Featured image: “Double” by Lena Mikulinskaya

Doppelgänger stories came into fashion during the Industrial Revolution, as an archetype in Gothic horror. But while their atmosphere, tone and settings might draw on the imagined irrationalism of the medieval past, such stories unconsciously tap into something powerful but unacknowledged in the contemporary scene at the beginnings of the machine age.

The term was coined by Jean Paul in his novel Siebenkäs in 1796, and came of age in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Doppelgänger (1821). Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson was published in 1839. Later, in 1886, we get Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and in 1908 Henry James’ The Jolly Corner. In every case the doppelgänger is similar or identical in appearance but opposite in character and ultimately inimical to the protagonist.

Feodor Dostoevski’s novella Двойник (Dvoynik), published in 1846, is an excellent example of the genre. The central character is Golyadkin, a shy young office clerk working in a government department, who meets his double on the way home from a party he’s been asked to leave after a series of embarrassing social gaffes. They become friends and the double gets to meet all his colleagues. He is identical to Golyadkin except in character, being confident, outgoing and charming; everybody loves him and soon it becomes apparent that the pseudo-Golyadkin is taking over Golyadkin’s life.

In Jean Baudrillard’s simulation theory, the industrial revolution gave birth to new orders of simulation which infiltrated our experience and became inherent to our existence. Mass-produced objects are copies, but copies of what? They no longer refer to an original, as a portrait does to a real face or a map to a real place. In the industrial age, a tide of mass-production overwhelms authentic making, and eventually destroys even the concept of originality. A mass-produced product is a second order simulacrum: indistinguishable from its ‘original’, the image now threatens to  displace reality. Such second-order images are described by Baudrillard as being of the order of malefice. This dramatic word-choice resonates with the strange anxiety reified in these stories.

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It would just be for a few weeks, we were told. But as the weeks stretched into months, it became more and more obvious, to those whose minds were not paralysed with fear, that something else was going on; that the crisis was in fact planned and contrived — a viral marketing campaign, in effect, for invasive technologies, but more that: the manufacture of consent for a high-speed restructuring not just of the global economy but of human society and culture.

Confirmation of these suspicions came with the publication in July 2020 of a 428-page book co-authored by Klaus Schwab, the founder and director of the World Economic Forum, the globalist institution that partnered with the World Health Organisation in declaring a global emergency. 

“In less than a month,” crowed Schwab, “from the maelstrom provoked by the staggering speed at which the pandemic engulfed most of the world, a whole new era seemed to emerge.” (p37)

Schwab’s two previous publications — The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016) and Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2018) — had anticipated the present moment. The new book set a nice capstone on the 4IR trilogy, and while it tempered its transhumanist message to a degree, compared to the previous two books, it still left no doubt about the role of C19 in accelerating that ‘whole new era’.

“Automation and robots are reconfiguring the way businesses operate with staggering speed and returns on a scale inconceivable just a few years ago. Innovation in genetics, with synthetic biology now on the horizon, is also exciting, paving the way for developments in healthcare that are groundbreaking […] The speed and breadth of the gains of the Fourth Industrial Revolution have been and continue to be remarkable […] the pandemic will accelerate innovation even more, catalysing technological changes already underway … and ‘turbocharging’ any digital business or the digital dimension of any business. (p187) 

The writing is so over-weighted with buzz-words — innovation, exciting, paving the way, healthcare, groundbreaking, remarkable, catalysing, turbocharging — that one could almost forget what the topic is here: the replacement and displacement of human beings.

“The process of automation was set in motion many years ago, but […] the pandemic will fast-forward the adoption of automation in the workplace and the introduction of more robots in our personal and professional lives. From the onset of the lockdowns, it became apparent that Robots and AI are a ‘natural’ alternative when human labour was not available.” (p210)

As a result, “… businesses, consumers and public authorities are now rushing to turbocharge the speed of adoption [of autonomous technologies and machine-learning]. So-called Robotic Process Automation (RPA) makes businesses more efficient by installing computer software that rivals and replaces the actions of a human worker.” (p213)

And these are not envisioned as temporary measures:

“In one form or another, social- and physical-distancing measures are likely to persist after the pandemic itself subsides, justifying the decision in many companies from different industries to accelerate automation…” and to “restructure the workplace in a way that minimizes close human contact. Indeed, automation technologies are particularly well suited to a world in which human beings can’t get too close to each other.” (p210)

Once kick-started, the process will become self-reinforcing, driven by the consequences of the economic suicide of lockdown.

“In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labour substitution, meaning that physical labour will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines…” (p70) 

“Automation anxiety,” he notes, “is therefore set for a revival.”

Could be. But that’s just because people don’t understand the Utopia that is just round the corner.

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Automation-anxiety found violent expression in the hammers, torches and and rifles of the Luddite uprising in England in the early years of the nineteenth century. A mechanised loom is a highly specified mimicry: it simulates the skills of a human artisan. According to tradition, when an apprentice weaver named Ned Ludd or Ludlow took a hammer to two looms in the 1780s, he was merely venting his frustration at being criticised for the quality of his work. But as machines progressively took the place of skilled artisans in England’s textile industry, his act of destruction became an inspiration to a growing movement of under-employed weavers whose livelihoods were threatened. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, machine-products were still inferior to the real thing, but the machines were growing in sophistication. From 1804 there was the Jacquard loom, fitted with a device that was essentially a punch-card computer, which could co-ordinate the execution of sophisticated weaves and embroideries such as brocade, damask and matelassé.

