Tower of Babel

I do not consent to the use of my likeness, my image, my preferences, my buying history, my browsing habits, or anything else about me being used by AI. I don't. 

But that doesn't stop it from happening. 

As I was thinking about this idea again recently - and watching the news - I realized how often a relatively few number of humans are making decisions for the rest of us that we are powerless to stop the effects of. 

A handful of humans created this thing called AI and they had the power to put it in all kinds of places, and even if I turn it off on my own device, someone else still has it on theirs, and I'm subjected to what it's doing. After a recent medical appointment, I was informed in documentation that AI was generating my documentation. I object. (And also, in case you don't know this, there's no such actual thing as AI, which is even more frustrating.) 

Someone's phone is listening to me all the time because it's turned on to listen to its owner and it can't help but overhear what I say, and now, all of a sudden, I'm part of the very complex that I hate. 

An even smaller handful of humans has decided we should go to the moon. Not only that we should go to the moon, but that we should build a colony there, complete with a nuclear reactor and a launch pad pointed toward Mars. Another guy has decided to send giant mirrors into space to try to create a new source of energy. 

Did you know that per human capita, there is most trash and junk and waste in space than anywhere else humans have ever been? So much junk up there. 

And if it should come to the point where there's so much junk in space that space is, well, ruined, or if there's so much stuff on the moon that the orbit shifts even a fragment of a millimeter, I will have absolutely no say in this. I will have absolutely no ability to stop it. 

And if the data center down the road that a handful of public officials approve sucks all the water out of my reservoir or the new roofing plant dumps toxic waste into my field runoff or an infected mosquito steals away in the luggage of an international traveler, I am powerless to stop this, too. 

It's all "progress," you know. The ability to build things and manipulate things and explore things and travel the world and all this other stuff they tell us is making us "better" as a people, is demonstrating our accomplishment as a species. 

And here I am, thinking about the Tower of Babel and realizing that one day, I'm going to be scattered against my will because of human "ingenuity" that I didn't consent to. I'm going to be swept away by the frustration of the human enterprise when it finally becomes all too much and our "progress" actually sets us further back than we could ever have imagined. 

I wonder how many folks in Genesis got buried in the rubble that comes crashing down when the earth shakes, even if they never picked up a single speck of dirt to add to the project. Even if they just happened to be there because they already lived in Babel and that was just the place the schemers and scalawags chose to start building. 

I don't consent to this, but that doesn't stop it from happening and it won't shield me from the fallout when it comes. 

That seems unfair.