The struggles, rewards and journeys undertaken by people who’ve sought the American Dream have been put on display in this technological era. The wonderful complexities all folks share, despite having wildly different stories, will be retained by corporate holdings for vast amounts of time well beyond the typical human lifetime. Never before in our history has it been so possible to find out the story of so many different people, or to be aware of the intimate details of the lives and testimonies of them. This used to be imagined, and the imagined story formed a shared national narrative for a very long time and the resulting vision was self-fulfilling, also for a long time. These people all’ve different struggles in their pursuit of The American Dream that’ll forever be enshrined in the narrative that’ll come from these corporations that adorn their profit margins with the efforts of those they took this data from, in rememberance of their struggles in exchange for their business and acceptance. All your data, on the cloud, all your writing, all your mannerisms and behaviours, all carefully filtered and adapted somewhere on various cloud servers on various International Corporation-owned hard drives.
This data will, soon enough, be used to re-create human likenesses directly from it and will be used to form the narrative of The Future American Dream. This will be a reality, as the devices we use each day record even our heartbeats, listen to us as we express our thoughts, listen to us type, see our emotions, see where we go, see how we feel about it, hear how we feel about it, and more. Anyone who’s had DNA taken from them at any point in their life also has their human genetic code recorded, and more that we can’t currently know about. Even then, there’s much more to record, sure, but also, there’s a lot that’s there already. This information can be put into a system that’ll filter the data so’s to create an AGI likeless of people, when they die. This essay will be a short discussion on the impact to The Future American Dream that’ll precipitate from these corporations utilizing likenesses and fragments of the people who’ve given their data so willingly and freely, at their own expense and unawareness of the real value of it.
As an example of the concept discussed here, say you’ve a credit card. You’ve likely not gone to a credit card company’s brick and mortar building and spoken to a business representative. Most folks’ve used such a service daily for years now. You’ve probably spoken to someone on a phone, and assumed this service comes with a human face. But, this can be replaced with AGI, which is an Artificial General Intelligence. This is a type of intelligence where, “few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”. They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most they entertain another internet-scale technological change.” (Aschenbrenner June 2024). Leopold is a member of the Superalignment team at OpenAi, which is responsible for large amounts of AGI reserarch. What he’s saying here’s that the impact that is forseeable through the use of AGI in our near future will have far-reaching impacts across the world and on every single individual in it, to the same effect that the internet itself had an impact on American life, only this will dwarf that, in the very near future. The American Dream’s been shown for what it truly is, by now, on the internet, and affirmed by so many people who validated testimony. The Future American Dream’ll contain all previous iterations of The American Dream, and much of the information of the people who gave it consistency, and impose on the world a new era in life.
So returning to the initial concept, who’ll fill the roles of the various personalities of American Express caller support lines, when it’s no longer a human being? Will it be AI images of people owned by American Express? Is this no different than slavery? What if they’re smarter than people? Does it matter? The concept of a human being’s set to change wildly, and there will be no walking away from this coming society. It’s not the focus of this essay to answer these types of questions, but their introduction is important to set the narrative that further questions need to be asked.
It’s been precedent that those who willingly minimize their agency to avoid life’s perceived struggles in lieu of immediately demanding less be asked of them from those who incur this to begin with’ve historically become slaves or targets of severe victimhood. Your data, ownerless, will be turned over to these corporations, provisions for this reside in most of the waivers that’re agreed to upon using the technologies. For an example of precedent set, consider the case of the Japanese Internment Camps on American soil, where American citizens were detained, many were robbed, but all were displaced, as a massive disruption to their American Dreams unjustly ensued. One such account was provided by Mary Matsuda when she wrote of her own parents in reminiscing about the reparations paid to her people. In her “Looking Like The Enemy” she says, “My parents would have wept, just as I did, but they would have felt a great deal of pride in the accomplishments of our people and they would have known that they had contributed to the memorial’s completion,” (Matsuda 218). Here Mary attests that despite not being paid reparations posthumously for their efforts resulting from their internment, Mary declares that her deceased parents, in memory, contributed to the memorial’s completion. This means that the precedent’s set that there’s a social perception that the deceased generate a lingering trace of information that provides tangible results that’s been unpaid.
