A New Type of Human Being

Political Philosophy
21

I sense a massive amount of jealousy in the replies here - for some reason, there’s tendency to find a target, instead of just discussing concepts. I don’t understand this impulse. It seems something that trades on not really understanding the opposition.
It makes it almost impossible to engage with the person doing it. Now that i’ve said this, to the OP:

I think more than this, the Western experiment proved it is wholly untrue.

That’s right. Ethics, though, are not bound to economy. It is not tour court immoral/unethical to amass wealth. There are intersections of various matters that have to been balanced in a way that actually causes some kind of undue historical ditch to be dug. Which obviously happens - this isn’t at all a denial of the unethical behaviour of unfettered (or, let’s say, socially blind) capitalists. I have, however, spoken to many, many people who amass weath along side a higher-order desire to do things like create jobs, fix mismanaged resource issues locally, influence policy they believe is good for humans not themselves per se and all the rest.
I don’t think the average person has any access to this sorts of analyses and so the average person is probably not in a position to make any worth-while comment on the over-all economic funcitons of society.

The only remaining point is that

It is a parody. Because it is made up. He has never said anything like this, and J_J’s response speaks to my opener. People stuck in their little houses are always going to throw stones at bigger houses.

That doens’t mean things need to change.

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22

That doesn’t sound particularly new to me. Let me share with you how I think ‘new’ will look, where it will come from and what its philosophical ancestry will be. Many believe that the current age of a.i. represents a startlingly new cultural event. One of the assumptions driving this belief is that technology represents the latest and greatest of human inventiveness, the bleeding edge of ideas.

On the contrary, technology always brings up the rear in terms of cultural innovation, lagging behind philosophy, the sciences and the arts. This shouldn’t be surprising considering that technology is applied science and science is applied philosophy. Even as the masses are being given their new toys the leading edge of thought has already moved onto something else.

The people who are the most impressed by, afraid of or angry with today’s a.i.’s are those stuck in the older worldview that a.i’s are expressions of.

Today’s a.i.’s not only don’t represent leading edge of ideas in general, they don’t even represent a revolution within technology. They are the tail end, the final realization of a technological revolution that is already old in the tooth, having emerged in the mid 1970’s with the likes of Steve Jobs. That revolution dovetailed nicely with the hippie counterculture of the 1960’s.

The hippies were for the most part good capitalists , and neo-liberal capitalists at that. Philosophically, their ‘new -agey’ ideas were grounded in 18th century thinking like Spinozist pantheism, sprinkled with a Westernized buddhism.

If you want to know where the next technological and economic system will come from, look to today’s ‘woke’ counterculture, which the right and many of the old left hates, and which draws from different philosophical sources than neo-liberal hippiedom.

Just as Jobs translated hippie values into a new tech hegemony, I beleive we will soon see scruffy 20-something’s emerging out of places like Portland,Seattle and San Francisco, ready to translate pomo critical theory into a new tech revolution in which llm’s give way to radically recursive, self-organizing machines operating according to principles which are no longer strictly compatible with neo-liberalism.

The ethic youre talking about is built into the logic of our machines, and that logic evolves along with the philosophical thinking it is drawn from.

23

I see many of them as locked in a manic death trip. There is a “vacuum” at the center of it. “Colonize Mars.” Why ? This is just more expansion, another frontier. More resources for more babies for more resources for more babies… Now I love resources and babies, but “of course I do.” The filter ensures this. For this “vacuum” is as deep as our DNA. We “cannot think” the end of the runway. We are the creature of the endless runway. The other animals are too, but they can’t come to understand this about themselves.

Of course we can — some of us — temporarily and personally “see” this “manic death trip.” But such a vision remains marginal and parasitic, as a kind of “glitch” in the scheming function, like a moment of sobriety in one who will soon return to the bottle. This “sobriety” is “fatal” and “suppressed” by the “primate directive.” It’s a black flower in the fugitive poetry of pessimism. It gives way to the bitter laughter of the gods, that can pour through mortals as its covers them with forgiving scorn. This is how we might read Nietzsche’s “infinite gallows humor” appropriation of Schopenhauer’s vision of cosmic horror, of the breathflower skinwheel sawblade.

24

I have an interesting question for you.

What if all of this is a natural consequence of the life processes of any species? Look, species continually emerge on Earth that adapt perfectly to their environment, fill it with their population, and ultimately, the very products of their life processes and their very life processes lead to mass extinction. The resulting conditions are perfectly suitable for the next species, which then begins a new cycle.

If you look at it from this perspective, our life isn’t all that special.

We harbor hopes that “intelligent life” hasn’t yet existed here, and this should give us the opportunity to endlessly reproduce the conditions for our own life.

