ChatGPT
approach to Artificial General Intelligence AGI
By Kristo Ivanov, prof.em., Umeå University
July 2023 (rev. 260715-1715)
<https://ia802703.us.archive.org/13/items/chat-gpt-agi/ChatGPT-AGI.html>
<https://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/ChatGPT-AGI.html>
CONTENTS
1. Link to a general disclaimer
3. Initial
overall considerations
AI in The Design of
Inquiring Systems
On Statistics and
Experimental Inference
Apparent Obsolescence
and Desperate Logic
Driving Forces behind
Technology
Ego Inflation or
Philosophy behind “Powerful Experiences”
David Noble and “The
religion of technology”
Autism, or
“Mathematical/computer-oriented Minds”?
Antinomy? – Non
mathematical/computer-oriented minds
The meeting between
the two different minds
Artificially
intelligent artistic production?
Return to The Design
of Inquiring Systems
6. References to ChatGPT in other own essays
From: Information and Theology
From: Computerization as Design of Logic
Acrobatics
From:
Computers as Embodied Mathematics and
Logic
From: The Russia-NATO-Ukraine Information Crisis
7. The open letter: "Pause Giant AI
Experiments"
8. Comment to the open letter (proposal for
moratorium)
9. Case study: “Creating safe AGI that benefits all
of humanity”
10. Conclusion: the meaning of hype
11. Conclusion: beyond the hype
12. Conclusion in one sentence
13. Beyond the hype in one sentence
14. Concluding humor
2. Historical background
The Wikipedia report on artificial intelligence - AI in July 2023, seen as an introduction to artificial general intelligence - AGI, in the last paragraph of its introductory section
observes that the term artificial intelligence has been criticized for
overhyping AI’s true technological capabilities. The present text is intended
to specify a few details of my criticism. The second paragraph of the very same
introductory section writes about AI’s “several waves of optimism”:
Artificial
intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and in the years
since it has experienced several waves of optimism, followed by disappointment and the
loss of funding (known as an "AI winter"), followed by new approaches, success,
and renewed funding. AI research
has tried and discarded many different approaches, including simulating the
brain, modeling human
problem solving, formal logic, large databases of
knowledge,
and imitating animal behavior. In the first decades of the 21st century, highly
mathematical and statistical machine learning has dominated the field, and
this technique has proved highly successful, helping to solve many challenging
problems throughout industry and academia.
I understand that we
are experiencing its last, or unfortunately only the latest, wave of optimism.
I suggest that the cause of these waves of optimism is the basic
misunderstanding of what intelligence
and consequent artificiality
are or should be, allied to the forecasted marketing power and hoped economic
profitability, and for whom, of the hype of AI and now AGI. This is related to
a misunderstanding of the essence of logic and mathematics, and consequently a
misunderstanding of statistics
that is reduced to big data
and to a controversially and problematically described mathematical statistics, as I tried to show that they are embodied in computers. The result suggests an ongoing cultural crisis as a
societal analogy to the scientific scandal of lobotomy,
a cut off or “short-circuit” of the emotions and feeling, valuational and
intuitional dimensions of thought and psyche of a great deal of the population,
and therefore also a cut off of misunderstood democracy. It portrays
difficulties that in part were discretely addressed long time ago in articles
about The artificiality of
science and, The metaphysics of design: A
Simon-Churchman "debate (in Interfaces, vol.
10, No. 2, April 1980).
The fist mentioned
article on the artificiality of Science is Churchman's review of Herbert
Simon's book on The Sciences of the
Artificial (1969) that
academically gave to the latter a prestige in the field of artificial
intelligence, impressing the academic community of his being a
"genius" in the most disparate fields of knowledge, and concluding
with his being awarded the Nobel prize in Economics. All based on a
misunderstanding of the essence and function of logic and mathematics as
mentioned above.
The latter article
refers to the work of a pioneer of AI and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences, Herbert Simon, and of prof. West Churchman, philosopher and systems scientist. It also raises
the relevance of Churchman’s timely article “An analysis of the concept of
simulation” (in Symposium
on Simulation Models by A.C. Hoggatt & F.R. Balderston, eds.,
Cincinnati: South-Western, 1963, pp. 1-13) as well as its application by Ian I.
Mitroff, “Fundamental issues in the simulation of human behavior”
(Management Science, Vol. 15, No.
12, August 1969). The main issue in also covered in Churchman’s “Real time systems and public
information”
(in Proceedings of the AFIPS/ACM 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, pp.
1467-1468, among others in pp.1467-1498). I am sure that very few people will
recognize that the same issue is partly covered in “The researcher and the
manager: A dialectic of implementation” in Management
Science, Vol. 11, No. 4, Feb. 1965 (more on this below). This is relevant
if we conceive the manager as analog to the questioner and user of the answer,
and the researcher as analog to the producer of the answer, based on his
database and elaboration of the data.
It
is finally symptomatic that the whole of discussions going on about AI and AGI
apparently ignore completely the violent hype that started in the (now
“obsolete”?) seventies around Hubert Dreyfus’s views on
artificial intelligence.
There is no interest in What
Computers Can’t Do. This will not treated here
because they were based on “modern” continental philosophers such as
Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and phenomenology that I perceive as arising
from a misunderstanding or abuse of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as
discussed in my essay on the ongoing computerization of society. The reason that the
earlier hype around Dreyfus is ignored in the present renewed hype of
AI-AGI is related to why humanity continues with divorces and wars, and why
ChatGPT has not been adduced to help in the solution of the Russia-Ukraine
conflict or the 2023 Israel-Hamas war. More on this below, but before that, it
is necessary to orient readers who do not yet know what the acronym ChatGPT
stands for, orienting them to Wikipedia’s explanation of the
term. Common
educated people’s difficulty to even understand the explanation is part of the
“mystery” that surrounds the hype of artificial intelligence as of most modern
mathematized science and technology, isolating them from democratic control.
3. Initial overall considerations
In the above section
it can be seen that the referenced texts are dated up to the year 1980. I I am well aware that they may be considered by some as
being outdated because of the great and rapid technological development in
these more than 40 years. Nevertheless, as I wrote in the latest revision of my
general disclaimer: On occasion of my
retirement I intended to carry out in full scale my research that had been
neglected because of managerial duties at my university, and to summarize my
experiences and reflections in one or several publications. The more I studied
and reflected upon my experiences, the more I got convinced that the main
problem was not the lack of debates, books, publications, experiences,
reflections, but rather the lack of wish, will, courage, that is "lack
of time" to select
readings, to read, to think, or to understand in depth and to act upon
knowledge that is still valid and already available.
