A historical moment ago, it was too obvious for words, but: Life is a blessing. So to regret the Cambrian Explosion that took place some 500 million years ago, when animals rapidly evolved—life endowed with eyes and speed, energized by a fillip of oxygen—would be insane. No less insane would it be to lament the emergence of the Cenozoic Era, when first primates and then humans made their way into a world that people would cultivate and sustain in forms conducive to life.
In our own time, a reversal of the blessing of life has begun: Call it the Cambrian Implosion. This implosion, foreseen with equanimity by nineteenth-century intellectual grotesques like Ernest Renan and championed by contemporary transhumanists, variously intimated and understood by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henri Bergson, Charles Péguy, C. S. Lewis, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Ellul—has begun to shape the whole of our lives. The particulars and paradoxes of this moment deserve our close attention. The contrivances and apparatus of the inorganic now assert themselves against the organic in almost every dimension of life.
Of course, we too are able affirm life, often through our capacity for ingenious technical interventions into organic nature. Technology can sometimes make the blind see; transplanted hearts and kidneys can sustain the blessing of life. In other areas, we appear to balance the claims of technology and life. Over the last twenty years, for example, the safety-enhancing technologies in our cars have improved, but the superabundance of technology in and around our cars has led to an increase in deaths from distracted driving. In this case and others like it, technology giveth and technology taketh away.
One can see a rather tortured logic making its way through decisions such as these. Francis Bacon’s declaration four centuries ago in his novelistic manifesto The New Atlantis has come into the open in our century: The exaltation of science and technology demands the “enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” So we resoundingly affirm life when it is a tribute to “human empire” in organ transplants, and in making our cars safer. But when, in order to save lives, we must reduce “human empire” by limiting the use of smartphone technology and onboard screens, we struggle to do it. It is only in egregious cases such as human cloning that we are able firmly to limit technology in a way that does not use one technology against another, but allows the blessing of life to shape technology’s presence and power. It is against our century’s imperial project to accord human life authority over technology, in which we increasingly live and move and recognize our being.
Meanwhile, what is happening to life that precedes and remains independent of Bacon’s technological human empire? We know some of the answers, although they often come to us as informational disjecta membra, rather than as full and integral understanding.
Take animal nature. We rational animals increasingly live apart from the animal kingdom; nonetheless, many of us have noticed the accelerating recession of animals from our presence. There are far fewer bugs meeting their ends on our windshields every summer, and far fewer birds singing around us (in the U.S. and Canada, almost three billion fewer compared to fifty years ago). Many of us have noticed media reports of a worrisome drop in the population of local fauna, as bats no longer fly through the twilit air nor bees flit around the blossoms in our gardens. The global decline is extraordinary: Animal populations have dropped by more than 50 percent in the last fifty years.
What of human life? Even as we live in lands increasingly emptied of animals, human beings are suffering a decline, veering toward a global collapse in birthrates. Sub-replacement fertility is now the norm in the countries where the majority of the world’s population lives, and it has spread beyond Europe and East Asia to parts of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as Latin America. In some regions of East Asia and Europe, the total fertility rate hovers around or has dropped below 1.0; from Japan and Italy to Ukraine and South Korea, historically unprecedented depopulation looms over the decades and generations to come. What is happening in some lands is coming to nearly all of them: According to The Lancet, only six countries will have replacement-level fertility rates at the end of this century.
The extraordinary drop in fertility is complex. But some observers claim that the human fertility crash is a blessing. A decline in the human population may slow or reverse the decline in animal populations (though there is little sign of that yet). And it may permit adults to give the young our full attention so that they can thrive. There are compelling arguments against the latter claim, but let it stand. It thus becomes all the more striking that, by many straightforward measures, our collective well-being over the last few decades, especially among the young, has declined precipitously.
Global rates of obesity in childhood and adolescence—the most physically active time of life for most people—have quadrupled since 1990, according to the World Health Organization. That this sudden and steep decline in fitness might be remediable by giving young people a diabetes medication rather than by confronting its causes—bad food, lack of exercise, and isolated lives are a few—is dubious cause for celebration.
Our inner lives, which naturally participate in embodied life and the world of “external” nature in myriad ways, have also fallen into difficulties. Adolescent and adult diagnoses of clinical depression and other mental illnesses have rapidly increased over the last several decades. Even before the pandemic did its grim work, rates of depression among American adolescents had doubled over the course of the 2010s, and rates of major depression likewise doubled. Further, from 2006 to 2016, there was a 70-percent increase in the suicide rate among white children in America aged ten to seventeen years old. Among African-American children of the same age, the increase was 77 percent.
Every struggle with depression is unique. But as the Oxford biologist Kathy Willis writes in her book Good Nature, regular encounters with nature improve human thinking and states of mind, in urban surroundings no less than rural ones. Yet as the young struggle to be happy, marry, and sustain deep friendships, these serious problems do not enjoy salience in respectable opinion. Rather than the preservation and fulfillment of young lives, we seek to widen access to abortion and euthanasia, including for the mentally ill.
