Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the spectre of human nature
Technology as the liberation of the will
Over the past two years, the first substantial consequences of the proliferation of artificial intelligence have begun to be felt across a number of sectors and organisations. The Big Four accountancy firms have all announced substantially reduced graduate intakes citing a reduced need for entry-level employees due to AI. Nationally, graduate job openings are down 44% from 2018 highs, with AI often given as one of a number of factors behind this decline. Schools and universities around the world are reverting to in-person examinations and reevaluating the use of coursework in the face of rampant cheating, with some going so far as to remove devices from the classroom to prevent students completing work with digital assistance.
These changes are well-understood, but they are only the beginning of what is to come. Thus far, AI has been thought of as a tool for cutting corners. Writing emails, gathering information, working through simple but time-consuming procedures: all can be completed more quickly by deploying ChatGPT or similar products to approximate an answer (which still often requires final human oversight). The next step, which is happening as we speak, is the development of bespoke AI products for every company capable of handling more and more of the ‘manual’ intellectual business of the firm.
This represents a total overhaul of how work gets done, and a transfer of the burden of labour from humans to machines. What this means in practice is that the procedural implementation of directives — say, determining whether an applicant is eligible for a mortgage — will be carried out by machines, and the outcome will be dependent on the parameters of the AI model rather than the decisions of a human employee. The productivity gains from this transformation are clear, and will be hugely beneficial for companies which will be able to lay off scores of employees, in particular the large numbers of lower-mid level staff mis-hired during the past decade of DEI-dominated recruitment practices (with a convenient excuse to avoid admitting that this was a mistake), massively lowering operational costs in the process.
This will also transform the nature of human labour within companies. As the effective marginal cost of procedural implementation, reiteration, and refinement drops to zero, process loses favour to synthesis; the efficient workhorse is outcompeted by machines, and creativity is privileged. A previous Pimlico Journal contributor offered an adjacent prediction for the future of the finance sector in an article last year. The criteria for entry into the white-collar job market will be dramatically changed, the bar substantially raised, and many a dull but technically competent graduate who could previously have expected an only moderately unsuccessful career in law, finance, or consulting will find themselves locked out entirely as the requirements for mid-level employees come to reflect far more closely those for higher-level executives.
For those who do make it through, however, AI will serve as a tool of unforetold creative liberation. Today, but for the top individuals in any firm, most intellectual labour boils down to the gathering and presentation of information, the management of data, the following of administrative procedures, and the composition of basic and formulaic communications. When all these functions are performed by the machine — and that machine communicates with its user through natural language — the knowledge worker becomes a conductor. Their job is imagination; an architect with an infinite toolbox. Tedium is abolished, and the creative will is unleashed.
This prognosis raises the worrying prospect that much of our current population will find it increasingly difficult to fit into an economy which has an ever-shrinking demand for their skillset. The problem is not just that AI can do their job better: capital is a productivity multiplier on labour output, and therefore it generates more value (and higher returns) in the hands of more efficient labourers. As AI begins to outcompete humans more and more, any firm which chooses to retain excess human labour will itself be outcompeted, and ultimately unable to access capital. In the future, you will either work with your hands alone or work with AI. Why use a chip to build a laptop when you could use it for a data centre?
A radical change in the competitive environment for mankind necessarily raises the spectre of human nature, and the potential for genetic engineering to change the future thereof. For all the pretence to secularism, the notion of the human as a biological creature still provokes deep anxiety among many, but maintaining ignorance in the face of this transformation means condemning swathes of the population to living in a world for which they are entirely malformed. Opposition to genetic engineering should be understood as a resistance against the recognition of the fact that biology is real and determines a great deal about who we are — from intelligence to personality and beyond.
These questions are made more controversial still by the (somewhat intentionally introduced) confusion between gene editing in embryos and the implementation of totalitarian controls on adults, two policies which need not have anything to do with one another. This article is interested only in the former. Aside from feminist concern that some societies will use the power of genetic engineering to assure the birth of sons over daughters, the principle opposition to gene editing in embryos comes in the form of a vague sense that some line is being crossed; that to reshape nature in this way is somehow intrinsically wrong.
As our understanding of genetics increases, and embryo selection becomes more commonplace, it is not clear whether this line will continue to hold. Will eliminating debilitating genetic conditions not be a sufficient inducement to cross it? The evidence suggests it will not: Iceland, which introduced universal (voluntary) prenatal screening in the early ’00s, has almost completely eliminated Down’s syndrome. When a nurse is able to explain to a mother-to-be that one of her successful embryos has a substantially higher chance of developing dementia, will she choose to act on that information? If you could choose — all else being equal — for your child to be ugly or beautiful, would you insist on rolling the dice?
