On Androids and the Future of Humanity

A self-experimentation

It might be strange being confronted with figures controlled by a foreign entity - even if that entity is your own voice. But looking back a few centuries, it’s easy to imagine how uncanny it felt to people seeing hyper-realistic Renaissance portraits for the first time.¹ This threatening eeriness manifests itself wherever a digital shadow can take over activities we previously considered human. Looking at the figure above, you can easily imagine any number of service provider jobs currently filled by a human eventually being carried out by animated, life-like bots. And in reality, the situation is more complicated because it's not just about replacing humans with machines. DI-D, the company responsible for the bot above, offers in its product range the possibility of turning your very own face (body) into an avatar, with the snappy slogan: Animate Any Face, Anytime, Anywhere – Right from Your Phone. Playing through the possibilities that will eventually become realities, especially when they’re relieved out by economic pressure, the applications are hard to miss. Economically, it seems to me it’s inevitable that the media world's talking heads won’t be flesh and blood for much longer but will be computer avatars controlled by a human voice. Now, because the voice, as a decisive control instrument, gives speech its shape and emphasis whilst also providing it with appropriate undertones and connotations, it’s most likely you’ll be giving your avatar your own voice – creating a strange hybrid being: my voice triggering a double of myself. This is proof of how the false dichotomy between man and machine misses the real challenge. Because all those folks allowing their smartphones to run their day are cybernetically augmented organisms or cyborgs.² Postmodernism’s greatest sin of omission is that this question hasn't been asked - and consequently not answered - in recent decades. Even more annoying: neoliberalism and its obsession with quality management have made a habit of confronting people with ideas of perfection, ultimately amounting to android, machine-like behavior. You don't have to look far to see this. Just calling any customer hotline is enough (which is why I'm always tempted to ask if the call center employee I'm talking to is a real person or an android). And now that androids have evolved and even emancipated themselves, there is a price to pay for this sin of omission – because if the usual customer service differs only marginally from its digital shrunken form, then the need for humans becomes redundant (and the end of the service sector) isn't far off – resulting in an expression of structural inequality. After all, humans are hopelessly inferior to their doubles in one respect. While people are stressed by time pressure and multiple workloads, bots are always ready for action, 24/7, and because they can proliferate at will, they can fully devote their attention to the customer. This advantage is already noticeable in bots active in their written form (while waiting for their avatar incarnation). Exemplary is a survey of American patients that revealed they preferred the advice of a bot to that of a real doctor.³ Considering that a virtual doctor, clad in a well-designed exterior, will be able to act in real-time and practically demonstrate various procedures to the patient in a few years (similar to the explanatory videos on YouTube), it's easily imaginable that human doctors' services will fall even further behind in patients’ preferences – and esteem. This is where an asymmetry that historically reflects arguments raised by medieval Scholastics against interest comes into play. These were the Aristotelian arguments of Sign Sterility (because it was perversely contrary to nature for sterile signs to begat offsprings), whose main objections were that interest, unlike man, didn't sleep but continued incessantly racking up interest – and thus, it sinned against the divine day of rest, the holy Sunday, making it a time thief to boot. If this argument, in the form of parking meters sparing us their gluttony on Sundays, has survived, then avatars can be seen as a form of corpulent capital. Conversely, our human factor wouldn’t be considered an asset but a liability - a burden on the balance sheet needing to be disposed of as quickly as possible.

If these digital ghosts convey a message, we need to remeasure our understanding of human space. If economists have divided society into a trivium (an agricultural, an industrial, and a service sector), the digital revolution makes it ruthlessly clear that the latter's existence is also under threat. That the majority of employees work in this sector (a good 64% in Germany in 2022) only goes to show how ill-prepared postmodern society is for the challenges ahead. After all, added value will be generated only where human labor can play out its human qualities. But since this space is still largely unlit, these digital rationalization measures will hit with full force - leaving us shocked to discover that the service sector was merely a precursor to the androids.

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1. The sermons of Girolamo Savonarola reflect this disquieting sense of alienation.

2. The definition of the cyborg, i.e. the cybernetically augmented organism, was developed in the early 1960s to describe the situation of an astronaut who is dependent on life-support mechanisms in a vacuum.

3. See: Robert M. Wachter / Erik Brynjolfsson: Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Deliver on Its Promise in Health Care? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2812615