The notion that we must progress is ingrained in our present character. The cause of this is that our minds must naturally progress towards total understanding because of their energy and curiosity. But this is not true human reason. Since we are harnessed to the Machine, our thinking is and has long been applied to technology or diverted by the money economy to the interests of the Machine. As a result we have come to think of progress in material and financial terms, and individually apply our minds and energies to the automaton; hence the term autoprogression. As individuals we submit to this existing reality, trusting that by instinctively orienting ourselves to its rules - by 'doing our own thing' on its terms, and pursuing its objectives in our own automatic interests - we may find a sort of happiness and satisfaction. This is usually not so much a sin of commission as omission, since the great majority of us believe the present to be the only possible reality, offering our only opportunity of happiness, and fail to envisage the humantrue alternative.
Early in our history, when we were struggling to prevail against the restrictions of natural reality, such progress brought benefits. The application of intellect to skilled techniques of basic survival gave to the African Bushmen a happy way of life which did not upset the natural balance but brought them to an optimum level of satisfaction within it, according to the intellectual level they had reached. When the intellectual level rose elsewhere, in the minds of other groups, it did not show them the wisdom of savouring their new understanding whilst otherwise remaining unchanged - they immediately began to apply it to autoprogression which, once it had taken hold of their minds without being questioned, could not be stopped. The Bushmen had reached a point in their development which, with common and innate understanding, they determined not to progress beyond. This was not the only point of development appropriate to that decision, and was probably partially dictated, later on in central Africa, by the harsh limitations of their environment. The fact is - a fact which their unspoken understanding must have embraced - that further material progress would be of no real value to them, for the advantages would not outweigh the disadvantages. This does not mean that there are no benefits from intellectual progress alone. From the evidence of their cave-painting, music and story-telling, the Bushmen did progress and benefit in this way.
Where civilisation autoprogressed it fulfilled certain needs but created its own additional needs, the further fulfilment of which brought added burdens and dangers. For example, invention of the wheel lightened the labour of transporting goods but at the same time increased it by opening up the unnecessary trading of goods for money, and heightened human conflict by its application to weapons of war. Useful items such as the wheel were not and still are not made available according to real need but for money-profit and other automatic advantage. Autoprogression serves the Machine's competitive concept of reality by always aiming to reduce money-costs in order to increase production. Where it succeeds, humans consume ever more resources, whether as food, or material goods, or as weapons of war, in many ways contrary to their well-being and dangerous to their prospective survival. Where autoprogression fails the Machine withdraws, and fewer resources are made available for human consumption, causing deprivation to the point of starvation. It is against the nature of the money economy to strike and sustain a balance between the two extremes.
So autoprogression is essential to the Machine and, since the Machine depends upon our willing effort, autoprogression must also appeal to us. This means that its achievements and goods must be attractive to us, and since it is we who accomplish the achievements, and manufacture and consume the goods, it is in our automated interest to make the whole process attractive. There are none but ourselves to use the Machine's services, nor to produce and consume these things. Rather than contemplate the drastic step of giving up the whole procedure, however, realising that it is not only unnecessary but also a great burden laid on us, we try to increase the artificial advantages of autoprogression to a point where they seem to outweigh the disadvantages. Very few of us fully succeed in this, but most hope to do so. For many of us the hoped-for automatic rewards are what we chiefly live for, to be realised only if we continue to go forward in this way - to autoprogress. Our material and technological standards are continually raised, and our expectations rise with them, so that we resist any subsequent attempts to lower them. Even when the burdens of automatic life are unrelieved by rewards, or we are personally bored by materialistic existence, our spirits may be lifted by the spearheads of autoprogression - the space shuttle, computer technology, planned Mars landings, or genetic engineering. Or we might simply live for football or darts, the fortunes of our chosen teams, or for the success of our nation's athletes in the Olympic Games.
In parts of the world, such as here in Britain, we enjoy much higher standards of living than we used to, and could say we have the Machine to thank for it. Yes, there is more comfort, less hardship and drudgery than there was, but for us every new advantage has brought built-in disadvantage, because the chief reason for autoprogress is not the balanced benefit of humanity. In the past our level of expectation was much lower so that it took much less to make us happy, particularly as we were not aware that any other condition was possible for us. Now our material expectations are much higher, and the Machine is capable of meeting them. But our minds have also been stimulated to a higher level of moral-awareness, which our autoculture does not reflect and which, in the process of providing material rewards, the Machine betrays. If we had planned our social advance according to true human reason and for the good of the entire race the result would have been utterly and wholesomely different. As it is, imbalance is the norm. Whilst we in the North receive more than our share of material things, and are in that sense happier, others elsewhere in the world receive much less, yet carry more than their fair share of the burden of providing for us and, in this worldly sense at least, are less happy. Even so we, in our affluence, suffer unrest, insecurity, fear, uncertainty and anxiety, because of inequalities and disagreements inherent in our society which lead to crime, violence, instability, and tensions arising from threats of impending disasters of all kinds.
