Kara Swisher: Keeping tech honest
This reminded me of our Singularity meeting. Talking about platforms like Facebook she wonders why they didn’t build social responsibility into it. This is partly because the techies don’t understand much outside of their specialty, like the humanities (see 4c), thereby not having a sense of how their tech impacts the broader world. They assume that somehow the tech will magically solve these broader problems, but Facebook has proven beyond doubt that they do not, instead exacerbating them. And ultimately it seems to boil down to an adolescent boy’s emotional quotient (EQ).
Concerning the goal of immortality: “Many people are likely to dismiss such statements as teenage fantasies.” Home Deus, p. 24. The discussion following that quote assumes capitalism is inevitable as motive for progress to end death. Yet earlier he notes that climate catastrophes are a consequence of our human foibles. Tech itself is not going to change our motives and socio-economic systems, which currently are leading to mass deaths and soon.
And in response to the main article on a lack of the humanities to constrain such tech fantasies, Homo Deus notes that when immortality is a likely possibility we “will refuse to go on pulling the rickety wagon of art, ideology and religion” (p. 28). That reinforces the main article’s point.
The section on happiness in chapter 1 reiterates that what makes us happy is a never ending spiral of increasing growth of the things that make us happy. It’s reductionistic capitalism 101, that our only concerns for happiness are things that trigger our ancient urges. It even suggests that we can “forget economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions,” as we just need a feel good buzz. Gone are the hierarchy of the higher needs that also make us happy and have little to do with this buzz. I know, some of you will say things like compassion and universal… Read more »
If we end up with engineered inorganic or hybrid internally integrated (cyborg) systems that can significantly mitigate the negative aspects of our evolved biases and tendencies, might we be able to boost our center of gravity up Maslow’s hierarchy? The first path (engineered external systems) would leave us as legacy (evolved) animals but turn over governance to AIs that would keep our social dominance drives in check. The second path (what Hariri called ‘technohumanism’) would internalize that governance through neuroprostheses.
Now near the end of this section he does discuss the Buddhist approach, which teaches one to recognize this never ending quest for pleasure and to temper it. But then he just accepts that we should keep feeding the “capitalistic juggernaut” and solve the problem with drugs to keep the symptoms perpetually satisfied. I mean really, WTF?
And concerning happiness, see the World Happiness Report to see which countries are the happiest and what factors makes them so. The goals of the humanities and political economies are the key factors that do so, not chemical manipulation or perverse ego-driven capitalism.
In the section on attaining godhood, on the one hand we are reengineering our minds and bodies yet still retaining “our foibles, kinks and limitations” where we can “destroy on a much greater scale” (41). How godlike.
In the section on hitting the brakes he assumes that our economy will collapse without unlimited growth and rightly connects that taken-for-granted assumption with capitalism. And yet there is an alternative to this mindset and economic system that creates sustainability and resilience, not collapse. Hasn’t this guy heard of ecology yet. He also claims that we don’t even know where the brakes are, as it’s difficult to keep up with let alone coordinate the various domains of knowledge. But that is exactly the job of social scientists, humanitarians, philosophers, ecologists and interdisciplinary generalists to get this big picture and put… Read more »
😉 I agree there are clearly viable alternatives to malignant capitalism. As ever, we crash on the reef of human nature. Perpetual growth mindset hosts the parasite of perpetually increasing power/wealth inequality (and its negative byproducts) not because ongoing growth is inherently bad (intelligence has a whole universe to expand into) but because our evolved nature ever pulls us back into the old perceptions and behaviors. This won’t change until we change ourselves. Unamended humans are never going to choose a sustainable, more egalitarian global way of being. Was it Einstein who said you can’t solve problems with the same… Read more »
In chapter 2 I appreciated the discussion of how humans are like animals, in the we both have emotional algorithms running most of our activity. And how these programs were ingrained through natural selection for survival. Therefore our treatment of animals for food production is inhumane. This started with agriculture in that God and man were the main players and the rest was our stage. This was further exacerbated by industrial agriculture. I appreciated the connections between the means of obtaining food and resources with the eras of human knowledge development. Hunter-gatherer with animism; agricultural with god(s) mythology; modern industrial… Read more »
In Chapter 3 he comments on Dehaene’s work but doesn’t see it as explaining consciousness; it’s just neurons and chemicals talking to each other without any subjective experience. Dehaene’s latest paper makes clear consciousness is linked to subjective experience. However he is correct that in that paper Dehaene also concludes: “The empirical evidence is compatible with the possibility that consciousness arises from nothing more than specific computations.” Thompson, however, sees the subjective experience of consciousness as irreducible to specific brain computation and more to do with its enactive, embedded, extended and embodied interaction with culture and the environment. Damasio makes… Read more »
Chapter 4 focuses on our shared and imagined stories. They are necessary to provide bonding in larger groups, creating mythological ideals for which we strive. But again, such shared and imagined stories are part and parcel of abstract consciousness, itself one step removed from concrete reality like the myths it creates. But these abstract fictions have to have some tie to the realities they represent lest them become divorced from them. Hence the most effective stories are a mix of fact and fiction. And yet history is littered with stories that are pure fiction used to manipulate the masses to… Read more »
Chapter 5 claims that science will only strengthen our myths. Now science will actually start to create a deity-like superman who can defeat death itself. So we need to especially be careful about the mythology with which we surround our technical feats. He defines religion as anything that which provides a social bonding function. It must also confer superhuman legitimacy to humanity’s creations. This also includes how we frame natural law as beyond human capacity and that we discover. Again, it is we collectively that create a myth about what constitutes the natural, which might or not have some actual,… Read more »
I’ll turn to my chapter by chapter commentary shortly. But first here’s a video by an AI developer called “How AI can save our humanity.” AI can liberate us by doing the routine jobs, thus liberating us to pursue human values like love and compassion, which AI lacks. It thus frees us to spend our time developing our humanity instead of our zombanality. After reading chapter 6 of the book, which tears down our humanity, I’m doubting the book will go in this direction. We’ll see.
