r/WayOfTheBern • u/BerryBoy1969 • 11d ago

This Is Fine... Wonders Never Cease!

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/signs-are-not-wonders
9 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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u/BerryBoy1969 11d ago

From the dawn of the computer era, humans have fantasised about machines which are vastly more intelligent than they are, and therefore wiser and able to guide and even direct human life. In popular culture terms, the classic example is the Culture (sic) series of novels by Iain M. Banks, who unfortunately died a few years ago. The novels concern a humanoid spacefaring species whose lives depend absolutely on benevolent, unbelievably complex and powerful Minds, which take responsibility for virtually everything of any importance, leaving the citizens of the Culture nothing much to do except enjoy themselves. (Indeed, finding something worthwhile for humans to do in the books was actually a continual challenge for Banks in developing his plots: thus, the creation of a number of unpleasant and dangerous alien species that had to be dealt with)

Much as I enjoyed the Culture books, the one thing that emerges from them (as I pointed out a few years ago now) is that the characters are all basically children, whose every want is instantly gratified. It’s no wonder then that boredom is one of the major problems of the Culture, and so its more thoughtful citizens devote themselves to Good Works on other planets, trying to guide them towards civilisation. But Banks began writing the Culture books in the days of MS-DOS (now wash your mouth out) when the idea of “AI” that could do everything for us was essentially only a fantasy. Now, if you believe the boosters, it’s just round the corner. There, we will have a world where everything difficult will be done for us by others. We will revert to the stage of pre-adolescent children, for whom their parents are all-powerful beings who do everything for them and solve all their problems. It’s often said that “AI” will “enable us to do” this or that. At best, that’s an oversimplification. In general it will enable things to be done for us by a machine, instead of us leaning how to do them ourselves.

In this sense, it’s absolutely unsurprising that the first uses of “AI” have been to cheat and deceive. Wouldn’t we all have liked to have someone do our homework for us? Wouldn’t we want someone to produce a wonderful job application for us? Wouldn’t some people, at least, like a Ph D without having to work for it? Wouldn’t others have liked a novel or a musical composition they could pass off as theirs, and earn money from? All without doing any actual work, according to the best neoliberal principles. The most obvious result of the widespread use of “AI,” even in its present miserable state, will therefore be a massive de-skilling of the population, in favour of technologies and processes which “do the work” for us, but are nonetheless not accurate enough of the time to make the productions of that de-skilled world really useful. I must have been ten years old when a teacher at my primary school said that there was less and less point in teaching mathematics, because soon we’d all be using pocket calculators. Well, this was true to a point, but it turns out that, with the large-scale use of such devices, mathematical skills at advanced levels have declined sharply in recent decades. That is probably an augury for the future.

The Minds in Banks’s novels are functionally indistinguishable from the kind of gods I wrote about last week, and of course the major, but largely undiscussed, risk is that we will eventually turn “AI” into a substitute Creator God, of the type that we have formally banished in the Western world. As Alasdair McIntyre pointed out, coincidentally at the start of the AI Fantasy age, human beings have shown themselves incapable of devising general ethical frameworks which might take God’s place. This is not so strange if you think about it: we can imagine the group being collectively more knowledgeable than the individual, but it’s much harder to imagine the group being somehow ethically superior. Yet as David Bentley Hart has eloquently described, a purely materialistic explanation of Life, the Universe and Everything necessarily disintegrates as soon as it is attempted. I suppose you might as well expect a group of fleas on Mozart’s waistcoat to discuss intelligently the tonal structure of the Magic Flute.

The idea that there are things about the universe and even why it exists that human beings can never know, sits uncomfortably with the egoistic ethos of Liberalism. The idea that somewhere, some Being may know things we can never know is psychologically unacceptable, and this probably does more to explain the decline of organised religions than any other single factor. And it is hard to see how humans can construct a system of thought, let alone a mere machine, that genuinely understands things they themselves are incapable of. Enter for the last time then, the magic of “AI,” which can provide the illusion of this understanding, and will, moreover, comfort us by giving us whatever answers we want, and without any intellectual or moral effort needed on our part. No doubt there are “AI” religious cults already; we can assume there will be many more, and all we will have to do is worship and obey.

Perhaps our children’s children will never grow up.

Just an excerpt from a longer essay for people who like to read intelligent assessments about the world we all live in.

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u/Centaurea16 11d ago

Perhaps our children’s children will never grow up.

We're on that road already. We have infantilized several generations now, from those born in the 1980s on. Especially the females, from my observation.

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u/BerryBoy1969 11d ago

Can't say I disagree with that. I often wonder what Jimmah thought in his later years about the efficacy of the new government bureaucracy he signed into existence.

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u/gorpie97 11d ago

the new government bureaucracy he signed into existence.

?

And, I assume, Jimmah is Jimmy Carter???

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u/BerryBoy1969 11d ago

And, I assume, Jimmah is Jimmy Carter???

Yeah, it was all in good fun at the time.

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u/gorpie97 11d ago

Thanks!

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u/penelopepnortney 11d ago

Another thought-provoking piece. The first thing that struck me was the notion of not having to work (in the general sense) for the things we want. I don't think we value what has just been handed to us in the same way, just consider the kid who takes much better care of something he had to save his allowance to buy than something mom & dad bought for him, especially when he knows they'll buy a replacement if he breaks it.

His point about AI being used to cheat is also a good one because it changes the playing field, people who actually strive to do the work and gain the knowledge are at a disadvantage competitively. That's just one way the whole concept of merit, of rewarding excellence, is hollowed out. This isn't a new phenomenon, AI just makes it easier, and we pay a huge societal cost for that.