This means that I
perceive the present attitude to AGI as revealing a deep cultural crisis, first
of all, in the western world, with certain affinities with the message of
Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the
West. Just because the western world is or was the most “advanced” (towards
nowhere?). The decline is properly illustrated by the breakdown of social
communication, which in science I exemplified by the reciprocal ignoring of
scientific insights within increasingly narrows fields of science where the
concept of “field” itself is being obliterated and promotes both the narrowing
and consequent speed of perceived advancement. The process of narrowing and
reciprocal ignoring the wholeness of reality also implies a loss of democratic social control of
scientific activities that often are driven by narrow and often secretive
disciplinary, economic and military interests. Scientists themselves who are
active as e.g. physicists in fields that earlier were related as in the general
denomination “physics”, not to even mention the general educated public, do not
understand and cannot evaluate their earlier colleagues work in many highly
specialized “sub-fields”, despite the assumed existence of one “scientific
method”, which bestows to all the prestigious name of science. All this while,
paradoxically, Democracy with capital D as the final “guarantor” has come to be
a substitute of the earlier perception of God as I explain in my essay
of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The loss of democratic control, which in its essence
is seen as "general" for implying the whole society, includes a loss
also in the community of scientists dealing with both science in general, as
well as within each field and subfield that results from progressive
specialization that is misunderstood as a sign or progress. In his book review
mentioned above, Churchman observes that "the debate about artificial
intelligence has been raging ever since the introduction of that rather unfortunate
terminology". He sees Simon's introduction of the term sciences of the artificial in one more
"benign" sign of his "unremitting enthusiasm", which is
matched by the community of scientists sharing his attitude of being
"strongly positivistic in his thinking". I myself have met scientists
who do not even know that positivism in this context means logical positivism, and justify themselves by boldly acknowledging that,
yes, they are proud for being positive in their attitude to their work (without
even differentiating between positivistic an
positive), and logical in their thinking. Similar improbable accounts have I
heard about AI-enthusiasts who counter the criticism of the system not
accounting for induction by
countering it with the question “what is it?”
Churchman goes further in explaining why databases
with statements in the indicative mood do not take into account the goals
implied in their application to particular uses related to unforeseen (whose?)
goals. And he observes that it is not perceived that natural science itself is
artificial. This artificiality of science in its gradual mathematization and
logification leading to "Newton's syndrome" (belief in the
possibility of going from the simple to the complex, or "more of the same")
is something that was already affirmed in the far-reaching insights of Jan Brouwer
about the foundations of logic and mathematics, as outlined in my essay on Computers as embodied
mathematics and logic. It should be seen as
a foreknowledge for understanding the whole text that follows. I have come to
the conclusion, supported by the text below, that the basic problem of the use
(not the design) of AI and AGI is the lack of understanding of its essence being
formal science as represented by mathematics and logic. The latter’s function
and limitations are ignored when they are further equated to intelligence
and further to a misunderstood human intelligence, which plunges us into a hodgepodge of philosophical
and psychological controversies that are also ignored and soon forgotten in
face of the possibility of making money and obtain power over nature and other
humans.
Quite often this is done under the mantle of an appeal
to “pragmatism”, but then there is no reference to what pragmatism is or should
be since it would lead to a discussion of the philosophy of pragmatism its history and its variants. I may be repeating
myself if I claim that one, if not the basic
problem in understanding AI and the more so in understanding AGI is that most
common, even educated, citizens including scientists do not need to understand
what the foundations of logic related to mathematics and to what a theory is related to the abused word model, and the even more abused term conceptual framework. For instance, in
mathematized science, best exemplified by a physics that is mathematical
physics, mathematics and logic would be meaningless without a supporting theory
and its concepts with closely
associated sensory presence (e.g. force, mass,
speed, acceleration) which have been
painfully developed under hundreds of years. Today in quantum physics (cf. my paper
on some of its problematizations) new concepts have been derived mathematically in order to support
empirical observations in complex experiments that have no direct bodily
sensory presence, e.g. “particles” that are not particles but rather
mathematical constructs.
The consequences are that quantum physics “works” in a
sense that eschews the basic of what “works” means in the deep sense of the
philosophical pragmatism developed up to Churchman’s DIS. It works for certain applications, not the least nuclear
weapons, and for total long-run consequences that are unknown. A weird serious symptom is that so late
as in July 2024 the mathematician Inge S. Helland had to publish “A new approach toward the quantum foundation” (cf. an earlier book on the foundation) which recalls several chapters of DIS regarding groups of observers,
representation and foundations of statistics (more on this below), as in the following excerpt from the abstract:
A general theory
based on six postulates is introduced. The basic notions are theoretical
variables that are associated with an observer or with a group of communicating
observers. These variables may be accessible or inaccessible. From these
postulates, the ordinary formalism of quantum theory is derived. The
mathematical derivations are not given in this article, but I refer to the
recent articles. Three possible applications of the general theory can be given
as follows: (1) the variables may be decision variables connected to the
decisions of a person or a group of persons, (2) the variables may be
statistical parameters or future data, and (3) most importantly, the variables
are physical variables in some context. The last application gives a completely
new foundation of quantum mechanics, a foundation which in my opinion is much
easier to understand than ordinary formalism. […]
On the other hand:
|
Most trendy AI and
AGI are logical and mathematical manipulations that are theoretically
supported only for application in well-defined and limited fields that have a
theory, but now are mixed with manipulation of common language and
unperceived use or abuse of “tools” of mathematical statistics divorced from
controversies about foundations of probability and statistics. |
More on this below. Science is being reduced to such
“statistics”, under the hiding labels of e.g. artificial “neural networks”,
“machine learning” or, extremely, “multilayered convolutional neural networks”,
by means of anonymous “training” and such, which may give speedy short-term
profitable (for some) and working applications of uncertain long-term quality.
This includes the medical field where theory is gradually reduced to
statistics, as indicated by a statistician friend of mine who (at least was a trained
statistician and) some 50 years ago could support his whole family by
statistically elaborating into exam-dissertations the data furnished by medical
students becoming physicians. Nothing of this kind of knowledge is available to
the common educated citizen who is now going to be drowned in the hype of
advertising on AI (including “advertising through mention in work of Nobel
laureates). It is even available to many scientists who work in well-defined
and theoretically supported fields, sometimes unaware that the concept of
“field” itself is put in question. It happens when the most is reduced to
logic, mathematics and computerized statistical computations that can never be
submitted to some kind of democratic control except by “cronyism” as surveyed in my paper on information and debate, or by general universal testimony that “it works”
(for some), as in the “proof” of quantum physics in nuclear explosions in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it “worked”. As AI or the AI-bubble is already “working” in medical
practice – health care.
All this is ignored or forgotten as source of debates
about AI, and even less about AGI in their "waves of optimism"
culminating with the ongoing latest hypes. But it does not detract from the
possibility of legitimate profitable applications, legitimate only when (if)
one (who?) knows the consequences of what one is doing (to oneself and others)
in the short and long run, and whether it is ethical (and what that means with
and without religion) besides of being profitable (in the short and long run,
and for whom?).
AI in The Design of
Inquiring Systems
I do not know a better
illustration of the meaning of AI and AGI than in the seminal work of the
earlier mentioned West Churchman with a background in pragmatism in his book The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971) to which I will usually refer further to with
its initials DIS, and that I extended with a general DIS Word and Subject Index. I “discovered” the extremely challenging, demanding
book at about the time I was completing my PhD dissertation. I used it in my later teaching with, because of some
important reason, mainly startling, unclassifiable and cloudy results as
expressed, decades later, by one of my PhD students in the context of Interaction
Design, HCI, Philosophy of Design, Technology and Society.
I remember seeing some year ago, in the “Talk” section of the Wikipedia article on artificial intelligence
somebody referring to this book. Older Wikipedia “talks” are not archived in
Wikipedia, but I remember that it was swiftly disposed of because the author
was seen as an “outsider”, without Wikipedia’s primary editors of the article
displaying an understanding of what it all was about. This is a less-known
attitude of a censorship by primary groups of editors with unconscious “vested
interests” in a particular subject of Wikipedia, as I illustrate in an article on Wikipedia-democracy. I resume the reasons for the impossibility of
“talks” or debates about such issues at the end of the conclusions of my
special essay about Information and
Debate.