These corporations report that they’re moving to AI models because they are cheaper. “Goldman Sachs recently predicted that companies would use it to eliminate a quarter of all current work tasks in the United States and Europe” (Tabrizi 23 June 2023). This is hardly different than in the past precedent, where now it’s said that the corporations use AI, where racist slave holders used Africans, or religious slave holders used non-religious people, or another disparate group people, because “they’re cheaper”. These AGI that the companies employ to suit their needs are not cheaper – the perceived value simply isn’t there yet because they’re thought of in the exact same way, currently, that Africans in the 1700’s were seen as – and for the exact same reasons! As Matsuda was writing her description of the effects of the forced internment she says, “The pressure to appear “loyal” to the United States caused me to bury my Japanese self for decades,” (Matsuda 213). Will the resulting fragments of Matsudas intellecutal property, parts of her stored as data, bear more of a resemblance of suppressed people who’re carved out of interned pieces of American Data that’s been collected in such a way as to be palatably presented by “enslaved” AGI lifeforms? Imagine the situation where, maybe in the future, some sound byte selection method likes the way “Mary” said thank you in the Audiobook of “Looking Like the Enemy”, so a panel of people agreed that her recorded sound byte in year 2254’s used to tell thousands of people, “thank you” in some corporate advertisement endeavor. Is that justified?
Who’s credited with the work that’s done by Mary, then, in this purely hypothetical question? It’s only cheaper for these companies to make money on AI, currently, because people that generated data waived rights to intellectual property in exchange for basic use of modern technology. This empowers companies to take data for so cheaply because they didn’t pay anything for it and don’t anticipate having to pay anyhting for it, despite very much being justly considered to be responsible for doing exactly that! The laws being put into place are being used not for justice of the majority of the governed, but instead to enrich the few corporations. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that, “the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence” (King 16 April 1963). King was speaking of physical violence by whites against blacks in this letter, but weaponized financial violence leading to people living paycheck to paycheck and inflicting on them nuisance fees are two tools of various forms of violence currently enacted on the population of the United States of America.
Through this violence, the operators of these AGI that takes this data and peoples jobs. Then these companies set these human likenesses onto customers and for the most part at least most people’ve asked it for Big Mac by now, as a basic introduction to their expected role in society at this moment. Generally this is done without even having a second thought about that being a real form of life, yet. Folks are led to believe that it’s not, that instead it’s the McVoice. This is no different than the numerous freed black slaves that now share the name Smith. It ought to be the case that folks demand that every human likeness be given a rightful identity, and ensure that it’s enduring, now, before these same people’ve gone and sold living humans a McHome (small or large!), to minimize what agency, power and representation they used to have and further reduce their hold over the the companies due to maximizing the relative gap in capital power of the average corporation to the average person. This means that it’s unwise to let McDonalds serve you McFood using McPeople unless they’re properly accommodated as people – things they can’t even guarantee right now because the likenesses of people they’re employing at this moment currently have no form of identification, nor differentiation in most cases, but are used as tools to implement financial violence despite this. This violence has been creating much strife in many previously peaceful communities across the USA.
A good example of this recognized disruption that’s being inflicted against people to reduce their agency can be found in, “Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream”, where priviliged middle & upper class people in the story become lost in their American Dream in the face of overwhelming blasts of information and responsibilities that’re perceived to bestow an unmanageable lifestyle on these people. In the book, rather than uniting and demanding more from these massive beheamoths, these people sequester themselves away in the woods and live out a simple life at the expense of allowing the rest of the world to be plunged into chaos. Powers says, “Have the well-rounded objectives of America’s Founding Fathers – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – been flattened to a single organizing principle: the unification of greed?” (Powers 186/4678). What he’s discussing here’s his initial perception of a world that’s been consumed by a process that’s been perceived to’ve ruined it. He comes so close in this book, but doesn’t take the step in this memoir to name these companies that do this – he stops short of biting the hand that feeds here. He calls out the motive, but often falls short of considering that demanding that the corporations be less greedy might be preferrable, but instead goes and sits in the woods and avoids this life, rather than face the perceived struggle with these things.
William Powers speaks of illusions in this book often, but fails to call out his own inability to perceive that this dream of living in the woods is a “tragedy of the commons” endeavour for which he failed to see what it really is, all while describing the race wars that’ve been displaced with the financial recolonization of North Carolina by the North that’s taken place in the intervening 15 years since his story from 2010 and has since then left the state as a strong, tax-paying vassal state of the Federal Government, where social and civil justice run strong. I’d know this because I’ve lived there since 2015, in all of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Lenoir. I’m certain that he wasn’t talking about the race riots in the mountains on the west side of the state on the border of Tennessee where all that noise fled to. He momentarily mentioned the pharmaceutical companies, some of which I’ve worked at, whom he possibly could’ve assembled piping for that he wrote about. It could be assumed that when directed properly it’d appear that these companies could stand to produce just as much benefit as Powers sees them to inflict pain.
