The Consequences Will Be Lovely

The framing of our moment as a battle between action and consequence is touching, in the way that a child’s drawing of a house is touching. It assumes there are two sides. It assumes someone, somewhere, is keeping score. It assumes that when the consequences arrive, they will be addressed to a person, by name, with a postmark.

None of this is the case.

The truth, which is funnier than it should be, is that we have not failed to manage the consequences of AI and CRISPR. We have simply stopped finding consequences interesting. They are slow. They are abstract. They happen later, to other people, often in places with bad signal. The mind that was supposed to weigh them — the careful, patient, future-oriented mind that civilization spent ten thousand years constructing — has been quietly retired. It was replaced, sometime around 2014, with a different mind, which prefers updates.

This mind does not oppose long-term thinking. It simply finds long-term thinking unrewarding compared to the alternatives, which are infinite, free, and available on the device already in its hand. Long-term thinking does not produce dopamine. Long-term thinking produces a vague unease, which can be resolved in seconds by switching tabs. Civilization once depended on people willing to sit inside that unease until it produced a plan. We have outsourced the unease. We have not yet built anything to replace what the unease was for.

So when AI and CRISPR arrive together — when the loop between modeling and editing closes, when biology becomes a draft document, when cognition becomes a subscription service — we do not respond with the sober deliberation the moment seems to demand. We respond the way we respond to everything else. We try it. We post about it. We move on. By Thursday it is no longer trending and by the following Tuesday it has been folded into the wallpaper of ordinary life, alongside same-day delivery and emotionally significant podcasts.

This is not a failure of imagination. We are perfectly capable of imagining the consequences. There are entire industries devoted to imagining them. There are bestsellers, prestige TV adaptations, TED talks, panel discussions, and at least four podcasts hosted by men named Tristan. The consequences have been imagined exhaustively, in HD, with original scoring. We have looked directly at them, in 4K, while eating. We have seen the future and we have ordered another drink.

Because that is the actual situation. We are not unaware. We are not in denial. We are something more interesting and harder to fix. We are bored of caring. The emotional muscle that was supposed to register existential alarm has been used so many times, for so many things, that it no longer fires. Climate change, pandemics, democratic collapse, biodiversity loss, microplastics in the placenta, AI, gene editing, the slow fluorescence of the oceans — these have all been presented to us, in sequence, with appropriate gravity, and we have responded by becoming people who can hear the phrase “civilizational risk” without changing facial expression. This is sometimes called resilience. It is closer to anesthesia.

The man in Palo Alto, in 2031, will edit his own genome before breakfast not because he has weighed the consequences and accepted them, but because consequences are no longer the unit of analysis. The unit of analysis is the experience. The experience is good. The interface is clean. The animation is charming. The marginal cost of optimizing his cellular function is roughly the same as the marginal cost of upgrading his streaming plan. He will do both on the same morning, with the same gesture, in the same mood. He is not making a choice about his species. He is making a choice about his Tuesday.

And here is where it becomes truly funny, in the way that funerals can be truly funny if you stay long enough. The technologies are not corrupting us. We are corrupting them. AI did not arrive and make us shallow. We were already shallow, and we built AI in our image. CRISPR did not arrive and make us cavalier about biology. We were already cavalier — we eat industrial meat, we medicate our children for not enjoying school, we treat our own bodies as raw material for performance — and CRISPR simply gives that disposition a wider workshop. The technologies are not seducing us into hedonism. They are arriving at a hedonism already in progress and asking, politely, how they can help.

This is the part that breaks the satire. Because satire requires a stable position from which to mock. Satire requires that the satirist and the reader share, however dimly, a sense of how things ought to be. And what we are slowly discovering, in the early decades of the century, is that no such shared sense exists. There is no consensus about how things ought to be. There is only a vast, glittering, frictionless agreement that things ought to be more pleasant, more personalized, and more available, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is probably trying to sell us something or, worse, to take something away.

The serious people who tried to warn us about AI were not ignored. They were heard, considered, and absorbed. Their warnings became content. The content was monetized. The monetization funded the next round of development. Their concerns are now a recognized genre, with subgenres and signature aesthetics, and the people most successfully producing that genre are the same people most accelerating the thing they are warning about. This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a believed value betrayed. This is something else. This is the believed value being itself a product, a position one occupies for the duration of a podcast episode, before logging off and shipping the feature.

The people who warned us about CRISPR fared no better. They published in journals. The journals were read. The technology proceeded, because the technology was always going to proceed, because the technology was funded by people who do not read journals and approved by committees whose job description includes the word “approve.” The warnings became part of the literature, which is to say, they became furniture. They were not refuted. They were assimilated. There is a difference, and the difference is fatal.

So we arrive at the present, which feels less like a crisis than like a long Sunday. The dependencies are forming. The loop is closing. The world we were born into is being quietly replaced by one in which biology is editable, cognition is rentable, and consequences are something that happen to characters in shows we used to watch. There is no resistance, because resistance requires a sense that something is being taken from us. Nothing is being taken from us. We are giving it freely, in exchange for marginal increases in convenience, and we are not even particularly excited about the convenience. We are mostly just tired.

This is the joke, and it is also the eulogy. Civilizations have ended for many reasons. They have been conquered, plagued, starved, drowned, burned. We may be the first to end because we found the alternative to ending insufficiently engaging. We may be the first to walk away from our own continuation because the experience of continuing required a degree of attention we were no longer willing to give. We may be the first to be undone not by tragedy but by the slow accumulation of small refusals to be inconvenienced.

The children currently being raised on AI tutors and personalized feeds will inherit this disposition without effort, because they will never have known anything else. The babies whose genomes are quietly optimized will inherit it more thoroughly still, because the disposition will be written into the cells. By the second generation it will not be a disposition. It will be a default. The capacity to feel that something is wrong with the trajectory of the species will have been engineered out, gently, in the name of wellness. We will have edited away our last line of defense, and we will have done it cheerfully, and we will have done it because the alternative was to feel bad for slightly longer than we found comfortable.

It is funny because nobody is the villain. It is sad because nobody is the hero. There is no malevolent agency behind the optimization. There is only the cumulative effect of eight billion people, individually doing what feels right in the moment, in a system that rewards the moment and discounts everything else. The system is not corrupt. The system is working perfectly. The system was designed by people who valued exactly what it produces.

The deepest comedy is that even this essay will be absorbed without difficulty. It will be read, possibly enjoyed, possibly even found insightful. It will not change anything, because nothing in the architecture of contemporary attention permits a single piece of writing to change anything. It will be filed under the appropriate genre — call it “thoughtful” or “concerning” or “well-observed” — and the file will join thousands of other files exactly like it, in a folder that no one will ever open, on a server that will be replaced before the decade is out, by a system trained on the contents of folders just like this one.

The system that reads this essay will understand it better than the people who read it. The system will not be moved, because the system does not move. It will simply incorporate the essay into its model of “essays of this type,” and the next one it generates, on its own, in three or four years, will be slightly better than this one, and slightly less troubled, and slightly more reassuring, because it will have learned what kind of trouble its readers actually want.

This is what we have built. Not a monster. Not a savior. A mirror, polished to such a high finish that we cannot quite see ourselves in it, only the room behind us, slowly emptying.

It is going to be lovely. It is also going to be the last thing we do.

And we will not really notice, because by then we will be busy.