The recent papal encyclical could not come at a better time. The Pope’s centering of the human dignity of all persons and the importance of community obligations cuts against the project of devising humanity as an “us vs. them” dynamic. Perhaps the most pernicious of these emerging ideologies, and the most relevant to AI’s effect on society, is the dark enlightenment. While there is no one definition of it, at its worst it is a flattering-to-tech-oligarchs gambit to restore a “master morality” on a world perceived to have been captured by a “slave morality.” It’s an effort to reinstitute a hierarchy focused on pre-Christian classical notions of strength-equals-virtue without the Aristotelian prescription of the golden mean but rather some Lacanian unleashing of libidinal energies towards an accelerationist future.
Because liberalism appears to be neutral on questions about the good life, some tech-oligarchs are drawn to a “post-liberal” politics with a version of the good life that foregrounds technological progress.. This flattering ideology locates the “them” as those unreasonably standing in the way of technological advance and the “us” as the benevolent masters of technology only seeking to better humanity. The solution offered by dark enlightenment proponents is to separate the technologically advanced from the political community. In some cases, this means elevating the “technologically elect” by substituting the apparatus of the liberal democratic state with a “tech-oligarchy.” In other cases, this becomes a literal call to physically exit liberal democracy and its restraints and move us boldly into what the historian Quinn Slobodian calls capitalism without democracy:
We can secede by removing children from state-run schools, converting currency into gold or cryptocurrency, relocating to states with lower taxes, obtaining a second passport, or expatriating to a tax haven. We can secede, and many have, by joining gated communities to create private governments in miniature.
If laws get in the way of tech oligarchs’ desires, they can “exit” and find a new land where they make their own rules. One in which the “creators” of the bold synthetic future are singularly capable of making history. At its most extreme, its advocates propose breaking society into tiny states, each governed by a CEO (what Slobodian calls zones). Some proponents support racial separation, with the belief that “elites” will enhance the IQs of their progeny if they associate and breed with each other. This dark enlightenment view envisions a future where dominant humans merge with machines and achieve superintelligence.
It is no accident that the Pope opens the encyclical with a contrast between two familiar biblical passages—the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the city wall in Nehemiah. In the Tower of Babel story, the Pope highlights the fallacy of building a tower that could reach heaven, but he locates its problematic nature not as an arrogance of wanting to know the true nature of God, but as hubris through expecting that humans can create an artifact that overrides the diversity of the human creation. The other story Pope Leo invokes is the book of Nehemiah, one that foregrounds our shared obligations to one another and the importance of the entire community in building.
I read this passage and imagined that, as the kids say (or said? I can’t keep up with the latest lingo), Pope Leo was “subtweeting” Peter Thiel. When Thiel proclaims, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he is offering a view that the diverse political community may undermine his ability to build his own surveillance-based Tower of Babel. While it may be difficult to pinpoint Thiel’s exact ideological position (he also identifies as a Catholic), he believes that if calls to slow down AI development conflict with tech-elite aims, those calls must be sidelined for the good of technological advance.
Many people not associated with the dark enlightenment advocate a minimalist state when it comes to the role of the state in the economy. But a desire to reduce liberalism to economic liberalism is taken to its extreme in the dark enlightenment. This philosophy advocates the acceleration of capitalism and technology even if that goes against popular will or liberal rights protections. Because proponents of this view prioritize the agency of techno-capitalism, they advocate for the rule of techno-corporate power unimpeded by a view of democracy that restricts innovation and freedom.
While not directly identified with the dark enlightenment, Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” echoes its accelerationist vision. In the essay, he chides those skeptical of AI as lacking in boldness. His call to “conquer” nature through technological advance has Tower of Babel echoes. When he declares in his manifesto: “we believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives cowering in fear of the lightning bolt; we are the apex predator. The lightning works for us,” he is placing a dangerously outsized faith in the ability of science and technology to solve the world’s problems.
The idea that liberal democracy and the messiness of diversity of opinion produces feckless outcomes is not a new Idea. Dark enlightenment thinkers are inspired by readings (mis-readings) of a broad set of thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille, and the Italian Futurists. Undoubtedly a dark enlightenment view appeals to some because it is transgressive and shocking. There’s a punk element to upsetting the normies. With Italian Futurism, there is something thrilling about the promise of living on the moon or having robot helpers. Compared to the messy and frustrating work of consensus building in liberal democracies, techo-authoritarianism has the effervescence of technological advance. How does sclerotic bureaucracy and deliberation compete with “move fast and break things”?
Yet competing with it is exactly what Pope Leo is asking us to do. In the section “Building for the common good,” Pope Leo calls for
accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations.
While few tech leaders embrace the worst aspects of the dark enlightenment, our current tech-oligarchs aren’t the Carnegies building libraries and museums for the public good. They aren’t even the Bill Gates of a decade ago, investing in mosquito nets to prevent malaria. For that matter they aren’t even who they were ten years ago when Jeff Bezos was investing millions to work to eradicate global climate change.
It is worth noting that the encyclical is not anti-AI. It gives the remarkable advances of large language models over the last three years their due. But the important thing it does is situate these advances within a broader call to ensure that they serve the common good, even if that vision of the common good conflicts with those drawn to the dark enlightenment.
Image Credit: John Martin, “Pandemonium”