It was thanks to the Cambrian Explosion that animals began to move more rapidly and effectively; now, in developed countries, homo sapiens is more sedentary than ever. Britain has nourished generations of youth with stories of children adventuring through pastureland and forests, from Mother Goose to Harry Potter. But in the 2020s, the number of British children who play regularly outdoors has dropped to about one in four—a more than 50-percent decline from the late twentieth century.
As we sit under florescent lights and stare at screens, our musical relation to nature likewise dwindles. The disbanding of choirs (in churches and elsewhere) narrows our opportunities to create music that celebrates creation with our own voices, rather than passively receiving recorded music. Similarly, according to one survey (also in Britain), many young parents now struggle to remember the lyrics of simple, easy-to-sing songs redolent of human life in nature in order to sing them to their own children—songs such as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
The language of nature is replaced by the language of technology and its appurtenances: Even beginner’s dictionaries testify to the rise of the inorganic at the expense of life. To the dismay of novelists, in the 2000s and 2010s the printed Oxford Junior Dictionary removed natural words such as holly, acorn, blackberry, heather, crocus and clover, heron and otter, and replaced them with contemporary technological terms such as broadband, database, and chatroom. (Tellingly, the dictionary also removed sin and saint from the view of impressionable children.)
In our century, organic life—and with it the language and creative liveliness that perceives and articulates human beings’ affirmative relations to life—has retreated and diminished, while the presence and power of the inorganic inexorably expands.
All of this happened before the appearance of artificial intelligence. Yet this last technological implosion of the organic threatens much more, even if it never reaches its programmers’ exalted ambition of general artificial intelligence—indeed, even if it never exceeds the abilities it now has. This latest project of human empire strikes closer to our innermost life than have any of its predecessors: It strikes at our will, our capacity to discover and develop our own reasons and insights, to make our own arguments, and to create stories and works of art by human beings for human beings.
The initial calls to resist the advance of artificial intelligence are already spent. The computer programmer Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” resigned from Google and warned us of extraordinary dangers for genuinely human futures. Soon afterward, more than a thousand Silicon Valley figures demanded a pause to the progress of AI research. For a moment, these extraordinary protests received dutiful attention in Western media. But the same media soon turned to what the next profitable or entertaining innovation in artificial intelligence might be—perhaps AI “friends,” including AI boyfriends and girlfriends, which are now (in a revealing contemporary turn of phrase) “a thing.”
By all accounts Sam Altman, head of Open AI, has a decidedly awkward relation to intellectual property, and yet he receives unfathomable sums of money and deferential treatment at pompous confabs sponsored by the New York Times. Eminent opinion seems not to care deeply or to act on warnings and controversies around artificial intelligence. Global competition requires that we race forward rather than reflect, and secular global techno-capitalism too often appears to its representatives as a hideously awesome god: Evils for its sake must be piously borne.
It is true that some of the claims for the sentience of artificial intelligence made by advocates—and some opponents—are implausible. It is not likely that artificial intelligence will become conscious as we are, or that it will become entirely free of hallucinatory fancies. Even so, it is already a “good enough” imitation of our language and our rules of work and play, and for that reason it diminishes our own occasions and acts of honest thinking, reasoning, and creativity.
Our status as homo ludens—as incorrigibly playful creatures—is in retreat, and at the highest levels. DeepMind’s Alpha-zero AI program now not only beats but dominates world-class players of chess, Go, and Shogi, something that would have shocked players only a decade ago. A few years ago, it impelled the retirement of Lee Sedol, the best Go player in the world, who was demoralized by the superior technological force deployed against him.
That is only the fate of one supremely gifted player, one might say, and after all it’s “only” a game. Yet in the years before us, artificial intelligence will enter not just into play, but into justice. Many expect that AI will generate not just routine legal tasks, but the most ambitious legal arguments. One prominent litigator, Adam Unikowsky, argues from experience that the more advanced forms of artificial intelligence are already writing plausible Supreme Court opinions and decisions.
As a final source of resistance, we can naturally turn to those most committed to humane learning—that is, teachers at every level, including college professors. Yet a growing number of them passively or actively accept the use of artificial intelligence for various tasks by their students. Other teachers use it themselves, submitting AI-generated reports, lesson plans, and comments on papers. This turn raises the increasingly likely prospect—it has almost certainly already occurred—that teachers and professors will command artificial intelligence to grade and comment on papers that were partly or entirely generated by artificial intelligence. In this latter case, John Henry Newman’s cor ad cor loquitur is superannuated: Now bot speaks to bot.
Even when teachers resist AI, readings are cut to make them fit the habits we have acquired from our constantly expanding “interface” (ah, the lyrical grace of the technosphere) with machines. The luminous flow of Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Tolstoy must make way for short excerpts, summary articles, and bullet-pointed presentations, so that the young may more easily “process” the required “information”—measures, in short, to format our organic minds with digitally induced expectations and imperatives. Practices such as these contribute to “the reverse Flynn effect,” as intelligence testing finds that young people are becoming less intelligent in the twenty-first century, an ominous reversal of a longstanding ascent.