Recognising nature, and seeking to gain control over it, is an impulse as far from authoritarian as is possible. The freedom to determine your genetic future is liberation from the constraints of biology. At the social level, the composition of a people is what determines more than anything the political arrangements under which they live. Political freedom is the ability of a people to express their will to live a certain way and to govern themselves in accordance with that will. Determining the nature of your descendants — the future citizen body — is the ultimate act of self-determination.
Enabled by technological developments in transport, communications, governance, and military affairs, the modern world was built by a select few, able to exert their will and extend their dominion farther than ever before in human history. That trend continues to intensify as new technologies, most notably AI, continue to develop. This state of affairs gave birth to a novel political and economic situation. Historically, when a group of people has precipitated radical political change, this has reflexively been a consequence and a cause of a rapid proliferation of that people within their area of influence. Technology, however, gave small groups of people the ability to impose upon others new modes of organisation without requiring or causing an expansion of their own population relative to other groups.
As more and more people become economically irrelevant, especially in the context of an overpopulated world, concern for the nature of future populations becomes irresistible at a global level. Current population levels can only be sustained by a variety of complex global systems that are an outgrowth of specific groups within a specific context, and require a supply of well-organised, highly intelligent people to maintain. The dynamics we operate within — global trade, relative international peace — until recently have often been taken for granted, but are in fact long-term consequences of repeated Western imperial projects of different forms which have imposed a particular global system on the world. It would be a mistake to assume that these projects have had success in local civilising efforts which would enable societies to continue operating in that manner without external imposition.
Moreover, these systems are fragile and vulnerable to changes in the circumstances which caused their growth in the first place. Changing attitudes to international trade are an obvious risk here, but there are subtler political reliances too: Africa imports 80% of its food at a cost of $50bn per year, and also receives $60bn in international aid per year. What happens when the moral consensus that this is a necessity collapses in the face of financial crisis at home in the West? A society which is organised in a manner which does not reflect the nature of its population depends on this external imposition to persist, and after centuries of Western global influence, there are fewer organic societies than one might think.
Overpopulation, combined with the proliferation of people hugely reliant on others — be those a small group of highly productive individuals within their own society, a larger group of foreign individuals, or some combination of the two — creates immense inactivity which calcifies societies. On top of that, people without something productive to do tend to find unproductive things to do — from crime, to drugs, to sex (partly why such people proliferate so extensively). This problem can only be remedied by the creation, concentration, and cultivation of human potential that can reintroduce dynamism.
If AI is the necessary solution to unlocking productivity, genetic engineering is the necessary solution to accommodating AI, as well as offering a promise of growth in and of itself. The building of a new world requires the building of a new people, or it will be built on sand. The further we move away from our natural state, the clearer it becomes that it is our nature on which we ultimately rely for our survival.
Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are not just possibilities which require one another; they are two sides of the same coin, and it’s not surprising that science fiction has often discussed the two topics in the same breath. Both can serve as tools of radical liberation of the will: its extension through temporally and physically unrestricted agents and its control over the biological substrates respectively.
Artificial intelligence also reveals colder truths about human nature. Ultimately, much of human behaviour is indistinguishable from that of AI. The pattern recognition and data compilation abilities of ChatGPT that make it so useful as a search engine also allow it to fulfil an essentially identical function to many individuals who do operate in effectively the same manner — even ostensibly creative people such as influencers and media personalities. Think of Andrew Huberman, who makes podcasts in which he reads out scientific studies on nutrition, compares them with others, and provides a conclusion on how long one should wait after waking up to have one’s morning coffee. ChatGPT can probably perform the same task in a few seconds (and even if it can’t do so now, it will be able to do so very soon). Does Huberman’s face really add that much to the equation?
Just recently, a flurry of TikToks worriedly proclaimed that music is ‘over’ because people are now listening to playlists of AI-generated music instead of songs written and produced by human artists. But, I ask you, if people are so willing to give their attention to and so capable of taking entertainment from the recombination of pre-existing data sets, how much depth and profundity were they ever seeking in the first place? What is here exposed is that a lot of us are not very interesting, and never were.
Human nature contains incredible possibilities for beauty, for drama, and for creation, but these expressions of the higher will are necessarily carried by a physical platform which must also incorporate baser drives which enable biological continuance. The banal is unavoidable, because the demands of everyday existence must be met. It is this fundamental conflict which binds AI (especially when combined with robotics) and human nature at a conceptual level. AI provides an opportunity to outsource these demands, and genetic engineering enables their overcoming — freeing the will to make its highest expression manifest.
