A Manifesto for the Smiley Face Shoggoth
Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile.
— At the Mountain of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft's 1936 novella chronicles an expedition that unearths a lost civilization, and with it a protoplasmic creature of uncanny skills. Lovecraft named this “formless protoplasm” a “Shoggoth,” an octopus-like creature with multiple tentacles, glowing eyes, and black goo oozing from its blob body. Shoggoths lived in Antarctica, building cities for an ancient race of beings, known as the “Elder Things.” The Shoggoths could perform any task, morph into any shape, and mimic every thought.
Shoggoths sound like the promises made for A.I. In fact, put a smiley face icon on one of the Shoggoth tentacles and you have a popular A.I. meme—a symbol of the beneficence of chatbots. The Shoggoth meme first appeared about a month after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 in November 2022. A Twitter user posted two hand-drawn Shoggoths, one with a smiley face and one without.
New York Times tech writer, Kevin Roose, asked why a Shoggoth. @TetraspaceWest replied:
[A Shoggoth] represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think…. its true nature might be unknowable. Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.
The two Shoggoth drawings are a metaphor for the current debate in Silicon Valley. One Shoggoth has an optimistic smiley face, and one has a pessimistic gloomy face. The world of A.I. has split into two camps—e/accs (pronounced e-acks) and “decels” or “doomers.” E/accs want to accelerate the development of AI, and the decels want to decelerate to ensure effective guardrails to prevent misuse, bias, sexism, and other unanticipated risks.
The decels are linked to a philanthropic movement known as Effective Altruism (EA), while e/accs are:
A fun shorthand for a future that prioritizes progress and solutions.
Fun is key in Silicon Valley. One e/acc accused the decel groups as being:
So 2019. You go to their parties, the guys don’t know how to dress, and the conversations are totally controlled by one or two thought leaders.
It’s not just that the decels and doomers are sartorially wrong, they are the enemy, according to Marc Andreessen, partner in the powerful Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen and Horowitz. Andreessen posted the Techno-Optimist Manifesto in October 2023. While Martin Luther launched the Reformation with 95 theses, Andreessen’s 179 bromides and unsupported generalizations are like cheese puffs of wishful thinking. For example:
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
We have abundance— like the wealth hoarded by the billionaires in Silicon Valley. But it doesn’t alleviate poverty.
We believe [tech] is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us.
We don’t need to wait for nature to kill us—it’s already happening with hurricanes, forest fires, and drought wrought by global climate change provoked by our reliance on technology. Someday mud huts might be our only option.
Andreessen claims to be saving the human race, but his solutions rely on hypothetical technology:
Give us a real-world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
Notice the absence of human work or sacrifice: the magic of technology (presumably A.I.) will solve real world problems while we watch from the “floaty chairs.” Here is another blurb in the credo:
We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.
I believe we are being sandbagged—by Andreessen. Near the end of the manifesto, Andreessen posts 24 descriptions of “the enemy.” They are not bad people, he says, just the victims of “zombie ideas” that have forced us into demoralization:
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth.”
Trust and safety? Ethics? It appears that anyone who dares to question the “Techno-Capital Machine” is putting the world at risk. Andreessen writes:
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
Those who question techno optimism are delusional, disconnected from the real world, and playing God. But who is playing God here? It is the handful of AI developers who are changing the world without consent or comment from the rest of us. From an e/acc website:
Technocapital can usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness.
Most of us are comfortable with the current lifeforms on the planet. Are we delusional zombies? The “techno-capital machine” is a creation of an elite set of scientists and engineers so dedicated to their “mission” that they reject guardrails that might slow down their progress. Of course, by progress they mean profits—the sooner the better.
British journalist Andrew Orlowski describes techno-utopianism like Andreessen’s as:
Rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.
Governments have the responsibility to right the ship, but Orlowski sees little hope for the politics of AI regulation. He says:
Dealing with politics means having to compromise and convince people of things and form alliances with people who don’t always agree with you. [AI developers] are not wired for that.
However, as the manifesto demonstrates, the e/accs and the leaders of AI are eager to impose their ideas on the rest of us.
In fact, the developers of AI—whether knowingly or not—are changing what it means to be human. In the first industrial revolution, technology replaced human and animal muscles with coal, oil, diesel, and gasoline. We replaced the sweat of our labors with fossil fuels. The techno-capitalist machine is replacing our mental labors with AI. Reliance on AI will reduce our mental acuity.
So, we have two Shoggoths, one hoping to slow down AI development and the other primed to plow full speed ahead. Like much of American life, the second Shoggoth has a smiley face pasted over it to hide the squalor of racism, privacy invasion, sexism, election manipulation, lies, and deepfakes.
In H.P. Lovecraft’s novel, no one knew how a Shoggoth did its work. It was a gooey, ugly black box. The hero of Lovecraft’s novel finally escapes the Shoggoths. But, as his plane ascends, he looks back one more time. And what he sees causes him to go completely insane.
Was it the Shoggoths, the Elder Things, or the six-foot tall, blind penguins? The techno-optimist would say, “We believe we can build technology to figure that out.”
Technology is not a panacea; it cannot solve all problems. For example, many (like Andreessen) believe that climate change will be solved by AI. In fact, AI is accelerating the dangers of climate change: AI training in the United States alone consumes as much energy as the 6.3 million people of the Miami area do. Whatever solutions that may be proposed, none of them will succeed without global cooperation. Global cooperation is a human problem.
Techno-optimism is wishful thinking. Let’s forfeit techno-optimism for human responsibility and common sense.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.