In chapter 4 (p. 79)
of the above mentioned DIS book the author presents an elaborated version of an
earlier paper On the Design of Inductive Systems (1969) written in co-authorship with Bruce Buchanan with material based on a research project conducted
by E.A. Feigenbaum, Joshua Lederberg, Bruce Buchanan and others, together with the author,
at Stanford University. Bruce Buchanan, however does not seem to have taken
very seriously his co-authorship with Churchman, since in his later works
mentioned below he clearly joins the
logical-empiricist track of Herbert Simon. The latter, in philosophy and
methodology of science, stands on the lucrative opposite side of West
Churchman, as suggested in the only text I know that indirectly and in
rhetorical elegant way spells this opposition, the earlier mentioned paper by
W. Ulrich's The metaphysics of design: A
Simon-Churchman "Debate".
What is happening
today is that AGI, or AI in the spirit of ChatGPT, seems to consist of smart
elaborations of the chapter 4 mentioned above, which in turn is a modernization
of what Churchman in a book published so early as in 1948 already had called Theory of
Experimental Inference, and Buchanan, without
daring to enter into the problems of philosophy of science, tries to extend
from MYCIN (and cf. DENDRAL. They are considered
by Churchman in DIS pp. 89, 93, 98) further in "Artificial
intelligence as an experimental science" in James H. Fetzer (ed.) Aspects of Artificial
Intelligence (1988, pp. 195, 207,
209-250,). In fact, much of the AI hype today is based on a simplification, if
not outright exploitation of misunderstood induction and experimental inference, thereby ignoring the reason and motivation
for Churchman's progress since 1948 up to 1971 and 1979, from the
above-mentioned Theory of Experimental
Inference up to DIS and The Systems Approach and its Enemies.
After having written
these lines, on October 9, 2024 I felt obliged to complete all this with a
quotation from the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics
(see details here
and here)
and Chemistry (details here and here)
2024. It did not acknowledge that it was no longer real physics and chemistry
but mostly mathematized statistical induction. It all is indeed being reduced
to mathematics and related to mainly hyped computers, AI, and brain research,
when stating:
The Nobel Prize in
Physics 2024 was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton "for
foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with
artificial neural networks".
And in Chemistry
2024:
The Nobel Prize in
Chemistry 2024 was divided, one half awarded to David Baker "for
computational protein design", the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis
and John M. Jumper "for protein structure prediction".
That is, most such
science is becoming mathematics as the discipline of statistics also became
computerized mathematics of formulas manipulating data or numbers fed by
“anybody” into computers without knowledge of the presuppositions of
probability and statistics. It is also an exploitation of misunderstood logic
and mathematics equated to “analytical - abstract thought”, equated further to
reason confounded with “intellect”, whatever it is or should be, forgetting the
subtle hodgepodge of Kantian differentiation between reason and understanding,
pure and practical reason, and their relation to the synthesis in his Third
Critique, of judgment, and aesthetics that today is reduced to “design”. Kant’s philosophical intervention
appears in his own work to be motivated as reaction to gratuitous societal
misunderstandings and abuse of religion, in particular Christianity. What he
himself could not witness is the consequences of his work in misunderstanding
and abuse of reason and intellect reduced to logic and empiricism. This is
noted in the famous quotation attributed to Chesterton (see here, #53): When men stop
believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything. And
the whole problem is alternatively reduced to the anythings
of “Intelligence quotient” IQ vs. “Emotional quotient” EQ (see below) seasoned
with the expectation that computers in the future will take care of IQ, and
humans of the EQ, whatever they are or should be. We can wonder whether capital
intensive industry and associated governmental economy with take care of
computers and IQ, leaving EQ to churches and agencies for social welfare.
On Statistics and
Experimental Inference
The problems are akin
to those relating to the critiques of "Big Data", and even those ignore the earlier criticism of abuse
of statistics such as Edgar S. Dunn's Social Information
Processing and Statistical Systems: Change and Reform (1974), with the author honoring me with a positive
review of my dissertation on Quality-Control of Information. Swedish readers have the opportunity to read Olle Sjöström’s
work, starting with a PhD dissertation (1980, which as usual in computer
context may be considered as “obsolete”) on Svensk Samhällsstatistik:
Etik, Policy och Planering [Swedish Social Statistics: Ethics, Policy and
Planning]. It starts (p. 154) its English summary asking rhetorically:
Has the growth in the
“production” of statistical data, together with the associated publications,
press releases and so forth, led to improved information for decision makers,
better informed citizens and increased knowledge about current social conditions?
The matter is
developed further in the book (1980, recalling why “history and critique is not
obsolete”) with the title Svensk Statistikhistoria: En undanskymd Kritisk Tradition [History of Swedish Statistics. A
Hidden Critical Tradition], with an extremely rich multi-language bibliography
(p. 240-245), and an initial English abstract that states:
This essay delineates
a critical tradition of statistics in Europe and Sweden, lost or ignored during
the last decades. European statistics develops from philosophical empiricism
and optimistic endeavours in the 17th century to the
exploration of social conditions (John Graunt) and to comparisons among European national
states (Hermann Conring). […] This book claims that it is necessary to
awake and renew such a critical statistics tradition in order to benefit from
modern statistical techniques and computer resources in the future.
One of the
consequences of the loss of a critical tradition in dealing inductively with
big data is the reduction of statistics to only mathematical statistics, the loss of the distinction and relation
between production or rather measurement, and consumption or rather use and
implementation of data or rather information and knowledge. Consequently
one uses standard statistical “tools” on “data“ that
is fed into the computer without needing to know the presuppositions for the
“consumption of data” by the automated use of the “tools” (more on “tools”
below). Never mind about the foundations of statistics as discussed, for
instance, in West Churchman’s discussion of “objective probability” in Prediction and
Optimal Decision (chap. 6). It is only
a question of automated computerized application of ready-made formulas on
available data. One further consequence and example may be the unquestioned new
AI hype of "biotechnology" in How Artificial
Intelligence is Revolutionizing Drug Discovery (March 20, 2023), raising "hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue their AI-driven drug
discovery pipelines". Which outsiders and laymen would or could question
such specialist "scientific" affirmations, when it is obvious that
"hundreds of millions of dollars" can always produce discoveries that
are difficult to or cannot be evaluated, the more so when there can be no
cost-benefits analysis (taste here the extent of the difficulties), and
forgetting that the relevant concept of cost here is opportunity cost. In oblivion of the discussions of
“objective probability”, one is reminded of the joke that even a broken,
old-fashioned watch is right twice per day.
Intelligence,
however, is much more than
(misunderstood) experimental inference, and the very same Fetzer keeps
returning cyclically in time to an endless inconclusive struggle about the
ineffable "much more", as in Computers and
Cognition: Why Minds are not Machines (2000), and Artificial
Intelligence: Its Scope and Limits (2012). Until Fetzer, like
myself, gets older and older, and cannot yet incorporate the last hype-revival
of ChatGPT in a new book. The less so when experimental inference, statistics
and mathematics are melted down, as in Q-learning, in an apparently prestigious mixture that ignores the
meaning of “inquiring system” and that is impossible to understand by both the
average well-educated democratic citizen, and at least by the freshman
university student of computer science. Because it requires a laborious study
in order to understand, for instance, how “the mode of representation of
information seems strongly to influence the success or failure of the inquirer
in arriving at a solution”. (And more, as in the DIS-book, chapter 6 on Kantian
inquiring systems: Representations.)