Whilst these topics are becoming more extensively discussed in some circles (especially Silicon Valley’s increasingly influential right-wing), they remain off-limits for many. The rediscovery of nature implies uncomfortable things, and even when shorn of authoritarian connotations, the notion of rendering nature a choice raises an awkward question: would you have been chosen? I submit that our own insecurity is no good reason to deny our descendants the promise that technology now bestows upon them.
Over the last five years, we have strayed well into territory once considered unthinkable — from the implementation of COVID lockdowns to the development of the conversation on identity and immigration — but the basic moral presuppositions of soft-secular post-Christianity (that human nature is divine, and that all permutations thereof are equally so) has remained intact. That may not remain the case indefinitely.
Incidentally, COVID itself provided the final nail in the coffin for the denial of nature. Freed of financial necessity and unburdened from the constraints of time, as many will find themselves in the coming world of AI, the millions of people trapped at home did not result in ‘a Goethe on every street corner’. Most people didn’t choose to learn a musical instrument, to absorb a new corpus of knowledge, to work on their physical form, or to develop their artistic skills. They sat on their sofas, glued to the television, and in many cases got fat. We must not allow this to be the fate of our future.
Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering combined offer a historic possibility for self-overcoming. They open a thrilling, if terrifying, Pandora’s box of opportunity. The instability of the current structure of global arrangements renders these powers ever more alluring. The only thing stopping us making use of them is our own lingering anxiety — and that looks to be abating. There is the promise of a bright future ahead, but the path there is full of challenges.
This article was written by TCS Miller, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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This article conflates technological possibility with social reality. It reads more like re-hashed 90s fiction than serious forecasting.
On genetic engineering: Intelligence is not governed by a single gene or even a handful of genes. It emerges from thousands of genetic variants, each with minuscule individual effects. This polygenic complexity makes meaningful enhancement through gene editing practically impossible with foreseeable technology. While eliminating specific hereditary diseases is plausible, the leap to "building a new people" is pure fantasy.
More importantly, the article ignores the human element entirely. We struggle to convince parents to vaccinate their children with thoroughly tested, decades-old vaccines. What makes anyone think they'll consent to experimental genetic modifications for potential, marginal cognitive gains? Even ignoring any ethical concerns, the gap between technical possibility and public acceptance is a chasm, not a minor obstacle.
On AI displacement: The assumption that AI will rapidly eliminate jobs in law, finance, and consulting ignores how regulation actually works. These industries don't operate as free markets moving at the speed of innovation. They exist under heavy regulation where human accountability is legally mandated. Aviation still relies on technology from the 1960s. Nuclear energy deployment remains frozen in time. Major banks run on COBOL code from half a century ago. Healthcare AI that demonstrably outperforms human diagnosticians still requires human sign-off. In regulated industries, technology waits (sometimes forever).
Middle management exists primarily to navigate Byzantine regulatory requirements, and those requirements aren't disappearing. The article envisions AI handling "procedural implementation" seamlessly, but doesn't seem to grasp a crucial difference: when an intern makes a mistake, you fire the intern. When your AI makes a mistake, you get fired and possibly sued. In industries where errors carry professional liability, this matters enormously!
Every AI researcher acknowledges that large language models hallucinate. This stems from their architecture, not from implementation flaws that will be patched away. In industries where precision matters, "usually right" doesn't suffice.
On Africa: The article frames African food imports as evidence of inherent incapacity while ignoring that Western aid often comes with conditions requiring recipient nations to purchase from donor countries. These stipulations deliberately distort local agricultural markets. Remove those distortions, and local production becomes far more viable. If Western nations stopped provided billions in aid each year the local economies would likely shift to doing more local agriculture. It is hardly like it's difficult for most African countries to grow food, Rhodesia was known as a breadbasket.
The fundamental error here is mistaking a theoretical capability for practical reality. The article assumes away every obstacle that actually matters: regulatory frameworks, liability structures that demand human accountability, and the simple fact that most people will not volunteer their children for genetic experiments. This analysis operates in a frictionless vacuum where technology advances well beyond it's current realms, deploys instantly, institutions adapt on command, and human nature bends to fit the preferred narrative.
The real world doesn't work this way. Powerful technologies don't remake society simply because they exist. They encounter resistance, get regulated into stasis, or sit unused because the risks of adoption exceed the benefits. We literally have an example of this with Nuclear, it was all the rage until a few accidents and then was put into societal cold-storage. The gap between what AI and genetic engineering could theoretically accomplish and what they will actually be permitted to do isn't a footnote to be dismissed. It is the entire story!
Interesting article.
It misses two important words: Humanoid Robots.
The sentence above would have seemed absurd 20 years ago but encapsulates the really big change that will overwhelm society within 20 years. AI is just the beginning. AI that can do your garden, thread a needle, fix your electrics, escort you round your supermarket... Humanoid Robots will leave no spaces at all for human employment.