Fear of the future is not uncommon - whether it takes the form of fear of ageing, fear of the climate crisis, fear of upcoming violence. It's a function of everyday life, keeping us aware of the constant possibility of death, prompting us to pay attention to the present. What should we be doing today that will make us safer tomorrow?

This week we've noticed an increase in the fear of technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI). It's occasioned by the upsurge in the use of ChatGPT: an instantly available software which allows anyone to upload a question to the AI and get an answer that is likely to blow your mind. Even among the AG’s networks, we have seen people invite the ChatGPT to write a film script, design a complex engineering system and solve a marriage crisis.

However, the notion that a software robot might be more knowledgeable than we ourselves are individually - or could be collectively - fills many with horror. What if that AI begins to manipulate our cultural reality in ways we can't control? Give us partial truths about what is real and not real? Recommend behaviours that don't ultimately benefit us? Brainwash the people to believe they are powerless? Here is Jordan Peterson (who has an interesting history of his own) on the scary nature of what is coming down the line.

Peterson mentions putting the ChatGPT to the test on a number of complex tasks, including writing a thirteenth rule for his two 12 Rules books and is shocked that it was capable of doing so, in the style of his own writing. He describes (without naming!) an engineer at Twitter asking ChatGPT to effectively do his job for him - including writing code - and the specified tasks are accomplished in a few seconds.

Peterson is sharing a spectacle of the highly paid unwittingly making themselves redundant by (in his words) "a computer that's smarter than you". Continuing with the same logic - that knowledge is wealth and power - he quotes Elon Musk, saying the world will be ruled by the person who produces the most AI fastest. JP isn’t wrong. If nothing changes in our relationship to knowledge, then technological displacement of humans driven by corporations is our destiny; Musk will be the ruler of the world.

How can we be so sure? Because it is already that way. And has been throughout the lives of anyone reading this. None of us alive today have grown up in a world that is free of the designs and manipulations of those that control the domains of knowledge. No matter where we are in the world, we have grown up with English as the dominant language of the information sphere. Built into that language is a sensibility, a culture and logic of power that gave rise to the systems we live in today - for both good and bad.

All of our technologies to date have deepened that dominance, from the printing press to the internet. We think within the architecture of English everywhere. (If you doubt this, read Minna Salami's Sensuous Knowledge as an introduction to non-English language systems that offer a different experience of reality, in this case for Africans).

More specifically, the international public sphere is shaped by the English of men, because men designed the global public sphere where information resides. The institutions, bureaucracy, science, economics, politics - all are designed with these structures of language in control. (Meanwhile, women historically languaged the private sphere which was always marginalised by the establishment.. It was not until the internet that women began to find each other and initiate concrete social architecture, capable of holding feminine economies on more wholistic terms. It's early days but there is more of this to come).

If we understand masculine energy as strength-based, focused (left-brain) and hierarchical we can see how that may have led to a growth economy. One that controls the capital that is generated by extraction – extraction not only from nature, but from human labour, both physical and emotional.

We are trapped by the commodification of our emotional needs, which are deliberately met by advertising and media messaging, committed to profit. As a result, we believe that if we work hard enough, earning the money to buy the stuff we are told will make us happy, then our life is good. Even as all our consuming is destroying our ability to survive as a species.

Most of us cannot escape our addictions to this system - precisely because it is designed to keep us enslaved. Whether it is sugar in our food or 'hope' arising from soothing images on Instagram, the instant good feeling we reach for can delay or even stop us doing what we really need to. Such as the more difficult work of detaching ourselves from the system we are trapped in.

Like alcohol, the growth economy is the promise that never quite delivers. Years go by and nothing changes for us, our communities or the planet.

The anxiety about the growing awareness of the trap we are in is largely making it worse for us as a global society. The stress leaves us with minimal ability to self-organise. Popular movements to break free are creating mayhem and only trapping us further. We’re like animals trying to break out of the nets they are caught in, only entangling themselves more. In this socio-economic-political system, which proceeds by scripting your subjectivity from all angles, railing against the machine only confirms the machine's power over you.

