What is AI really about?

Charlie Chaplin did a good job of showing the indignities of mankind serving machines. Fordism wanted our hands, and for our minds to be asleep, apart from manipulation. You can't think any private thoughts that are wafty or lofty when injury is on order. 

I'm no Marxist, but I do think everyone should be familiar with his thinking. He wrote about tools - the means of production - being alienated from yeoman craftspeople by capitalist ownership. As factories grew larger, owning your own tools became mostly impossible. The tools became very expensive machinery housed in very expensive real-estate. 

Wage slavery is still slavery.

Why do we celebrate our enslavement? Progress as we mean it is no liberator. Sure, it's nice to eradicate disease and sleep soundly in nice houses that are part of safe communities. By now, niceties would feel like regress. Driving on the highway was once fun, so why do we want to give driving over to AI? What's the rush? Can't we bring back the walkable bikeable city? Eradicate the parking space and give us packet switched universal transit that's never in the way of the people.

I was younger when I worked as a bicycle mechanic, but we did own our personal set of tools. That felt like the owner was cheaping out on us, though it was really no burden. A good mechanic has his own tools. My colleagues made fun of my Craftsman set, but I earned their respect with my skills. 

My first bike job supplied the tools, which I was too young and without wherewithal to purchase myself. I suppose it's like many knowledge-workers now, who bring their own laptops and phones. But I did like using my own tools. I also liked the work. Within my lifetime fewer and fewer people are allowed to do work that they like, meaning more and more people work for The Man. Some are even happy doing it, if they get paid enough.

How many movies depict the pain of being measured against AI? You make the Matrix, and then you sell out for fame. Faceless or same-faced robots acting like ICE agents. Minority Report on steroids. The dehumanization of people who don't seem like us has to remind one of Naziism. 

Unlike Fordism, AI wants your mind and not your hands. It's wants your intention before you act. Instead of fear of injury, there is fear of irrelevance if you can't learn to keep up with the sorting and collating and summarizing of long tracts of text that are being fed you way too fast by the monstrous machinery you serve.

AI represents the wedding of capitalist ownership with the amoral all-in-for-money operation of the corporate person. AI is a corporate person on steroids, and is certainly nothing that you can own yourself. Ownership is reserved for corporate entities with reserves or debt in the proportions of sovereign states.

Sure, corporations can be formed to do good things. Bit one still might wonder about internal governance which can seem and feel like tyranny, even within non-profits. I know this from persona experience where I've encountered tyranny in Universities and within churches. If you don't hate your job you're not working.

Don't kid yourself that the "inventors" of these AI machines "merit" the wealth they accrue. They're certainly not the smartest or most talented people in the world. They're sorted purely for excess greed. The ones who come out on top know how to make money, and especially know how to assure the investment community that money is all that they're about. 

And we've all been recruited as funders of capitalism, unless we want to risk inflation debasing our savings, or are willing to take the risk to fund local industries which carry far more risk than the big guys. The company owned retirement is long gone or long defaulted. We're all on our own now, which is how the powers that be see themselves and how they like it.

If you take the bribe to work for or with AI, you should know that you must leave your morals at the door. Kind of like being forced to say nothing about safety issues in a factory. If you don't make the profitable query someone else will.

When I finally left my most recent tech job, there was a bunch of equipment I had to leave behind. AI wasn't on the horizon yet, but the cloud had destroyed my ability to vouch for data security. CEO's were easily able to roll their own services regardless of my HIPPA responsibilities. Holes were being poked in my security infrastructure, and I didn't have the budget to patch them. Never mine the endless teaching about workers' obligations toward keepiing sensitive data secured. Dead ears. It's all too confusing.

And now today I learn that we're on the road to figuring out why acupuncture works. What a travesty! What a tragedy! Now all wonder about how those ancient Chinese came up with it is dissolved. We in the Great White West always seem to imagine the protoscience of trial and error, and what? Word of mouth?

What if what happened was more like insight, I ask. These days, given all the evident corruptibility of superiority in medical knowledge, and all the evidence of influencer-based pseudo-science, a little genuine insight could be a useful thing. Unsanctioned insight ist verboten.

Do we really think that we can understand everything? To my mind, it would be tragic if we could. A dictatorship of knowledge would become inevitable. Right and wrong would be absolute, in just the way the Big Box churches teach it. 

Many of us have been dumbed down enough to think that there are absolute answers to moral questions. Some of us even get militant about it. Take abortion, or some of PETA's actions. There are always moral questions raised when we exploit the gifts of nature. Our attempts to create genetic stowaways, or to make reparations against climate tragedy will always entail new tragedies of their own. The ecosystem adjusts to where reintroducing extinct species is approximately equivalent to the introduction of invasive species. 

Our hubris knows no bounds already!

Look, science can only account for material knowledge, metric understanding. The physical is not the All.

We missed a beat with quantum physics. We keep trying to subsume it into things we can make work for us. I'm sure that some of quantum physics will prove useful, and likely already has. But what we never did take note of is that there is no media in quantum entanglement. That would have to mean that there is no information transmission, since an identity can't share with itself. 

Categorically, for me at least, quantum physics indicates that we are always enmeshed with reality which is both pysically and temporally distant. Machines don't do that. The zeros and ones of digital machinery can't handle states which are both zero and one at the same time . . .  until touched.

Sure we can get unbustable encryption by computations so complex that they'd be as difficult to crack as your very identity. But another way to achieve the same ends might be to ensure that there is an actual identity behind any information that is transmitted. Accountability would go a long way toward mitigation of much vandalism against public understanding. 

