IMAGINE being a 50-year-old South Asian or someone from the Middle East, especially the Levant; most of your life has been shaped by a three-letter word more offensive than any four-letter word: war.

When they hear the Western media talk about the ‘coming war’ or the ‘Armageddon’, they ask, ‘when did it leave?’ Surge, shock, awe, ethnic cleansing, genocide, death and destruction are some of the terms that define their era. The foreign villains who bring these horrors almost always have local accomplices. The process of otherisation necessary to justify violence often turns into self-alienation. If you don’t care about yourself, what chance does the rest of creation have? There are no winners; all sides lose their humanity.

In this context, the debate about the loss of human agency to AI, chatbots, robots and other machines seems rather alarmist. What is it that we are afraid of losing to machines? The machines lack consciousness; we lost conscience a long time ago. If it’s just jobs we are worried about, then the prophets of technology have already assured us that ‘work would be optional’ not too far off in the future.

That war is a business is well known. The military-industrial complex and its allies, who pretend........

© Dawn