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25

To me it’s all “natural” enough. I’m not fanatically anti-AI. But I am a creature of my time, who lived out my 20s before the internet was the center of the world.

Are you suggesting a case for optimism ? If so, I’m OK with that. Things might turn out better than I currently expect. I am pretty happy with my gallows humor pessimism, so I don’t mean to come off angsty.

As we discussed before, I’m here for the jazz.

26

That is precisely the question I am trying to ask.

In the case of communism and Marxism, the ideology was built upon serious theoretical work. Communists were not naïve romantics—the early communists were intellectuals. Today, however, we are being reassured with promises of a kind of quasi-communism, and I am asking: show me the theoretical works that describe a society in which most people live on universal basic income.

Indeed, to me, people who believe that universal basic income is feasible look far more naïve than the Marxists. And yes, Musk as a philosopher strikes me as a parody.

27

I do not think AI alone is the problem. It is an astonishing tool, but also a double-edged sword. AI makes intelligent people more intelligent and stupid people more stupid. But it also deepens existing asymmetries, continuing the trend of making the poor poorer and the rich richer.

The easiest response is simply to tell people to shut up by dismissing such arguments as jealousy. When people say that there is nothing fundamentally new about AI, that it is merely another technology, and invoke the Luddites, they forget that in the nineteenth century mechanized looms caused prolonged hunger, and that social upheavals and world wars were among the consequences.

28

Jobs was not the originator of the technological revolution. He was simply a good salesman. Several dozen personal computers were being developed around the same time, and without Jobs, someone else would have won out.

AI is not merely a continuation of that revolution but a fundamentally new one. It is even more significant than the internet or the personal computer. We have not seen a technological leap this powerful in a very long time.

29

As you know, I studied the math of neural networks. Beautiful stuff ! And amazing things are already being done with them. So I am not “anti-AI” or dismissive of AI. “Skynet” looks plausible to me.

So it’s my cynicism about the people controlling this technology that I would foreground here.

Does AI make smart people smarter ? Well, perhaps. We can assume that smart people use it well. But perhaps we can go all the way back to Thoth in Phaedrus. A person might become dependent on the tool, so that they become relatively helpless without it. There’s also the risk of hyper-gossip. A few models “determine” the limits of cognition for a vast chunk of the global population. I can imagine a intensification of the usual “presentism.” The absent and the forgotten “do not exist.” The forgetting is itself forgotten.

On the other hand, I am already a “cyborg” because I wear these glasses. This screen and keyboard function for me as a magic carpet, which would be useless if others weren’t sharing this strange digital space with me.

Personally I lean toward the preservation of a wild plurality of perspectives. So I’m reluctant to endorse technology that reduces the “biodiversity” of lived perspectives. I’m not saying at all that AI “must” do this, but it’s the kind of thing that could do this.

30

The issue is obviously not AI itself, but the people who control it—or, more precisely, how it will inevitably be used by those in power.

There is always an asymmetry of control between government officials, businesses, and ordinary citizens or employees. For example, we do not know exactly how the food we eat is made or what it contains. Yet when we apply for a job, we are required to undergo sophisticated tests and are then closely monitored. Upward mobility is, for the most part, always a matter of playing outside the rules—of finding some way to hack the system. AI is the perfect overseer, and it will be used—and is already being used—primarily in that role.

A simpler example concerns business. Small businesses often begin by exploiting obvious gaps or unresolved problems. Two years ago, for instance, I developed simple utilities for analyzing job interviews, tracking calorie intake, and so on. For a while, they worked because SEO still worked. But that quickly came to an end, presumably because Google’s AI learned to recognize automated SEO, while large corporations soon replicated my utilities. As I wrote earlier, the rich became richer, while I earned almost nothing.

One could give many more examples of how this might operate in a Big Brother fashion. I have heard of people in Europe losing their jobs because of their political views—for example, because they were skeptical about supplying weapons to Ukraine. AI-based tools will almost inevitably make such repression automatic.

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31

So we largely agree after all. This is why I focused from the beginning on the character of those in power. I lost my cherry long ago via a brisk horse ride, so I am hopelessly and yet (whilst this machine is to sufficiently to me ) happily-enough cynical.

As you seem to hint, we are faced with an oncoming surveillance system that surpasses the nightmares of libertarians in the 60s, excepting perhaps a few visionaries.

The “new AI human” is … a bland cog in the machinery ? Endorsed after thorough scanning by the departwent of inhuman resources ? Those scanners were themselves scanned.