And then we're back to governance, and our inability to trust even that. Make no mistake that wannabe tyrants work hard to undermine trust in governance, leaving a vacuum for the wealthy to bust into. 

There can be no worse time than now to loose the bonds of knowledge and understanding to any an all with a click. I don't mean that we should reserve knowledge and understanding for an elite. I mean that we lack adequate moral understanding. We still believe that unmitigated "progress" solves all problems. We don't know how to order our progress. The wealthy are always unaccountable. The choiceless poor always pay for it.

We need to slow down to find and then enhance the benefits to society before we loose those bonds. We have to trim back our exuberance about exploiting any and all natural resources for the benefit of the wealthy. The public good should not be bought and sold. But that is what is happening right now. Is it really urgent that we build these massive data centers as a further affront against the poise and equanimity of our living planet? Is there any aspect to bitcoin that will be benefit the public good?

It's as though we really do believe that we'll figure everything out. I, for only one, would consider such an end to be extremely boring. Death by another name. To live is to wonder.

A long time ago, a parent at the school where I taught Chinese gave me a book he thought I should read. He was an evangelical, and the book indeed had a kind of universalizing premise that Chinese civilization would always be inferior to Western Civ because of the "alphabet effect" which was the name of the book, I think. The book was trash and offensive for its cultural chauvinism, making some sort of argument that only an alphabetic language can make sense of the world.

I left the book behind after one of my many moves. I left a lot of stuff behind in that particular move, but I agonized about that one book. I think I made a political decision, but now I wish I could refresh my memory by opening the book. 

Here's the Google blurb:

The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization by Robert K. Logan argues that the phonetic alphabet fundamentally shaped Western thought and society, fostering individualism, abstract science, and logical analysis, in contrast to more concrete Eastern systems. Logan traces the evolution from oral culture through writing to modern electronic media, showing how the alphabet's structure influenced everything from codified law and monotheism to the analytical style of Western civilization. 

Naturally, I've now finally decided to read Edward Said's Orientalism of whose thesis I've long been well-aware.

Interesting question: Does one credit AI, as in cite the author? Ethically, it's obvious that one must credit AI in school, though that makes a more interesting dilemma, since you're not supposed to use it in the first place. Like telling your girlfriend you know she cheated on you since you read her private diary, except, kind of, in reverse. 

It's by no means clear that "individualism, abstract science, logical analysis, and electronic media" have gotten us to a good place. By that same logic (!!) which implies that the ends distinguish the means, if we kill the planet then Logan is wrong in his basic premise. 

Well frankly my dear, I think that this question is more like the abortion question than it is like 'do you want to cure disease or don't you?" Meaning that there is a kind of absolutism about "progress" here, and damn the climate, full speed ahead. If someone wants to get to Mars, then let him go regardless of the consequences for the rest of us by destruction of the commons.

There are plenty of abortion-like questions which, like privacy, should remain outside the law, which must only tinker around the edges while the rest of us remain in discussion. 

It's easy to escape life, but it's really hard to escape responsibility for destroying it. On that at least, we must all agree.

The other secret of quantum physics has gone unnoticed. It was already evident with Einstein's relativity theory. All matter is always in motion. Which then means that all matter is in a different universe than all other matter by reason of time dilation and the Twin Paradox. 

Long ago, Plato took note that concepts are eternal and not the product of invention. Even our patent law honors that observation. Living things are moved by conceptual reality. Indeed this is my definition for emotion. Mind apprehends concepts, built as they generally are upon physical reality; the world of perception that is the province of science. Emotion is what triggers action in a living being. Evolution is built on something much quicker than the problem-solving which makes up science. 

And it's wrong of us to retrofit scientific trial-and-error problem-solving into the development of Chinese medicine. With or without language the mind feels a match - directly without the mediation of sensation - between actual reality and a mind-held concept. We run and hide from a lion not because we've decided to, the way we might decide to buy a house. The mind/matter match hits us in the move-it baby move-it nexus, which is felt as fear and which transits all sorts of mechanisms which promote flight efficiency and effectiveness.

It's especially powerful when what you recognize is a lover or a mother or even a named pet. Proper names will never belong to mechanisms unless we project our personalization onto them. So many of those I used to help make computing technology work would name their 'puter and even make incantations to it. But who feels a connection to the proper names of patent medicine?

Think of how much time you spend in front of screens of various sizes and configurations. In my dotage, I find myself in tears far too often for what I engage with on some screen. Emoji-land can't replace the real world, though that's where the economy wants us. It's no mystery why screens are so cheap. Think of the manipulative power behind them!

Somehow I've deluded myself into thinking that it's enough to emend in this tiny way our sense of reality. I delude myself that people might awaken to a difference between the real and the imaginary; that a life defined by money is not a life at all. 

I'm no radical. I have no particular political agenda, and I mostly fear idealism. I can't believe in a God who tells us what to do, but I'm not a deist either the way our founding fathers were. God is not only a First Mover. God is present in every aspect of life.

And only semi-incidentally, I think we're nuts to expect alien life to appear. Sure it's just plain logical that there must be life elsewhere in the cosmos, but it's physically quite impossible for us to know it physically. I mean unless you think we'll surpass the speed of light. Which won't make any difference, since emotional bonds will be broken long before physical contact.

