Pearls and Irritations

Fakes, deep fakes, disinformation, lies and rumours pollute the internet, the legacy media and conversations. Some of these are not new, but their power is growing. Now we have a new contender, so-called artificial intelligence, interfering in our human experience, and the technutters proudly claim it will get a million times worse within a decade or two. We are degrading an essence of our humanity. Can we have any conception of what that might do to us?

I have grandchildren, and they are a joy. They delight with their liveliness, their driving curiosity, their enthusiasm, their creativity with language. Sadly all children as they grow have to learn to deal with the larger world that, for a long time, has involved deception, lies, and power over others. Most of us, as we grow, retain some of our childhood purity. We stay mostly with the truth, though self-delusion is common enough. We believe that truth is essential, even as we know it is often displaced by omissions and lies.

Even so, a great deal of harm has resulted in a “civilised” world, that for centuries has had its information distorted by media, and for millennia has been misled by self-interested rulers. For all our claims to value truth over lies, a measure of faith is required to maintain that the truth will always out.

The balance of truth versus lies is now shifting. The lies are gaining more power. They are likely to gain so much power we may struggle even to know what truth is. This is not just about politics. It is about the essence of who we are, the essence of what makes us human. We are social. We communicate. We share and accumulate knowledge. We are still intimately connected with the natural living world.

We are a highly social species. The evidence is clear and strong every time we speak. If we were hermit creatures like orangutans, we would have little need for language. Even other highly social mammals like chimpanzees and dolphins don’t have our kind of language, though they have large behavioural repertoires, including calls and exclamations, that support their social groupings.

The kind of complex language we humans have says we are even more social than others. We can share a lot more of what we feel and think. We do so even though we are also individualistic: we need a level of autonomy over our own lives. Human beings’ social nature involves a continuous and complex balancing of individuals and the group, and our sophisticated ability with language is very important in working that balancing out.

By the way this balancing of individual and group, of me and us, is completely missed by the simplistic ideologies of the 20th century, communism and neoliberalism. That is why they are both disastrous failures.

So now we have the exciting arrival of “artificial intelligence” sophisticated enough that it reportedly can supply us with news items, business reports, speeches, music, art works, essays and so on that are hard to tell from authentic products of actual human beings.

A lot of it is being deliberately fed into the internet, it is said, so already it is hard to tell what is true and what is manufactured. Fraudulent scientific papers are said now to comprise perhaps 5% of published works. Science, discovery, will be suffocated by works of fiction intended merely to get someone a promotion.

This stuff is not as “creative” as the technutters might have us believe. It is sophisticated copying. It might impress or even delight us, but we need to be clear it would not have written the first movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, which sounds like nothing before or since, nor Schubert’s impromptus, which are astonishingly diverse, just for example.

If we hand over so much of our activity to machines, what sort of lives will we live? Will be become passive spectators in our own lives. Couch potatoes on steroids?

Even the fund of human knowledge is threatened. Universities, already staggering under the decades-long oxymoronic assaults of neoliberalism and managerialism, are now finding that large proportions of work handed in by students are rather obviously produced by AI programs. Students who are barely functional in English are submitting works written in excellent standard English. Universities are close to ceasing to be the guardians of knowledge, enjoined to preserve, add to and pass on the vast fund of knowledge accumulated by human beings. They are, in other words, close to collapsing.

That our world might fill up with plausible-sounding hack work is a problem, but it is still not the deepest problem. Nor is being passive spectators of our lives.

What will become of us when one of our deepest and defining characteristics, our communication through language, is severely polluted? When we don’t know if we are engaging with a real person or some ghost person, avatar, or deep fake? It is hard to see how our large societies can survive.

They will be prone to disintegrate, as we revert to dealing only with those we can see, and trust, to be human beings, real people. Perhaps that would not be a bad thing, ultimately, but the disintegration of large societies is not likely to be pleasant, because those presently powerful would not like to see their power evaporating.

But now the techies are telling us that quantum computing is really coming, within a decade or two, and it will be 100 million times faster than present computers. Some of these nutters want to directly interface our, or their, brains directly with quantum computers, and look to the day when such hybrids take over the world, the next grand stage in evolution, supposedly.

I have not heard anyone explain how the entities that supersede people will gain their sustenance. Perhaps they will enslave people to provide for them, that’s a well-tried path. Perhaps they will be abiotic, and not need the miraculous living biosphere that they inherit, but they might discover that much of what they need still comes from the biosphere that their progenitors ignored.

If quantum artificial “intelligence” can be done then it will be done, as our human societies are presently structured. It will be promoted by the self-interested. If someone can see a way to make a buck out of it, then they will want it, and they will find a ready supply of myopic techies to create it for them. Our human world demonstrates over and over that some people will pursue profit, and its consequent power, regardless of who gets hurt, or murdered, and how much the planet might degrade and kill most of us.

I can’t begin to imagine what that world of pervasive hacks and hybrids would be like. I do know that it would have very little of what delights me about my grandchildren – their play, their creativity, their spontaneous affection, their own delight at mastering another human skill that is the product of thousands of generations of people learning how to be human beings. I am not alone in my scepticism. Famous Japanese movie animator Hayao Miyazaki thinks “AI is an insult to life itself”.

The tech world is oblivious to the foundations of our being. We are, still, intimately and intricately a part of the organic biosphere that embraces this miracle planet of ours. All the food we eat, the water we drink, the oxygen we breathe comes to us from or through other organisms. We have co-evolved with every other living thing.

Our future is not on Mars, or in space capsules, or in tech dystopias that pretend we are separate from the biosphere. Our future is within the biosphere. If it sickens, we will sicken. If it dies, we will die.

Promoters of the next wave of technology always rabbit on about the phenomenal benefits it will bring to humanity, speaking in vague generalities and oblivious to the drastic failures of the last wave to get anywhere near what was promised. The internet has not turned out to be a benign medium creating a peaceful global village of well-informed and self-assured people.

Here is a simple truth that needs to be spelt out: we don’t actually need any new technology. Radical and shocking as that statement might be, it is rather obviously true. We can live very well with what we know already. In fact, we already have so much power over the world we are wrecking it. We need to pull back. 

We will reduce our problems if we focus instead on getting along with each other, and with the living world that is our life support system.

The old wisdoms still apply, though we have grossly neglected them for 6,000 years of so-called civilisation. Our great challenge could be to learn to harmonise ourselves with the living world even as we might live in large societies of some form, using those technologies that help and letting go the ones that do not.

Artificial intelligence is not what is pretends to be. It is artificial cleverness. It lacks artificial wisdom. Nor is it a viable reproductive form. It is a parasite likely to destroy its host.

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