All this that makes up our existing reality is the end result of a system which is all right in its own terms, all wrong in human terms. It does not serve us, so we should not serve it. Our present world is the result of our exploitation of ourselves and Earth, by instinct with the aid of intellect - the result of autoprogression or, if you prefer, civilisation. Are we really capable of pretending that our extremely bad record is good - so good as to warrant extension of this reckless exploitation into space? How can anybody dream of humanity leading the way to a 'galactic super organism' when we find difficulty in successfully running a local council? Our space projects are really dreams of escape, but the burden we want to escape from is self-imposed by our conscious selves on our minds, and would be carried with us wherever we were to go. We are products of Earth which have not yet found our proper place here.
The nature of autoprogression is that it proceeds to make things happen, by our agency as a sort of side-effect of the work we do. Our personal aim is to gain satisfaction, prestige and reward. As we work, we allow ourselves to be persuaded that the product, being of vital interest to the money economy, must be of value to humanity. This stills our consciences, allowing us to concentrate on the job in hand and preventing us from projecting our concerns effectively into the future. The micro-chip, for example, simply happened in this way. It is something which every industry has to use to speed production in some way, or lose in the general competitive race, but whose introduction was not planned and whose effect on humanity was hardly considered and so not foreseen. I shall return to the micro-chip in the next chapter (on employment). Right now, let us consider two other examples of autoprogression.
Human evolution. By automatically pursuing the science of biology we have learned how to modify the genes in a cell, opening the door to the creation of completely new species. Since this existing reality is wrong, any new species we tailor to fit it shall also be wrong. In view of the fact that we hardly realise this is the wrong reality, much less know what would be the right reality for us, we can not know what would be an ideal species to create. Besides, genes are natures tools for securely fitting all life-forms into their reality in a balanced way. Our job is to make what changes are needful in world reality, by intention. We, and all other creatures, shall then genetically adjust, as we have always done, in a much more satisfactory and natural way than is likely if blinkered science intervenes.
Computers. This is a particularly vital subject because the aim is to develop computers that think, when that capacity of mind is our own chief attribute which we have not yet fulfilled. This development is proceeding so fast that its ultimate aim has been brought rapidly forward from the realms of fantasy into impending reality. Not so long ago it was publicly announced that the race was on to make fifth generation computers with capacity far beyond anything existing. Now it is anticipated that sixth generation computers will be achieved in the 1990's. But the target is UIM's - ultra intelligent machines - the first generation of which will be able to process information (whatever that may truly mean) better than the human brain. Second generation UIM's will (it is confidently predicted) have capabilities way beyond human intellectual abilities, and third and fourth generations will follow with exponentionally rising levels of intelligence.
Do we want thinking machines with capacity way beyond ours? As I have said already, we have yet nowhere near fulfilled our intellect. Until we have done so we are in no position to decide to create UIM's. Admittedly existing computers are already better at calculating and reproducing information than the average human brain. We already submit to fellow humans who are above average in this respect - the experts. Clearly the human race shall be obliged to bow down to the almighty expertise of its fourth generation UIM's if and when they super-compete internationally and maybe on an inter-galactic scale one day. This is why the Machine wants them, because our morality is a nuisance to it; once it had them it would by-pass us, and then we would never be able to fulfil our own intellect effectively, for we could not argue with their supposed, officially acknowledged superior intelligence. Not only would many of us become physically superfluous, as is already happening, but all of us would be made mentally redundant.
The point about human intellect is that its most immediate truth, of the utmost significance to us, is humantruth - wholly appropriate to our life on Earth but hardly likely to appeal to an ultra-intelligent Machine. Our intellect is the supreme achievement of universal evolution. Our bodies are agents of the influence to express energy, but our minds are creations so to speak, of the influence for truth. Our fulfilled minds shall turn us against the Machine and towards truth. UIM's are the product of intellect abjectly applied to instinct, serving the Machine. Their human inventors produce them without any clear idea of what will result - for egoistic, romantic, ambitious or purely practical and financial reasons rather than humantrue reasons. If these UIM's were really to surpass human intellect they would be designed independently to correlate more knowledge than we can absorb, but also with more complete processes of reason in which case they too most turn against the Machine which gave birth to them. Obviously the designers of UIM's have no intention of allowing this to happen. These super-computers will be programmed according to automatic concepts, and so shall be merely extensions of the automatic thinking of existing reality - calculating according to the conflicting elements of the competitive norm. In other words they shall be incapable of thinking truly, of intellating, and shall thus be infinitely inferior to human intellect, being externally programmed and incapable of free intellation and self-determination. The whole UIM project is based on misunderstanding of intellect, a true understanding of which would not have occasioned the idea to arise, and would now cancel it as undesirable and futile. Our intellect is capable of comprehending truth from the viewpoint of life, which represents the ultimate meaning and purpose of the universe - of existence. The material existence of the universe, like the human body, is merely the vehicle of that truth. No amount of extra thinking capacity to absorb endless universal facts can surpass the human intellect as an instrument of truth - only mislead it, further confuse the issues, and more firmly establish the Machine.
