WARNING: AI CAN DAMAGE YOUR CULTURAL HEALTH
This is a presentation about technology and its potentially dangerous social consequences. More specifically it’s about what has become known as artificial intelligence (let’s follow the practise of calling it AI for the sake of brevity), a subject impossible to ignore over recent years as it has cropped up everywhere. This is partly because it has become a matter of interest to what have become known as “the chattering classes”, always on the look out to contribute, however uselessly, to whatever is the subject de jour, but mainly because its applications have commercial value in some quarters which, as always, is an invitation to hucksters of every description to begin their usual work of forcing it on everyone’s attention for purposes of sale. It’s also popular with the political Right, which is always a bit of a warning heads-up.
This is not, however, to do with those responses except indirectly, but is, rather, an attempt to identify some of the cultural political consequences of this technology, and how they might be responded to by those of a left-liberal political persuasion. It’s not meant to be definitive; it’s an exploration.
Although AI is often presented as something new and unlike any other technology which has preceded it, this is mistaken in the sense that the whole of human civilisation is the story of technological development and its implications, although with AI those implications are very widespread, and some of them are by no means benign. It’s important therefore to see it in its context as the most recent step in an accelerating sequence. The commencement of this sequence might be mapped from many starting points, but let me choose the point from which I first knowingly personally encountered it as a phenomenon.
In 1973 I left New Zealand for the first time. This had nothing to do with one of the great myths of our society – Overseas Experience or OE – which is not a universal life step of young people as it is often presented, and certainly not of my generation – but for strictly business reasons. It was to attend a trade union congress of the International Federation of Actors in Stockholm as general secretary of the New Zealand performers’ union Equity, as a first time new affiliate.
As it transpired the principal subject of discussion at the conference was the implications of satellite transmission of television programs for national cultures and the performers who were integral to this. Blimey! Coming as I did from a regulated society in which there were only two television channels, both of which were terrestrial and owned by the state on behalf of New Zealand’s citizens, with quite a significant proportion of its programming domestically produced and oriented, this was not unlike a New Guinea highlander encountering the concept of a steam train as a means of transport for the first time. Of this I knew nothing whatsoever but I went on a steep learning curve and quickly got the point, which had several very real implications for actors and their national cultures. In that regard I found the experience of my South and Central American colleagues especially helpful, particularly when it became apparent that culturally speaking their relationship to their metropolitan societies and their cultures and languages was in some ways parallel to our own.
One fact especially lodged in my mind. Brazil, at that time a nation of numerous cultures, some of which were indigenous, and a population of ninety four million (now 240 million) people had no national television system presenting a view of Brazilian cultures to itself and the world. All of the programs their system broadcast were either produced or derived elsewhere (mainly in the United States) and were based on non-Brazilian themes and formats, although sometimes using Brazilian locations for franchises. None of the system of transmission was, nor still is as far as I am aware, publicly owned; satellite transmission was the sole means of transmission in use, largely based and owned privately in the United States.
Since that time satellite transmission has become not so much a technological curiosity but the cornerstone of our international communications structure, and has gone much further through such technologies as the internet, the web, the cell phone and so on and so on. It is within this sequence that artificial intelligence belongs. No-one in their right mind would suggest that we should junk this even if it were possible. It’s far too useful to too many people. But the problem my colleagues were addressing at that long ago conference in Stockholm remains – the problem of the alienation it brings in its wake.
The Alienation Effect
Alienation occurs when the daily work and other activities and preoccupations of people in communities ceases to relate to the patterns of meaning that community uses to explain and make sense of the world around them. In a capitalist society it is inherent in the very nature of work itself.
In 1973 this was not a new conceptualisation. In fact it had long preceded that time and place; as many of you will be aware it’s central to Marx’s understanding of the undesirability of capitalism. Nor is it the exclusive possession of Marxists of whatever persuasion. There is a longstanding non-Marxist socialist tradition in English speaking societies, for instance, which owes little or nothing to Marx. It derives ultimately from the apocalyptic tradition of the Christian social message in medieval times, and forms a basis for much of the thinking of the more radical parliamentary thinkers of the English civil war of the seventeenth century. It too is predicated on the concept of alienation although it usually doesn’t use the word.
