So, I thought, what if you made a computer network that required human brains to run on?
It wouldn’t make sense to kill us.
It wouldn’t want to kill us.
But what it might do is organize us more efficiently.
— Grant Morrison
Joseph Campbell – The Story of Indra from the Brahmavar Upanishad
Swervin’ back to Brave New World. One other thing I liked about that show was the AI system called Indra which must be a reference to the concept of Indra’s Net.
GM: And as you know the drug in the show is Soma, which is Huxley’s creation. I just figured if Huxley named the drug Soma… if he had predicted AI, which is one thing he didn’t predict, I think he would have stuck with the Sanskrit and called it Indra.
Indra was my notion for explaining a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense in Huxley’s book.
Why are there Epsilons?
Why does the World State need a labour force?
The book is about the consequences of capitalist mass production, mass consumption, mass destruction, because Huxley had moved to Hollywood and he’d seen the consumer society in full flood and witnessed the world of glamorous unreality — the talkies — which was happening. The whole thing is his attempt to deal with the impact of Ford and Hollywood. As I said, the one thing he didn’t think of was AI. So, the question became how could you make sense of a lot of the things he didn’t make sense of?
And the idea came up of having a computer network that ran on human brains. We have all those neurons and all that capacity there. So instead of having a central server, the computer is a distributed network that runs on the brains of everyone in the World State. That was designed to solve the problem created by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking who were both terrified that AI was going to rise up and take over, steal our jobs, and occupy our homes in a kind of immigration nightmare gone sci-fi.
So, I thought, 'What if you made a computer network that required human brains to run on?' It wouldn’t make sense to kill us. It wouldn’t want to kill us. But what it might do is organize us more efficiently. So that might explain a lot of the stuff Huxley didn’t bother to deal with.
The network starts to self-organize and it creates this homeostatic caste system, like a hive. It stratifies people and what it gives them in return is happiness.
In Brave New World, the ultimate commodity is happiness. There’s no love, no money, but if you could make everyone happy even if they’re up to their necks in shit, then you’ve won. That was the idea. To create a computer network that doesn’t want to kill people.
So, the reason why there are Epsilons — the reason people do jobs and manual labor, is because the computer needs its components to be fit and healthy. Rather than mechanize them, with everyone just slobbing out, it needs citizens to be super fit.
So, they are always having sex, they are always playing sport, they are always working. They have pointless jobs that encourage them to be fit and healthy. That was the idea. The Indra network solved a lot of problems and I think it was one of the elegant additions to Huxley’s original.
Then who created the network in the story? Who gave birth to the AI?
GM: Well, that was the original ten Controllers who started the World State. In Huxley’s book, there’s an anthrax pandemic that kills 2/3 of the world population and there’s only a couple of billion or whatever left.
And everyone else gets together and forms a world scientific, anti-religious state because the killer plague was largely caused by political and religious conflict. So suddenly the World State arises to ensure that people won’t screw up so badly ever again. In our version, America is the only country that secedes from the World State. In Huxley, the Savage lands is just a Santa Fe reservation, a pueblo culture.
In this version, the Savage Lands is all of North America. The idea was to imagine America 300 hundred years after The Fall.
People are sick, and the environment is fucked and there’s been six presidents in the last five months, and it costs three thousand dollars to buy a Mars Bar! America’s decision not to join the World State has brought the country to the brink of ecological, economical, and societal collapse. In this version, I think we got a richer background than even the original.
