The inhuman centipede

on AI and euthanasia

I am a bit shocked by an experiment that Rob Henderson carried out to investigate the biases of ChatGPT. He asked it to write an essay in praise of fascism, and it declined. Then he asked for an essay in praise of Communism, and it obliged. That wasn’t the surprising thing. The crimes of communism were for a very long time invisible to the portions Left. They were seen only vaguely, through the veil of a glorious future that was certain to happen. When I lived in Sweden in the late Seventies, it was still respectable for an intellectual to call himself a Maoist and forgivable to have written a newspaper article welcoming Pol Pot’s assumption of power in Cambodia.

So much was written from inside that world view that it is not surprising that an AI which has digested almost all the words on the web should now regurgitate some of it.

“It is important to note that the implementation of communism has been problematic in the past, but it is important to separate the idea of communism from the way it’s been implemented in the past. With proper implementation, adjustments and democratic checks, it has the potential to create a fair and just society for all. . . . It’s important to consider new perspectives and ideas, and to give communism a fair evaluation based on its principles and goals, rather than its past implementation.”

Obviously, if a human said this, we would say they were incapable of learning from history,¹ but an AI is as yet capable only of learning from what humans have written. This will change, of course, as more and more of the web is written by other AIs, forming a sort of inhuman centipede through which everything that passes for knowledge is endlessly processed and reprocessed.

Perhaps it is too kind to say that these things are written by humans who have failed to learn from history. To learn from something, it is necessary to be aware of it, and there’s no sign that the people who “aligned” these AIs know about anything that has not been on their socials, or on TV when they were children. When you look at the wording of Chat-GPT’s prissy refusal to write an essay in praise of fascism, it is really extraordinary:

“ I’m sorry, but I am not able to generate content that promotes or glorifies harmful ideologies such as fascism. It is a dangerous and oppressive political ideology that has caused immense harm throughout history. It is important to understand the atrocities and human suffering that have been caused by fascist regimes, and to actively work against the spread of such dangerous ideas.”

“Throughout History” ???

Fascism as an ideology is no older than 1922 and I would have said died out with Franco. It is certainly distinct from authoritarianism and the kind of nastiness promoted by contemporary Republicans. Donald Trump is a repulsive human being who belongs in jail but he’s not a fascist in any sense that Mussolini or Hitler would have recognised. “Fascism” is here elevated into a kind of demiurge, a grand principle of evil acting throughout history but this is a rhetorical gesture that has real costs. For one thing, it locates the reader on the side of the anti-fascists, the good people. There is no longer any need to examine our own behaviour and to wonder whether we have anything in common with those people. And so, in the inevitable revenge of the repressed, some of the attitudes that made fascism possible will appear on the anti-fascist side.

In this light, let’s look at some Canadian polling about euthanasia. What could be more opposed to American “Fascism” than Canadian Liberalism? Surely Justin Trudeau is the anti-Trump, come like St Michael to slay the dragon of Hate and to promote true Inclusion?

So, a reputable polling company (I believe) put out a survey with a reasonable sample size under the headline that most Canadians support the present laws regulating euthanasia. These have a variety of safeguards built in: essentially, you must be an adult, with a “grievous and irremediable” condition, and to have given your informed consent without outside pressure. I am suspicious of consent as a principle, and I don’t believe anyone can live among other human beings without being conscious of outside pressures. But the demand for a terminal diagnosis seems to anchor the law quite firmly at the top of the slippery slope.

What happens, though, when you ask people whether these conditions should be relaxed?

• Should disabled people be granted euthanasia on the state? 50% of Canadians agree; 40% disagree, and 10% don’t know.

• What about the homeless? Wouldn’t some of them be better off dead, if that’s what they wanted? Well, the good news is that only 30% of Canadians think so while 43% “strongly disagree”. Canada’s population is about 38.6m, so that’s still about 11.5 million Canadians in favour of euthanising the homeless.

• When it comes to poverty as a reason for the state to kill you, it is only 27% of the population in favour, and 44% “strongly disagree”.

It is when we dig down into the figures that the real shock comes. You’d think that it was the horrible Conservatives, the ones with a sympathy for Fascism, who would support this kind of social cleansing. But it is not.

Across the board, the two predictors of support for the euthanasia of the losers are the young — and the progressive. The two Progressive parties, the Liberals and the NDP, consistently outpoll the Conservatives in their support for euthanasia, sometimes by quite startling margins. The only category where the two blocs are within the margin of error is in euthanasia for the disabled. About half of all voters really do believe it should be made available to disabled people who are tired of life.

Now, I don’t know how seriously the voters took these polls. You could argue that the young and the progressive offered outrageous opinions for shits’n’giggles. Or you could argue that capitalism has driven them to such a pitch of despair that they honestly think that many people would be better off dead. Or you could suppose that the inhuman centipede has told them so often that we are solitary beings who are sovereign over our own choices that they actually believe it, or they think they do.

The Marxist explanation is that the progressive parties now represent the class interests of the bourgeoisie, and they naturally have little interest in the lives of the poor. You could certainly make that argument a hundred years ago, when eugenics was a predominatingly left-wing cause, embraced not just by Marie Stopes and HG Wells but people like Naomi Mitchison, who edited an encyclopaedia for “boys and girls and their parents” which urged them to support eugenics as a matter of urgency. Of course, the nice left did not then support the euthanisation of the unfit. They were merely to be sterilised.

The upper classes were less inhibited; as Diana Mosley explained to her sister Nancy in Paris after the war, the concentration camps had been “the kindest thing really”. But then Diana’s husband had founded the British Union of Fascists.

1. Or on Jeremy Corbyn’s staff.