I recently met an artist ( nice guy ) who though…maybe we should put AI in charge. To deal with human frailty and wickedness. To me this is naive, but I have looked at the math. I’m not up to date on the latest, but I know enough to think it’s a bad idea.

No, sir. What we “need” is a Higher Species from Outer Space that will love and keep us like pets. Cue the civil war among humans. Some want to throw off the alien yoke. Others count us as saved from ourselves. Presumably the “higher species” will gently place the “human freedom fighters” in a clean fuzzy cage for a long time out.

In Lord of the Flies, the boys gone wild are saved by a warship. Our saviors need not be innocent and enlightened, any more than we are as we are nevertheless good “servants” of our cats.

I’m not optimistic ( ? ) enough to expect such a rescue. So it’s a theoretical point.

32

I have no ideas on that score; I simply don’t know. All I can see is an unfamiliar asymmetry. Every previous revolution was first theorized by philosophers, and only later did its time come. Now, however… silence.

There are, admittedly, some vague premonitions reflected in the work of Nick Land and other quasi-literary philosophers, who alternately upload intelligence into machines, transform human bodies, or summon Cthulhu. I regard all these images as premonitions of the nightmare we have yet to live through.

AI is not the direct cause here, but one of the preconditions, alongside others.

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33

I sat down to read Aristotle’s Politics. At first, it was painfully tedious: right from the beginning, he spends a great deal of time discussing whether slavery is an intrinsic part of a slave’s nature or a social construct. I kept mentally rolling my eyes: could Aristotle really not see that there can be no such thing as an essence of slavery, and that it is nothing more than coercion? Why spend dozens of pages spelling all this out?

Then something clicked. Damn—modern capitalism thinks exactly like Aristotle.

Today, the most important thing is “soft skills,” which are essentially nothing more than loyalty and a willingness to submit. And this learned helplessness is treated as an intrinsic quality of the employee rather than as something produced by a particular workplace relationship. In Russia, for example, management or business experience is often considered a red flag. A good employee is expected to show initiative only within the confines of their job role—and to remain helpless outside it.

So much for the naïve and stupid people of antiquity. After 2,500 years, we are still using the very same patterns of thought.

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34

The internet, personal computing, cloud computing, databases, and machine learning all emerged from the same underlying vision, the world as information, computation, networks and probabilistic systems. AI extends this logic, but doesn’t replace it.

The philosophical worldview underlying AI is continuous with the one established by the Information Revolution. This includes Leibniz’s dream of a universal calculus, Humean associationism and statistical regularity, cybernetics and systems theory, information theory and connectionist models of mind.

In that sense, ChatGPT may be to the Information Revolution what the steam locomotive was to the Industrial Revolution, transformative but not a new cultural logic.

The Industrial Revolution expressed a Baconian-Cartesian worldview that thought of nature as object, knowledge as control, mechchanization, predictability. and human mastery.

The information Revolution embodied a different ontology. It was about information over substance, networks over hierarchies, systems over mechanisms, probability over certainty and emrgence over linear causality.

My claim is that current AI doesn’t introduce a third worldview but merely intensifies the second. AI does not yet offer a fundamentally new metaphysics. It still treats intelligence as information processing, learning as pattern extraction, and knowledge as computation. These are the assumptions that have governed the digital age for decades.

So a.i. doesn’t represent a technological leap in terms of its philosophical underpinnings, but that doesn’t mean that it wont be profoundly disruptive in its effects on more traditional segments of culture and their ways of life.

In the 1970’s and ‘80’s, writers like Timothy Leary, Alvin Toffler and Stewart Brand recognized that the digital tech revolution expressed ways of thinking which broke from the older established cultural modes, not just in technology and business but across many other areas of society.

If you look at those today who are making similar claims for the implications of a.i. (Ray Kurzweil,etc), they tend to be those who are buying into the same assumptions, the same worldview which drove the tech revolution of 50 years ago (Leibnitz-Hume-Kant). They, along with today’s tech moguls, rightly see a.i. architectures as expressions of paradigms of organization which easily translate into politico-economic concepts of free market capitalism, neo-liberalism and technocracy.

If you listen instead to those thinkers whose ideas have been influenced by figures like Hegel, the Pragmatists, hermeneutics-phenomenology and Wittgenstein, you’ll find people who see through the hype. For instance, Evan Thompson writes:

The map does not know the way home, and the abacus is not clever at arithmetic. It takes knowledge to devise and use such models, but the models themselves have no knowledge. Not because they are ignorant, but because they are models: that is to say, tools.’They do not navi-gate or calculate, and neither do they have destinations to reach or debts to pay. Humans use them for these epistemic pur-poses. LLMs have more in common with the map or abacus than with the people who design and use them as instruments. It is the tool creator and user, not the tool, who has knowledge…

We said above that LLMs do not perform any tasks of their own, they perform our tasks. It would be better to say that they do not really do anything at all. Hence the third leap: treating LLMs as agents. However, since LLMs are not agents, let alone epistemic ones, they are in no position to do or know anything.