Apparent Obsolescence
and Desperate Logic
Of course, it is
characteristic for the AI field that "older" works from the 1960ies
are in practice ignored or dismissed for not portraying later modern advances.
But not only from the 60ies: also those from the 80ies
are considered to be old. By whom?: by those whose
opinions and work today will therefore also be considered obsolete after a
couple of years. This is the more so when there is no consciousness of the
foundations and thereby the meaning of logic and mathematics, that were
discussed up to the beginnings of the past century as I survey in my Computers and
embodied mathematics and logic. Not to mention the
basis of mathematical or formal logic in the work of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). And in my later essay the consequent
problems of computerization or digitalization of society, represented here by
the AI-hype, I have a section of a "Case study of desperate logic". It could be seen as being completed by another
“case study of desperate mathematics” when a serious and engaged deep-going
Italian mathematician and numerical analyst, Paolo Zellini.
After having entered into the deeper meaning of mathematics and “algorithm”, he
writes what I see as a desperate attack on the apparent abusive impotence and
abuse of mathematics in a book with the eloquent title La dittatura del calcolo [The dictatorship of calculus]. I comment more in
detail his work in a particular section of my essay on Computers as embodiment of mathematics and logic. Zellini’s work also problematizes the abuse of
statistics in hyped Nobel prizes of chemistry and physics, sometimes adorned by the popularizing hype of
“algorithms”, which the general educated population does not know anything
about, and is not supposed to even understand the presentation of Zellini’s book The Mathematics of
the Gods and the Algorithms of Men: A Cultural History (my italics below):
Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Have
we invented numbers or do they truly exist? What sort of reality should we
attribute to them? Mathematics has always been a way of understanding and
ordering the world: from sacred ancient texts and pre-Socratic philosophers to
twentieth-century logicians such as Russell and Frege and beyond. In this
masterful, elegant book, mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini offers a
brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics, from ancient Greece to India
to our contemporary obsession with algorithms, showing how mathematical thinking is inextricably linked with philosophical,
existential and religious questions—and indeed with our cosmic understanding of
the world.
It is a "desperate
logic" which could include William J. Rapaport's section of the book Aspects of Artificial Intelligence (p.
81) with the desperate title of "Syntactic semantics: Foundations of
computational natural-language understanding", that revives my text on "Symptoms: Syntax. Semantics, Pragmatics". It reminds of older desperate logic as
expressed in Sheldon Klein’s
interest for “meta-linguistic pragmatics of artificial intelligence and
grammars” (sic), as well as in his Culture, Mysticism
& Social Structure and the Calculation of Behavior (European Conference on AI, ECAI, 1982, pp. 141-142).
In the latter he (in a Kabbalah
spirit?) endeavors so far as to relate computer science and linguistics to the
ancient cosmological and philosophical Chinese Confucian bible, the classic I Ching. It also reminds of the present hype of ChatGPT in
terms of its use of large language models LLM, which may be seen as a
hodgepodge of syntax, semantics and pragmatics that tends to invalidate all
these categories, as they would also be invalidated by the hype-attempt to
create a Data Science akin to an Information
Science if one could unravel the meaning and difference between them, in
oblivion of earlier mentioned The Design
of Inquiring Systems - DIS. It is also a "desperate logic" as
suggested in the nowadays mostly dimmed but formerly hyped book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979). It is a subject (whatever it is) that is
constantly and inconsequentially revived, as lately "mystically" on
the Internet as About the "Uncalculable World" and "Mizutani Portfolio". My impression is that the latest modern example of
desperate logic is found in the mindblowing
undefinable field (whatever field means) of prompt engineering as a “process of
structuring text that can be interpreted and understood by a generative AI mode”, mentioned also later
in this essay.
I myself feel tempted
to feel pride in having devised as analogy that, despite my exceptionally
numerous links, I do not remember having read or heard anywhere. It is today’s
view of “old obsolete knowledge” of 400, 100, 40 or 10 years ago, the account of
the painstaking work of, say, Leibniz, Galilei and Newton, not to mention the
world’s sacred books and the philosophies of, say, Plato and Aristoteles, all
this, invites to conceive a bold, if yet ultimately and necessarily imperfect
analogy:
|
It is as if those
pioneers were like hunters who, with sacrifices up to risking their own lives
and deepening their skills, had succeeded in imprisoning and domesticating
the big wild beast of “nature” or putting it into a cage. Later come we and
in relative comfort examine its “capabilities”, kill and dismember its body
eating gradually the flesh and exploiting its remains, until arriving at the
bones and analyzing their material composition. And then some of us realize
that the beast is dead that we know nothing about its origin, the effects of
its earlier life on the environment, or its offspring and its effects:
desperate, greedy, mindless “hunting”.
|
Or one of the latest logical-mathematical geniuses who in
"neuroscience", and based on experiments with masses of neurons in
monkeys' brains, finds that "the human
brain would be the center of the universe and tries to explain the history, the
culture and the human civilization based on recently discovered principles
regarding human brain function". Worse than that: in the letter ”The Economist Today” that I received on October 4,
2024, long after having written most of the present text, I read what can
always be justified by the Newtonian idea of starting from simplicity plus “more of the same”, such as a build-up of logical networks. It is a
sort of “lobotomy” (see more below), in the sense that it cuts out and isolates
the brain from the mind, intellect or psyche that is then ignored and then
unconsciously “resurrected” in the form of vague speculations about “consciousness”,
with a continued ignorance of the unconscious. So, The
Economist Today writes (and see here a
mind-blowing video of 12 minutes on this research):
This week we noted a
remarkable scientific achievement: the complete mapping of the brain of an adult fruit fly. That should help
understanding of the far more complex human brain—and could open up new fields of information
technology too.
Finally,
this brain science or neuroscience is
converging with AI in the latest hype of worldwide European and
USA-projects: the USA National Institute of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies
(BRAIN, here and
here, with the Wikipedia summary here).
It goes from an understanding of the “structure of the mouse brain” over to
“the structure of the human brain” and “Developing and applying brain-inspired
computing technology”. What is mentioned is “brain imaging data structure (BIDS)
conversion” and “neuroimaging data and metadata”, without worries about difference
between data, metadata, information, and system, or between structure and
function (DIS, chap. 3). But guess
whether “To date, more than 1,100 awards
totaling approximately $2.4 billion have been made by the BRAIN Initiative” will not produce some interesting
and successful results and applications. In front of this perspective, it is a
small consolation to read the insightful and benevolent reflections of Abraham
Kaplan about what seem to be a scientism of “brain mythology” in The
Conduct of Inquiry
(1964, p. 325, my italics):
Suppose it were
definitely established that the direct cause of schizophrenia is the
concentration of a certain substance in the blood, or the formation of a
certain structure in nerve cells or their connections. The effect of this
cause, so far as it concerns psychiatry, would still be statable only in terms
of macro behavior (for instance, that resulting from delusions of persecution).
Nor would it follow that treatment
necessarily requires the laying on of hands, whether by medicine or surgery.