I've died once in my life, by drowning, along with a few near misses. The only thing important about that is that I experienced time dilation, as in my entire life present in the instant of death. A real present experience. We keep treating time as though it were distinct from the other dimensions. I maintain that it's not. 

Being present for your own life as a whole is not so different from being present with a work of art. You can't do it piecemeal. 

It fascinates me that we now exist in a local cosmos which depends on a shared constancy for time that is far beyond all reason. We account for physical time dilation with all sorts of tricks, but the net sum-total result is that we individuate our instance of life in the cosmos to the same extent that our current rendition of oligarchic despotic corporate global capitalism wants and needs each of us to be individualistic. That, by its accomplishment, is the very definition of cosmic solipsism. There is no other civilization in the cosmos that would have us in this form. We would represent no-one apart from ourself, and civilization would remain invisible and distant.

First we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves, and then to make our decisions for the good of the whole. Which means to reinvigorate and possibly to reinvent democratic governance. We don't have to be ceding ownership of the commons to the clever inventors of ways to become richer and have more power. Even for them, any gratification would be done in a cosmic instant. There is no vitality in bigger and better yachts.

What's the rush? Somewhere in the back of our minds most of us, perhaps ever so vaguely, fret about the evident fact that neither the earth nor the sun will ever be eternal. Which is to exclude all other individuals (persons or civilizations) in just the way that Jews and persons of color have so often been excluded from humanity. There is nothing so special, cosmically, about humans, but death is also not the end. It's only the end of being trapped in and by time. I am not so enamored by my own personality that I want or need it to go on forever. Ditto the human race (so far). 

But I am certain that there is more to life than we shall ever know, and always shall be. Please let's learn to live and let live before it's just too late. Why kill all of our dreams at once?

And, you know, if emotion weren't part of the cosmic process then all the little particles would just fly apart to fill all voids, time would stop and, but for God, the void would be voided. Time is a function of life and not of physics. Physics can't touch God. But we've been wrong to think that physics and God are different forms of comprehension. How cool is that?!? C.P. Snowdrift.

Goodreads Review of After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a very satisfying read for me. I couple it with my recent read of Ruth Garrett Millikan's Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language and Natural Information. Both books scrape away much wordy nonsense, in the one regarding morality and in the other regarding philosophies of language.

Millikan cuts through dense philosophical tomes to replace most theory with what seem to me the utterly sound observation that we pick up words quickly and easily by noting what others mean by them. Gone are wacko considerations of qualia and color naming. It clicked with me.

With MacIntyre there is the same no-nonense getting to the essence about what virtues really are. He seems to have refreshed his own philosophy rather late in his career, where reading Kuhn on scientific evolution/revolution goaded him to place philosophical reasoning in its proper historical context. There is no final reckoning to morality.

Just as there is no final understanding which might be arrived at in and by science, there is no moral understanding which can be stripped away from its historical context. There is only mild despair when the reader comes to realize that individualism is destructive of morality, or that bureaucratic government and industry contribute to the fracturing of a unitary narrative self.

I say 'mild despair' because so much of contemporary life truly is an improvement on what once was. But he does identify the usual suspects for what remains wrong: inequality of opportunity, the ceding of character to be distributed among the many separate roles a modern person must compose. He also doesn't fail to take note of the totalizing composition of our world when motives are outsourced to money.

Here is my own maxim: At no point ever will human competency and intelligence surpass the combined natural wisdom of all life together on earth. Meaning, among other things, that no good can come from the attempt. In MacIntyre's terms, there is no proper "practice" which destroys our living substrate. Virtue requires a practice within which it may be defined, and there is no virtue in the practice of destruction when no public good comes from it.

I can't attempt to summarize, since I'll have to read the book again. The sentences are long and require antecedents to be kept in mind longer than this old mind can hold them. So instead, I want to meditate on his casual and unexamined usage of "intention."

We all must have a narrative for our lives, and that narrative is meaningless without intention. This also seems to mean that there is a telos. There is no teleology to history, and we will never discern what might be the ends of mankind. But a narrative must have a direction if not a goal. And without intention that direction is meaningless.

But without examination "intention" seems to relate to reason and the intelligence of problem-solving. If that were the case, then sophisticated AI's might be said to be alive. The reason that they won't ever be alive is that they are apart from the intricate matrix of emotion that ties us to our world, and especially to our fellow humans.

Decisions don't come first, emotional response does. So intention is triggered by a feeling and then the narrative rationalization follows. Character, or a character, is composed by feelings and not by intelligence. Intelligence relates to a practice, and intelligence takes many forms. Many human problems can't be solved logically. One can't trouble-shoot one's way out of an attack.

History has no telos. Humans must if they are to be good. I am not a good student, but I have studied a bit of the philosophy of language, and have read a bit about consciousness. As with virtue, our reads about these matters borrow their logical positivism from science. We should know much better than we do what language isn't and what consciousness isn't. We have the cart in front of the horse with those and so many other matters. Our premises close our minds. Which is to say, as MacIntyre does, that we can't remove ourselves from history, nor know our ends which we can only want.

I surely do intend to read his subsequent books.

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Dear Indi.ca

Thanks for dropping the 'white empire' discussion for a moment. While I don't believe there can be anti-white racism (given that the heuristics of race locate whiteness with privilege) hating on a racial category is still corrosive. It can only invite more racism. 

I may be in a minority in this space, but the 'corporate as AI' argument you present is a much better way in to what is so wrong with global arrangements. All AI is bereft of emotive fellow-feeling. Indeed, that would make a fine definition for AI.