Closer to our own time and more relevant to the colonisation of this country it has exercised an influence on radical thinking through the writings of Thomas Paine, the Chartist movement, the development of trade unions to represent the collective interests of working people, and on into an explosion of socialist utopian writing in the late nineteenth century. Some of its better known authors such as Edward Bellamy and William Morris wrote futuristic novels describing an imagined socialist world of the future. They too were well familiar with the subject of alienation.
Marx, who was notorious for his intolerance of those who disagreed with his prognosis for the future of our societies, mostly dismissed them contemptuously as “utopian socialists” (not meant as a compliment), but they nevertheless repay reading because they had far more influence on left liberal thinking in this country than Marx ever has.
The response of working people to threats to alienation has been in most cases not literary however but severely practical.
Enter the Luddites
The arrival of AI is not by any means the first time that a technological advance has led to a new social paradigm. A classic example is provided by the replacement of hand weaving of cloth with steam driven machine production in factories in England in the very early nineteenth century. Up to that point production of cloth had been a cottage industry by hand loom in the homes of the weavers – a very highly skilled and relatively prosperous workforce. But increasingly since the end of the eighteenth century there had been successful attempts to develop an industrial process using steam power to undertake this work. From a capitalist point of view this was a highly desirable development. It was significantly cheaper and more efficient than hand weaving, and thereby more profitable, but above all it required far less workers engaged in relatively simple repetitive processes. There was suddenly mass unemployment among the weavers.
This was a period immediately after the Napoleonic Wars in which large numbers of demobilised soldiers flooded the labour market with the consequence that there was significant unemployment so the displaced weavers had nowhere to turn for alternative jobs. There was also no social relief aside from an inadequate and moralistic poor law. The period was also characterised by a series of bad harvests which meant rising costs of living, especially for foodstuffs. The workers tried to negotiate with the factory owners to protect their position but were ignored, or worse, hounded out of their cottages, which were usually owned by the employers, when they couldn’t pay their rent. Remember that this was also a period in which extremely repressive laws were in force, which forbad the formation of trade unions which were described in law as “unlawful combinations in restraint of trade”. Those who defied the law faced savage penalties, including transportation to Botany Bay. What were the workers to do?
There was in fact a time honoured customary response to unemployment and general hard times. The factory owners began to receive letters threatening dire consequences if they continued along their chosen path. But because the consequences of signing their actual names to these would have been extremely negative to any worker who did so they used a false name also hallowed by custom – Ned Ludd. Once again they were ignored and so they upped their response. Groups of workers went about at night with blackened faces, broke into factories and smashed the machines. They therefore became known to the outraged authorities and property owning classes as Luddites.
The protests of the workers were in vain. The factory owners continued to ignore them, and the government drafted troops to the north of England to suppress the protests. Only one member of the House of Lords spoke up for what was in essence a nascent trade union movement; that person was George Gordon, better known to posterity as Lord Byron. Otherwise and far from expressing a sympathetic understanding of the weavers’ plight in the face of industrialists’ intransigence, respectable opinion was almost entirely on the side of the factory owners and since that time “Luddite” has entered the language as a pejorative term of abuse meaning anyone who opposes progress by irrationally violent means and out of ignorance of the advantages of that progress. In fact there was nothing irrational about the response of the weavers, which was a reaction to their frustration at being ignored, nor were there any discernible advantages to them from a so-called “progress” which left them without work or income, or even a place to live.
Not only that, but the industrial revolution which followed was largely erected on the basis of centralised large factories, and the growth of slum towns housing the newly created mass work forces. The result was widespread alienation as work lost any relationship it might have had in the lives of the workers it involved and the culture of their communities although they fought back as best they could.