Of course, nature absent human ministrations and ingenuity can be cruel to human beings, and one reason we have struggled against the limits of given nature is that some of them were indeed cruel. The impulse to escape nature’s deadly caprices is a legitimate dimension—one legitimate dimension—of our own nature, and many modern technologies and treatments have helped us a great deal, to say nothing of exalted explorations of the real, from quantum mechanics to theoretical mathematics. But in our moment, we must acknowledge our veering into a new age in which this single dimension of our nature increasingly asserts itself as a usurpative power over all others.
In the now evanescent modern age, the heroic efforts to eradicate smallpox and polio, to bring music and sports and reading and writing to children all over the world, rich and poor alike—those and other historic initiatives were in service of life, specifically and uniquely human life. It was held to be good that there should be more life, and that human talents and gifts should be permitted the time and attention that the harsher dimensions of nature had denied to far too many people.
This earlier modern world might occasionally have dreamt of Bacon’s empire, but it remained a human world, with human goods. Even as inveterate a modern materialist as Marx, in his reflections about the utopian fulfillment of “species-being,” speculated about forms of quotidian happiness aspirationally legible to many people in strikingly different cultures and historical periods. In those days to come, mused upon in the famous passage in The German Ideology, one’s daily round would comprise hunting and fishing, learned criticism and raising cattle.
Given that there are far fewer fauna to find for raising, hunting, fishing, or any other purpose, that we are less physically fit, and that we read a great deal less than we did just twenty years ago, these human hopes seem far less plausible in the ersatz world . . . not aborning exactly, but being fitted around us, like the bear-suit wrapped around the doomed Christian in Ari Aster’s Midsommar. We have begun to summon technology as a replacement for, even a consumer of, our own lives.
Distracted ourselves, we find it difficult to focus on the sacrifice of the well-being of the young, on our own capacity for learning and creativity, on finding and keeping happy relationships, and on caring for the nature for which we serve as stewards. Step by step, it becomes easier to relinquish ourselves, our natural possibilities and responsibilities, for a planet-spanning techno-mechanical exoskeleton of artificial action, thought, and creation. That exoskeleton offers to relieve us of the burden of being active and intelligent creatures who live reasonably and creatively in nature with other people. It offers to make us spectators in an artificial world that uses nature, including our own natures, as its resource mine—and as its trash dump.
Perhaps I spoke hastily in saying that the artificial intelligence race will not be meaningfully constrained so that humans might remain free. Last Christmas Eve, the Times reported a limit placed on the power of AI, agreed upon by China and the United States. Though the negotiation was anything but easy—it reportedly “took months”—both governments agreed that, in the words of Thomas Friedman, “no decision to fire a nuclear weapon can be made by an A.I. bot alone.” Indeed, “there always has to be a human in the loop.”
This is good to hear. But the fact that, after laborious negotiation, the bilateral regulation of artificial intelligence between the world’s two greatest technological powers appeared to issue in little but denying a new technology the authority to destroy a great proportion of life on earth is revealing, et pas dans le bon sens, as the French say. Perhaps—and it may be a proposal too tiresomely earnest for the attention of our technocratic guardians—there might also be some effort to give humans authority over technologies that will protect the prerogatives of life?
It will be difficult. To realize Bacon’s ambition and make “all things possible” is to abolish all boundaries of given form and nature, including the form and nature of human beings. For nature to be subjected completely to technical and procedural artifices, everything must be potentially changeable into something other than itself, by a sovereign will that draws energy from human passions and desired states—pride, greed, fear, idleness, pleasure—and yet ultimately tends to become unmoored from anything extrinsic to itself. The human empire must conquer nature in toto, including the varied and innermost recesses of human nature—and hence subjugate and transform all that is organically given, in ourselves and the world.
The Cambrian Implosion will probably accelerate in the decades to come, with life, especially human life and all its possibilities, in retreat. Our technocratic-managerial guardians and their sophists (now known as “Comms Teams” and “PR People”) will call this desert peace. They will praise and enrich themselves from its course, then enrich themselves again by selling select mitigations of the consequences it visits upon life. They will celebrate technological advances that treat the diseases and disabilities of human life, while maintaining silence as what is given to us as organic life declines, withers, fails to generate more life, and disappears.
It is wise and right to have confidence that there will be good paths through our century, paths that make judicious use of new technologies, including artificial intelligence. But human life, and life as such, require that technology resume its role as an assistant to human beings in the stewardship and furtherance of life, the mutual and complex relation of general nature with all of our naturally human hopes, talents, and responsibilities.
There is a better, higher standard than the one being made explicit in our time. For whatever technique, procedure, or technology discourages and diminishes organic life and the gifts and blessings of human life—even if it is powerful and profitable and convenient and affords us opportunities for ease—is not for people at all, but for incipient cyborgs.
It is past time for the Cambrian Implosion to be seen truly, with all its ugly, consumptive power over the primordial blessing of organic life. This empire should not be allowed to advance under the banner of “Progress.” Its inversive power has a truer name.