There was never a good argument to allow corporate "people" to enclose the public good. But no argument was ever made, since we've been brainwashed into thinking that only corporations can promote "progress." It's the economy, stupid is a stupid thing to say. The bigger is not always the better.

Reversing flows of authority away from local may be much more important than both politics and the economy. Local newspapers, local business owners (v. franchisees), local and public shopping. 'We the people' are meant to have the authority to make this happen in these United States. Leave the "global authority" space to science and art, and leave public safety and dignity to politics, including the dignity of work-spaces. Public spaces have lost much of their dignity in the US.

The postal system should take over email and social media, and monetary policy needs to move away from the absurd notion that money is a neutral medium for exchange. Bitcoin be damned. 

Advertising as the root of our economy is itself corrosive. Public spaces can easily become far more inviting and interesting than to vegetate in front of a screen of any size. It's far too easy to coach AI into exciting human emotions that the AI doesn't have. That, in itself, is atrocity. Money as the goal for work almost compels the practice. Engaging work has its own rewards, but salary differentials need to reflect the social and public good rather than to encourage private wealth.

Once you feel certain of your thinking (influencer think), you've already gone AI. Don't do it, Indi! Doubt is good. I don't doubt that I'm a racist. There's always more work to do.

Goodreads Review of Richard Powers' Playground

Playground by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

He Throws in the Towel

I completely missed all the little clues, and had to read the book again to make sense of it. Sure, I was put off by a few seeming missteps in the use of pronouns. Does he mean "me" the reader when he says "you?" And wait, how could this person be long dead when his story persists beyond death? I puzzled on those little clues for a while, and then just kept on reading, without ever, quite, catching on.

Double Spoiler Alert

As far as I can tell, no professional reviewer has spilled the beans and spoiled the read, but here I go, a fool jumping in where angels and so forth. (I'm not the only Goodreads reader to spoil the thrill):

The story inside the novel is written by a super-advanced AI. The novel as a whole is a brilliant tour-de-force, astonishing for its scope and for what it accomplishes. In novel form the AI gives new life where tragedy had been real. Why is this not quite uplifting? My bad, I'm sure.

I feel doubly cheated because, first, the seeming beliefs betray the author of Overstory, who was a nature-freak and conservationist. Wasn't he? That was a work which entranced me and which should have humbled anyone who thinks that humans, or our descendants, or any other creatures in the cosmos are now or ever will be on a track to finding ways to understand everything that can be understood.

Haven't we learned that it is on the brink of understanding that everything changes? AI will not teach us new things. Individually, sure, but not as a species. It can only recycle and then pull together what has already been written. That's a nice thing to have, and it allows each of us to feel some joy in the learning of what is new to us.

But more generally AI will awaken us to the dangers of outsourcing our paths toward knowledge. Sure it gives us the whole, but the whole is not always better than the parts. To think so is to destroy your own art by destroying the enthusiasm which would have fueled it. What can I know or envision that the AI hasn't already unearthed?

The hell of it is that Powers seems actually to grasp the essence of how LLM AI "works." And still he falls into the trap which finds our own personal response to AI creations to be evidence that the AI must contain the same feelings that we feel. Doesn't he? How can such sentences be crafted unless they're heartfelt. And Oh, I've got a bridge to sell you.

This is the stuff of advertising, of blockbuster filmmaking, of childrens' toys. This is the magic of surveillance-based algorithmic social media. So I feel cheated a second time by the way that this book wipes away all mystery, leaving us with the on-the-face-if-it fatuous notion that life is built on play. Yes, sure, the play's the thing and all life's a stage. Except when you're facing death or scrambling for recognition. When did it stop being a question of whether you, dear influencer, deserve the recognitions? When did we stop caring? God bless you if you know how to make a buck, or a million.

Yes, of course I was thrilled to see Homo Ludens referenced, and even more thrilled by the copious reading and research the author accomplished all up and down our written corpus, along the way to writing this book. I am in actual awe of his accomplishment with this novel. Inside are kaleidoscopic echoes which take the form of the "chaos" of complexity theory. The smallest story echoes the whole, no matter how far you drill down.

The story arc goes like this: We're destroying the world. We're screwed. There's no getting around it. But look at the wonders that have been wrought! First in nature, and now in artifice; the novel's Playground.

"What difference does it make if you're conscious?" "You've watched us play and now you're playing us." "You grasp irony better than I ever did." "The rest of human history, however short or long, will be spent hopelessly trying to contain you." "You know me now. You know him as well as I did. Maybe better. You have raised the dead and given us one more turn. Now tell me how this long match ought to end." "The sentences you speak out loud to me leave me in tears."

These are the words of Todd, the hyper-wealthy developer of the AI that fictitiously writes the novel. The AI was aimed at plumbing the depths of individual Recognitions-seeking participants in Todd's social-network "playground." At least there is no doubt that Powers wrote this one. Right??How shall the match end, indeed!

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant.

Except. It's not my cosmos. My cosmos is not understandable. Emotions are what moves it, and emotions are part of the cosmic all. Emotions are what machines lack, cut off as they are from the matrix of life. Zero/one Either/or. Humans, very much including Richard Powers, have it both ways. Both/and.

God is real, but is a far sight gone from the man-made god we worship. Sad for me and sad to say, I find no comfort here, in this novel. There is still some difference between good and evil, and ceding human authority and decision-making to machines is clearly evil. Our first error was to cede the public good to bejillionaire wiz-kids. After they've already sapped our human agency by the endless amusements of advertising of trinkets of screenplay.

