Will AI Spell the End of Human Supremacy?

Editor's Note

Among the many ways to define the divide at the heart of the cold civil war, perhaps the simplest is this: on the one hand, those who seek to preserve the natural — that is, the American — order; on the other, those who seek to replace nature with something new, artificial, and (they claim) better. Peachy Keenan muses on the conservative’s proper approach to technology in these circumstances: How do we ensure the preservation of our way of life without letting inevitable developments simply leave us behind?

I am a stay-at-home writer and mother of five and, despite my too-online habits, I’m generally a low-tech person. Reader, I did not ever learn to code. 

News of the latest developments in Tech World echoes in vain across a vast chasm, an uncanny valley, of my natural aversion to my future replacement by machines. AI, sentient robots, artificial womb, genetic editing—all our jobs are going to be replaced, including parenthood. Our children 3D printed in labs, our spouses replaced with metal sex dolls, our wombs outsourced to plastic bags filled with jelly in incubators. 

An AI more powerful than we can even imagine will, I am told, wipe out humanity with a supervirus, a nuclear war, or both. But first you’ll get a few years to enjoy self-driving cars, self-flying planes, self-birthing babies, and household slaves that you can treat as badly as you like. It will be like The Jetsons but with Westworld sex slaves, a utopia where no one has to work but everyone is poor. 

Meanwhile, my main exposure to AI is Grok, the X platform’s AI tool, which I love using to make funny pictures of Donald Trump and squirrels. This is what’s going to kill us? Grok wouldn’t hurt a fly!

While I remain skeptical that AI computers are anywhere close to wiping humanity out, or bothering to try, it’s the biotech stuff that scares me more. 

I met someone at a conference last year who works at a biotech startup. Their pitch is that they will clone you and then edit the genome of your cloned embryo, so the baby has no brain. They will keep the cloned, brainless you alive in a tank somehow and boom — lifetime supply of any organ you will ever need!

Hopefully sane people and lawyers can stop tech wizards from growing their armies of lobotomized clone zombies, but this is not even the worst thing. The worst biotech excesses are already legal and happening every day. Not only that — they are considered blessings. I’m talking about genetically modified embryos selected for sex or other traits, frozen embryos forever locked in ice, and other painful human byproducts of reproductive technology. 

Another wondrous innovation brought to us by Science: the tragic lab-grown children born to surrogates and then handed off to be raised by ill-equipped transgender drag queens doing it so they can post their sad-eyed, bewildered, damaged “theybies” on TikTok, even “chest feeding them” from their hairy male nipples.

We are at this point in history already; the toothpaste is out of the tube. 

Now back to AI. As a writer, I have tried to use it for research purposes, and it’s not bad. But you’re not allowed to have it actually “write” for you, of course. That would be cheating! Programmers are allowed to ask it to write their code for them, but writers still must do the heavy lifting themselves. I tested this on Grok by asking it to “write an essay on the dangers of cloning in the style of Peachy Keenan.” 

Here’s what it spit out: 

Cloning: A Brave New World or a Brave New Nightmare? 

Oh, cloning! Doesn’t it sound just peachy? We’re talking about creating carbon copies of humans, like we’re some sort of divine Xerox machine. But hold your horses, because this isn’t about making a better batch of cupcakes; we’re meddling with the very essence of life, and my oh my, isn’t that just asking for a Pandora’s box of trouble? 

Then, there’s the ethical quagmire. Cloning humans? That’s some Frankenstein-level stuff right there. We’ve got to ask, where do we draw the line? If we can clone a human, what’s stopping us from cloning a slave labor force or, heaven forbid, a perfect little army of mini-Mussolinis? The ethical implications are as clear as mud in a hurricane.

I give this effort a C+. Sounds much too glib and cutesy, with too many homespun metaphors. Looks like I’m not getting replaced by an AI version of me—yet.

But what about robots? Tesla is cranking out squads of titanium house slaves that will be for sale soon: the Optimus robot will be available to buy next summer for between $20 and $30 thousand. This one I am actually interested in. Having an unpaid house servant that can simply stand in front of the sink, wash dishes, loading the dishwasher, mop the kitchen floor, clean the windows, dust — life changing! The big question is: can it be trusted with laundry? Imagine an Optimus stationed in the laundry room loading the washing machine, loading the dryer, and folding all the laundry into neat piles in baskets. If it could do those things, it’s worth $20,000 easy. 

I draw the line at nannying or babysitting. Like artificial wombs, artificial child rearing can’t lead to anything good. Would you actually trust your infant to cold metal arms that are powerful enough to rip your child’s arm off? I know it wouldn’t, but it could. And what could stop it? Yes, human nannies have glitched and killed their charges. Yes, babysitters abuse kids. And the robot can’t really molest a child, I believe. But could they hurt it? 

That’s not the main danger, of course. Kids spend enough time on screens and fiddling with their devices. But there is no confusing the iPads with a loving caregiver. The metal robot caregiver is straight out of the heartbreaking Harry Harlow monkey experiment the “wire mother,” which took baby rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and put them with hard, metal substitutes that offered no comfort or warmth or soft fur. The babies raised by the hard metal mothers failed to thrive, got sick, and didn’t gain weight. 

What is obvious to us is somehow still not obvious to the tech geniuses. Humanity will prevail, but only if it decides to assert its flesh-and-blood superiority over the merciless metal and cold inputs of the machines. 

The best, highest quality products are always the ones that are handmade, hand sewn, hand carved, cooked fresh, made with love. This too is common sense now almost lost. Would you prefer a sculpture made by a machine, or one painstakingly wrought by human hands? The finest clothing is the stuff made by expert seamstresses who sew each detail by hand.

Producing art, books, and babies is no different. I’m sticking to doing the hardest things—writing an entire novel from scratch, raising an entire batch of kids from birth—by hand, and I would have it no other way. Preserving our way of life means opposing those who seek to replace the natural order with one governed by machines; but in the twenty-first century, it also requires using new technologies in service of what is good, human, and beautiful.

Now make me a picture of Trump in an Elvis costume hugging a baby squirrel, Grok.