Poking at the mind

Ursula Torr | February 2023

It’s a bit of a situation we’ve cooked up for ourselves here with this demonstration that all non-physical productivity can be better done by bots, now or very soon.

This itself is ticklish: now the threat is at the intellectual end – the thinking and professional arenas. It is not the labour and low skill space under fresh attack – those traditionally under threat through automation, industrialisation, increasing portability of skills and global upskilling are for once not under extra squeeze. The very core of the untouchable mind has been poked, because even the very, very cleverest cannot protect – or even envisage complete protection – against the collective mind. 

We can’t let this go! We must protect our history! Poets of old, original Shakespeare, scientists making breakthroughs need to be credited! Code cannot be plagiarised! If we let this run rampant, what is our value to employment, and how will we earn? Great fear accompanies the threat to the cleverest minds, as never before. Rules of copyright, of originality and of work are tightened. Let’s catch those using ChatGPT to replicate original work in a noose!

Yet it feels inexorable, impossible. It’s like catching the sea in a net. 

What if the next phase is a collective responsibility for all people and creatures and the very earth itself? There are enough resources to share, and sharing those resources can free us in unimaginable ways. And if we are each and all housed and fed… Now, what use is productivity? Imagine if productivity were simply for fostering community, connection with the earth and each other. Imagine creativity were pure: an essential part of existence, as a channel to the reason of it all, its own end. No need to own the product you created, no sense holding onto a concept of sole authorship. Productivity and creativity are an exploration of your own path, and an opportunity to weave with others and advance humanity together.

ChatGPT is surely at the heart of the nature of impermanence, of always being in transition, of things “sparkling in and out of existence”. The collective mind cannot be outthought by one, but the soul. Ah. Perhaps the soul can fly freer than ever before.