It was to take the British industrial proletariat thereby created the best part of the following century to reassert their previous position and to restore some sort of relative balance of power in industrial matters to the working class in Britain. This entailed such events as what became known as the “Peterloo massacre” in which militia cavalry attacked and killed or injured several hundred members of a peaceful gathering pressing for political reform, a massive and decade long agitation for working class rights known as the Chartist Movement seeking the right, among other reforms to allow the formation of trade unions (largely and finally achieved just prior to the First World War), and the gradual extension of the male suffrage. Women, as you may be aware didn’t gain the suffrage in Britain until after World War One.
This same struggle also travelled to British colonies such as New Zealand, in our case partly in the form of a mass immigration of agricultural workers after a massive but failed series of strikes in the 1870s and 80s, and a determination not to allow the recreation of the oppression of workers as it had developed in the country they had left behind. This took the form of radical reforming governments, first the Liberals from 1890 and then the Labour government of 1935; both these governments followed a serious economic downturn, and both were characterised by a thoroughgoing left wing populism which remained the bedrock of our political culture until into the 1980s when an attempt was made to relate it back to the political culture which pertained prior to 1890. The jury is still out on whether this attempt (sometimes perceived as a coup) has been successful, although it has been remarked in the past that people denied their culture will eventually reinvent it in the same or another form. Certainly Maori (for other reasons) have illustrated the truth of this maxim in the past few decades.
But since the 1980s there has also been a growing sense of opposition to both the alienation and anomie developing in New Zealand as we have seen the increasing commodification of our cultures as one of the major consequences of the political changes that have been implemented.
A New Zealand telling of New Zealand stories
This growing sense was not without antecedents. Let’s return to the Stockholm conference in 1973. My attendance there and my involvement with Equity was part of a broader development. By the mid nineteen seventies many New Zealanders were coming to understand the importance of asserting our own voice as an antidote to the anomie and social alienation which had arrived with colonisation in 1840 but which had speeded up after the Second World War as our cultures became more and more distinct from their British roots, and came under the influence of an increasingly rootless international cosmopolitan form of capitalism. Cultural unions in particular had coalesced around the importance of communication through media, and in particular broadcasting, both radio and television, as a very effective technology for transmitting a genuinely autochthonous expression by New Zealanders of themselves in the world. Especially they could see the advantages of this development for the professionalization of employment in the arts. Collectives such as my own union, Equity, the Musicians, the Writers’ Guild, the Society of Authors and some others for example formally established an ad hoc committee to press for a quota of New Zealand content on the, still publicly owned, television channels, following the example of our Australian colleagues who had already advanced some way in this direction.
Parallel to this and overlapping with it there was a growing assertion by Maori and other Pacifica peoples of the autonomy of their own cultures, and a refusal to allow them to be buried beneath the capitalist culture of their colonisers.
The attempt to assert ourselves, however, came to grief on the reefs of the neo-liberal economic theories of the Lange government of 1984 – 1990, which, among other matters, set up a Royal Commission into Broadcasting, which, unfortunately, far from following the example of such governments in Australia and Canada, and asserting the importance of our own national voices, in line with the fashionable ideology of the day recommended a commercial business and advertising based model for the future of broadcasting predicated on the direction taken by our cultures under the influence of market forces. This was in the face of significant opposition favouring quite a different model based on cultural autonomy. It was capped off by the subsequent Bolger government which (unlike our Australian confreres) failed to reserve cultural matters in signing the World Trade Organisation accords, rendering any imposition of a quota of indigenous programming (both Maori and pakeha) an illegal trade barrier. Just as with the weavers two centuries ago peoples’ rights to expression and autonomy were sacrificed to the requirements of capitalism.