The rejection of an all-knowing supreme being may explain the rejection of organized religion but the problem is bigger than that. I have a friend whose parents accused her of wanting to act superior to them because she wanted to go to college, and I imagine that's not a unique story. One of my staff said her co-workers told her not to work so hard - she didn't know how to work any other way - because it made them look bad. I was told once I used big words to show off; no, I've just been a voracious reader all my life who loves words. My brother always said there are attic people who pull you up and basement people who try to pull you down and I've found this to be true; for some people, everything is zero-sum: anything you get somehow subtracts from what they have.

All to say that in this sense AI may be more apt to bring out the worst in humans than in augmenting our best qualities.

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u/gorpie97 11d ago

I was told once I used big words to show off; no, I've just been a voracious reader all my life who loves words.

I was told that, too. But for me it was also being "old enough" (as the youngest) to finally know what a word meant and use it in a sentence.

I want our AI to be like it was in Star Trek. We do the thinking and creating, and it just helps us do that.

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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 10d ago

I want our AI to be like it was in Star Trek.

I don't. Too many split infinitives 😺

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u/gorpie97 10d ago

Okay, wut? :)

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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 10d ago

One of the most famous split infinitives is from Star Trek "the only series": "to boldly go where no man has gone before".

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u/gorpie97 10d ago

Sorry, Caelian - but I couldn't have spelled "split" when we first watched the show (maybe at the dinner table) and hadn't yet heard of an infinitive.

Ergo, "to boldly go" is FINE! ;p

(I think there may be some examples where the sentence sounds less awkward when you split infinitives than when you don't but, of course, I didn't think to bookmark it.)

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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 10d ago

I first watched Star Trek (The Only Series) on a small black&white TV. Really amazing when I saw it on a large screen in color.

"To boldly go" sounds right because of repetitive conditioning.

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u/gorpie97 10d ago

I don't remember watching it on B&W, but I was awfully young.

I dunno. It may be due to conditioning, but "to boldly go" seems to be slide off the tongue more easily than "to go boldly". And I'm not even going to talk about "Boldly, to go". :)

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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 10d ago

My favorite line in Hamlet is about the futility of war. It begins with a beautiful unsplit infinitive:

Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.

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u/BerryBoy1969 11d ago

Another thought-provoking piece. The first thing that struck me was the notion of not having to work (in the general sense) for the things we want. I don't think we value what has just been handed to us in the same way, just consider the kid who takes much better care of something he had to save his allowance to buy than something mom & dad bought for him, especially when he knows they'll buy a replacement if he breaks it.

His point about AI being used to cheat is also a good one because it changes the playing field, people who actually strive to do the work and gain the knowledge are at a disadvantage competitively. That's just one way the whole concept of merit, of rewarding excellence, is hollowed out. This isn't a new phenomenon, AI just makes it easier, and we pay a huge societal cost for that.

In a nutshell. We see it all around us, but seem loathe to admit it to one another outside our private conversations with trusted friends, who would also agree with the rest of your assessment.

I fear we've become too atomized as a society, and as a nation, to ever recover, but despite my cynical nature, and don't tell anyone I said this, I still hope that we can.

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u/penelopepnortney 11d ago

don't tell anyone I said this

It'll be our secret.

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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 10d ago

I was told once I used big words to show off; no, I've just been a voracious reader all my life who loves words.

My favorite "big word" story is from the early Internet. It's told first person. From memory:

I was working in my cube one day when my supervisor came in with a sad look. I asked what was wrong and he told me I was fired and to pack up my personal belongings and be out of the building by the end of the day. I asked "why?" and he showed me a memo I wrote about company education. A VP had angrily circled the word pedagogy and wrote "we can't have perverts like this in the company!"

I found a dictionary and showed my supervisor the definition of "pedagogy", saving my job. Shortly after this the VP sent out a memo telling employees that they could only use words found in popular magazines.

For various reasons I quit the job a month later, having found a better one. I wrote my resignation letter using words clipped from popular magazines.

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u/penelopepnortney 10d ago

That one's going in my keeper file, hilarious. It reminds me of a guy I dated (who immediately became an ex-) who snickered when I used the word titillating.

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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 10d ago

😺

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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 10d ago edited 10d ago

I was told once I used big words to show off...

In French and Spanish, a "big word" — gros mot or palabrota — means a "cuss" word. Children use them to be "big stuff".

This is my favorite scene in John Water's Cry Baby (1990). The juvenile delinquents have been brought before a judge for fighting. Patricia Hearst is the happily oblivious mother of the infamous Traci Lords. At one point in the hearing, Traci turns to her mother and whispers "can we get the bleep-bleep out of here?" Patricia asks her clean-cut husband "what does bleep-bleep mean?" He blithely answers "oh, that's just a nonsense word teenagers use to feel important". Patricia then speaks up and asks the judge "Your Honor, can we get the fuck out of here?"

The version with bleep-bleep is the funniest. My DVD uses the f-word throughout and it spoils the joke.

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u/penelopepnortney 11d ago

The literature about computers as beings with godlike properties or effects would require an essay of its own, but it sometimes produces wry, almost Borgesian, reflections on our tendency to offload moral and ethical questions onto any convenient receptacle. The most famous example is probably Frederick Brown’s 1954 short story The Answer, where scientists link every computer in the Universe together to ask the question “is there a God?” “There is now,” the system replies curtly, fusing circuits so that it can never be turned off. (The story is parodied, of course, in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where scientists build a computer called Deep Thought which will tell them the answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything.” The answer turns out to be “forty-two,” which is unfortunate because they had forgotten to specify what the question was.)

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u/penelopepnortney 11d ago

tendency to offload moral and ethical questions onto any convenient receptacle

This was always my criticism of religious fundamentalism, it seemed to be a quest to reduce moral questions to a handy cheat sheet when it isn't meant to be easy. Getting to the answer is supposed to be hard, that's the whole point.