian implications of Artificial Intelligence tends to dominate. Yet utopian societies can often be illusory, and more often than not they are deeply authoritarian. One way of perpetuating authoritarian government is to confuse people’s perception of reality, whether it is through mass delusion or through a blurring of fact and fiction. Nowadays, the media landscape is changing too rapidly for us to easily adjust to the new ways of ascertaining truth and discovering lies. In such a confusion, utopian solutions might appear more realistic than they actually are. Indeed, these utopian solutions are based on the perpetuation of a tool – Artificial Intelligence – that is programmed to create an alternate reality from stolen fragments from the real world. The question we need to ask at every juncture when AI is lauded as the key to the future is as follows: Whose utopia is being heralded by AI’s warping of reality? The answer is most likely going to be very unpleasant.