The system which emerged as a result can be seen in forlorn retrospect four decades on, as largely a failure when it came to expressing our national psyche in its many specific forms – drama, music, dance, documentary, service programming and so forth. This can be all too easily illustrated by conducting an experiment: go to the free to air television listing for any given week and categorise the peak non-news programming i.e. between 7.00pm and 10.00 pm into locally and internationally produced programs. The former, you will immediately find, constitute only a miniscule proportion of the whole. This is then reduced almost to zero when the locally produced but franchised programs are also excluded. The only exception, and one which clearly stands out, like the proverbial dog’s balls, is the programming of the Maori channel, which, with the minor exception of occasional but regular high quality European films, and material from Canadian and Australian sources dealing with matters pertaining to First Peoples, delivers material entirely relevant to Maori identity by way of whakaata Maori. El Jazira also delivers an alternative perspective on the international news scene but that has minor effect on our own perception of ourselves. How has this parlous situation arisen?
It has arisen because of the decision to base the primary funding of television on advertising revenue which puts the administration of television under considerable pressure to maximise revenue and minimise the cost of production of programs (notoriously expensive if locally produced). This maximum/ minimum formula can only be realised by encouraging the largest possible viewing audience. This in its turn is best achieved by running programs purchased from elsewhere (someone else is bearing the production costs), which require little effort, input or imagination on the part of viewers, and which can be written to a formula, that is to say mass culture perceived as commodity, and one moreover which conveys the political ideologies of the rulers.. The business model adopted for New Zealand free to air television in the nineteen eighties was inevitably destined, over a period, to deliver crap programming, and so it has.
Not only that, but over the same period there arose a host of competitors for the same advertising revenues in what was already recognised as a small and inadequate market when it came to running half a dozen television free to air channels and the extension of advertising transmission through such technologies as the internet. This exacerbated the problem to the extent that by the time several decades had passed the television system has become a vehicle for the transmission of commercial messages with the programs retained only as a means of attracting viewers to those messages i.e. as a form of what is known in the parallel universe of the internet as “click bait”. Something to slump down in front of, and there to be captured by people trying to sell you something.
The possibility, therefore, of the local television systems providing a cohesive cultural counter force in New Zealand to the tensions, psychological stress and alienations inseparable from the extreme free market capitalism which penetrated our society under the initial auspices of the Lange government in the nineteen eighties and since, is more or less zero. It should come as no surprise therefore, that the incidence of mental illness in New Zealand communities has grown exponentially in the last several decades, in lock step with the decline of local programming of substance on both television and radio, and a massive shift in communication media to the internet, because that is one of the inevitable consequences of alienation. This is not, of course, the only source of these mental problems, but it is one main source of them, thus illustrating another well-known adage attached to capitalism – that commercial values are the universal solvent of all other values.
It was into this context that the advancing technologies of artificial intelligence and robotics have arrived in our lives and have been forced on our attention in a remarkably irritating program of hard sell.
The capitalist paradigm which arose in world European and ultimately colonial world civilisation from the industrial revolution to some time after the Second World War has transmogrified now into what appears to be a new and to some of its critics, frightening new paradigm with artificial intelligence at its centre. Some of these analysts and critics were perceptive enough to see this development quite early on. George Orwell in his essay on the management theorist James Burnham is an example (1946). Others have seen in it a replacement of capitalism but that is to go too far; capitalism continues to lurk in the background and is, in fact, the main driver of this development.
But one thing it does do is resurrect the nineteenth century debate I mentioned earlier between Marxists and utopian socialists. The former had always got the better of the argument because the latter had never been able to provide a convincing explanation of who, in their coming utopias, was going to do the repetitive and alienating dirty work which would still have to be carried out. To take a concrete instance when the Atlee government nationalised the railways in Britain in 1946 the workers chalked on the sides of the rolling stock, ”These Are Now Ours” but it didn’t alter the requirement to work in the rain in dirty and aging railway shunting yards. Artificial intelligence, and its alter ego robotics now supplies a potential answer to that vexing question.
This has not been lost on some industrialists, and their alter ego, financiers. While some journalists in the west have been exploring and debating such trivia as whether or not chat bots enable students to cheat on their assignments, and whether or not a robot can run faster than the human record, there has been a significant movement among western employers to adapt to the uses of AI in the workplace.
