Commentary: The Way AI Fits into Broadly Rising Anti-Humanism

The future of humanity is becoming ever less human. The astounding capabilities of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence have triggered fears about the coming age of machines leaving little place for human creativity or employment. Even the architects of this brave new world are sounding the alarm. Sam Altman, chairman and CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, recently warned that artificial intelligence poses an “existential risk” to humanity and warned Congress that artificial intelligence “can go quite wrong.”  

While history is littered with apocalyptic predictions, the new alarms are different because they are taking place amid broad cultural forces that suggest human beings have lost faith in themselves and connections with humanity in general.  

The new worldview might best be described as anti-humanism. This notion rejects the idea that human beings are perennially ingenious, socially connected creatures capable of wondrous creations – religious scripture, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Beethoven, the science of Einstein. Instead, it casts people, society, and human life itself as a problem. Instead of seeing society as a tool to help people to build and flourish, it stresses the need to limit the damage humanity might do.     

Many climate change activists, for example, argue that humanity’s extinction could be a net plus for planet earth. State-sanctioned euthanasia, which just a few years ago was considered a radical assault on the sanctity of life, is becoming common practice in many Western countries – available not just to the terminally ill but those who are just tired of living. 

All this is taking place as social science research reveals that people are increasingly cutting themselves off from one another. The traditional pillars of community and connection – family, friends, children, church, neighborhood – have been withering, fostering an everyday existence defined for many people by loneliness. The larger notion of human beings as constituting a larger, collective project with some sense of common goal is being replaced by a solipsistic individualism, which negates the classical liberal values of self-determination and personal freedoms in a worldview that nullifies the societies they built.

These trends, which have been studied largely in isolation, could be amplified by the ascendance of artificial intelligence. As humanity wrestles with powerful new technologies, a growing body of research suggests that a more fundamental question may be whether human beings are willing to shape their own legacy in the new world order. 

Anti-humanism has a long history – it can be traced back at least to Thomas Malthus, who warned in 1789 that overpopulation was the greatest threat to human prosperity. Although the British economist and cleric was not hostile to humanity and his dark predictions never came true, his claim that people are the problem has provided the cri de coeur for the modern environmental movement. In 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich’s best-seller “The Population Bomb,” which expressed horror at the proliferation of people, prophesied that continued surges in population would lead to mass starvation. Ehrlich and his acolytes urged extreme measures to stave off disaster, including adding sterilant to the water supply to prevent human reproduction.  

These views have not gone away. The big business-funded Club of Rome report, issued in 1972, embraced an agenda of austerity and retrenchment to stave off population-driven mass starvation and social chaos. Humanity’s ancient effort to create safety and comfort – its commitment to progress and prosperity – was cast as a lethal threat.  

Others were less politic in their embrace of anti-human memes. In 1991, the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said that “in order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.” Today, this mindset informs many climate change activists, who as the writer Austin Williams has noted, believe human beings represent “the biggest problem on the planet” as opposed to the “creators of a better future.” More than 11,000 scientists signed an emergency declaration in 2019 that said having fewer people should be a priority.  

In a May New Yorker article about “The Earth Transformed,” a new book by Oxford University professor Peter Frankopan, Harvard professor Jill Lepore notes: “In his not at all cheerful conclusion, looking to a possibly not too distant future in which humans fail to address climate change and become extinct, Frankopan writes, ‘Our loss will be the gain of other animals and plants.’” Lepore then quips, “An upside!” 

Manifestos such as Frankopan’s, whose writing on the history of climate change is quite nuanced, reflect how the climate agenda tends toward apocalypticism, and a highly toxic view of humanity. Already more than half of young people around the world believe the planet is doomed. Although few prioritize climate as their main concern, concerns about warming underpins a profoundly anti-human agenda based on the impoverishment of much of the population. Many corporate interests, as well as their allies among green activists, have embraced the notion of “degrowth,” embracing a weird form of autarkic feudalism in which people live in small places, eat a meager diet, and surrender any chance of upward mobility. The “tiny house” movement is a small example. It is hard to overstate what a radical departure this is from long-held beliefs tying progress to rising standards of living, much less creating offspring. 

Such an approach seems to require a quasi-religious commitment which, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of supposedly sanctified science. Two environmentalists, writing in Time magazine this April, argued that Earth Day should be designated a “religious holiday” just like Easter and Passover.  

Unlike traditional religious holidays, sacralized Earth Day festivities likely will not celebrate the family or human fecundity. Around the world, the ties between parents, children and extended family are clearly weakening and thus undermining the bonds that have held human society together from the earliest times.  

To be sure, many children are being brought up without two parents. The number of children living in single parent households has more than doubled in the last 50 years. In the United States, the rate of single parenthood has grown from 10% in 1960 to over 40% today. 

Rather than a nation of families, the United States is becoming a collection of autonomous human beings and childless households. The impacts of a weaker family, as Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves and others have noted, are felt most among poorer people, and particularly their offspring. “This is probably the best documented fact in sociology in America that no one wants to admit,” observed demographer Mary Eberstadt. 

The links between family dysfunction and crime have been clear since at least the 1970s. This breakdown has worsened as city leaders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, New York and other urban centers now accept homelessness, open drug markets, and petty crime. This can be viewed as another aspect of anti-humanism, rejecting the notion that people are capable of productive and fulfilling lives. Instead of seeing people as members of a community with obligations to one another, it reflects a kind of live-and-let-die individualism that leads to isolation, despair, and anger. 

The Friendless American  

Family decline reflects just one aspect of an increasingly dehumanized social order. The U.S. Census Bureau has found that 28% of American households had just one person in 2020. In 1940, this number was just 8%. In a recent survey conducted by Cigna, researchers found that almost 80% of adults from the ages of 18 to 24 reported feeling lonely. In 2018, even before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, one study showed that 54% of Americans felt like no one in their life knew them well. The “atomization” of America, first examined 20 years ago by Robert Putnam in books such as “Bowling Alone,” has been simply “speeding out in the wrong direction,” warns journalist Jennifer Senior. 

As the pandemic wound down in the spring of 2022 and many were looking to resume their lives as normally as possible, a survey of American adults revealed that many people found it harder to form relationships now, and one-fourth of adults felt anxious about socializing. The biggest source of anxiety, shared by 29% of respondents, was “not knowing what to say or how to interact.” As social commentator Arthur Brooks notes, “Many of us have simply forgotten how to be…