For the possibility would still be open that the substance or structure itself
is produced or destroyed by various patterns of interpersonal behavior or
communication (as in the familiar case of ulcers, so far as producing then is
concerned, at any rate). Psychophysical dualism always encounters the
problem of interaction between the two realms. What I find as exciting about
such development as cybernetics and related disciplines is precisely that they
have “helped to pull down the wall between the great world of physics and the
ghetto of the mind”. [Kaplan’s ending quotation is from Phillip G. Frank, The Validation of Scientific Theories, N.Y., 1961/2018, p. 155.]
The hype of
cybernetics in the sixties is today in 2023 the hype of AI and AGI. Neither
Frank nor Kaplan seem to have been able to imagine that instead of “pulling
down the wall” what would happen is that the “world of physics” (as future AI)
incorporates or outright swallows the “ghetto of the mind”, the more so for not
considering a ghetto sufficiently dignified. And, in fact brain mythology, now
a while after the main of my text was written, appears under the label of
neurobiology (in Academia Biology 2024-10-97) appropriating even theology in
such a paper as Credition and the neurobiology
of belief: the brain function in believing. All the while it is communicated that DIY [Do It Yourself] Brain Stim[ulation] is Growing in Popularity, but Is It Safe,
Effective?”. It is
mind-blowing, but not more than its historical basis in the philosophy of
science as exposed in the year 1935 by H.H. Price in the paper Logical Positivism
and Theology (see also here).
“Desperate logic”, has in the
meantime invaded science under the label of Nobel prizes in the year 2024,
disregarding the meaning of mathematics, logic, and statistics as related to
philosophy of science and cultural aspect represented by language and arts. The
Swedish public television on occasion of the
Nobel banquet on 11 December 2024 (video, at minutes 51:40 – 52:40, whole video summarizing the banquet
here) shortly
interviewed the earlier mentioned Geoffrey Hinton who was awarded the
2024 Nobel
Prize in Physics,
shared with John Hopfield,:
-
You
have said that you are used to be the only one in the room being right. Where
does that come from?
-
I
guess that it comes from my childhood. My parents were atheists and sent me to
a Christian school, and I was the only person who did not believe in God. As
time went by it turned out that I was right.
-
Has that mindset
helped you?
-
Yes, tremendously,
because from a young age I was surrounded at school. Everybody else had a
different opinion, and I thought they were wrong. And that was very useful when
I was studying neural nets. And for many many
years there were very few of us who believed in neural nets. Everybody else
said that this was a ridiculous idea, and it turned out that we were right.
-
Well, I wish you a
lovely evening, professor Hilton.
-
Thank you.
-
Congratulations, one
again.
-
Thanks.
Some spectators perceived Hinton’s answers as
surprisingly haughty, raising in today’s considered “antiquated” psychology the
suspicion of a diagnosis of ego-inflation or narcissism close to Narcissistic
personality disorder. I think, however,
that it rather reveals a psychology or way of thinking that fits what this
present text of mine associates with an extremely mathematical-logical mind,
which in turn fits the essence of a misunderstood and therefore abused AI. A
late more complex example is the very same Nobel prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton
as interviewed by Curt Jaimungal who is introduced on the net at YouTube,
Substack, X (Twitter), Linkedin (Self-employed
University of Toronto), and Spotify, with the latter stating (read on 27 Jan
2025, after the main of the present text had already been written:)
“Listen to Theories of Everything
[TOE] with Curt Jaimungal on Spotify, exploring theoretical physics,
consciousness, AI, and God in a technically rigorous manner.”
The interview is found on YouTube, as a video of about
13 minutes with the label Artificial
Intelligence is Advancing at a Frightening Rate (saved here)
with a further reference to 73 minutes’ video on Why The “Godfather of
AI” Now Fears His Own Creation, (undertitle
“The Existential Threat of AI”), and
would require a sort of doctoral dissertation for commenting its severed ties
to philosophy, physics, logic and mathematics, which I consider already
implicit in the body of my present text. Such “sort of doctoral dissertation”
would be also an example of a preposterous requirement of intellectual effort
for commenting a body of arguments that amount to an intellectual “straw man”,
and a case of what the AI-hype is creating, a series of “intellectual straw
men”, which require extenuating intellectual resources for sterile
“straw-struggles”.
Another more simple example
of the wanderings of a mathematical or exclusively logical min I did already
offer in an earlier paper, labelling it as a case study of type psychology. A further example is when a colleague of mine, upon
my suggestion read but did not seem to understand Tage Lindbom’s book The Myth of Democracy. When reading another book that mentioned and commented
the word “myth” he stopped and remarked that it should not be allowed to be
used for democracy, as Tage Lindbom had done, because it is dangerous, most
readers taking for granted that myth means a lie: it is dangerous to claim that
democracy is a lie. I understand that if this colleague of mine were a dictator
or the manager of a newspaper or publishing house, he would “democratically”
apply censorship to book’s title “Democracy is a myth, or to the book itself.
The interesting thing, in our context, is that this may be taken as an example
of how a logical-mathematical engineering mind can stop considering seriously a
book after reflecting upon the logical connection to a couple of another book’s
sentences about its title.
And this is also what seems to be happening to many of
those who got or hail several of the scientific Nobel prizes this year 2024,
such as those who participated in the Nobel laureates’ discussion of
“opportunities and risks of AI” at the round-table in the Swedish television on 12
December (page saved until 25
December 2025). In particular, Geoffrey Hinton (who had been assigned the
historically preposterous title of “Godfather of AI”) has affirmed that
philosophy is unnecessary in practicing or discussing science and its impact.
Nobody seems to mind that the idea of neural
networks, as elaborated in recurrent neural
networks originated in statistical mechanics, and developed in so-called neuroscience
that we refer to on several occasions. Please note: human mind’s workings being
studied with tools from statistical
mechanics. Probability and statistics, while ignoring their ultimate
foundations as also happens with regard to mathematics (mathematical
statistics), is apparently seen as the ultimate tool of universal scientific
research, as clearly spelled in the rational given for hailing the work of
theoretical physicist, mathematician, and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek.
Together with three other scholars he is quoted as declaring that “success in
creating AI would be the biggest event in human history” but “Unfortunately, it
might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks”. (Who are “we”
in politics? Politics of the “democratic” United Nations and its International
Court of Justice?) He also declares himself as atheist, agnostic or pantheist,
while:
In May 2022, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his
"investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, that has transformed
our understanding of the forces that govern our universe and revealed an
inspiring vision of a world that embodies mathematical beauty. […] a vision of
a universe that he regards as embodying mathematical beauty at the scales of
the magnificent large and unimaginably small.”