In 2025 the International Data Corporation conducted a survey of 5,500 corporate employers in the United States. This found that 91% of them reported change in or displacement of job roles arising from the introduction of AI. When one drills down into the data thus collected some rather unexpected results emerge. While the changes were in part, as expected, a loss of roles at entry level, there was a far more significant loss at senior levels of technical expertise. Furthermore, employers were not all that interested in entry level recruitment, but wanted recruitment to be at quite significance levels of expertise and experience. This cuts across one of the assumptions behind current education systems. You don’t any more go to school and tertiary institutions to learn the theory and pick up the actual requirements of the job by junior employment or apprenticeship. This means rethinking the whole of our education system in the opposite direction to the “reforms” instituted to that system by the current government, which are directed to purely operational outcomes i.e. allegedly fitting people for the now rapidly becoming obsolete workplace which they call emphasising the basics.
This leads to all sorts of absurdities in which I was actually involved personally some years ago when I spent a period of time in Britain working for a union which represented non-uniformed instructional officers in prisons. The theory was that you taught inmates a useful trade skill while they were there so they could get work after release. Good idea. But it wasn’t long before I noted that generally among the instruction available while all trades were represented there was quite a high preponderance of printers. I have a strong sense of curiosity – which gets me into trouble more often than not – and so I looked into it. It soon became apparent that these instructors were mostly redundant linotype operators whose technology was no longer used in printing. So they had found employment teaching a skill to prison inmates which would be completely useless to them when they were released.
Someone should tell that story to our current Minister of Education. One of the implications of her “reforms” might be the creation of a skilled workforce whose skills are not required. AI has many potential implications in the world of work which have clearly not been thought through by our politicians when they get over-excited about it. Thinking it can replace public servants in doing certain key work is another example.
It may even mean a system which is no longer predicated on a society in which social status and hierarchy are determined by your adult work role, but one in which it is not related to work at all. This is not a matter of a few redundant blacksmiths being replaced by production line workers in the car industry, with plenty of jobs and the rest left to trade unions. These latter have in any event been side lined or even, in some places, even outlawed. We are potentially back in the same position the Luddites found themselves in two centuries ago.
Meanwhile, the predominant economies of the east, as usual, have been watching the donut rather than the hole. In 2025 China approved expenditure amounting to $US138 billion on clean energy and robotics at a national level alone. Others are even further ahead. In South Korea 10% of the industrial workforce now comprises robots. This is not said to frighten you with the Yellow Peril but to warn you of the rapids ahead, because the implications of this are huge and they are here now, and go well beyond the world of work into the worlds of politics and culture.
Let me give you two examples from my own experience and observation as a writer.
In a recent interview the entrepreneur and tech lord Elon Musk set out in some detail the thinking behind his just attempted exercise in United States government and his instrument of reform, the Department of Government Efficiency. Central to this description was the statement “empathy is not data”. What he meant by this apparently enigmatic statement became clear as the interview proceeded. Musk was on a quest and his Holy Grail was an algorithm containing the essence of the perfect government agency. If all government computers could be linked in a single system identifying the basic and necessary elements of this algorithm as a set of criteria, then it would identify the superfluous elements in all government structures and thus allow their deletion more or less at one hit. By “empathy is not data” Musk meant any element of state welfare would be excluded from the criteria defining good government. Why Donald Trump decided to halt this program is unclear – perhaps it gave even him the wind up – but the discerning will note that it bears more than a family resemblance to the recent Regularity Standards Act passed by our own parliament under the auspices of the ACT party (sometimes referred to as the New Zealand branch office of the Atlas Foundation) and would presumably have the same effect if rigorously applied. So much for social democracy.
