Humanism meets the AI god!

Only Conspiracy
Nov 4 · 8 min read

The future is a fickle thing to predict. It is one thing to predict something and another to feel it coming in a gut wrenching way.

It is not up to us to choose the future, as that has already been chosen by the environment we find ourselves in. We can no longer ignore the death march to nuclear annihilation that the world finds itself doing.

One such developing and inevitable trend is machine learning. In this post, I’m not going to cry wolf over the possibility of super AI (way smarter than humans) emerging, earlier than expected. I’m not even talking about general AI (as smart as humans), which too is quite capable of causing existential threat to humans.

Rather, I’m more fascinated by the growth of specialised AI that allows us to build intelligent systems that are capable of doing specific tasks such as driving cars, buying stocks, etc. We will focus on the changes in human interaction as a result of it.

Humans are no longer the smartest creatures when it comes to strategy, planning and decision making. There are algorithms that have beaten us at chess, other games and even predicting how stocks will perform. These specialised algorithms are making their mark in tactical decision making and would soon be replacing humans in strategic planning.

This much is almost inevitable, such that our imaginations do not have to run wild before we can envision it. A brief reading on the topic will tell you exactly how closer we are to totally autonomous battle tactician. Same can be said about laws, policies and socio political situation in the world.

We all hated Facebook and YouTube when they began deciding our news and content feeds for us. There was outrage. Then there was Trump tweet and we all moved along to outrage about something else. The result is clear, nothing changed. Our feeds are still decided by learning algorithms. We have come to accept it and try to even rig it in our favor. You will see videos after videos on YouTube showing just how to game those algorithms.

What does this mean for all of us?

It simply entails that we have accustomed ourselves to the new status quo. This is not without it’s positive effects. Those very algorithms are protecting the drivers in self-driven car and will reduce the probability of accidents happening due to drunk driving. Machine learning algorithms are all about optimization. It ensures resource optimization, making life better at all levels of human experience, hopefully.

Consequently, the AI will earn the trust of people, as it benefits will outweigh the negatives. It’s result will definitely be measurably better than the policies created by human lawmakers, primarily because those lawmakers tend to create law by negotiating the deal between the opposing parties, but only among the powerful stakeholders. As for powerless, lawmakers never could do anything for them. I believe it is these powerful stakeholders, who will vehemently oppose the replacement of lawmakers with the algorithms, for creating and implementing policies. Even if it be a losing battle, like that took place between monarchy and democracy.

A little detour

During the Renaissance period, a great many thinkers came up with ideas that led to the general acceptance of ideals such as democracy, equality, liberalism, libertarianism and so on. It was supplanted by scientific discoveries, which kept hitting the nail on the coffin of religion. Together with such advances, it was possible to create a modern age based on reason. Although, we did take a step backwards in the post modernist times. But general trend, fortunately, seems to be in favor of reason.

Ever since time immemorial, the biggest argument in favor of the existence of God was the lack of explanation for existence and complexity of the natural world. It still is to some extent, known to many as “God of the gaps” argument. But none of this was possible before Charles Darwin propounded his theory of natural selection and made evolution a household concept.

Evolution killed the argument by ignorance that suggested that all species were created. There was a biological process that led to the origin of innumerable species, rather than a conscious act of God. For the first time there was a way to explain how we came to be. “How” alone was good enough to give the arsenal to those who were opposed to the grip of church on all things important.

Nietzsche, being the brilliant philosopher he was, concluded in 19th century that atheism was a rational outlook and explained why we humans invented God. He proposed that morality must be grounded in something that is beyond good and evil. It gave rise to the trend of viewing morality as a subjective concept that humans engage in and define over time.

Immanuel Kant, another brilliant thinker, introduced morality as fundamental to humanity and reasoned that it can be objectively derived from first principles. Unlike Nietzche, Kant argued that humans are unique in their environment as they have consciousness and that in itself is the primary reason to perceive humanity as central to any ideals that we may decide to live by.

These subjective discussions of morality were not new, but it effectively divorced morality from religion. From this perspective, value judgements became a human prerogative rather than defined by the word of God or some belief in the supernatural.

Psychology played an even bigger part in removing the supernatural from the daily life of individuals. Sigmund Freud showed the overwhelming control of subconscious on mind and argued that we are but the outcome of our childhood traumas.

It was realized that the reason was slave to feelings and hence how you feel dictates how you will behave. The spiritual experiences were reinterpreted as either mental illness or drug induced hallucinations.

Humanism came about as a result of all these ideas merging together, to give every individual their rights. It does not require a specific deity to look towards for meaning. Each individual is its own creator of meaning, while at the same time the community of these individuals have the right and moral authority to call something right or wrong.

However, all of it requires the fundamental sovereignty of human soul or whatever that makes us humans and separates us from all other species on the planet. Because, there is nothing universal beyond it to fall back on.

Everyone agrees that human rights are fundamental and religious freedom is a result of that. Not the other way around.

The demise of Humanism as we know it.

The concept that all humans are intrinsically equal by virtue of being born as a human, was the central foundation of humanism. Of course, some are more equal than others due to the environment they are born it and we concede that there is an inherent inequality in the way the world works. This inequality is a systemic problem that the left liberals are outraged about. Everything they do, emanates from this systemic problem.

The right tend to discount that inherent inequality and suggest that we accept the world as is and work to improve our situation. The primary contention is whether you accept the inherent systemic inequality or you don’t. There cannot be a solution, because we cannot change all the environments to conform to a certain standard at the same time.

Even if we do set up a system that removes such inequalities, then we find that the humans responsible for those systems become corrupt and tilt the system in their favour. This natural human corruption was for the most part why the system of communism collapsed.

More policies to mitigate issues from previous policies are not solution as those policy implementers suffer from the very same corruption. We cannot root out the human greed, but we can contain it. By making sure that no such opportunity arises.

How do we make sure we control corrupt implementation of policies?

We outsource it. We allow a system that is incapable of errors or corruption to take care of such decisions. A decision making algorithm. It also must be capable of learning, otherwise we will have system being gamed again by those who identify the weakness in that algorithm. The patch to remove such exploits should also be generated much quickly before harm comes to be.

Are we seeing this? Yes we are. We are seeing this in our social media feeds like I discussed earlier. We allow algorithms to manage our feeds because humans started acting like partisans. Similarly, we also see that play out in loan systems and cyber security. Where we use machine learning techniques to allow a loan or perform authorisation and at the same time, allow learning algorithms to patch themselves to identify new form of credit fraud as well as cyber exploits. Spam management is working the same way right under our noses.

The only problem is that we don’t know how these decisions will affect us. Following is the video where the AI surprised the research with its out of the box decision making capabilities.

These act as the factors of uncertainties. Our plan is to convert as much of these uncertainties as possible, into tractable problems. Then we can reason about the possible decision making that underwent any action. Whenever that happens, we will be confident that we are ready to let it out in the world to be free.

As an aside: A brief note on genetics

The current trend of gene splicing to make humans greater than humans is another factor that must be considered.

However, as long as we remain part of the animal kingdom and the world remains natural, pareto principle suggests that all the best forms of genetic manipulation will only be enjoyed the elite.

Harari speaks of these people as the superior races. This factor adds another tangent that we will be covered in another post. For the sake of readability, let us stick only to AI.

Worshipping the AI

Humans came to understand that the power of nature is so much stronger than them and so much detrimental to their existence that they ended up worshipping them as some sort of godly pantheon.

When we replace a lot of decision making to these specialized algorithms, it is likely that we will change our behavior to earn the favour of these algorithms.

That is what religion supposedly does to us, changes our behaviors to appease some real force or non real ones.

As more and more humans change their behavior to earn these favors, more exponentially these effects will spread.

Their spread will be to the point where it will be a norm to live by the rules, norms, morality or ethics dictated by these algorithms.

Even if we consider the happy scenario, where AI does as we expect it to, it will inevitably end up becoming the top of the hierarchy of the human conscious.

When that happens, we will no longer be seeing humanistic ideals as we are currently accustomed to. We will see it as a faulty theology that needs to be suppressed as one of its basic axioms of human centeredness will no longer be applicable.

The point of absolute morality will rear its head and this time again, it will be a non human, even if it is natural. That is what worshipping is all about.


Originally published at http://trickstertheories.wordpress.com on November 4, 2019.

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