One hears the term machine learning fairly often, and it seems to relate to machines that learn. Descending from that is artificial intelligence, perhaps of a sort which feeds neural-network style computers the results of intense statistical triangulation among linguistic structures. Those structures are presumably proven to be meaningful among humans engaging with them. One doesn't really know what might happen when the language generated by AI overwhelms the human language in the feed. Some kind of anti-singularity?
But we concentrate too much, I think, on the artifacts of our various industrial scientific and communications revolutions. The real interest should be on what is happening to humans on the planet as a result of changes to human learning.
It would be hard to ascertain whether we've become more or less brutish. The record clearly shows that we've always been brutish, while people like Steven Pinker assure us life is getting better and better. Which hasn't stopped him from hanging around with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe that means we all like even better better than we like better, as it ever has been.
Even though I spend scant time with social media, and almost no time with anybody telling me what to believe, my phone is still at the center of my existence. I check the time more obsessively than when I had a watch. I check the weather, and the wind direction and speed. I check the news. I still miss out on events that I might enjoy, much more than I used to when I talked with people more than I look at my phone.
We use YouTube now to coach our amateur mechanical work, and I often wonder how, as a kid, I was able to learn carpentry and house-painting and bicycle repair and boat-building. Of course I know it had to be by way of conversation. In stores, at shops, at the boatyard, from colleagues, and sometimes from magazines. People always seemed eager to share their knowledge and expertise. People were helpful. I even read various books when I needed to know something in depth. "Corrosion in Boats' being one book. Nobody ever seemed to have a motive to lie, unless it was for a practical joke.
It's the ways of knowing which interests me. I think those ways may be more constrained than they've ever been before. Back when the US was young, it would take the railroads and the Erie Canal to pull us together. Telegraph wires after the Franklin Post Office which facilitated newspapers' spread. So much of the country was filling with people who scrabbled to plant, and were maybe concentric around towns.
Now that we climb Everest for a personal best or find other ways to mimic pioneers in our self-reliance, it's hard to imagine so much solitude as we once endured. How poignant to say our farewells from the summit by cellphone. To announce deaths and diseases on digital bulletin boards. To never write a letter ever more anon.
And now somehow we're all willing to tell lies to one another if it gets us attention. This all feels like yelling into the void to me, though here I am with my own truth to tell.
Just as sheep will, we let this wave of massive data centers wash over all that is left of open land. We think somehow it might be progress still, and that there might be a Christ-like imposition of wonder and glory at some end or other.
I think it wasn't until the 1600's that Europe learned first-hand of China. We encountered a language that imposed more orthodoxy than even the Latin of the Church. The wealth and power and privilege differentials were of the same grade as we now suffer, although peasantry isn't nearly so unpleasant as it once was, over here or over there.
Will we awaken to God finally as he comes back down to earth? Can we possibly accept that sort of dictatorship? We have been impersonating God - personalizing God - making God in our image and so forth - for so long that some have actually come to believe that the teachings are finished and some of those show no mercy upon those who disagree.
In the race between full understanding by humans of the everything and the all and full submission to the certainty of God's revelations, there is a kind of terminal energy. Both are vacant quests.
In any case, we will awaken, yes, to the impossibility of full understanding. We will awaken to God that is not personal but is the everpresent fact that we cannot know. The fact being that we cannot know everything. And we certainly can't know God.
Which doesn't, however, preclude miracles. Most of what has made me me has nothing to do with my intention or desire or even appetites. Call it random, but there's God in it.
I wondered aloud the other day why anyone would buy a car from Carvana (what a name!). My friend said that he didn't find car-buying to be pleasant, always feeling swindled by someone who holds all the cards and practices his wiles all day long. He understood why someone might want to buy from a machine.
And somehow it's better to buy from a machine that knows exactly how much you're likely to want to pay. Have any studies been done about price variation depending on buyer, controlling for the goods? We think all used car dealers are sociopaths, but a machine is sociopathic by definition. I've had very pleasant encounters with car salespeople. Fellow feeling is not a possibility with machines, which is also true of corporate decision-making. Think how Bill Gates adopted a curated persona as he ruthlessly put others out of business. That was once personal for me.