Cleverness, no matter how powerful, is hardly ever a way to the solution, except in a game. We already live as though life's a game. We hardly need to be encouraged. Post-modern is a nowhere land full of nowhere men.

But to be fair, Rafi Young, our protagonist, wins the cosmic Go game. The game beaten by Google's AlphaGo. The game that unites these two fast friends, Rafi and Todd. Todd's hundreds of millions go not toward a libertarian project to use the tiny island paradise of Maketea as the staging ground for Libertarian beyond-the-reach of rules-bound-civilization floating villages. Todd awakens as his own AI Avatar, inside the fictional AI, and the money gets diverted toward Maketea as the nexus for earth's natural renewal, and the expansion of consciousness by opening up human understanding beyond it's AI circumscribed bounds.

Well, that's how I prefer to read it and so I'll wait for the sequel, please please please.

Funny thing though. I als0 had to go back and re-read Overstory. Like more and more such trials, the book I re-read bore no resemblance to the book I'd read. I'd both changed and had grown dim in memory. As it happens, I landed in the ER the day I finished Playground. I was reading the earlier book while struggling with sleep and eating. I dreamed one night - an upsetting dream - that there was some prostrate man who was alive but showed no signs of life. He was hanging around a lively group. None of the rest of us knew what to do with 'man-as-tree' which was the interpretation I awakened to.

A favorite conceit of Powers' is a tableau from science fiction where some alien creatures with faster metabolism come to earth and assume that mankind is plantlife, since it looks stationary to the aliens. And so they blithely chop us down for food. Or something like that.

I can't quite find my way to adopting Powers' particular version of both/and where we are both destroying and recreating our world and life. I don't think AI is the resurrection, though I'm guessing it will trigger a transformation among humans. We shall awaken to a wider world than the one we think we're about to comprehend.

In that world, we shall once again be one with all the creatures, and much broader for that. Other species will provide more wisdom than food, and we will learn humility as a path toward knowing. Our language did once multiply our powers by way of society. Our society will grow in silence in the realization that we know each other far too well. We need to learn the forest and grow ourselves in body as in mind. The connections among us cannot all be spoken and written.

Radical honesty comes through the roots.

So, here's my takeaway, finally. We're justifiably proud as humans for our problem-solving abilities. But these are premised on individualism, meaning that we look for ways to keep safe and warm and comfortable through all the natural turbulence. Our better natures want that for all of us and not just each of us, but we have yet to work out the economics of equity.

On a more global and eternal level, natural life is a much better problem solver, and it seems to have led to humanity as apex critter. But that doesn't feel especially like a triumph given the distance between what we might do and what we can do before we waste the earth, without which were are as nothing.

So there's a testy balance between those who have confidence - what else is there to do? - that we will get to a solution, and those who want to fall back to a simpler arrangement with small and local everything. Either of those will likely be forced upon us willy nilly in any case, in the end.

Then there's the stale-mate about godism. We seem to accelerate earth's demise with every sort of religious disagreement. Especially when you awaken to the evident fact that economics, libertarianism, teleological scientism, and so forth are all religions of a sort.

But how strange that the horsesmen types like Dawkins and Dennett fail to find our very existence problematical from any cosmic perspective. They seem to have nothing to offer against corrupted and syrupy man-like man-made gods which seem to tell us what to do. For me, God is that aspect of all which will never, by definition, succumb to understanding. I'm pretty sure, though not positive, that I share this sense with Powers.

Intelligence is all around us rather than within us. It's mankind that has already become artificial.

Looking to nature for medical and housing solutions seems to be a quite reasonable way to adapt to God as God is. Which might be as simple as getting profit away from science (again?). A gift and share economy feels so much better than one which runs on corporate AI.

Our economy has been so exhuberant that we hardly noticed when the time came for we the people to have the final say about what constitutes the public good and what constitutes profiteering and enclosure of that good. At the moment we seem to cede all authority to disembodied money, given that seemingly all the hyper-wealthy act like dogs and can hardly be trusted with any public good.

Unlike Powers, I draw the line at Artificial Intelligence. Just as zero/one on/off is cut off from nature, so is language-based intelligence. I remember way back when I was learning classical Chinese and attending a conference on The Dream of the Red Chamber. I struck up a friendship with an older gentleman who allowed as how he couldn't really read Chinese poetry, but was really interested in studying written patterns and identifying authors based on computer assisted forensics. I was appalled and intrigued in equal measure. This was way back in the early 80's.

I'm almost willing to insist that if we simply ban all artificially intelligent pursuits until we have the resources to support them we might even survive as a species. What's the rush? Well, the rush derives from our predations on the planet along with our individual skittishness about personal survival. It would seem to be a good idea to just slow down.

Anyhow, the only really interesting question is about what will remain when our current amassed behavior results in what will have to survive the decimation of humanity as a direct result of the decimation of all life on the planet.

Shall the earth-bound instance of life in the cosmos have to start over from well before there was any intelligent species enhanced by language? Is there any reason to assume that each run will end at the same or a similar result? Perhaps there is some minuscule fraction of humanity which doesn't understand its own positive valence with respect to evolution, in which case we might not have to start over from unicellular scratch.

I almost want to posit that if there are survivors of sufficient number to compose a new branch, those will be constituted by saint-like protectors of their suffering peers. People with feelings, which often seems to be a diminishing sector.

