Planet of the Chatbots

These days to mention Planet of the Apes is generally to evoke film--with, I suppose, the listener's generation determining the version of which they think. The young, I suppose, may be most likely to think of the currently ongoing franchise (headed into its fourth installment with The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes headed to a theater near you in 2024). Still, even they may remember, if only through constant reference and parody (down to a whole invented musical in The Simpsons' glorious "golden age"), the first 1968 film adaptation of Planet of the Apes, and its closing scene with Charlton Heston's Taylor pounding the sand with his fist in rage and grief in the shadow of the Ozymandias-like wreck of the Statue of Liberty, testifying to the destruction of humanity in a nuclear war.

Yet the franchise really began with a novel that had nothing to do with nuclear war, or the latterly more popular theme of genetic engineering--Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel offering rather a different "secret" to the rise of the ape-dominated order, to which the book's narrator-protagonist first catches on during a visit to the apes' stock exchange, and subsequent "remembrance of the world of finance" as he had known it back on Earth. This was that for all its apparent complexity humanity had built a civilization on the basis not of reasoning, original thinking, but of "monkey see, monkey do," such that even "monkeys" could replicate it, and eventually did.*

Considering how chatbots work, and all people seem ready to credit them with being capable of doing, it appears we may be having such a moment. Our chatbots are a very long way from that intelligence that can "parse" language, and process subtle audio and visual data, and reason from fact to conclusion. By design they are just imitators, and often not terribly convincing ones as yet--but whether the task is writing an essay for a student, or being a romantic partner (!), they seem capable of all that is required.

I will not pretend to have all the implications of this worked out. But I think that it says more about the nature of society than of "human nature." Humans have their capacity for intelligence and creativity; but society, intricately and stultifyingly hierarchical and controlling, with relatively few allowed very much in the way of choice and initiative, requires the vast majority of us to simply play a limited and limiting part, even those who perform supposedly "elite" functions. Indeed, much of what we call "education" is about conditioning the individual to accommodating themselves to this limited part (with those acquiescent to the process showered with moral praises and those who are less acquiescent showered with opprobrium as "immature," "irresponsible," "refusing to grow up," etc.). Putting it bluntly, society trains people to be machines, and rewards or punishes them for being more or less serviceable machines. We should therefore not be surprised when we find that a machine is a perfectly adequate replacement for a human trying to be one.

* Indeed, in the book it was the use of trained apes, not machines, that became the basis of labor-saving and "automation," such that one could see it as a variation on the "robot rebellion" theme. (And lest it need be said, the author is fully aware that apes are not monkeys, hence the quotation marks.)