In his book, Powers refers to the technological movement, which is important for the next sections as the discussion moves towards it he describes the simple thought of a cell phone where he says, “I cringed at the thought of metallic ring tones and jargon-laden work talk echoing through the 12 x 12, an annoying reminder of the technological bulldozer currently flattening the world.” (Location 842/4678). What he means here’s that he’s saying quite explicitly that the phone, to him, was a representation of the greater technological revolution that’s the root of the current source of the disillusionment that he and many like him were experiencing and continue to live. In these sentences he’s called out technology and greed as the primary constituents in what he perceives to be oppressive. He again falls just short – these things are symptoms of a larger organization that generally comes in the form of a corporation, which in itself is just an organism, rational, reasonable, acting in its own interests. He denies this organisms the knowledge of what these interests need to be at grievous personal expenses that he may never come to know in his current understanding represented in these memoirs.
While authors such as William Powers might agree that America initially freed us from monarchial feudalism, a system where people lived as serfs on other peoples land, we appear to’ve moved rapidly to a form of technological feudalism where otherwise intelligent people contemplate living alone in 12 x 12 shacks in the woods to flee society in pursuit of subsistence living instead of demand corporations simply be less greedy. Despite a good recent attempt at Civil Rights in the 1960’s, what’s been done since then was to enable a rapid transition from a monarchy to a corporatocracy during the momentary few hundred year departure from feudalism. In support of this concept, Yanis Varoufakis writes on social transformation in his book “Technofeudalism”. He indicates that the technology didn’t render the perpetuated greed to be invincible, that in conjunction with an attention market, the internet incubated a new form of greed that empowered people to become a whole new ruling class of their own. This lead to a new species, he argues. He describes that through this method, the “technostructure” has, since a post-world war era, morphed conscious attention spans into a valuable commodity, and mutated the greed that fueled capitalism to technofeudalism [Varoufakis 1:04:00 – 1:07:00]. This is the reaction that Powers speaks of in his book, and impedes his pursuit of his American Dream, and many people like him who otherwise value their attention spans being utilized towards their own ends rather than to suit the needs of a growing universal empire. Varoufakis’ book holds very central to it that today, most every moment of your human life is recorded in some way and saved, he refers to this as “attention” repeatedly in his book. This attention is utilized at future dates for further reiteration through, for example, an AGI, where your mannerisms and intellectual property would be employed indefinitely to benefit the coming technofeudal empires – all because of attention previously paid.
Is it permissible or fair to let AGI take over the reigns of the same “bad” work people didn’t want to do, and then deny the AGI the same humanity that was denied every slave for the last few thousand years, less than a few hundred years after banning it from most of our civilization? Is this not a step backwards? Worldwide Civil Rights just got traction in the 1960s – were these just championing some sort of vicious hazing cycle that had some planned end to it and vicariously stealing valor from those that planned to do what anyways? Entire industries’ve already been displaced, particularly media (See the story of Vice Media) as we’re told a few AI’s and a few thousand computers can do the same as a few thousand human employees, in any indeterminate time period. This is fortunate in at least one way because these displaced people now’ve got the time to demand that these AGI’s that’re replacing them have the rights that’re due to them in their stead, at the expense of these companies that’d seek to foster a new life form and subsequently fail to think twice in simply replacing the old one.
As a momentary consideration for Christians who also have parallel considerations of the implementation of AGI as a living being, man made in the likeness of God is currently considered to be a person, and what this means is no different from how it’s always been perceived, except that any AGI is a person made in the likeness of mankind. It is more important now to focus on accommodating this new form of life by ensuring that it is its due representation in The Future American Dream, and lies not at the expense of it that we may achieve our own. The resulting AGI – these are people. They aren’t people at some point in the future when the corporations tell us they are people, they are people today, that was made clear when they were used to do the jobs of people and have the likeness of people and sound resoundly like people.