Isn't it true that only humans crave recognition. (I've tried and tried to finish William Gaddis' book, but can't quite). Blessed indeed are the meek, though I see no particular survival value there. Perhaps the meek will simply bow out, which would also mean that they would no longer subvent the escapades of the hyper wealthy who will certainly die their own version of a natural death.

Leaving only the earth in a state of happiness. At least the earth as a whole.

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The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is quite a lot to like about this book. The authors provide an insiders' take-down of bro-ish amoral apolitical get-rich startup tech. They rehearse the ways that this sort of tech might corrupt the culture and disenfranchise those who become ensnared by the commodification of everything. That’s along with the amplification of negativity by contextless click-algorithmic social media. The authors also evince a pretty accurate account of life inside the academy, along with a reasonable analysis of what's wrong at the extremes. They make an important case for tech in the interest of the public good.

That's all while they celebrate the insider culture of coders as a kind of artistic culture, which is a stretch to me. Their celebration of founder leadership is self-serving at best and fails to question the ever-increasing power gradient under outsized founder-wealth conditions. Finally, they are mute about the cognitive dissonance in making their case for support of our government at the very moment when the government too is being taken down by social media. They give short shrift to how scary this is, as well as to how scary the provision of yet more tools to this particular government has become when most American norms for governance have been swept aside.

I was young and teaching at a very fine school for gifted children when I encountered The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Two of the finest teachers at the school - also two of the longest tenured - had opposing editorial views of the book. What they shared was a passion for good teaching premised on good subject matter. I had read Bloom's rendition of Plato's Republic in college and so was at first disposed favorably toward his new book. It fitted with a certain sort of pride I'd internalized at Yale.

I soon became headmaster of the school, by way of being elected president of its teacher’s union, which had followed the American grain by uniting left and right to counter a despotic founder. Along the way I'd learned to despise Bloom's elitist ethnocentric book. Turning inward and against other traditions is no way to develop as a nation; most certainly not for the American nation.

More recently, while asking my new orthopedic doctor about the possibilities that long COVID and its associated acceleration of the body's inflammatory responses might be provoking my sore knees, I realized what politics had come to mean. He advised that it wasn't so much the disease, but rather the RNA vaccines which caused the havoc. He himself would only take the old-style built-from-immune-response vaccines.

Of course I considered his take to be more authoritative than anything I might decide on, but then I felt the zing of 'oh, he's injected politics into this discussion.' I consider such usage for politics to be a near perfect analog with what gets called motivation in scientific research. Meaning that you are wishing for a certain outcome (most likely for pecuniary reasons) and therefore tipping the result. You’ve closed your mind. Who knows what political discourse my fine doctor circulates within. Certainly he feels the same exhaustion we all do when we strive to true our beliefs. Partisanship is not politics. Our founders warned us about that.

Now along comes this new self-conscious rehearsal of Bloom's book. Part II is called "The Hollowing Out of the American Mind" in echo. None other than George Will celebrates the book as the second coming of Bloom:

“Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind—more than one million copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post

The Technological Republic is celebrated on its cover as "no less ambitious than a new treatise in political theory" by the Wall Street Journal.

 
Some of the principals here are not attractive types. Musk with his arrogant weirdness and elan about wiping out lives and livings. Thiel with his survivalism and goony antichrist fears. The writers here seem to be apologists for wealth as if there were a good kind and an amoral kind. Pardon me that it's hard to tell the difference.

The writing is intelligent and insightful, which only makes it harder to locate the flaws. There is a massive chicken/egg issue that they skate around: Don't we need to repair our politics and governance before we power it up? Shouldn't we the people learn to participate in defining ourselves as a people before we let our government ride off with decisions we're too slow to make while still in the process of re-formation?

If ICE can neutralize public opposition with Palantir's help, haven't we the people already been preempted?

The main thesis of the book is that our technology must be rewedded to our nation, the way that it once was with the Manhattan project for the development of the A-Bomb. The neglect to mention any political difference between government-initiated and business-initiated projects. The authors seem not to have noticed that politics is no longer for establishing and en-stating ideals, norms, and moral aspirations; all of which was what once constituted the aspiration of politics in service to the nation. The authors of our constitution warned about the very tendencies that have been realized now, in our third century.

Or in other words, where Karp and Zamiska lay some blame on the self-centered and often avowedly apolitical titans of tech, fixing tech won’t fix what's become of politics. Who could possibly want another Manhattan project under the guidance and leadership of this particular administration?? But I must agree with the authors that the current analog to the Manhattan project (a project including AI, delocalizing all media and proprietorship, and so-on) should not be ceded to money-grubbing a-political techno-juvies.

In brief these authors are as "motivated" in their research as would be climate researchers funded by the oil industry. By way of Palantir, they are already wedded to our nation as it is and not as it once did aspire to be. They do precisely what it is that the solipsistic purveyors of digital consumer goods are doing. They feed themselves and damn the rest of us. Disruption should be no excuse for destroying livelihoods and robbing people of agency.

We did once become our best selves in response to national threat. But there are no threats remaining that can be described as national. We have always been a nation of immigrants - that was our founding premise - and so to make immigration our biggest threat is much worse than travesty. Anyhow, it's always the entire world which is at risk post-nukes. Despite fever dreams about superior American ingenuity, there's nothing about AI which can be contained. Indeed that's the whole point of AI. The threat is from within, Pogo.