By 1810, Ludd had become the folk hero and fictitious leader of a resistance army using sabotage and arson to roll back mechanisation in the textile industry, or at least to force negotiations over the role of skilled labour in the new economy. The Luddites attacked mills and factories across the North of England, smashing machines and scrawling NED LUDD DID THIS on the walls.

As the rebels grew in daring and violence, Ned was promoted to Captain, then General, and finally King. His soldiers were organised and disciplined, meeting at night in the woods or on the moors to train and plan. Eventually twelve thousand British troops had to be diverted from the Peninsula War to deal with them — so for a while, King Ludd was a more urgent threat than the Emperor Napoleon. There were several pitched battles before the movement was finally put down in 1813, with the imposition of the death penalty for machine-breaking. There were mass hangings and deportations, and eventually the mill-owners could sleep easy in their beds once again, without fear of arson or assassination. 

That’s the kind of vengeful, life-or-death ferocity that tends to spill out in the end, in these doppelgänger stories.

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Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005), invented the first text-to-speech reader for the blind, among many other software applications. He is known now as a futurist, transhumanist and prophet of artificial intelligence, and occupies a position of significant influence as Google’s director of engineering — his brief, to gift the machine with natural language.

Kurzweil wrote his first computer programme at the age of fifteen. The programme used pattern-recognition software to analyse the works of classical composers, then synthesised new compositions on the basis of those patterns. In 1965, at the age of seventeen, Kurzweil appeared on television playing one of these synthetic compositions on the piano, and later that year the invention won first prize in the International Science Fair. 

Once his career in information technology was well-established, specifically in the area of text recognition, Kurzweil returned to the subject of electronic music. He was lucky enough to meet Stevie Wonder, who complained to him about the poor quality of electronic instruments at the time, and this inspired Kurzweil to apply himself to the creation of a new generation of music synthesisers. In 1982 he founded Kurzweil Music Systems, and in 1984 unveiled the Kurzweil K250, the first synthesiser to use sampled sounds from real instruments, coupled with improved methods of storage and recall. In tests, professional musicians were unable to distinguish its piano sounds from the real thing. With the K250, a composer would be able to produce an entire symphony without any recourse to real musicians or musical instruments.

Kurzweil’s work on the synthesis of musical sounds and the simulation of musical composition typifies a mindset which seems entirely animated by the spirit Baudrillard tried to define. This mindset can do amazing things, and seeks its ultimate expression in the creation of synthetic worlds indistinguishable from reality. But despite its vast confidence, its self-apotheosis even, this doppelgänger-mindset cannot create, only recreate: it can simulate, infiltrate, subvert, and displace, but it cannot truly make. It can engage in all of Baudrillard’s phases of the image except the first, the order of sacraments.

It may do some good in the world along the way, as with Kurzweil’s reading machines for the blind, but these are stepping-stone applications, emphasised purely for PR reasons — golden rice with terminator genes. The fundamental drive is the fetishistic compulsion to map, analyse, copy.

Kurzweil helped make manifest the machine-music hitherto only imagined by Orwell and Huxley in their satirical dystopias. It might seem a superficial thing, but it is not: music is inherent in reality, and human music a vital thread in our connection with the universe. 

Reality, in Baudrillard’s dispiriting definition, is ‘that which can be simulated.’ To the doppelgänger-mindset, it appears, nothing that exists in this creation is of interest except in as far as it can be mimicked, replicated and put to the uses of sorcery. Now, according to the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, the ultimate simulation is just around the corner: a machine-intelligence so sophisticated that it awakes into sentience, into consciousness — a simulacrum of the order of malefice — a doppelgänger for the human race.

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In the art of war, wrote Sun Tzu two and a half thousand years ago, one should seek to subdue the enemy through psychological means, and so win without having to fight. Appear strong when you are weak, weak when you are strong. 

Gary Kasparov, probably the greatest chess player who ever lived, always maintained a high awareness of his opponent across the board, subtly observing body language and micro-expressions to gauge his emotional state.

It doesn’t work with machines, though. Kasparov was challenged to play against IBM’s Deep Blue chess engine in 1996, and won — but then lost the rematch in 1997. In these games, there was no player across the board. Kasparov played against an empty seat.

The match was hyped as ‘The Brain’s Last Stand.’ But Kasparov knows it wasn’t that. In fact it wasn’t man against machine at all. There are always humans behind the machine. When he talks about it now, he names and praises the Deep Blue team, sincerely, for their achievement. It was their intelligence — their hard work and persistence — that he was playing against. 

Chess machines, let’s be clear, are not intelligent. They number-crunch the game and win by brute force, sheer memory and computational power. Deep Blue could compare millions of positions every second, and calculate the probabilities. 

Even then, it only ‘won’ because Kasparov made a mistake. Machines win by being more consistent than humans. A chess machine is ‘narrow artificial intelligence’. A contradiction in terms, actually. It has no intuition, no imagination, no daring, no strategy, no thought — therefore no intelligence. 

Computation is not intelligence. Even a machine can do it.

In retrospect, Kasparov believes that neither he nor the computer played well in the deciding game.

I disagree. Why? Because there was no game. No game of chess took place, either in Philadelphia or New York.

How so? A priori. Machines don’t play chess — because machines don’t play.

They are programmed to simulate, that’s all.

So, no player, no game. It was all an illusion. 

Kasparov won and then lost. The machine did neither: it experienced neither victory nor defeat.

Kasparov acknowledges, correctly, that “Machines will always beat humans in a closed system.”

A game is a closed system.

A human being, however, is not.  

This planet is not a closed system.  

Life is not a closed system. 

And that’s why, to win, first they have to close the system. 

Featured image: “Double” by Lena Mikulinskaya.

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