Consider some further examples of autoprogression. In the van of modern industrial practice is precision engineering to accuracies of the order of 10 to the power of minus-6 millimetres, presently used, apparently, to produce musical compact discs and improved micro-chips. Science and technology has brought this civilisation to the threshold of space-colonisation. Many humans are now linked to highly complex communication systems which are spreading and growing in power and complexity all the time. It is doubtful whether anyone can give good reason for these developments, in human terms. Autoprogression is the reason for them happening, which intellect cannot justify. They contain their own justification, confirmed by their automatic evolution - that energy shall express itself in any and every possible way. That this is so, and that these things are not practiced in the human interest, can be judged from the apparent fact that here in the rich North it takes fifty times more energy (chiefly derived from oil) to produce our processed food than we get from eating it.
What we are doing, by this accelerating evolution, is no different in character from that which evolution has always done - blindly going where opportunity leads, without purpose of our own. Amazingly, most humans are not fully aware that these staggering things are happening, and the fact is that we can achieve a perfectly satisfactory standard of living without them. Highly precise engineering was developed for money economy reasons and to meet automatic standards, not to fulfil the most pressing human needs. It will become vital to our living standards only if and when it is so widely practiced that we come to depend on it, unable to function without it. As for the colonisation of space, if there is ever to be good reason for it that reason doesn't exist now. And complex communications are of little use if that to be communicated has no real humantrue purpose or value.
Whilst autoprogression, which lacks true human purpose, is bad, this is not to say that all products of human ingenuity are so. The solar cell, for example, is a simple, direct and harmless way of tapping the source of all Earth's available energy - the sun. That we have not fully exploited the solar cell, despite its advantages and all our scientific and technological resources, is another indication that we are not in control of our destiny, pursuing human interests, but are harnessed to the Machine, serving its interests. Instead, we are replacing the dirty and dangerous method of burning coal with the possibly potentially more dirty and dangerous method of nuclear fission. A primary reason for this is military, for a by-product of nuclear reactors is plutonium, an effective component of nuclear weapons. These weapons still threaten the world with explosive destruction and carcinogenic radiation. The very main reason for being against nuclear power is the chief automatic military reason for developing it.
There is an argument in favour of autoprogression that many important discoveries are made by accident, in the course of other research and development; also that useful products emerge as 'spin-offs' from the invention of special materials and techniques required for quite different purposes. This may be so, but returns us to the question of advantage and disadvantage. This case in favour of autoprogression is that by satisfying our curiosity, with no known benefit in sight, we challenge ourselves to develop new technologies which sometimes happen to prove useful. My case is that such effort to discover diverts attention from real necessity; leads us into activities like space exploration, which, seen in this light, are disadvantageous; and that the so-called advantages, like heat-proof porcelain from the development of rockets, may be of interest to the Machine, and of use to sophisticated cooks, but do not provide vitally needed solutions to the real problems facing humanity.
I do not subscribe to the argument that unless it is to satisfy curiosity or gain personal advantage humans have no cause for endeavour and will stagnate. This is the argument of our instinct, not our potential intellect. What better true cause can we have for trying a new thing than the knowledge that it is vitally needed, and what better reason for doing what we do than that it is for the good of the whole race, and of the whole Earth? It could be argued that without the tools, disciplines and techniques of automatic research we could not have come to understand the concept of Gaia, for instance. This has two answers. One is that the discovery of Gaia was an act of imagination on the part of James Lovelock, contrary to the normal pressure and direction of scientific research. The other answer is that without our history of autoprogressive science and technology, which characterises the modern Machine, we would not need to understand Gaia because we would not be threatening it. Were we a humantrue society, Gaia would simply be continuing to look after us, and all other life, without our knowing help, or ignorant hindrance.
Perhaps we should consider a possible danger, arising from our retsriction, exploitation and destruction of instinctive natural life - that the surviving species of all kinds may react with an upsurge in their own intelligence levels, resulting in counter-measures against us of rapidly increasing and deadly effectiveness. Perhaps the diseases which plague us are not only due to our unhealthy habits. It may be that cancers and viruses are the spearhead of this counter-attack, since vuruses and bacteria, being the simplest life-forms, are able to change most quickly. It is possible that even Gaia may turn against us in the interests of life on Earth as a whole, by ceasing to compensate for the results of our activities such as the rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thus allowing us to become extinct by way of our own recklessness. Remember that our civilisation and, more especially, our industrialisation have occurred very quickly in planetary terms. Also remember that we may not notice moves against us, since we are not looking for them and do not have comprehensive records which go back far enough.
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Pt.IV REVELATION
AUTOMATIC DRIVES
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