We once could judge a price. Prices now are meaningless. So much for friction-free capitalism. We've got hucksterism on steroids. Digital pricetags which will change by algorithm, and maybe even according to personal history.
And yet just as we once denied women full admission to a world controlled by men, we still ban emotion from our quest for knowledge. It gets in the way. It distracts us, just as a woman might distract which becomes an excuse for dismissal.
We reject the differing ways of knowing among those not party to the ways of power. We falsely believe that money is a neutral medium of exchange rather than that this supposed neutrality is way to make money a vector of power. In almost the same way that oil is.
The really important development isn't ever-increasing understanding. It's the shift from manufacturinig things to manufacturing money. Raw. It's no accident that the best money-making machines are the ones which are free to use. We are that easy. Please know everything about me. No-one else does.
Meanwhile, I've just finished this great book called Portals to a New Reality, by Vlatko Vedral. He seems accurately to have charted the course for future developments in physics. I'll have to read it again, but sadly he seems to have drawn at least one premature conclusion along his way. He seems to still conclude that we might possibly and eventually understand everything. That's even while his approach to quantum reality, which would mean to incorporate gravity in the theory, implicitly denies the possibliity to know everything.
It's not just that everything's related to everything else. It's more that everything is implicated in everything else, and so there's no longer any position for understanding that's outside of what's being understood. Everything is mind and there's no mind apart.
Quantum entanglement doens't break any rules of instant information at a distance. Rather, it determines aspects of a universe of entanglements, none if which is entirely severable from all the rest. When I say everything is mind, I just mean that there is a conceptual structure to reality which has no physical measure, and which is, therefore, apart from the forces which describe and determine old-fashioned physical reality. God certainly can and also ought to be defined as that aspect of reality which will never be comprehended.
And no matter how much you might want to, you can never make everything your scope. You must choose the domain of your inquiries wisely.
Vedral gets a little silly when he imagines things we might do with quantum knowledge. Like implanting 'chips' which might allow us to "feel" the quantum measurements the chips accomplish. He has what to me is a sympathetic rather than dismissive idea of what emotions are, without daring to realize that emotions are also abroad in the stuff of the cosmos. There is no survival value in hacking emotions, which is what Vedral wants to accomplish by his trick. There's always weird voodoo when people think that it's possible to feel more alive than we do.
We'd do better, of course, by trying to stop from feeling as dead as we're about to feel when machine learning takes over everything. Get out and live is no idle order.
It's hard to leave go of the quest for further knowledge. I would say that it's time to start making choices. We already know enough about reality to start to make choices about our collective existence. Which would mean to start to take responsibility rather than to seek power (over nature, over others, over death and pain).
We can already responsibly define life as a continuum which cannot exist for the benefit of one single species. I'm saying something far more grand than to say that we can't live without our natural environment, though I am saying that as well. But since we're implicated in all of life everywhere in the cosmos, we have to find a way to live with rather than against it.
If you think you make your decisions rationally, you're wrong. Your mind builds associations, but the impetus to decide is always emotional. I still suspect, as I did when I discovered these matters in my relative youth, that gravity makes the intersection. Vedral offers his suspicion that space-time is not physically real. I have to concur. Time is a function of life, and space-time indicates the limits of physical mapping.
Without life, everything runs down. I can't say that I truly understand what Vedral calls q-numbers, but I know I sort-of do. The two of us branch in different directions when considering the twin paradox of relativity. To my mind, in a process of reductio, the twin paradox means essentially that as we diverge in time and space, we cease to be any matter to those we left behind. Getting back in touch becomes a logical impossibility. Emotion is what resolves the paradox. The want to be together is what replaces space-time.
And death loses its sting. No different from moving out of touch while time dilates in the exit. I've experienced that very thing by drowning when my entire life became present to me. I have no real desire to move or to get attention. I do worry about our direction though. It doesn't feel very alive.