The important and
serious thing seems to be the necessity of a serious study, probably possible
only in terms of analytical psychology, of what is happening nowadays with the
mind or psyche of modern man in the shadow of computerization, digitalization or
logification. This to the point of disrupting the basis of human relationships,
as illustrated further below with reference
to Reason and Gender. It is then more than
fair, however, to remark that such kind of analytical thinking, typical in
formal science such as mathematics and logic, has been important for the
particular development of the West. It may be seen as rooted in the
Judeo-Christian tradition, as noted in controversial studies of the Jewish
Ashkenazi intelligence (cf. here, here and here)
and its performance in the West (cf. the "archetypal" Albert Einstein). This happens, however, in parallel to the gradual
secularization or loss of its religious basis and Christian influence. Here is
also the place to acknowledge, of course, the immense importance of the formal
way of thinking in science, technology and industry. It stands behind the
western mainly material wellbeing with the remark, however, that it may have
been what Goethe meant with what came to be called a "Faustian bargain". An explanation of the meaning of such a
Faustian bargain can be sought in Carl Jung’s insight (Collected Works, Vol. 6,
p.77 §113) in a quotation that I already reproduced in an essay of Information and
Theology:
Through the shifting
of interest from the inner to the outer world our knowledge of nature was
increased a thousandfold in comparison with earlier ages, but knowledge and
experience of the inner world were correspondingly reduced. The religious
interest, which ought normally to be the greatest and most decisive factor,
turned away from the inner world, and the great figures of dogma dwindled to
strange and incomprehensible vestiges, a prey to every sort of criticism. [...]
Modern rationalism is a process of sham enlightenment and even prides itself
morally on its iconoclastic tendencies.
So, Leibniz is not
even mentioned in e.g. James Fetzer’s edited book on Aspects of Artificial intelligence, not even in Clark Glymour's contribution with the title "Artificial Intelligence is
philosophy", despite his writing
(p. 205) that "The trouble with artificial intelligence work is that it
can use the senses to overwhelm the intellect".
I propose that it is
much more than this: the advent of incursion of the latest if not last AI-Hype
is the misunderstanding and abuse of mathematics and logic in the process of
dissociation of the human mind in the process that I present in my text on the meaning of human-computer interaction HCI. In this process can be seen (by those who know it)
an oblivion of the historical issue of Geisteswissenschften or “sciences of the spirit” related mainly to the
name of Wilhelm Dilthey, an issue which later seems to have reverberated in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. The dissociation of the human mind
can rhetorically be seen as tragic ongoing analogy to the historical scientific
and political scandal of Lobotomy,
which also happened to dissociate the brain from its so-called emotional side,
as formal science does with the undefined thought or "cognition" in
the undefined mind that eschews all relation with analytical psychology. The metaphysics of design: A
Simon-Churchman “debate”. I guess that many
readers will think that it is too farfetched and controversial to be reminded
that a "cultural lobotomy" also was the background of the Holocaust,
(cf. the identification of inmates in Nazi concentration
camps, which later became worldwide personal identification number) based on the "intelligent" superiority of a
"race". It all accompanied by eugenics in several "advanced" western countries,
with controversial interpretation of the Swedish national intellectual heroes, Nobel
Prize winners Gunnar and Alva Myrdal's stand on the issue.
It is a cultural
lobotomy that may also stand in the background of the ongoing equalization of
humans and animals, with humans reduced to only animals, while believing that
we are heightening animals up to humans. This is related to the fact that the
undervaluation of humans increases the incapacity of seeing the difference
between human and animals, but also between humans and machines, as evidenced
in the apparently unproblematic frequent reference to the famous "Turing Test".
It reminds us that the less one understands what a human being is, the easier
it is to equal him to a machine or to “nature”, including to see as Nobel prize
laureate in economics Herbert Simon did “behaving human beings as simples as ants” (more on this below). All this is in turn related
also to the philosophy of veganism as well as of
the heightening of "Mother Nature"
to a new goddess for a pantheistic solution of the issue of pollution and climate warming, up to the point of youngsters declaring to relinquish
having a polluting offspring.
The step is short to
equalize humans and machines, with the supposed final attainment of machines
that are not machines, with own "consciousness" if not
"spirit", whatever it is perceived to be, and a superhuman if not
godly intelligence. But if computers do not become superhuman, humans can
perceive and behave and be slow computers and not only as animals as in the
Holocaust of the second world war. This is also the rationale for the
expectation that not only many manual workers but even so-called intellectuals
and scientists who nowadays already think as slow computers in the computerized
West, will in the future be replaced by, or kept operating advanced
AI/AGI/ChatGPT. The greater the number of people at work, even “intellectual”
work, with tasks that are designed to require to act as only slow computers,
the easiest will be to replace them with faster “AI” computers.
Not only that: it is
the same cultural lobotomy of the separation (and not only differentiation)
between brain, logic and psyche, that enables democratic societies and
especially politicians to believe that it is possible to counter criminality
with only computer-logic, law, police, prisons, military and weapons, instead
of relying honestly on "love thy neighbor". Or
to believe in countering credit card frauds with a progressive build-up of the computer
"security" behind advanced passwords, e.g. of at least 16 characters that must include
uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters or symbols, card security codes, multi-factor authentication and facial recognition systems, including the whole security industry as suggested
in e.g. a magazine like Detektor. Why not, soon, also brain recognition systems? Or,
ultimately to believe in security behind shields of the police and military
that are supported or counteracted by logical gaming in spyware like the famous Pegasus (that I consider also elsewhere), property of the controversial Israeli
cyber-intelligence group NSO Group
(cf. its mind-blowing history), in international espionage or wars against and between criminal gangs. That is, the belief of being able to substitute
computer security and struggle against disinformation, for quality of information as defined in my doctoral
dissertation on Quality-Control of Information, as originally suggested in my early paper on the concept of security that today reappears under the avatar of (AI-)Safety.
We can indeed expect to meet a mind-blowing future, man-machine interaction, further exemplified by a mind-blowing website like HIBP (Have I been pwned? See
also here), which relate to
DDOS attacks like the “Internet Archive Breach Expose 31 Million Users”
in October 2024, undermined by increasing complexity, and worsened cultural
crisis under the label of AI-Safety and the coming neologisms of
“AI-something”. It all can begin with the infantile (of course my-our) Good-AI
and (of course your-their) Bad-AI.
In lack of an
understanding of the human psyche that would require study of the history of
philosophy and e.g. analytical psychology with and understanding of theology,
there is a hodge-podge "models" to support the ad-hoc concept of
"Emotional intelligence" (EI) possibly measured by a corresponding
emotional quotient - EQ, analog with old abused IQ. Even forgetting that the
problems mentioned above may lie behind the reportedly increasing frequency of
the diagnoses of Autism, including Asperger.
It is interesting to note the vagaries of people, especially when discussing
the arcane modern questions of whether AI will be able to “feel”. The flood of
mass-media speculations is exemplified in a program of 44 minutes at the
Swedish Radio on March 15, 2024 with the title Kan AI ha känslor? [Can AI have feelings?] with the under-title “Today,
humans are increasingly interacting with AI. AI can make us humans feel joy and
even love, but can AI have emotions and what would they mean if AI had real
emotions?” The program, with two guests researchers Fredrik Svenaeus and Karim Jebari, showing the practical impossibility of expressing
and sharing psychological and philosophical knowledge when philosophy that
historically included psychology is reduced to simple reference to
“phenomenology” (appreciated in universities for its theology without God). Love and its Christian theology (surveyed in my essay on Reason and Gender) usually is programmatically ignored and silently
excluded from the conversation. Or it is reduced to politics and in the best
case to (social human feelings in) “relationships”. It is the case of the apex of the fourth and last (on AI and Creativity, retrievable until April 28, 2027, saved here)
in a series of four television programs at the Swedish public television broadcaster with the title Smartare än hjärnan [Smarter
than the brain]. After the first three programs trying to popularize a
necessarily superficial understanding of AI, the fourth and last one tries to dwelve into AI’s relation to creativity including art and
entertainment, it interviews some researcher and others related to the matter
(cf. below about art, and “Alphago”), namely Mark Solms, Anna Lembke, Robert Waldinger, Alexander Reben, Pulkit Agrawal, Jodie Foster, and Karin Adelsköld. The conclusion seems to have been that creativity
has to do ultimately with “consciousness”
(whatever is its connection to the unconscious, cf. in my Reason
and Gender) and the importance
of human relationships, which are problematized by AI developments. For me this
“conclusion” in our context is an anti-climax, and “relationships” are an euphemism.
