All the AI gurus have taken to saying that Artificial General Intelligence is just about here. Maybe a year, may be two, maybe tomorrow. What's really just around the corner is awareness of that in which human intelligence consists. That will be transformational, and maybe even this quest for AGI will have been helpful in our dawning awareness.
Our dawning awareness shall include our awakening to the fact that the weather, the earthly pushback and even the volcanos and earthquakes gather their energy inside of us, if, unlike me, you believe in that insider/outsider distinction.
Trumpism is, of course, a force of nature. To the extent that we don't know what to do about our complicity in earth's destruction - I just helped my daughter buy a sports car, ferchissakes - we also must celebrate MAGA insanity as the identical force that a tornado has when it tears through a community. Thank you Agent Orange for prodding our awakening! We so innocently sanctioned your spewing.
I'm just guessing, but people involved in AI have probably had the experience of feeling really smart. They're among people who are also really smart, but they just somehow get it better and faster than everyone else.
I once ran a school for gifted kids and never did figure out how to resolve this conundrum of goodness's self-awareness leading to its self-destruction. If I had, the school would still be alive and promoting and instilling all those humane human tendencies which characterized the innocent direction of the lost and forever departed so-called American Century. We knew not what we did.
What they're good at, these AI titans, is something godawful boring to the rest of us. No, don't include me, I too was mesmerized by my first encounter with networks, and proceeded to spend an unforgiven godforsaken chunk of my life on them.
Naturally, these people, we these people, assume that intelligence is like what they have. But what if they're all really amoral, like AI is amoral. Meaning here that there's nothing "inside" the AI that generates moral acts and behaviors, but it's rather taken in from the handling they do of language and other artifacts. They might be able to project a shadow of human morality, but wouldn't be able to initiate a moral act on their own? Or if they would, it would have to be derivative.
One example of amoral behavior is that of the tech titans and especially of the titans of AI, when they go all out for themselves. Would any of them do what they do if there was nothing in it for them? And if they think that their work will make the world a better place, why aren't they willing to accept the opinions of others on that score? Simply because they have no need to. In our world, the economy stupid, is the proxy for humanity. Our wants are toted up for us, and along we go, merrily or not.
AI is the oldest story in the cosmos. God forsaken.
Well, OK, so the rest of us mostly are cheering them on because we largely think and believe that tech is good and AI could be good as well, especially if it becomes better at problem solving than humans are.
But what if humans are the problem that needs solving? Collectively, we all are supposed to thrive on recognition. On standing out. That's our interpretation of the cipher of evolutionary genetics. AI can do so much better than we can with that or any kind of ciphering. Oh please God turn us over to an AI engineering of our future! Please guide our DNA. Oh.
Maybe there's a difference between a stand out artist and a standout money-maker? Adrian Brody plays long-suffering Jewish geniuses in The Pianist and The Brutalist, and wins two academy awards. Living life in an antisemitic hell. Can there ever be too much beauty in the world? There can certainly be, and already is, too much technology.
It's not just the surveillance capitalism which Shoshana Zuboff calls out. It's the network effect, where each of us wants and needs to be where the rest of us are. But post-digital, none of it can be called capitalism when only one thing needs to be made with zero labor for the rest. Now it really is become a zero-sum game, with almost all of us losers when the winners win so big.
It's not even so much the dispiriting as caused by immiseration within the dynamics of inflationary costs and expectations. It's the more direct immiseration of the spirit when you know there's nothing all that special about yourself. When it's all a lottery.
Sure there's a bit of schadenfreude when trollish boring geeks like Musk and Zuckerberg and Cowbezos are haplessly lured into revealing their ghoulish innards by the likes off Trump. But can that compensate for their criminal appropriation of the vectorial commons for themselves?
I myself see a dangerous sub-text in Brody's roles. That some of us are simply superior, smarter, morally better. That some of us are guided by a compulsion of rectitude. But the suffering is human and he never makes a direct argument that his roles are more deserving of a better life than all of his fellow sufferers. He too mainlines heroin.
Anyhow, machine intelligence is a one-way street. It embodies the assumption that more intelligence is a good thing and the we humans can continue to behave as beastly as we do because super-human intelligence will make it all good. When what we really need is a Jesus Christ figure to bring us down from our anti-earth high. The problem to be solved is indeed ourselves. Maybe we can do it once the nature of human intelligence is revealed to enough of us. Only then will the utterly repudiated actual Jesus come back to life. JD Vance is sufficient alone to goad His IHS return to us.
Hell is a lousy concept, though maybe it worked for all those years. Anyhow we're bringing more hell down to earth than we care to admit. Yes, sure, life is better for more people than it has ever been before. But if it all ends in a hellish mess . . . it does none of us any good to externalize this evil.
How can we deter smart individuals from craving recognition and the power that goes along with it? Without personal hell? Without actual hell for the rest of us? I wish I knew. In what humanity consists.
Let us pray.
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