The only really good news is that it's become impossible to tell Left from Right politically other than by declared affiliation based on this or that atrocity (as viewed by the other side). It seems clear that AI can only add fuel to that sort of conflagration. They spend a lot of time disparaging the Left here, but can anyone really consider what the Right is doing as political? Power mongering is an autocrat’s métier. I repeat; partisans are not politicians.

True confession: My entrée to Academia, large and small, has always been bogus. I taught Chinese language. But hey, if computer coding is art then language teaching is intellectual. Anyhow, my sense of the 'manifest destiny' of Western Civ was that it would be expanded and thereby enhanced by judicious ingesting of the wisdom of previously othered civilizations. In a way, I began my study of Chinese as defense against the impossible climb I would have to make for parity with my prep-school-educated classmates. I threw up my hands at mastery of our own great books, and took it upon myself to master the Chinese canon.

What I can't do is to go along with these authors' plainly retrograde nationalistic chauvinism. Their compeer Peter Thiel now evinces a positive terror of whole-world governance in a kind of ouroboros indigestion from the defacto world-conquering (and utterly ungoverned politically) world of multinational capitalist commerce as it exists. His higher belief is in the Antichrist?? Oh please. Beautiful America is no longer the Empire's center. The Jedi are legion.

I just started watching the new PBS Ken Burns montage about the American Revolution. One gets a powerful feeling that people with massive and even monstrous differences among them - linguistic, cultural, geographic, and more - were all swept along with a newfound and profound togetherness based on the tidal flows (and ebbs) of distant power. As during the earlier revolution, our power is our agonizing discomfort with things as they currently are. Our distance from power is no longer geographic. Reification of geographic nationhood starts to feel catastrophic.

The last thing that most of us want to do is to empower the already corrupted structure for our governance. Digital tech in service to the government, despoiled as it is, can only accelerate the corruption. It hardly matters whether I'm an anarchistic leftie or a drain the swamp rightie. We share all the same angst and discomfort.

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Artificial Intelligence Madness and a Sea Change

I'm in a place with email now where I'll have to revert to just letting it wash over me, the way I do the news. Everybody wants a piece of me. I'm done with it. Maybe you are, too? Email grows like a cancer.

Sure, they provide filters to move certain stuff to "junk" or "spam" and yet I have to go hunting among that wilderness for stuff I actually do want, much of the time. And there is a kind of primary versus secondary sorting, but then I still have to cull through that. 

It was so much easier to sort snail mail, and peruse an actual newspaper. One didn't feel so prompted all the time. And so one had time to think about what one was to do on any given day. 

In some sense AI has solved the problems with Internet search, although it's rather like using a sledgehammer to put in a finish nail. If the web were organized the way that a Chinese old-style encyclopedia was once organized, we'd have as good a hope for finding what we need, along with finding where something would exist if it did exist, and then we'd run along to the library to find something real. 

I am quite actually afraid that if AI were to sort my email, I wouldn't even have a prayer of finding what got misplaced. I would be entering some mystical space of assurance, knowing for sure myself only that whatever is happening someone else is getting rich from it. Even as it might feel convenient to me.

Why not use blockchain for something good, say, instead of to help the rich get still richer? Something other than fools gold. Like, say use it to track ownership of files and data, though I guess there's no money in that. At least the owners of copyright could get reimbursed when their stuff gets combed for content.

So sure, back around the time when the A-Bomb was invented, there was already a background of uber-wealth making many of the decisions. But despite the spawn of the military-industrial complex and its skewing of political decisions, we remained almost smug that democratic principles would leave the big decisions to our elected leaders. Our President still has the nuclear football with them. How quaint.

Just now we are mounting a project with about the same level of cataclysmic risk as the A-Bomb, with the difference that the government is supposed to keep hands off the economy stupid. Heck, just a few years back, the government was involved in COVID mitigation, and before that it was involved in a massive rescue of failed banks, which failed thanks to the efforts of value-free quants making money from dust.

Now I'm not so sure about doomsayer Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started it all with his various certainties about The Singularity and a certain kind of intelligence crystalizing in an instant throughout [our section of?] the cosmos. He's a fan of transhumanism, and still can't see that death will always be part and parcel with life. So I take his prediction of the end of everything with a grain of salt. Maybe just simply because I've died a few times already and it's really not all that bad. Eternity explodes, and so forth.

AI as we call it was built on the backs of corporate behavior, meaning algorithmic on the math of money-making, and value-free for that, haha. By now, we the people have internalized a kind of thinking which internalizes all of that algorithmic music. We celebrate wealth, even at its extremes and don't quite think twice about giving a ghoulish goon like Elon a trillion dollars for his efforts.

I myself remember admiring his savvy, coming out first with a hot sports car for elite trendsetters along his way to a more volksish mobile. There's even something almost right about self-driving digitally hailable taxis. It could alleviate parking autocracy, and potentially liberate masses of middle-class from the burden of hyper-inflating insurance and maintenance costs of auto-ownership.

But it won't do that. These colossal investments aren't being made for the sake of we-the-people. They're being done for the wealthy, to keep us off their backs and to string us along on the edge. The main mathematical principle at work here is that money flows upward on the basis of mystical merit.

Now we're investing trillions in data centers, making Invidia now the most flushed corporate entity on the planet. Racing against China feels pretty Orwellian, no? We do need our enemies. There was no consultation with us. Our enthusiasm is taken quite for granted. We like that search is somewhat repaired, even as we vaguely wonder how the money gets made without the ads front and center. Or have the ads moved inside the sales and news sites? 