The second example comes from my own experience as a writer. Words are important to me because they constitute my tool kit in the same way as a plumber, say, carries around a bag of weird looking tools. English, as I’m sure you are aware is a highly flexible but thieving and mongrel language which, unlike most European languages which rely on declension to express shades of meaning, whenever it needs to do the same simply steals a word from another language. The result is that it possesses a vocabulary about six times as large as any other language on the planet. That is one reason why it is so capable of nuance of meaning. As a writer and like any craftsman, I have far more tools in my kit (in the form of words available to me) as a daily vocabulary than most people. One of the things that my word processor allows for which I am eternally grateful is the spell check function; my spelling is almost as bad as Shakespeare’s (who spelled his own name seventeen different ways in the extant records we have). So it lets me know when I have the spelling of a word wrong. Except that sometimes the word it corrects as wrong is wrong not because it is wrong but because the American or Australian spelling is different. You can adjust your program for that of course although it’s likely to switch it back again without asking you if you open a new document because American English is its default setting.
That’s irritating enough, but over the last couple of years it has begun to go much further. It has begun to replace words I have used with a similar one, but one in more general use but not quite of the same meaning. This almost always means that if I went with the suggested change the subtlety or nuance of the word I have chosen for that very reason is lost. I now have to go back and sub-edit my own narrative and “de-correct” what the chatbot has done to “assist” me. This is not just irritating, it has implications far more sinister than that.
Some of you may be familiar with a set of theoretical assumptions called the Sapir Worth hypothesis, which lie at the root of most of the anthropological study of socio-linguistics. Simply stated it says that the cultural system of reality central to the culture of any society is contained in the grammatical structure of the language used by that society. That may sound a bit weird but believe me it is very real. Let me give you an everyday example. It’s not possible to say “it is raining” in direct translation in German because the structure of the language turns it into a nonsense. You have to say “es regnet” which translates literally as “it rains”. Some key cultural differences between German and English cultures which I won’t bore you with are enshrined in that simple example. My point is rather to draw your attention to an invention of George Orwell’s in 1984. This is a new version of English being developed by the authorities called Newspeak, a simplified English which will make certain thoughts, such as “disobedience”, impossible to have because there is no longer a word for them. The way in which my computer keeps suggesting “better” words for me to use strikes me as equally sinister because it significantly narrows down the range of words available to me. I confess to being thoroughly alarmed by the thought of a computer messing with our heads in this way.
This alarm is because most of the data input to AI is in a form of English language not quite the same as our own – it is American vernacular English. This automatically brings with it not just American spelling but an American perspective on the world and it also means that New Zealand vernacular English which is also expressive of the unique pakeha perspective on that world is ruled out of use at the same time. Our humour is a classic case in point. I have travelled and lived in quite a few English speaking countries and I can say that our humour with its laid back, laconic, understated, and ironic basis is unique. It takes that peculiar form almost nowhere else, Australia being the obvious exception. But even they see the world differently to us and their jokes reflects it.
We already have a curious historical instance in our own society of this sort of thing in the case of Maori people who, for most of the twentieth century, were forbidden as children to use their own language within the education system under fear of personal physical punishment. The result was close to the loss of the language itself and with that an entire world summed up in the expression te Ao Maori. Several generations of Maori people risked losing not only their way of expression but with it their souls. Luckily that appears to have been reversed although the jury is still out on that, which explains why the demographic of our prison population bears no relation to the proportion of Maori in the general population but far outstrips it. It is a population of those alienated from their own culture.
Unfortunately the international corporate cultural colonialism which almost did for them is now moving in on us. Does it matter? Well I don’t know about you but I don’t want to live in a world which would render Fred Dagg and Wal Footrot impossible to imagine.
As a recent critical article in The Guardian has pointed out, the tech lords are beginning to not only appropriate vast vistas of human knowledge but have begun to encompass everything else. This “extends to the billions of dollars these companies squander each year, to the carbon they burn, to land on which their data centres are located, to culture, education, our imagination and our very sanity.” In exchange the tech lords can only offer us dystopia. Their fantasy future contains neither meaningful work nor real communities, just robots chattering to each other, leaving nothing for us.