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.
