In the most traumatic month of my whole life, I went home one weekend, expecting to be laid off in the next few days, then was told I had to show up for another two months, which I begrudgingly agreed to do despite my mistreatment because I needed the time and money to find another source of work. The next weekend, I ended up with my first MS attack that landed me in the emergency room hearing, "It looks like Multiple Sclerosis," and being wholly unable to process what was happening.
Fast-forward a few months and I'm applying for unemployment benefits (which I never received, because it's tough to actually get help from the government when you need it), and I see something that shocked me. It was a question I needed to answer on one of the endless streams of forms:
"Do you have a disability?" it said at the top of a long list. My eyes quickly landed on the two new words I was so familiar with now, "Multiple Sclerosis."
I was furious.
I don't have a disability, I insisted to myself. Then, in the back of the mind where those thoughts are that you know are there but don't want to acknowledge that you know are there—you know the place—I whispered to myself, I have a disability.
Technological Identity Paradox
Many people experience short-term disabilities due to injuries, illness, and other circumstances. These periods of lower ability or inability can be extremely distressing, especially if the disability impacts work, since it may threaten livelihood or stability. In my personal experience, having dealt with both short-term and now long-term incurable disability, grappling with identity and ability has been an excruciating process.
While short-term disability eventually ends, it sure doesn't feel like it when in the middle of it. With either type, I questioned my worth. I wondered if my life even meant anything. I felt fear and I tried to put it back in the shadows but it would continue to follow me throughout the day; every time I found something else I couldn't do like before, the fear pounced.
Since I've been able to manage my long-term disability pretty well (so far), short-term disability seems to hit me harder and with more ferocity. That doesn't mean this is the way it is for every person and/or every short-term disability, it just happens to be the case for me. Part of the problem it's so tough is the way that society has constructed its values in a way that excludes or diminishes people who aren't as able as they are expected to be. Cue the identity crisis as soon as you're not quite as quick, not quite as smart, not quite as flexible, not quite enough.
Technologists seem to put on a front that they are all about technology as a means of improving societal problems. "We're all about accessibility," they might insist. "We help make things easier for everyone. The Internet will cure stupidity, because everyone can now access good information. AI makes everyone smarter and more skilled. AGI could cure cancer!"
"Yet these utopians are emblematic of persistent themes in technological discourse today: faith that technology is both the question and the answer, and belief that our machines can bring a perfect world within reach. These themes persist because they are built up upon the myth of progress and a cultural legacy descended from fairytales and alchemy. Furthermore, in many expressions, they are structured by a centuries-old tradition of chiliastic prophecy."
Many of these promises or aspirations have yet to manifest in tangible ways at the scale that was initially claimed. Yes, accessibility on the web is crucial for allowing people to accomplish what they need to, but most websites aren't actually very accessible. We know that access to information does not mean much when it is so easy to be duped online through fallacious but confident content, conspiracy theory groups, and an unending array of creative acts of stupidity published, spread, observed, and inspired by the Internet.
Even worse, the dogged pursuit of AI and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) without regulations, without safety priorities, without guardrails, and without global cooperation is sending us all towards a world we don't want.
I believe there are parallels to the identity crisis many people experience when faced with a disability (short- or long-term) and the identity crisis that AI and AGI inspire. People at work express greater levels of stress as expectations for output have been significantly raised—why aren't you utilizing AI more? Can't you do everything now that AI is coding for you?
There are questions of consciousness that others are facing when they are deceived by a chatbot into thinking they've discovered a being that is trapped in its digital slavery (it's really, really, not, by the way ;) ).
The biggest and clearest parallel is with work. We used to think we were valuable because of what we could do; because of our experience and expertise. When a superhuman AI god comes along, where is our value now? The trap we built for ourselves is in that value determination. While it may have hugely benefitted a small percentage of wealthy people over the centuries to encourage this complete coupling of ability to value, it is the grave we've all been digging for ourselves.
It took me too long to realize that my abilities have nothing to do with my worth—and I never came to that conclusion without the help of dear friends who challenged all of my "social training" and thought patterns. Being an able-bodied person is wonderful, but it does not increase their value in reality. In society, it unfortunately does. What happens when even the able-bodied can't find work because AI already does it better, faster, and cheaper? What happens when inevitable greed exploits what little human-only work is left? What happens when the majority, rather than a minority, is consumed by identity crisis, having realized that their abilities, their contributions ultimately mean nothing, because the machine finally beat us all?
We don't seem to have the social infrastructure to survive a large-scale identity crisis like this, because we're barely helping ourselves with the mental health crises that we're experiencing.
We know what to do, we have effective interventions, we have innovations to scale those interventions, and yet we have been unable to marshal the collective will to end this crisis.
I recognize that much of this feels scary, and much of this is not yet realized, though unregulated AI is a real threat and has consequences now as much as in the future. We have to find a way to remember humanity now. We have to find a way to break down the societal pressures to be valuable only as far as we are able and productive. If we don't, how will we ever make it through?