This is ultimately
also the reason of why those who happen to study The Design of Inquiring Systems are not able to figure out how an
application of e.g. the ignored philosopher Hegel’s and others’ philosophical
thought (p. 180ff, see below) can be related to Carl Jung’s analytical philosophy
as it appears in the discussion of “progress” (pp 203-205) and of “the mind”
(p.261ff.), but the more so in the conclusion that (p.272):
[I]t may be safe to say that at the present time
inquiry has become part of the unconscious life of most people: they are
unaware of the ways in which they function as inquiring systems. Nor is there a
strong inclination for them to give expression to this function so that its
nature appears at the conscious level. As a consequence, we are suffering now
the most dangerous symptoms of an inability to bring to the conscious level an
important human function. We assign to the experts and the politicians the roles
of designing and creating the environment in which we live because we can see
no way in which we can play any role whatsoever in these activities. Appalled
as we may be at the events that are occurring in the world about us as the
output of blind technology and politics, we each in our own frustrated way feel
that we can do nothing about it.
Medical brain
lobotomy, seen here as an archetypal analogy to the reduction of intelligence
to logic, mathematics and formal science divorced from emotions, feelings and
intuition, was supposed to deserve the highest level of international official
scientific recognition by means of the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine,
year 1949. It also raises the memory of the Nobel prize in economy to Herbert
Simon, while West Churchman arguably decreased his chances of a similar
official recognition because of his opposition to Simon's view of intelligence
in the artificiality of science and his view of "behaving human beings as simples as ants", (probably not intended to be applied to the
author himself). As with the case of the Turing
Test mentioned above, the step may be short to considering certain
“non-intelligent” humans as machines or ants to the point of allowing for
attitudes such as in the Holocaust. Churchman also opposed some tenets of an earlier recipient of the prize in Economic
Sciences, Kenneth Arrow. It belongs to this story the confession of a
colleague of mine who as member of the awarding institution for prize in physics, the Royal Academy of Sciences,
that an internal report he had written about a case of this
kinds of problems in his discipline had been classified as secret for
the next 50 years. Talking about democratic freedom of expression and openness
in research.
There is a symptomatic case of a Swedish doctor and
author, grand old man and champion of intellectual debate in journalistic
contexts, mainly in social criticism and satire in the last more than 60 years:
P. C. Jersild.
One of his best known books, A Living Soul,
symptomatically relevant for our “lobotomized brains”, deals with a living, thinking, and feeling (?) human brain
floating in a container of liquid. Also symptomatic is his answer at the end of
a long interview of the Swedish Radio in a program broadcasted on December
9 2023, about what he
thought on the ongoing hype of AI-AGI. After his many well-formulated answers
and thoughts about “everything” during the interview, including about his
atheism and commitment to voluntary euthanasia despite of being a physician, he
finally, with a certain hesitance, confessed that it was a difficult matter and
that he had not yet a formed opinion. Guess why. It is not easy to know what a computer really is, the less so as related to formal
science and the human psyche, that is, again: human-computer interaction, and “intelligence”.
Driving Forces behind
Technology
So much for
democratic freedom of expression at the highest levels of the highest sciences,
reminding the barely advertised that "Democracy is a myth" because of
negligence of its presuppositions, as I explore in a text
of the information on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Science as scientific "fields" in general
and computer science in particular, and artificial intelligence more
particularly, nowadays eschews all democratic control because it is only
controlled by narrow isolated self-controlled communities of adepts who, as in
universities and in supposedly democratic Wikipedia, are the only who are seen
as entitled to understand what it all is about. And in the meantime
the ongoing new wave of AI-hype is advertised by means of a plethora of
"visionary" programs of doubtful quality in mass media and in
discussions in social media: a reprise of the Dot.com bubble, possibly a revival of the historically archetypal Tulip mania. Let's remark that many people made big profits by
all those "visions", as they are making or have made by Cryptocurrency. Long after writing the main of the text in this paper I saw in Fortune on July 17, 2025 that
Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, warns AI stocks are even more over-valued than
dot-com stocks were in 1999. In an
research note, he illustrated how shares of Nvidia, Microsoft and eight other companies are creating an even bigger bubble than we saw
during the dot-com era. And that could cause serious market damage if and when
it pops.
While there’s plenty of skepticism about artificial intelligence, the
chief economist at Apollo Global Management is warning that the technology is
so overblown it risks crashing the market worse than the dot-com bubble burst
of 1999.
Ultimately, however,
the question may boil down to which are the motivating forces that drive modern
scientific, technical and industrial view of western and already also parts of
eastern one, the latter’s antiquity having already been the object of my reflections in the text in Logic and Rape as related to Science and
Civilization in China. It is a view that may
be related to a peculiarity of the Judeo-Christian civilization as related to
“smartness” in the controversy around the “Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence” (see here, here
published here,
and here). It is a view that is driven by
mathematics and logic of western mathematized technoscience, as synthetized
also in mathematical logic as embodied in computers. It is a matter that has
been studied in the philosophy of science and of technology that is touched
upon in an essay of mine on Trends in philosophy
of technology. I believe that
theologically this field was best surveyed by editing of Carl Mitcham
and Jim Grote in Theology and
Technology (volumes 1 and 2). My
own experience, in witnessing that even deeply committed and educated
scientists and philosophers adore the power of mathematics and logic (a power
as suggested by Jan Brouwer, cf. my Computers
and embodied mathematics and logic), is that they are seduced by the
feeling of power (supposedly for good
and for bad) over nature and humans
to the detriment of the Christian primacy of charity and love. It may
be a case of the analytical psychology's conception of Ego Inflation when believing the they are high priests gifted with
the capacity of understanding the mathematical-logical language (synthetized in
mathematical logic) in which God himself is supposed to have described the
created universe. Or, as I saw in a letter written by a particularly gifted and
educated physicist:
I particularly
remember an experience when I was taking a PhD course in quantum mechanics and
going through a particular proof using group theory to predict atomic states.
It was like a lightning strike and I actually started crying with emotion. It
was a powerful experience.
It is interesting and
symptomatic that this is a powerful experience, to the point of convincing if
not compelling humans to a religious conversion that could have been a sign of
the Biblical message that humans have a divine spark in themselves because they
are created in the "image of God". Nevertheless, it can easily be a
symptom of proud "Ego inflation" mentioned above. It is therefore
also the source of powerful speculations raised around the names of Fibonacci
and Mandelbrot,
as already considered in a couple of other essays, on Computers as Embodied
Mathematics, Information on Christianism or
Atheism, and Quantum Physics, Computers &
Psychology. A well-known
Swedish professor of theoretical physics tells in an interview at the Swedish Radio about a likewise life-changing (but not religiously
converting) powerful childhood experience in his witnessing the appearance in
the sky of the announced apparition of a comet. Other theoretical physicists
witness but are equally insensitive to religious conversions, such as e.g. the
famous Nobel prize laureate Peter Higgs about whom Wikipedia reports:
Higgs was an atheist. He described Richard Dawkins as having adopted a "fundamentalist" view of non-atheists. Higgs expressed displeasure with the nickname the "God
particle". Although it has been reported that he believed
the term "might offend people who are religious", Higgs stated that
this is not the case, lamenting the letters he has received which claim the God
particle was predicted in the Torah,
the Qur'an and Buddhist scriptures. In a 2013 interview with Decca Aitkenhead, Higgs was quoted as saying:
I'm not a believer.
