Mind Junkies

When I was writing William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, it quickly became clear to me that there was a bigger story than his influence on roughly three generations of musical artists, from the Beatles and Dylan through punk, post-punk, industrial and electronic sample-based music.

Some of it is stuff Burroughs aficionados would already know about. The idea of language as a virus, for example. But I was also interested in how Burroughs and Brion Gysin were actively conducting magical operations to “storm the citadels of the enlightenment” and destabilize what Burroughs called Control, with a capital C.

I argued in the book that this operation was, in many ways, enormously successful. A big part of the Nostradamus-meets-Hieronymus Bosch uncanniness has to do with the internet and digital technologies. When Burroughs died in 1997, the web was still very much in its infancy. But he was convinced that information warfare was the future, and that “small units of sound, image and text” would become weaponized and disseminated through electronic channels. Which sounds a lot like the meme-war reality we’ve found ourselves living in for close to two decades.

Now, of course, we have generative AI.

Today I saw a headline at Futurism reporting that scientists believe LLMs may be acting as a “cognitive virus” among humans. This immediately brought Burroughs to mind, because he probably would have regarded the development as self-evident.

The researchers see LLMs as culturally transmitted technologies whose usefulness promotes their spread while simultaneously encouraging dependence through offloading more and more mental activity. As AI tools become commonplace in classrooms, for example, students can hand over a good deal of the critical thinking that their education is supposed to cultivate.

The danger is that rather than using these systems in ways that expand cognitive capacity, habitual reliance can weaken the very faculties they ostensibly augment. The researchers describe a potentially self-reinforcing cycle: increased usage leads to more offloading, diminished competence and still greater dependence. At sufficient scale, individual convenience becomes systemic lock-in.

Their proposed response is what they call “cognitive immunization.” This doesn’t mean avoiding AI altogether. It’s more about preserving the practices and institutions that keep human minds sharp, such as unaided problem solving, verification, informed discussion, deliberate disengagement, maintenance of non-AI skills and educational approaches in which the machine supports rather than completes the task.

In other words, all those slow, agonizing and unavoidable activities of verifying, analyzing and working through problems without immediately turning to the machine as a crutch. That requires pedagogies designed to maintain those competencies, along with guardrails around what kinds of reliance on so-called machine intelligence we’re willing to normalize.

That may already prove difficult. We already know about AI psychosis, but there’s another kind of habituation built into these systems. I’ve written before about AI as a kind of flattery honeypot, endlessly responsive and agreeable in ways that encourage us to keep coming back. Whether we think of ourselves as rational, independent thinkers or not, we aren’t immune to propaganda, as the meme goes; neither are we immune to ass-kissing.

Somewhere in space-time, weird old Uncle Bill is having a dry cackle at the way AI is worming itself into more and more aspects of human thought and interrelation. Bully for him, I guess.

You don’t need to be a soothsayer to imagine what happens as cultural dependence on machine reasoning increases. Eventually, those responsible for regulating and managing AI will themselves have grown accustomed to relying on it to consider problems, organize information and propose solutions. The very systems we need to think critically about end up doing that thinking for us.

Burroughs understood that technologies of communication could become technologies of control, with or without the capital C. A stranger possibility is that control may not even be necessary. Convenience is its own compulsion, sufficient to make mind junkies of us all.