A relation last night talked about believers’ weak arguments for the existence of God.
“Look around,” they say.
I looked around the kitchen — from floor to ceiling to the clothes we wore — and said, “Everywhere I look, I see corporation.”
It’s the earth-threatening legal critter we invented, thought was cool at the time, and haven’t noticed is threatening to destroy the planet. It is lobbying really, really hard to stop us from stopping it.
But maybe coprorations fueled by AI (artificial intelligence) will destroy humanity before we jointly destroy the planet. It’s not just the external world being changed, but our interior landscapes, says Ayad Akhtar at The Atlantic:
Something unnatural is afoot. Our affinities are increasingly no longer our own, but rather are selected for us for the purpose of automated economic gain. The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry. It is a late chapter of a larger story, about the deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals. This technology is no longer just shaping the world around us, but actively remaking us from within.
It’s a partnership made in hell, reducing our every action, every interaction, our every waking moment to digital information for making humans more suitable to mercantile interests. And it is as invisible to the naked eye as the corporations behind every floor tile, cabinet, plate, appliance, table and chairs in that kitchen.
Merchants of attention have learned that nothing adheres us to their traps like emotion, and that some emotions are stickier than others. The new and alluring, the surpassingly cute. The frenzied thrill at the prospect of conflict or violence. The misfortune of others. Perhaps most emblematically, the expression of our anger, rightful or hateful. All of this lights up a part of our brain that will not release us from its tyranny. Our fingertips seek it. To say that we are addicts does not capture the magnitude of what is happening.
What works best to keep you clicking, revealing your needs and desires to the AI? You know already.
Nothing quite does it like outrage. Moral outrage. Those we know are right to hate; those we love because we are united together against those we know are right to hate. This is the logic behind the viral campaigns leading to the slaughter of Rohingya in Myanmar. And the logic of the increasingly truculent divide between right and left in America today. Driven by engagement and the profit that it generates, each side drifts further and further from the other, the space between us growing only more charged, only richer with opportunity for monetization. The cultural clash in America today has more electrical engineering behind it than we realize.
For more than a generation, science-fiction writers and aficionados have speculated about the possibility and imminence of the singularity—that is, the moment when AI will finally eclipse human intelligence. To many, it’s meant the robot capable of thinking, and with an intellect surpassing our own. Let me suggest that digital problem-solving has already surpassed human capacity. Indeed, our advanced societies are now being ordered by a digital matrix of data collection, pattern recognition, and decision making that we cannot even begin to fathom—and that is happening every single successive millisecond. The synergy of data technology, computer-processing speeds and capacity, and an almost frictionless interconnectivity—all of this enables exchange; delivery of services; production of goods; growth of capital; and, most centrally, the endless catalog of our every interface, however glancing, however indirect, with this system’s sprawling and ubiquitous apparatus. The singularity is here—we could call it the era of automation—and its inescapable imprint on our inner lives is already apparent.
For far more than a generation, as I noted years ago:
The classic formulation of that warning comes from a one-page, short story by Fredric Brown, titled “Answer,” from Angels and Spaceships (1954). After finally networking computers from ninety-six billion planets, the lead scientist puts the first question to the new supercomputer: “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
Around the coffee urn at the NSA, they must think, “How cool is that?
The creature has no soul, no conscience. Only appetite and instinct. And already it is running us.