This was written as an open letter to the producers of Biohack the World.
My dear co-producers,
As I’m preparing to write the next mailer (and future mailers), I want to impart to you my disposition as a technologist and futurist with regard to recent events and the current political landscape.
As you’re probably aware, I stand on the more radical end of the spectrum when it comes to proper governance and oversight. I’ve touched on it a bit in my previous openers, where I make a call for the implementation of the Scientific Method (and even AI) in policy-making decisions.
If you really want to know what I think, I regard our current system of government as antiquated and inept, and at this point has become antithetical to our mission of preserving life and our natural environment.
I personally don’t think humans are up for the task of managing our economy and society as it exists today. There are way, way too many new threats, variables, and unknown unknowns in this world to deal with, from natural disasters to pandemics to climate change, a looming cold war with China, and innumerable others.
IMO, the only way to appropriately process all these accelerating changes happening concurrently would be with the guidance of scientists. And while we desperately need the help of AI in our government, we absolutely cannot have the current leaders be the ones to install it. I would, therefore, support a movement that calls for the complete dismantling and restructuring of our gov’t in support of a new democracy led by a panel of elected social scientists (who agree to be surveilled), leveraging big data and AI for the betterment of all citizens of the world.
Taking a step back, our current political system is wrong on all sides. It became really wrong when we lost the ability to have meaningful discourse with fringe third parties that have historically been responsible for things like the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Suffrage, workers’ rights, and much more (those didn’t come from the Republican or Democratic parties, mind you). Now that we don’t have that, we’re given merely the illusion of choice when what’s really been put in place is the newest form of slavery — the slavery of the lower and middle class by the corporatocracy. The American Dream is a fallacy. There’s nothing to dream for now because the brand of capitalism that has evolved here has racism, classism, and exploitation built into its core (ref: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that describes a class of laborers).
(I want you to know that I personally don’t subscribe to partisan politics and I see all of Washington as one big bad apple. So I’m not taking one side over another. As Andrew Yang says, “It’s not left or right, but forward.”)
Separately, it’s clear that China is on the path towards installing an authoritarian AI in its government and will likely surpass us in the AI race in 2–3 years. Make no mistake, the AI race is the new nuclear arms race. We don’t have time to dick around with a divisive President, an impotent Congress, and three branches of gov’t that takes forever to get anything good done. Our current leadership is merely a reflection of all the bad that underpins Washington. The President has always represented the sum total of all our dirty laundry for the world to see, going back many decades.
China and Russia see how weak and ineffectual our government is and they smell blood. They’ve caught on that AI can replace humans in politics and therefore can crush us within the next decade. This is precisely what has emboldened China to balk at our efforts to collaborate on AI. If I were competing head-to-head with the US on the world stage, I’d think the same way, sensing my opponent’s weakness and going in for the kill. We have a gigantic bullseye on our back and we’ve now found ourselves in the most precarious position in the history of our nation. And that should be the impetus for the wholesale restructuring of our gov’t.
Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, as they say. They’re merely actors with political degrees. The air they breathe there is laced with ego, narcissism, posturing, and greed with the net result being the gross negligence of America’s health, safety, and intelligence. It’s not only immoral and unethical but it’s fucking dangerous. It ALL has to go before we can rebuild with AI that will help humanity, and not surveil us.
If I were King for a day, I’d surveil and fire all the corrupt politicians, see who’s left, and opt for the scientific method instead of partisan politics. Doing so will improve the living conditions and standards for all Americans at the same time.
There’s absolutely nothing sustainable about what we have in place right now as it is completely decoupled from any consideration of environmental protection. We need a science-based approach to building better systems and a better society — especially now that we have the data to back it up. We would employ the same approach as we would the colonization of a new habitable planet (i.e. Mars). We would prioritize the survival of the human species first before anything else. We’d then take a very accurate assessment of all the resources and manage its use judiciously, leveraging all the data we can gather about our environment and implement policies to ensure the safety of all members.
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it. — Ernst Fischer
Still, there’s all the reason to be optimistic about our future! We will win in the end because of our right to act, speak, and create impactful movements through our art — what we do at BTW is an art! American music, movies, fashion, tech, and food have all acted as extremely powerful agents of global change. Even the hardest run dictatorships can’t keep our culture out of their borders.
(Have you ever played Civilization the PC game? You can win the game by investing in the arts and sciences as your culture can spread through other civilizations and overtake them in the process!)
Our art, humanity, and ingenuity will be our saving grace and not the deplorable violence we’re seeing in the streets, although I completely understand and empathize with the plight of the people. The looters too, like our President, are merely a reflection of everything that has gone wrong with the system, like a giant mirror reflecting back at us. Did we really think we could pillage entire communities and not have it come back to bite us just as hard? Or maybe we did realize it but we were too busy running the rat race to do anything about it.
We need to channel all our angst into creating art that is so beautiful that anyone looking at us from the outside would hang their head in shame and disbelief that all their efforts to control their people have been in vain.
But the powers that be here in America are threatening to dismantle our constitutional rights one by one through one unconstitutional act after another. The question is, are we going to take it lying down or will we organize and mobilize? We’re fast running out of time to save humanity from ourselves.
This is our time, right now. Let’s be bold in our thoughts and actions. I can’t tell you exactly what you should be doing as it is up to each of us to figure that out. But we absolutely cannot squander another opportunity for a revolution. We will march on until we fix one problem, and we will march again to fix the next big problem — we won’t stop until we’ve solved the biggest problem of all — the lack of protection of the human species and our natural environment.
Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to love all of humanity so hard that we’re willing to martyr ourselves for it.
With love,
David