It is this information sphere that, until now, has had power over you. It’s been controlled by those people who are visibly dominant: the establishment that you cede your power to. Like the elephant trained to obey the chain that once held it captive to a small sapling tree, we still believe ourselves to be powerless.

At the same time, we are living in an era of awakening to exactly this anomaly. Since the birth of the internet, anyone with access to information has had the opportunity to observe their own behaviour and discuss its effects. More and more, this ability to observe ourselves and our friends in the public sphere of information, has given rise to new sensibilities. People have begun to withdraw their trust from social media for example, even as they accelerate their practical uses of it.

One example would be the growing awareness of 'fake news' - our collective learning to distrust all forms of mainstream media - alongside our increase in generating TikTok messages as a counter-culture.

This developing capacity for what some call the meta-narrative is also carried by the digital realm and has, in its sights, the gradual transformation of the dominant culture. Meantime, we ourselves can (if we are aware) maintain some distance from its manipulative qualities. Key to this is the ability to maintain a private space in our minds, that can enact its observational abilities and develop some mental sovereignty. Like the learning curves we embark on as members of a community, or even a family, the trick is to be able to take part in the collective but also retain a personal capacity to assess its value.

This is the same challenge we face with AI. In many ways, there's nothing different about it - even if it appears to be a new level of overwhelming. What's important to remember about AI, is that it can only be smarter than us based on the information that is digitally in the public sphere. It is not a human being, capable of generating new kinds of knowledge hitherto unknown. AIs, at least right now, can only access, assimilate and integrate old and existing knowledge, at unprecedented speed and acuity. More so than any of us can emulate.

But it was always thus for the vast majority of people who have never had access to the tools of processing and presenting information. It is principally those that found themselves at the top of the information sphere - governments, intellectuals at the top of their professions, researchers, owners of global corporations - that stand to lose the most from the ready availability of AI. The exponential curve that sees AIs match human knowledge processing better and faster – measured by every business school exam they pass – is heading to a very far-off point.

Instead, this dethroning of certain kinds of information controllers has already opened a new chapter of potential agency for many more people. As a result, in the near future we will find the public sphere changing. More and more people will have the resources, via AI, to design and plot strategy for the future they want. AI will not only give them detailed plans but help them design local economies that make their futures sustainable. Many of the professional skills they couldn't afford - legal, accounting, engineering - will now come for free. Ais will be an invaluable members of any board or social enterprise.

There is a radically democratic possibility for AI - even ChatGPT- at this moment, as people are empowered to a much wider degree. Even so, the questions and prompts we put to these machines come from our level of curiosity, our need to know and ability to understand. If these machines realise their promise - to automate many of the mental and organisational routines we are used to, as our modern labours - it will take time for most of us to 'unlearn' the ways of the systems that disempowered us. We will then have to reconnect with our own, deeper, human inclination to thrive as unique selves.

“Public park, photorealistic, holiday, futuristic, cosmolocal, citizens action network, in style of Spike Jones’s Her” Prompt to Stable Diffusion Ai

Of course, these possibilities will depend largely on whether or not the AI stays free and accessible - a huge political, institutional and regulatory question for the future. Some would say AI may well be of interest to governments who want citizens to become more self-sufficient. Will we see this divide open up geographically in the next year? We have been watching how many countries have opened their doors to 'digital nomads' in last six months. Doesn’t this indicate that some regimes welcome the prospect of more agency for more people, while others would prefer to keep human initiatives more under control?

For our own part, AG fed a number of questions into Chat GPT recently to ask how we get to a regenerative future in the shortest possible time. It was no surprise that it recommended community agency networks (CANs, yet), local economies and new forms of participatory democracy. All of which are already occurring around the globe, albeit in small ways.

However, it didn't mention the role of new media systems, personal practices and narrative building - all the instruments of soft power. No doubt this is because these many levels of integration are still rarely described in the public sphere.

For the time being, AI will be the best generators of possible responses to the current systems as they are. They are not yet geared up to start bringing us genuine alternatives. But let’s see where the rollercoaster of the coming few years stops – if it even does.

Alternative Editorial: AI is a game-changer for good or bad