http://integralpostmetaphysicalnonduality.blogspot.com/2018/08/how-ai-can-save-humanity.html
Chapter 8: He claims science is disproving that we have a single, indivisible self and thus no free will. But he’s using the debunked research of Libet and his successors as proof. And this as evidence that our entire humanistic tradition, which he claims presupposes this self with free will, is thereby a pipe dream like gods. We are automatons guided entirely by chemicals, neurons and natural selection with no intentional direction whatsoever, the latter part of that illusion. Tech can replace humanism because we can simulate any and all of its achievements with chemical and mechanical manipulation. We can… Read more »
Another interlude: UN scientific paper says capitalism has to die.
I posted chapter 8 our of sequence above. Back to chapter 6: The modern deal: Humans agree to give up meaning for power. Life has no cosmic plan, no meaning. Science assures us nature is a blind process, natural selection. This frees us to act without resort to a higher plan; we create it. In this is power, our power, to create. Scientific progress and economic growth in alliance. Evolution was stagnant and economies were in equilibrium, but with modernity things had to grow. Growth assumes that we need to consume more for a happier life, and that growth is… Read more »
Chapter 7: So capitalism’s greed was rescued by humanism? Therein humans take responsibility for what used to be the province of God. We create our own meaning for the the ways of the world. Meaning goes with the authority to determine all lives. And yet it’s supposed to be about individuals deciding their own meaning? If it feels good then do it? W assume free choice, that people should decide not just for themselves but for society when they vote, their feelings their guide. It assumes we have some inner guide that is true. Free will reigns. He equates this… Read more »
Chapter 9. So liberal humanism will be eliminated because humans lose their economic and military usefulness; humans are valued collectively, not individually; except superhuman individuals will be valued and lead us unto salvation. AI and machine tech can now for the most part do the work individuals used to do. We still need a few of them around to do the tech and super soldier work, for now. He’s granting that humans have consciousness as it was necessary for highly intelligent activity. But AI does not, won’t anytime soon and doesn’t need it for the same intelligent activities. So human… Read more »
Interlude: “Why the rich love Burning Man.” Quite the indictment of the Silicon Valley masters of reality: “The top-down, do what you want, radically express yourself and fuck everyone else worldview is precisely why Burning Man is so appealing to the Silicon Valley technocratic scions. To these young tech workers — mostly white, mostly men — who flock to the festival, Burning Man reinforces and fosters the idea that they can remake the world without anyone else’s input. It’s a rabid libertarian fantasy. It fluffs their egos and tells them that they have the power and right to make society… Read more »
Chapter 10 is on techno-humanism, trying to retain some semblance of the humanist project while we update humanity with tech. One of those upgrades is expanding our mental states, which now assumes those conscious states as a given. He claims that our science has only studied subnormal and normal, white, educated mental states. Not true, as our current neuroscience has investigated numerous meditative states beyond normal comprehension from other cultures, so we indeed have a bigger map from which to explore and expand. While declaiming any true authentic self will he admits that we are all influenced by a global… Read more »
Chapter 11 is on the new scientific religion of dataism. Everything can be reduced to mathematical algorithms. Hence AI electronic algorithms can handle much more data faster so therefore it is the epitome of this religion, in essence godlike. The Internet of All things is supreme, the free flow of information is its Bible. We just need to give up our humanity and let it decide everything for us. Part of what makes it superior is that it is a distributed rather than a central processing system. And capitalism is thereby justified in that it operates on this free flow… Read more »
Even Tononi and Edleman, supporters of an informational paradigm, support consciousness as a “single, coherent, and unified representation.” E.g. “The dynamic core hypothesis (Tononi and Edelman, 1998) proposes that information encoded by a group of neurons is conscious only if it achieves not only differentiation (i.e., the isolation of one specific content out of a vast repertoire of potential internal representations) but also integration (i.e., the formation of a single, coherent, and unified representation, where the whole carries more information than each part alone). A notable feature of the dynamic core hypothesis is the proposal of a quantitative mathematical measure… Read more »
Thompson though has a different approach: “Consciousness isn’t an abstract informational property, such as Giulio Tononi’s ‘integrated information’; it’s a concrete, bioelectrical phenomenon” (343).
Waking, Being, Dreaming (Columbia University Press, 2017)