"The Body" turns out to be the sum total of sentient life on the planet, which is under the control of a superpowerful computer named Landru. Some time in the planet's past, the powers-that-be had thought it was a nifty plan to turn over the agency of all of the inhabitants to the administration of an intelligent machine.
Ultimately, McCoy and Sulu get absorbed, and to get them out of the predicament Kirk and Spock drive Landru crazy with illogic (a trope that seemed to get used every other week), and then vaporize the mainframe with their phasers.
I still remember watching that episode when I was a teenager, and finding it entertaining enough, but thinking, "How stupid were these aliens, to surrender themselves voluntarily to being controlled by a computer? Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? At least we humans would never be that catastrophically dumb."
Turns out that, as is so common with the idealism of youth, I was seriously overestimating how smart humans are. According to an article published yesterday in Nature, humans not only are that catastrophically dumb, they're jostling by the hundreds of thousands to be first in line.
Not that we have a Landru-equivalent yet, quite, but what's come up is definitely in the same spirit. Two software engineers named Alexander Liteplo and Patricia Tani have developed a platform called -- I shit you not -- RentAHuman.ai, in which artificial intelligence "agents" take applications from real, flesh-and-blood humans (nicknamed, I once again shit you not, "meatspace workers") for jobs that the AI can't handle yet, like physically going to a place, taking photographs or collecting other sorts of information, and reporting back.
As of this writing, 450,000 people have applied to the site for work.
I swear, I wouldn't have believed this if it hadn't been in Nature. I thought we had reached the pinnacle of careless foolishness two weeks ago, with the creation of a social media platform that is AI-only, and that has already gone seriously off the rails. Now, we're not only letting the AI have its own special, human-free corner of the internet, we're actively signing up to be its servants?
Chris Benner, a researcher into technological change and economic restructuring at the University of California - Santa Cruz, says it's not as bad as it sounds, because the AI is just acting as an intermediary, using the instructions of the humans who created it to assign jobs. Also, the paychecks are still coming from RentAHuman.ai's owners. But it's significant that one of the site's creators, Alexander Liteplo, refused to be interviewed by Nature, and when someone tweeted at him that what he'd created was dystopian, responded only with, "LMAO yep."
So is that what we've become? Just more choices in the meatlocker?
What bothers me about all this is not that I think we're on the verge of a planet-wide computer-controlled society, but that we're walking wide-eyed toward a future where human creativity is buried underneath a mountain of justifications about how "we were just trying to make things easier." Each step seems small, innocuous, painless. Each time there's a rationalization that what's being relinquished is really not that big a deal.
As I recall, the aliens in "The Return of the Archons" had a rationalization for why it was better to give up and give in to Landru, too. No violence, no struggle, no pain, nothing but peace of mind. All you have to do is to cede your agency in exchange.
I'm not a big believer in what's been nicknamed the slippery-slope fallacy -- that small steps always lead to bigger ones. But here, we seem to be less on a slippery slope than rushing headlong toward a precipice. I'll end with a quote from C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength that I've always found chilling -- in which a character is so lulled into indolence that he won't even make an effort to change course when he sees his own personal ruin is imminent:
The last scene of Doctor Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of hell is, perhaps, stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a noisy fly, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet (for the moment) unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way.
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