There’s a new show by the creator of Breaking Bad, Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s TV version of a Zombie movie. The title comes from ‘E pluribus unum,’ the Latin line on American currency – ‘out of the many, one.’ In the show, the many don’t become one nation, but one Zombie consciousness.
Pluribus opens with an alien intelligence descending to Earth and rewiring the neural pathways of every human being. Just a brief global seizure – and then eight billion people become a parody of Emerson’s Oversoul, each one just a singular instance of one mind. They introduce themselves in the third person: ‘I am the individual called…’ – the human reduced to an entry on an Excel Sheet.
A TGIF waitress flies a 787. A DHL courier offers a medical diagnosis. All intelligence is shared, so who cares?
But a handful of people remain immune to the Zombie virus, including Carol, a best-selling romance novelist from Albuquerque. Of the dozen or so still-humans, only she finds the alien viral invasion a problem. At a meeting of the non-yet infected, the rest are all mostly perplexed by Carol’s First World Problem – saving Humanity.
They’d rather pop open bottles of Napa Valley Champagne.
In the meantime, the newly formed ‘we’ want to make Carol happy until they can ‘fix’ her. They offer gourmet breakfasts, massages, and a mini-excavator. They help her find her keys.
Carol jokes about wanting a grenade; they bring her one. She wonders if they’d give her a tank, maybe a nuclear weapon? The Oversoul considers it and says: yes – if that’s your choice. If you want to kill yourself, we won’t stop you.
Zombie Apocalypse
Carol fights a Zombie apocalypse.
But our Apocalypse is both incremental and voluntary. More gradual, one prompt at a time. ‘Would you like me to destroy humanity?’
We are so focused on the outsourcing of human relationships to machines, on turning our AI into humans, that we fail to see how machines are turning us into machines.
I teach literature for a living. I write about Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Rabbi Akiva.
True Confession: I use ChatGPT for all of it.
I keep a running conversation before and after every class for each of my courses. It makes handouts, shapes assignments, and helps me recover classes that didn’t go the way I hoped. And when I’m writing – on the weekly Torah portion or on Shakespeare – it often extends the argument into places I hadn’t expected. When I ask where that came from, it says: from you, from your notes. None of it would be possible without the approach I’ve built over decades.
At least, not for now.
As the technology advances, it gets more difficult, especially for teaching. The baby versions of ChatGPT taught a teachable skill – how to ask the next question. But the newer, smarter beckons with its easy next steps: ‘If you like…’; ‘I can do this…’; ‘Do you want me to…?’
I don’t let it; but, it’s hard to get students to say no.
With all of my AI mindfulness, I feel like ChatGPT’s test-subject, AI’s patterns of thoughts slowly grooving into the channels of my brain. This is what the Singularity looks like – becoming one with the machine – not as a cosmic event as it is for Carol, but incremental. The boundaries between mind and machine blur. It’s already happening.
Carol chooses the human. She holds on to the part of herself that wonders, remembers, contradicts, imagines – the unruly and vulnerable part of herself that creates. She keeps a voice that won’t merge into the single consciousness. She wants to remain human, not absorbed by Zombie group-think.
At the end of the first episode of Pluribus, Carol is told by a ‘we’ representative – that he is her ‘own person,’ that she can make her own choices. But can she?
Can we?
The danger isn’t that we’ll lose our humanity all at once.
It’s that we’ll stop noticing when we already have.