Have you ever noticed the weird sense of resignation that most people have toward the advancement of artificial intelligence? 

Everyone knows about the dangers of technology run amok.  We see articles about it all the time.  We know it in our hearts:  Technology poses an existential threat to us, if used unwisely.
 

And yet, most people respond with tired resignation:

"It's inevitable," they say.

"Technology always marches forward," they recite.

"There's nothing we can do about it," they tell themselves.

Strange, huh?

When it's any other problem or threat, people are perfectly willing to take action. If a meteorite were headed straight for us, 9 billion people would be clamouring for some government or billionaire to blow it up. If radical Islam or a German with a small moustache were on the verge of militarily conquering the planet, people would be fighting with tooth and nail to drive back the tide. If nuclear war were about to break out, even the most bloodthirsty armchair warmongers would get scared. Humans have a survival instinct.

And yet, if you say “humanity is about to be enslaved and exterminated by super-intelligent A.I., and in the best case scenario we’ll have to merge our bodies with cyborg shit and connect our brains to the internet and become a sort of pseudo-humanity in order to keep up with it”, you’re likely to get little more than a shoulder-shrug in response.

"Gotta let that happen!"

​"Hey man, progress is progress!"

"You can't stop the march of technology!"

​Isn't it creepy?

That’s because technocracy is a cult. And like any cult, it insinuated itself into our consciousness very early in our lives. In fact, it took over our culture long before we were born.

We've been bombarded by propaganda, disguised as books, movies, and TV shows, showing us a vision of the "future" that looks a certain way, with several consistent characteristics:

​1. More and more buildings, less and less nature

2. More and more metal, less and less organic substance

3. More intellect, less compassion

4. Endlessly expanding power of computers over us

5. Fusion of humans with computers

6. Eventual elimination of (non-computerized) humanity​

The entire Sci-Fi genre envisions such a world, doesn’t it?

This is the Jetsons - a show about “the future.” Notice how there are no trees, no grass, and even the “plant” is a creepy abomination. Notice how everyone is living thousands of feet off the ground, disconnected from the Earth - literally. And notice how they have a robot in their family.

For most of us, this association has become automatic.  Whenever we think the phrase "the future", we see pictures in our minds that look like these.​

When was the last time you read a book or watched a movie or TV show (one which was classified in the futurism genre) that depicted people living organically in harmony with Nature, without artificial intelligence?

Almost never, right?

​Sure, there may be a few exceptions, like Star Trek: Insurrection, wherein a race of space-traveling people settled on a green planet, and gave up most of their technology to live a peaceful, agrarian lifestyle in harmony with Nature...

But even in that movie, the hippie planet was the outlier.  Everyone else in the galaxy was doing the computers-and-cyborgs thing.

In every "futurist" tale promoted by Hollywood and the corporate media and the big print-publishing houses, "the future" is a world of machines, and the further in time it ventures, the more machines there are.