Referencing the transhumanist musings of Yuval Noah Harari through the lens of AI and modified human bodies. AI confuses body parts with meat and mutant flesh and bodies put back together in all sorts of wrong ways. AI's weirdness in depicting the human body seemed the perfect aesthetic for Harari's creepy transhumanist narratives and body modification horror.
Harari is part Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, part digital evangelist Nicholas Negroponte from MIT and part extropian transhumanist. Both Harari and Applewhite shared a cult-like worldview of modifying the body in order to prepare it for the next evolutionary stage. Applewhite called it the level above human, and he and his followers died in a mass suicide in 1997 as they left their container bodies behind. I can never work out if Harari is in support of our coming digital convergence with things like AI or if he is presenting numerous warnings.
Harari's cult-like proclamations about the end of homo sapiens and humans being hackable animals aren't that removed from Applewhite's favour for male castration (and his followers rejecting their human nature) and reaching the next evolutionary stage. The disturbing difference is Harari's digital evangelism, is followed by millions. He is no wacky nutjob cult leader but has the ear of governments and NGO's around the world.
Many of Harari's ideas about evolution, digital technology and the body as a modified organ are incredibly reductionist and the result of drinking far too much silicon valley Kool-Aid over the years. He happily refers to those not on board with the plan of digital body modification or having one's immune system augmented by technology and AI implants as useless eaters, a term derived from the Nazi party just in case anyone bothered to look.
Harari also recalls the worst aspects of 1990s cyberculture, with a new unbridled and uncritical wet dream of all things digital minus anything that remotely resembles humour or irony. Besides, if Mark Zuckerberg, chief reptile and silicon valley pond scum, considers Harari an essential voice in the coming convergence of the body and technology, you know it isn't going to end well, and it's all going to shit.
AI is weird, it also can result in some incredibly bad photoshop style fantasy/gamer fan art, which I am sure Harari would like. AI has a hard time sometimes understanding human bodies. There is something ironic after all about AI which in some way at least is an extension of ourselves of not quite knowing how to depict ourselves. This is no mere uncanny valley but monstrous distortions of flesh and code that seem to sum up those quips of Harari's about hacked body parts and our future consciousness being downloaded from the cloud. I like the mistakes, the glitches, the errors of the body in AI. For me, something is comforting in these errors, and something, dare I say it, that is human.