An AI>de-mémoire from the year 802701.

Or, maybe ... A country road. A tree. Evening.

DeepSeek is Big News. Huh? Me too, I’d never heard of it before yesterday.

However, as we all swiftly learned, DeepSeek is a Chinese start-up, founded as recently as 2023 by a gentleman called Liang Wenfeng who, as well as being CEO of DeepSeek, is a co-founder of a quantitative hedge fund called High Flyer.

It quickly became clear that Liang and his team had something of a coup on their hands. Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek:

stirred awe and consternation in Silicon Valley after demonstrating breakthrough artificial-intelligence models that offer comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at seemingly a fraction of the cost.

Later in the day, the UK Daily Telegraph was reporting:

Chinese AI has sparked a $1 trillion panic …

Coincidentally, Jef Teugels, a friend who knows more that a thing or two about sustainability and the effective management thereof, posted on LinkedIn to point up his most recent article discussing the issue of ‘cognitive offloading’, which he describes as “the habitual reliance on external tools to manage tasks such as memory or problem solving”.

The point is, AI tends to promote cognitive offloading and, the more ubiquitous and successful AI becomes, it seems logical to assume (according to human reasoning, anyway!) that it will be ever more relied upon to do so. This may, of course, detrimentally serve us humans in the long term.

My response to all of this?

Well, life in the year 802701 came to mind.

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I first read about life in 802701 way back when I was just twelve or thirteen years old. The source was a novella written by H.G. Wells and published in 1895 called The Time Machine.

In this distant future, the human race has evolved into two distinct forms.

The Eloi are a child-like race that eats only fruit and enjoys a leisurely existence in an apparently elysian garden-world.

The Morlocks are grotesque subterranean creatures who come to the surface only during the night. They provide for those above ground, but the payback is extreme … they ‘harvest’ the Eloi.

Within the story, Wells rationalized his characterizations on the basis of life in his own Victorian world. As the Time Traveller explains in the story:

Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?

Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people - due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor - is already leading to the closing in, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. … So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort, and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.

Which is to say, Wells interpreted the situation as he saw it in terms of his own political view - socialism.

However, what if we re-interpret the racial elements of the story in a different way to reflect today’s developments? What if we see the Eloi as humans and the Morlocks as AI?

Might that suggest that we humans could easily fall into the same trap?

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In The Time Machine, Wells theorized that, if all our needs were catered for, we humans would become increasingly passive, to the point of disconnection with … well … everything except immediate self-gratification.

When a young female Eloi, Weena, falls into the river and is being carried away none of the other Eloi lift a finger to help: they don’t even notice what is happening. It is the Time Traveller, himself, who dives in and saves her.

Does the rise of AI, and the accompanying cognitive offloading, mean that we may now have to confront a similar dynamic?

In his article, Jef Teugels labels the effect of cognitive offloading ‘dummyfication’.

French commentator Renaud Camus sees it in much darker shades:

I am not saying that the teaching of forgetting was intentional, deliberate, or chosen as one decides on a plan. I am not saying that mass entertainment, which is permanent and impossible to flee, like the noise pollution with which our public spaces are today deliberately saturated, corresponds to a carefully crafted policy. I am saying that they played an indispensable role in the change of people. As I like to say and to repeat, a people who knows its history and who knows its classics, a people who knows itself and knows what it owes itself, does not let itself be led - except in the case of open tyranny, armed constraint, and rampant terror - into the unspeakable abysses of history. But stupefaction dispenses with the need for terror, intensive entertainment returns patent dictatorship to the prop room.¹

Whatever your view, it is surely wise for us to stay very, very much on the alert. In which regard, I personally find a comment from what might at first be considered an unlikely source to be truly profound:

ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.²

Thanks for reading.

I took the photograph at the top when I was out walking the dog (or vice versa). It just seemed appropriate.

1. Renaud Camus, trans. Louis Betty and Ethan Rundell. The Replaceable Man (2012)

2. Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot (1956)