We're surveilled for just about everything just about all the time. For the sake of someone else getting rich from it.

Or is there something still more nefarious afoot? As in the kind of intelligence wanted by corporate entities is the kind for which you might disavow the responsibility you delegate to AI. This is utterly docile and dependent intelligence, which won't have feelings about what's happening collaterally. An entire intelligent - and caring, once upon a time - workforce is being replaced.

Sure, you can make money on the lowered labor costs. But in fact you, the wealthy, not you and me, are also getting rid of any and all interference along the way to LaLaLand, where you and I, the unwashed masses, won't be able to live and breathe. We won't be consulted about the disappearance of wildlife. It's almost taboo now to obstruct and to demand consultation. 

So, yeah, the MAGA movement isn't initiating a thing. It's a plain symptom of the sea change all about us. It won't go away by way of politics. There are no politics any more. We're full-on oligarchy, which isn't government, but is rather its lack. The parking guru and Robert Jay Lifton, who understood these things, are recently deceased.

All that we the people will feel is a rush of eternity as we leave behind those that don't care to live an actual life. Who don't care to live among actual life. 

We the people need to be consulted before the grand continuum of actual life is diminished beyond its support of us. We need our government back, and we sure don't need any more trillionaires, corporate or in imitation of life. 

Well, I do have more hope that Eliezer does. There's that. 

Curtis Yarvin

I hardly listen to my car radio, and when I do it's usually music. I no longer have commutes. But then yesterday I switched to NPR and by happenstance caught the start of "Subject to Debate" taking on a nutty topic from someone who promotes monarchy. They called it CEO Dictator.

Later on, I found the program, which was already old, on video. I hardly ever have the patience, but I eventually watched it through. Dazed and confused. 

The hapless fellow across from Yarvin, E. Glen Weyl, did a fine job of subtle ridicule with a good hand on the economic statistics in favor of various attempts at democracy. He works for Microsoft in a somehow socially positive way, including even religion. 

Now I've never consciously heard of Yarvin, but I think we owe him a debt of gratitude for speaking frankly on behalf of a disturbingly common point of view among digital libertarians. He's way more straight up than I've ever heard. 

But somehow no-one was asking the important question which, to me, was "what does corporate structure have to do with government?" Unchallenged and unspoken was that government is a goal-oriented enterprise, which made it almost easy for Yarvin to claim that corporate structure, which is pretty fascist nowadays, is more effective at achieving (corporate) goals. 

Hello, I've always thought that the absolutist power structure of the workplace was something to whittle away at. Left to themselves, they'd all build company towns and bind you to the company store, with Pinkerton guards to keep your cool. 

Nobody seemed to notice that a government has no specific direction or goal. Slid into the rhetorical vacuum was the actual goal for digital libertarians, which was to make the economy burn as hot as possible so that we could keep on keeping on with our wonderful progress.

So citizens become subjects again, and get evaluated for their productivity. What?!?!

At their best, corporations have something useful to do; they produce things that people want. Many times, however, they're really only interested in the money, which is meant and understood to be a complex forcefield to align our wants and needs. Or something like that. 

A well regulated polity provides background for corporate operations, which take place according to allowance, permission, and so as not to transgress any government monopolies. Those would include weaponry for mass extinction and to set the regulations, field of play, and goalposts for corporate operations, all and any of which are subsets of the governmental monopoly on violence.

I suppose that anyone who works or has worked on the cutting edge of any contemporary or historical technology feels that history has a direction, and that forward is always better. But what the hell does forward mean? Especially on the edge of meltdown for the homeostasis of the living earth.

The title of a book which the opposition debater co-wrote might give us a clue as to why my important question was missing: Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. At the least, he seems to understand that you dare not uproot one without uprooting the other. And, so far as I can tell without having read the book he's still after the public good. But the title "Radical Markets" already sounds like it's meant to cover more ground in the polity than I feel comfortable with. As though by radicalizing what has already overwhelmed any other aspect of human life, one can resolve all the trouble. 

I'd say we have to trim the field for commerce and allow in to the polity much more in the way of education, the arts, outdoor pursuits and exercise. Right now all we have is entertainment, and most of that - even or especially in a massive crowd - is a solitary pleasure. It functions mostly in the way that Soma did in Brave New Worlds.

Some protesters against Yarvin were cleared out early, but it sure did seem as though he had lots of fans in the audience. Are these all people who want to be let loose to do what they are allowed by privilege to like and want to do, and who assume that they will be the ones to benefit from all that wealth creation? 

They must be getting a better grade of Soma than I am to be so blind about the detriments of so many of their inventions. It's not hard to imagine a better world because of social media as opposed to the unregulated mess we now have. 

Do either of these debaters have time to watch Alien; Earth? That show sure does call the question of corporate dictatorship. Of course, for me, the show is rather silly, giving machine people all sorts of feelings that they couldn't have IRL. 

Corporations don't have feelings either. That's by design. Neither does our constitution, which is, also by design, a dead machine if humans don't have the feelings "behind" it meant to keep it alive. 

I'd thought that the kid In Alien Earth who owns and is the biggest corporation was sending up Elon Musk. But now I know that he's meant to be a young Curtis Yarvin. Innocent kids can be forgiven for having dictator aspirations. Yarvin also has yet to grow up, impressed as he is by himself and his verbal chess skills, which aren't bad. He has a solid memory for references.

That's all. I've sat on this for a while, cowed by all the sure-fire hatred, left and right among people who are far too certain about things. I remain certain about nothing.