THIS ROBOT IS GOING TO KILL YOU.

Here’s why. I’ve been thinking a lot about politics these past few weeks. I’m in the process of developing a panel for this conference around issues that relate to social media and commodification of information. This is something that interests me, but my personal analysis of this isn’t what this post is about. If you’re looking for a personal political opinion, contact me personally! Even then I probably won’t make any strong arguments because, um, politics is strange. Just call me “other”, I guess - and I’ll keep my fingers tied that the gods of LeftForum might approve my panel submission and wait until later to realize I’m not a Marxist.

So this post is about this. Robots are getting “their own internet” so that they might be able to pool data input they receive. This “internet” would function to empower the robots with a greater body of information so that they might better serve the human world. My argument for the panel submission is that financial interest transforms information into an exchangeable good - and this is bad because those things that we identify as valuable in information is transformed. If I upload a photo of my bunny to Facebook, that is data information. The way that Facebook pays for its operating costs (you know, the electricity that’s used to power the servers, the Facebook cop-type people who take down nude photos, etc) is through marketing. Basically, that photo of my bunny is sold as information to marketers who are interested in learning about a customer base. When ads appear on the side of my Facebook profile for bunny food, it’s not a coincidence. It’s tailored retailing.

What bothers me about this is that the basis for relationships of every sort is information exchange. Twenty years ago, I might have mailed a photo of my bunny to my friends, or thrown a bunny-meeting party (I really love my bunny). This act is now being changed into something I never intended it to - fodder for companies to understand their marketing base in powerfully personal ways. This is a phenomenon of the digital age.

Robots are not humans, but they are getting something close enough to our internet that the BBC refers to it as an “internet”. In doing this, we are empowering robots with information so that we might have a better-abled body of robots to serve human needs.

This is where science fiction meets reality.

So Nietzsche (am I spelling that right?) has a theory he calls master-slave morality. I’ll quote a relevant bit of that article:

Nietzsche was concerned with the state of European culture during his lifetime and therefore focused much of his analysis on the history of master and slave morality within Europe (partly through the rise of ‘slave’ religion like Christianity. The superior person looks with profound suspicion on values such as compassion, pity, and selflessness, as well as on the ideal of equality of all persons. Superior people, in expressing the will to power, embody completely natural human functioning; they live the most completely actualized human lives, and as such, are happy, energetic, and optimistic about the human condition. Slave morality, by contrast, is pessimistic and fearful. Slaves are victims (the “abused, oppressed, suffering, unemancipated, the weary and those uncertain of themselves”; but according to Nietzsche, most slaves choose to be victims. Slave morality is timid, and favours a limited existence; it “makes the best of a bad situation.” It promotes the virtues that “serve to ease existence for those who suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness are honored — for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility,” i.e., a morality that values the mediocre group over the superior individual. In slave morality, “good” means “tending to ease suffering” and “evil” means “tending to inspire fear.” (In master morality, by contrast, it’s good to inspire fear.) Nietzsche believes that slave morality is expressed in the standard moral systems (particularly Christianity and utilitarianism). That is, Christianity and utilitarianism both exemplify the same ideology: the ideology of the majority, the herd, the cowardly, the conventional, the less-than-fully-human. Inferior people, who outnumber the superior ones, use ideologies (“slave moralities”) like Christianity, utilitarianism, and Marxism, to try to deny the will to power. They promulgate silly ideas like equality, and urge “virtues” like humility and pity. But they are trying to live a lie; they are trying to deny obvious facts of nature, and trying to make a virtue of their weakness and cowardice. In so doing, they develop artificial boundaries that constrain the strong from reaching their full potential. Nietzsche thinks slave moralities have pretty much taken over as the official moralities of the Western world; unlike most philosophers, he thinks the triumph of ideals like equality and democracy in modern times is a great tragedy for humanity. Equality and democracy are for Nietzsche the worst, not the best, values; they are the exact opposite of what humans in their hearts actually value, the opposite of what it is natural to value. .

… if you’re not familiar with Nietzsche’s other writings, that might sound pretty nutso. Nietzsche’s gotten kind of a bad rap. After he had a mental breakdown, his sister used his texts to promulgate anti-Semitism . This was a clever way to spread propaganda. You have to remember that Nietzsche was writing from a time before our modern understanding of self-determination and freedom was part of any cultural context. I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with this, but that it’s interesting to consider in light of the fact that, well, we’re basically enslaving robots. Sure, humans created robots- and we can destroy them, if we want. But most people in the world believe in a metaphysical force that created humans. According to that logic, couldn’t we say that we, as humans, are a metadigital force that created robots in our own image? Remember that “meta” translates from the Greek to “beyond”.

Part of my argument for the conference is that we, as citizens of the internet, are actually slaves to information exchange. Marketing firms use research from psychological studies of attention span and color and object placement to get potential consumers to give their money away to whatever. As such,internet-abled people are going to be forced to develop a slave morality - and just be like, “yo Facebook, even though I told you I loved this band, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to buy tickets to a concert of a band that you think is like that other band that I like. Holla!” The reason I’m convinced that robots are going to kill us is because, well, Nietzsche was a smart dude. If we’re enslaving robots, they’re going to develop something like morality. It might not look anything like human morality, but then again, I’m sure the “robot internet” isn’t very similar to our internet. And you know what comes after slave morality? Slave revolt! … so I think it’s high time we make peace with the robots. Especially if we like philosophy. Then maybe somebody smart enough will translate the metadigital importance of “Genealogy Of Morality” into binary, and we’ll save ourselves from incumbent doom .

- e_Mm_A