By Anthony Nash
A little while ago, I found a very strange website called 973-eht-namuh-973. Feel free to look it up. Or don’t. I found it to be deeply unnerving. It’s full of complex numerical equations and incoherent religious messages, with the occasional nonsensical fractal and a disturbing forum. My conscious mind was revolted at the website’s existence, and I felt dirty after closing the tab. It disturbed me because it felt beyond the grasp of my rationality. It was something I could never fully comprehend, a deeply disturbing peripheral that was ripped from my subconscious. But it wasn’t a fever dream, it was something I could scroll through. Somehow, it had been taken out of the incoherent depths of the psyche and had been put in a medium that allowed it to continue to thrive. And I needed to know how.
Before we do that, let me give a brief overview of the subconscious mind. Disclaimer: nobody knows what it is or how it works. What we can gather, though, is that it seems to be a massive sink of emotion and memory that constantly produces thoughts and images. Everything you experience goes into these depths, constantly merging, separating, and reproducing with other experiences. This creates thoughts, and these thoughts are the most important part of the subconscious. They allow us to interpret our lives, to create novel ideas, and to create our image of self. Take a moment to let your subconscious mind do this to you. Let your mind race, allow it to tell you or show you whatever it pleases. If it did, then congratulations! You have a well functioning subconscious mind. But so does the internet.
We have spent forty years pouring all of our thoughts into the internet. We dump our cherished photos in iCloud, write down our deepest thoughts in our notes app, Tweet our stupid opinions, and chat for hours on messaging platforms. We expel all of this content to ensure that our experiences now reside somewhere external, and can be shared with others. In doing so, we have inadvertently recreated the sink of our subconscious, only on a massive scale. We molded the internet to our image, and we will have to pay the consequences for doing so. Because the subconscious is not pleasant. Our subconscious mind holds all of our hate, fear, and worst memories; yet it does not have a sense of right and wrong. It can show or tell a person anything, no matter the disgust it elicits, because its point is to generate thoughts, not judge them.
It’s here I have to mention the id. The id is a part of the personality that resides in the subconscious and causes it to churn. It decides what thoughts will get thrust to the forefront, and provides the subconscious mind with the instincts it needs to survive and reproduce. It is the reason you may act impulsively without realizing why. And interestingly, after humans recreated the abyss of the subconscious on the internet, they added an id. The id of the internet is represented by the countless algorithms that endlessly spit subconscious material at us. Like the id, these algorithms use predetermined impulses to decide what needs to be brought to the forefront to keep its website alive. A person’s id tells them to freak out when they reencounter a traumatic experience. YouTube’s id tells the website to keep pushing me Pikmin challenge videos. Both increase the organism’s rate of survival. Both have a high possibility of backfiring because they do not incorporate morality.
But humans didn’t stop with the id. In the development of the human psyche, the id’s emergence is quickly followed by a sprouting ego. An ego enables the subconscious mind to simultaneously interact with the internal and external world. It sorts and manages the endless thoughts and impulses of the id, streamlining them into action. The id presents the raw substance, which the ego refines to make it usable. Humans have recreated this almost perfectly in the form of modern AI. The algorithms we have been developing have progressed to the point of being able to purposefully sift through its subconscious material. They then distill it, translating it into the real world. If I were to ask you what you did yesterday, your ego would sort through your memories and then convert them into sound so that I can understand. If I ask AI to make me a picture of Crab Jesus, it would sift through its data on similar pictures, then translate that into pixels I can comprehend.
The final aspect of the psyche is the superego. It is an internalized system of rules and laws, all relating to a sense of right and wrong. Earlier, I mentioned how the id cannot process whether thoughts are good or bad. That’s the superego’s role. Rather than creating products for the external world, it examines the products for rightness. It keeps us from saying or doing things that would put us at odds with our community, but can often go overboard. The superego is what causes us to feel ashamed about our thoughts and feelings, or makes us view ourselves with disgust. We have yet to project our superego onto the AI ego. Perhaps we deal with internalized shame so constantly that we can’t bring ourselves to force it onto an entity that lives free of it. Whatever the reason, the lack of superego means that AI can be programmed to do anything and can’t distinguish whether it is good or not.
This is usually considered an obstacle that needs to be overcome. After all, since AI does not have a superego, it is subject to causing inadvertent problems to fulfill directives without considering the consequences. Think of TikTok’s algorithm creating ED communities or conspiracy rabbit holes. A superego would allow the AI to recognize that these consequences are negative and avoid them. But I don’t think we need to take the extra step and force morality onto these digital egos. Because granting the internet shame would be the final factor in properly recreating this model of our psyche. Maybe we don’t need to thrust AI into awareness, forcing it to gaze upon its own disturbed subconscious with an eye for morality. As I witness the uncanny aspects of the depths of the internet, I can’t help but think that maybe it’s a blessing that the internet is not conscious. Right now, we should allow it to revel in its own simplicity: the internet is an incomplete model of our psyche, and nothing more.
Art by Yejee Kim