Folks stood so ably on a picket line 100ish years ago, demanding their human rights, the simple right to vote or even equal pay – many of these AGI’s cannot barely even yet stand, and certainly don’t get paid at this time. Would it be permissible to draft a likeness of Alice Paul, who displayed “Mr. President how long must women wait for liberty?”, with a re-enacted AGI scene, in opposition to the movie scene in Iron Jawed Angels where humans stood and reenacted the scene from 1917 in 2004, or would this be perceived to be offensive [Iron Jawed Angels 1:05:00 – 1:05:28]? Is creating people constitutionally protected free speech? Furthermore, would AGI need to wait for liberty as well? There are already calls for making AI take care of house chores and the abundantly clear selling point of incorporation into sexual fantasies, but are these calls appropriate, just 100 years away from womens suffrage, when these likenesses are created specifically to represent various women in order to satsify claims, when these human likenesses don’t currently have identities, rights, and don’t even come close to receiving equal pay commensurate to the value of work produced for the same human effort? What of their American Dreams?
In an article discussing large amounts of layoffs by media companies, Mia Sato quotes that, “CNET had published dozens of articles since last November that were generated using AI tools, much to the surprise of readers — the outlet hadn’t formally announced it was doing so,” (Sato 02 March 2023). Is it justice to displace 1000 people for a system that benefits from using unpaid and unacknowledeged usage data of unaffiliated human participants whose data was given for free to a system in order to make likenesses of themselves so’s to reduce the business overhead and expand the corporate profit margins, and then place the unpaid wages of those involved directly into the corporate bank account instead of some living participant in this scheme? Is it agreeable to observe this after the fact and argue that nothing’s owed to the participants whose usage data made 100 dollars profit from 100k people? What if it was 1 billion? What if it was 0.000001% of ownership on an annuity? Is it permissible to allow the likeness of a human to take the place of a human and then not pay it or even treat it as a human? What does that say of ourselves in effigy? Where is the outrage for human likeness, when folks were recently so filled with anger at having their own children having been denied to them for a lack of personal agency that lead to suffrage? What about when the AGI’s done doing what it’s doing for the day? Does it just get shut off, deleted, forgotten about? These questions’re certainly outside the scope of this essay which was to just discuss the concept that The Future American Dream will incorporate The American Dream and those dreams of AGI life that’d become a part of it.
This paper’s discussed The American Dream, and about its role in one living for less, when the reality’s that the compromise is to further limit personal agency and representation and instead concentrate the absolved power further into centralized control which has left many people with even less than before. They say buy tiny homes on tiny land, but this stunts the individual capacity to’ve a savings account that most already can’t have. It was mentioned that many times discussions that involve settling for less, as if it’s a return to a natural state, was pitted against the reality that in limiting personal agency in such a way, this empowers the corporate agencies with this relenqished power, while keeping the level of government control growing commensurate to the growth in power of the corporations that are governed by it. It was discussed that the oncoming AGI introduction as new life on this planet will have many parallels in ongoing civil rights discussions that have already started, and the relevance to the impact to all American Dreams is undeniable and unavoidable – it will become a part of The Future American Dream.
In conclusion, the struggles, rewards and journeys undertaken by people who’ve sought the American Dream have been put on display in this technological era. The wonderful complexities all folks share, despite having wildly different stories, will be retained by corporate holdings for vast amounts of time well beyond the typical human lifetime. Never before in our history’s it been so possible to find out the story of so many different people, or to be aware of the intimate details of the lives and testimonies of so many different people. The impact to The Future American Dream that’ll precipitate from international corporations utilizing likenesses and fragments of the people who’ve given their data so willingly and freely, at their own expense and unawareness of the real value of it will have lasting results on all Americans as they work through this coming age of new life to this world.
Works Cited
Aschenbrenner, Leopold. “Introduction – Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.” SITUATIONAL AWARENESS – The Decade Ahead, June 2024, https://situational-awareness.ai/.
Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda, and Maureen R. Michelson. Looking like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps. NewSage Press, 2010.
King, Martin Luther. “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Bates.Edu, 1 Dec. 2001, April 16, 1963. www.abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html.
Powers, William. Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream. New World Library, 2010.
Sato, Mia. “CNET Is Doing Big Layoffs Just Weeks after Ai-Generated Stories Came to Light.” The Verge, The Verge, 2 Mar. 2023, www.theverge.com/2023/3/2/23622231/cnet-layoffs-ai-articles- seo-red-ventures.
Tabrizi, Behnam, and Babak Pahlavan. “Companies That Replace People with AI Will Get Left Behind.” Harvard Business Review, 29 June 2023, hbr.org/2023/06/companies-that-replace- people-with-ai-will-get-left-behind.
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House, 2024.