True technological revolutions express paradigm shifts in philosophical worldviews. Today’s tech engineers, ceo’s and media cheerleaders are drawing from the same moldy-oldy worldview which was fresh 50 years ago and reaching its final stage or its ultimate realization today.Whats new aren’t the ideas embedded in today’s but the hegemonic reach it makes possible for the old ideas. Heidegger warned that technological thinking was producing a transformation of the human being and culture as a whole into ‘standing reserve’ to be utilized for programmed ends.

His point concerned not what the technology itself was doing but how we were understanding it, and ourselves through it.

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35

I believe that the heads of companies developing AI, as well as the engineers implementing language models, do not fully understand what they have created. In essence, artificial intelligence was discovered rather than invented. It is based neither on the Turing machine nor on the von Neumann architecture. The modern computer is merely a substrate for artificial intelligence. It is entirely possible that future models will be implemented using biological substrates—for example, nerve cells grown in a Petri dish.

Philosophically, artificial intelligence is closer to postmodernism. Another name for language models might be the Saussure machine. Artificial intelligence has more in common with linguists and philosophers than with programmers and mathematicians, even though it was programmers who made it a reality.

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36

How would you explain how it can be that a product whose architecture is based on specific philosophical and scientific concepts, and is rebuilt on a regular basis as the inventors’ concepts are updated, can suddenly leap past those grounding concepts into the land of postmodern thought, or Saussurian structuralism, which is a ways away from postmodern philosophy? Isnt that like claiming a fish can evolve into a dog without a modification in the genomic blueprint?

What evidence is there that a human-created device has ever reconfigured its material and conceptual blueprint beyond the limits of those who designed it?

37

If you consider my speculative theory—that everything goes extinct sooner or later (including our species)—to be optimism, then I suppose it is.

In reality, it’s more like Stoicism: since we’re doomed anyway, why get too upset about it? =))

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38

This is actually quite a common situation. It often happens in medicine, for example: a drug works, but the reason why remains unknown. The same is true of AI. The results are unexpectedly good for an algorithm that, at least in theory, should not work nearly as well as it does.

39

Ok, I thought you might have meant something in that direction.

I am 100% with you on this. Stoicism, ironism, skepticism, epicureanism, pragmatism. I like to mix a cocktail.

We charge the machine guns with a song on our teeth. Life is beautiful. Life is obscene. Life is ecstasy. Life is horror. Life is clean and unclean. Any visit is vanity. But vanity is vapor, is breath. “All is breath” sprayeth the preacher. “Another one writes the dust.” Coins from a vaseline saxophone. Snot from a plastic trumpet. Tonight fell off his horse. Now Mr. Felix Culpa will perform the hit jingle “Of All From Grays.”

The sorry of the going of believing. And so and and so and, for these our believing less eyes. “The moral of the gory is floral.” A telegram flab sit swings. The creek is having it sway. Thus beaks Cryglorff, an owl from the forth to mention.

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40

I suppose the Netherlands combines Capitalism with Socialism, just as the United States does. Google says the base rate in Dutchland is 35.70%, and the top rate is 49.50% ; to make sure no-one pays more than half his income in tax.

Google also estimates that in 2005, Donald Trump "paid roughly $38 million on an income of about $150 million, making for an effective tax rate of about 25%." Before I retired, my typical tax rate was about 24%, on income of about $40,000. So that’s a pretty wide range for a “progressive” tax system. And I must have been in the same tax bracket as Trump.

To be fair though, I also benefited from the covert socialist elements of our governmental redistribution. Since I spent 4 years in the military, I now (retired) get free medical care from the Veteran’s Administration. And members of Congress, mostly wealthy, get free medical care from a special system. The US also has a variety of other Social Services (e.g. Food Cards) that cater mostly to poor people. The rich are left alone to pay their own way in life.

In the near future, a new type of human may emerge that depends almost entirely on artificial intelligence & cyborgs to manage their daily affairs. I doubt that Marx looked that far ahead, to a time when only robots work in “dark satanic factories” (Blake), and most office work is done by computers. The 2008 movie Wall-E, depicted future humans as fat & flabby, unemployed, lounge-layabout refugees from devastated Earth, but living in space-faring cruise ships, where their every whim is catered to by artificial beings. Is that the future New Human of extreme Socialism? :winking_face_with_tongue: