Clarification is our only hope

Mike Meyer
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read

Time does march on but I did stumble back to this discussion. As always the responses add much to the discussion so I’m responding a bit to the main response and the responses to that. Our subjective reality is increasingly complex and three dimensional.

Who decided this?

John Hopkins questioning of who made the decisions about AI and our management future, that took up several points to my original essay, all I can say it you must have been out that day and missed the vote. For that matter so did I and everyone else. This is a very serious issue that needs to be understood as part of the process of change in our emerging social order. And that underlies much of what I am struggling to understand. I have to do a little history here to lay this out.

Our tradition of struggling against choices and directions in our societies came to be focused in forms of rebellion. The standard points of contention have been unchanged since the rise of civilizations some 10k plus years ago. Taxes, food, military exploits, and acceptable diversity pretty much sum up the real issues until the last roughly 200 years. Most people still have trouble getting past these traditional issues as these things are long tied to simple emotions such as fear and hope. Periodic fascistic reaction, e.g. the GOP in the US and Trump, play to these. We’ve tended to over emphasize the fear part and underestimated the hope part that is consistent presented as going out and kicking someone’s ass to take their stuff. While that is still tried it does not work at all well anymore but lots of people don’t think so they get suckered still.

The patterns of rebellion have been reaction to extreme exploitation of resources or time (military actions take people and time and so do taxed resources). The action to change is the replacement of the people in charge who then do something else or simply stop doing whatever was taking too much of people’s resources. That’s all that really matters. Religion is the exception but that is simply a disease and may yet kill us. It doesn’t appear to be curable.

In the last five hundred years we have made increasingly complex changes that were not directly related to the above issues. Our political traditions are limited to food, time, and military/security issues. The simple reality is people will accept risk if they think there is a real change to get more for themselves and will eliminate administrators/rulers who try to take away too much. That is the road to revolution or the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. What we’re dealing with is not that simple and most of the old simple things are not even relevant anymore unless you are trying to play a zero sum game, e.g. again the party system in the US.

Everything that matters now is too complex and is not even decided by the old governmental structure. They may facilitate or delay it but they don’t decide it. No one voted on industrialization. No one voted on the Internet, now the planetary virtual society. No one voted on automation of everything that could be automated as it was decided by market choices. And that is not a capitalist thing but just he way human society works. In groups we may decisions on things that seem to work and that used to be on things like festivals, building a new house for the chief, etc. Now we live and work at a much higher level and choices have great implications. Where the market is enshrined as divine (late stage hypercapitalism) most everything is taken out of the formal decision process and handed to the people who control most of the economy. Where the market is understood to be a useful and pragmatic way to let many decisions be made on production while retaining public input to manage it, there is more chance for formalized decisions on bigger issues. We don't have that in this country so the decision was long since made to automate everything and implement AI as the means of administration by a series of unregulated corporations. This is being done by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Ford, etc. The US is the extreme, and failing, example of hypercapitalism and the market as divine. I was simple reporting what the market has decided through the priests of the great corporations.

The illusionary self

Yes, I was less than clear on this and created a contradiction by attributing both problems and solutions to actions of an illusionary self. Touché. The self is illusionary and far less involved in choice than we wish to believe. We do act on what we think whether or not that is free in some complete sense. This was in the context of our inability to deal with nonlinear complex systems and the need to accept AI as the only available solution to our inherent biological limitations. That is the essence of what I am saying and have been saying for almost three years. Not wanting it to be that way is not an argument against it but a refusal to deal with that limitation. You can certainly say that is not true but the consistency of human failure in the face of AI already, I think, simply goes around you there. Our choice, in my opinion, is to accept the complexity of the situation we are in and that it is beyond our ken (as they use to say) but it is not beyond the ken of our newest devices. Again, the reality is there like it or not, and our only choice is to try to block the only route to survival open to us or to go down with the planet. We really only have about one hundred years to make it and thinking good thoughts is not going to do anything. As the natural disasters increase we risk being too late to do much of anything and will then have to accept our fate. No.

On the specific issues of technology not being what I am saying you are again in the realm of wishful thinking. I’m wishful in saying we may make it with AI and augmentation but definitely won’t without it. And data in now increasingly gathered directly by AI system (machine learning). You are partially correct as the now recognized critical problem is the human creation of the base algorithms that can and do corrupt the data with false assumptions, e.g. racism, ethnocentrism. This needs ultimate human management but is already beyond our means. This is our biggest challenge.

The discussion of the self as a map and the analogy of maps that are themselve analogies is more than I want to get into right now.

The point is that we are not hopeless. In fact we are on the edge of the next stage of planetary existence but it is definitely not Kansas anymore, Toto.

TheOtherLeft

Mike Meyer

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Educator, CIO, retired entrepreneur, grandfather with occasional fits of humor in the midst of disaster. . .

TheOtherLeft

Exploring change past, present, and future . . .

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