The Robots Are For a Long Time Already Here They Are Huge and They Already Won

It is a perk of the human subconsciousness that it always finds creative ways to communicate with our conscious mind, you could blame that on the conscious mind's limited attention span, but who knows maybe our subconscious do in fact tries with clearer messages but the message cannot get through unless is creative or stands out. Nowhere this phenomenon is more visible than in the contemporary art.  
Sometimes this window into our subconscious comes by projecting our doubts and fears on a distant past, like when we are fascinated with Atlantis. But not Atlantis of Plato's account, but the theosophists' and occultists' accounts where Atlantis disappeared because they misused and abused their advanced technology, you could argue and indeed some people in fact do, that our fascination with the end of Atlantis could be one "way of talking about the crisis of our age." Although this is a theme dear to me that appears in many forms in contemporary art we will not talk about this.  

Instead we will talk about another recurring theme in the contemporary art, this time projected as an event in the future: the battle between humans and machines, the later coordinated by a giant artificial intelligence hub. I would argue that this kind of artificial intelligence is already here and they are the corporations. Corporations manage to amass a high level of intelligence, so much so that not only they have a mind of their own but they are rather resilient as any component could be replaced (including the CEO) without affecting the whole. This artificial intelligence is coordinating an army of workers both robots and humans. So The Matrix (or SkyNet etc) in a sense is already here with the humans not being harvested for energy, but instead for labor, intelligence and creative work.

 
This theme of war with the intelligent machines irrespective if it is portrayed in the movies/novels/comics/etc seem to gravitate around 4 major stages:

1. the time when the artificial intelligence gains some sort of personhood and is seen as human like
2. when this artificial intelligence kills a man
3. the moment this artificial intelligence starts to understand that it competes with humans and human communities for resources
4. and the final battle when this artificial intelligence starts to loose to humans and encounter life or death fight struggle from the people

If were to keep in mind my speculation that the artificial intelligence portrayed in contemporary art is a subconscious metaphor for corporations, arguably all the first 3 stages already happened in the past, corporations gained different levels of personhood in the last two centuries, corporations did actually kill people, both directly and indirectly more than several times in the last two centuries, and yes corporations understood long time ago that they compete with humans and human communities for resources. That's why they have the biggest political lobby apparatus, they get financially bailled with trillions when most of the people hardly make ends meets, they get away with big ecological disasters that fuck up people food systems and living and the mess usually remain for the people to clean up (BP, Exxon, etc), and while they are at it they try to discredit the global warming phenomenon or the health issues of their chemical goo. They own Politics, Commerce/Economics/Finance, Culture/Media and Oil/Water and prety much everything and this is where we know that they acknowledge that they compete for resources with humans, because they grabbed as much as they could.  

All looks similar with the 4th stage never actually happening, quite the contrary, we depend on everything on corporations, medicine (just think dialysis), entertainment, energy/transportation, food, clothing, etc, and even spiritual journeys just ask those psychedelic enlightened heads who synthesized LSD, DMT, etc. Not only people are not in the fierce battle with this artificial intelligence but they are competing to persuade this organizations to give them a cog role in this big machines, and they take pride when they are accepted by this big names. No wonder that this the of war with the AI and the robots is prevalent in the american contemporary art, their landscape is littered with this entities.

This phenomenon, I argue, is not isolated in history, we have to look into how it all starts, but for this we have to go back to what makes a civilization, and since my knowledge about the history of civilizations and what makes them tick is limited I will appeal to what I think is a higher authority, Arnold Toynbee:

...examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders

But this inspiring elites as an engine of civilization have a major drawback: they either tend to die or may want to drop out. But since every civilization has a bit of surplus energy, and some sort of organisations, these tend to come up with solutions and come with ways where they try to keep the influence of this creative individuals by either appealing to their personality's mark on the social memory(statues, odes, etc) and by educating the masses about their body of work. Thus a new type of elite forms, let's call it the owner elite, the elite that own and have influences over this institutions and organizations. The problem is when the owner elite overcomes the power of the creative elite in influencing the overall workings of civilization. And the struggle is real and this nowhere is more visible than in art, more specific the much ballooned modern art. Here enters a quote of Picasso, or rather Giovanni Papini's Picasso, even if the quote is actually not one of Picasso's, but rather Papini's I find it even better, because Papini is better as a man of words:

In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto [and] Titian, Rembrandt [and Goya] were great painters: I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere. (Papini, 1952, as cited in Brink, 2007, p. 60)

And even if the above quote is not one of Picasso's, Picasso was himself aware of the political struggle with what I call the owner elite, and that can be seen in his political views:

"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he's a painter, ears if he's a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he's a poet – or even, if he's a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, passionate or pleasing events in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How is it possible to be uninterested in other men and by virtue of what cold nonchalance can you detach yourself from the life that they supply so copiously? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy."

To my understanding I think he knew he was a part of a creative elite and the political power that should come with that:

"I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics." (Interview with Jerome Seckler, 1945, Picasso Explains)

This observation is by no means isolated in the artistic world, or in the eloquent words of George Carlin:

"There's a reason education sucks, it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers,­ people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club." - George Carlin

The fact that this owner elite overcomes the creative minority elite is not without its consequences for our civilisation. The consequences are the breakdown of the civilization itself. Or in the words of Toynbee:

[on the cause of the breakdown:]
On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.
...
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
[on how the breakdown goes:]
"First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force—against all right and reason—a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creation—and this on the part of all the actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands."

What Toynbee may have overlooked is that the greedy elite is not the same creative elite, that the minority that were "sustaining and expanding their own wealth and power" as he put it is not the creative elite. So those enriching themselves instead of solving our civilization challenges are in the most part not made by that creative minority, but rather the owner minority mentioned earlier.  
Apart from this tendency of power grab, that is common to all civilizations that died before the one we live in, this civilization has this peculiarity of advanced knowledge of science and technology that brought many processes to a high degree of automation. And the robots we see doing mechanical works or any work for that matter, are represented on a organizational, social level by the corporations.
And this automation of the organizational grab over the individual creativity, lately, seems to me, metastasized in all the aspects of creative work. Not only this machine is in for the of highly creative individuals but also for the creativity of common folks, the so called crowdsourcing , so much hyped about, which without the people that contribute gaining any value or recognition for their work turns out to be just another form of digital serfdom.

This pattern reverberates in any space where it seems to be creative work, it all gets sucked in the organization, all the fuss now, is no longer about the singer but the record label, is no longer about the player but the club, is no longer about the artist but the studio, is no longer about the employee but the corporation, is no longer about the individual but about the organization behind him. And even where an individual seems to matter is just an image for the organization behind him.
Even the latest grassroots manifestation of creativity have been reign in the machine, people started singing and making a name on the internet, then companies came with popular talents contests on TV, where content is provided by common folks instead of well known artist, people started publishing creative cooking on internet the response of cable companies was cooking where the content is provided by common folks instead of well known cooks. This is good cheaper labor, more creative content.
Programmers that just a decade ago could had a say, have been reigned in by coding styles, frameworks, agile methods and team distribution so much so that they can be easily discarded without affecting the overall projects.
It seems that the machine is ready to make money of every creative content it is thrown at it, they just provide the platform and take the revenues, people provide creative content on twitter, facebook, youtube, etc, and the companies get the money, at least most of it, as sometimes some of the creative people also get a fraction.

And this machines, the corporations, seem to accept some level of change, they actually thrive on change, they are able to process change and give a reasonable amount of creative content in many aspects. Except where it matters, leadership and social change.
It may seem that holding to this organizations, will keep the civilizations alive, but since a civilization is more than about creative methods to bring bread and circuses, and since real creative change where it matters seems to be out of question, because this change could challenge the very foundations this corporations are based upon, our civilization's collision course with History is just unfolding, and the final blows are just a matter of time.
And so we end up with this predicament that without these corporations we cannot have the comforts and privileges that came with this civilisation and with them leading as it were we are in for the same ride to downhill but with wars, social injustices and pretty much a lot of human misery.

My only hope is that along this road to another try there will be people that locally will give a helping hand and a kind word to their fellow human beings.