Some people get confused between the science and the theology. They claim that
what happened at Cern proves the existence of God. The church in Spain
has also been guilty of using that name as evidence for what they want to
prove. [It] reinforces confused thinking in the heads of people who are already
thinking in a confused way. If they believe that story about creation in seven
days, are they being intelligent?
— The Guardian, 6 December 2013
But I have not seen
speculations at all about parallels with the relation to our
"powerful" experiences of feelings of passionate love as considered
in the essay on Reason and Gender. There are people who infer from their own feelings
of love, love for children spouses and parents, that
they have to ask wherefrom comes this
powerful feeling of love, as well wherefrom and why do tears come when
listening to certain kinds of music that ultimately can be religious, as I remind in my text on “Intuitions in Music” in the paper Information
and Theology. There must be a “powerful” feeling of love in them, instilled
from outside, from above or the “inside” (Genesis 1:27). That is, love up to the point of being able to
sacrifice their own life in saving or losing the loved ones’.
If, as in analytical
psychology, it is a question of “archetypes” or worse, “mechanisms” rooted in
the human mind, then the answer will be that psychology only affirms that they
are there, not claiming to know wherefrom or from whom they are placed there.
Up to now I never heard people confessing to have “started crying with emotion”
or sobbing and getting tears in their eyes, upon the intuition that their
feeling of loving or being loved by their children, but unhappily sometimes
less by spouses divorcing spouses, is the same feeling of godly love for us
(not “intelligence”), making them to intuit how much we can be loved, and to
wonder where this feeling of love comes from. But many if not most of them seem
to be readier to prize mathematics for their own supposedly godly mind that in
fact navigates in the world as a proudly engineered Titanic did in the ocean.
Perhaps fantasy in science fiction has a presage of decadence in imagining, as
in the film Zardoz, that the immortal “Eternals” leading a luxurious but
aimless existence “are overseen and protected
from death by the Tabernacle, an artificial
intelligence”. And this is consistent with the hypothesis that ultimately it
was mathematical logic that raises disoriented powerful feelings.
A support for this
hypothesis comes from the simultaneous tendency to argument only or mainly in
logical terms (and/or with the help of ChatGPT!), without reference to
historical sources or “philosophical” thinkers. Whenever other sources are
mentioned, as here, the accusation is raised that it is an illegitimate “psychologizing”. But see an example in my bold attempt to suggest
with the accusation of psychologizing, the enforcing of pure logic can be experienced as a spiritual “rape”. Or the accusation is raised that references beyond
pure logical argumentation are an abuse of “academic-philosophical-historical”
speculations, while the question should be seen “pragmatically”, whether it is
convincing and “it works” in the physical world, often combined with “it sells”
that in turn is reduced to coarse usability, utility and economic profit or “it
is profitable”. One should instead say: “As quantum physic works, until a next nuclear third world war”. The appeal to
pragmatism, however, is then done without questioning the history and essence
of philosophical pragmatism
that is downplayed to being only “philosophical-academic” interest.
And talking about the
forgotten love it comes to my mind what Oswald Spengler writes in his amazing
great work The Decline of the West. Building,
as he claims, upon mainly Goethe and Nietzsche he writes in a book that I
bought some more than 40 years ago but do not claim to have been able to study
and digest before reaching old age. Nevertheless, in this present context I
cannot avoid to remark what he writes in vol. 2, pp. 218f.:
Religion is metaphysics and nothing else – Credo quia absurdum – and this metaphysics is not the metaphysics
of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness) but lived and experienced metaphysics – that
is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as
existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment
in any other world but this. […]
“His” teachings, as
they had flowed from his mind and noble nature – his inner feeling of the
relation between God and man and of the high meaning of the times, and were
exhaustively comprised in and defined by the word “love” – fell into the
background, and their place was taken by the teaching of him.
And today, when for
many there is no much left of His
teachings, but only “powerful experiences” possibly seasoned with some
theological erudition and reference-dropping, this can be taken as a support of
my view that mathematical powerful experiences
are an expression of the inflationary power
in the Ego-Mind, and not of human
or godly love. It was the "super-intelligent" power of
mathematics and logic over nature (and climate), and power over other human
beings, the "enemies". It was a “science” applied to wars with
high-tech weapons including "lethal autonomous weapons" (see here, here
and here).
Application to wars, however, is more complex than the manufacturing of
products. AI will claim that it is, and will also be, applied to the general
use of weapons such more or less conventional bombs, as illustrated in the case
of the 2023 Israel-Hamas war in an article by Jonathan Cook
(see also here
in the necessarily highly controversial Unz Review, December 5, 2023). Here follows my excerpt from the
article, including a couple of readers’ comments:
The whistleblowers confirm that, given new,
generous parameters of who and what can be attacked, the artificial
intelligence system, called “Gospel”, is generating lists of targets so rapidly
the military cannot keep up.
…
In a report last
Friday [December 1, 2023], the Guardian
[in an article with the title ‘The
Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza, with
repercussions as in Le Monde, Dec. 6, 2023] corroborated Israel’s reliance on the Gospel computing
system. The paper quoted a former White House official familiar with the
Pentagon’s development of autonomous offensive systems as stating that Israel’s
no-holds-barred AI war on Gaza was an “important moment”.
…
Israeli
military is now using an artificial intelligence system, Habsora
or Gospel, to identify targets.
…
Speaking
of the military’s new reliance on Gospel, Aviv Kochavi,
the former head of the Israeli military, told the Israeli Ynet website earlier this
year
[June 23, 2023] “In the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year.
Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50 per cent of them
being attacked.”
…
A
former intelligence officer told that the Targets
Administrative Division that runs Gospel had been turned into a “mass
assassination factory”. Tens of thousands of people had been listed as “junior
Hamas operatives” and were therefore treated as targets. The officer added that
the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality”.
…
COMMENTS [two
selected comments of the article]
The REAL value of “AI” is as lying sockpuppet to take the blame:
•Health Insurance companies use “AI” to deny claims. (Don’t blame us)
•Military uses “AI” to kill civilians. (Don’t blame us)
• Hedge Funds use “AI” to insider trade. (Don’t blame us)
• Corporations use “AI” for sales targets during down quarters (Don’t blame
us).
This is the other face of Sam Altman’s empire!
The Ego’s
inflationary power offers also an important advantage of logic (and
consequently AI/AGI) in the politics of academic careers: it dispenses painful
references, not to mention charitable attention to contemporaneous and
historical work of the “neighbors” that we are supposed to respect, if not to
love. A logically structured text is the only way of claiming attention without
a single reference to, and (worse) dependence upon prior knowledge except
technical and analytical. That is: unless one questions the essence of
mathematized science, or of logic and mathematics in inquiry. So, in my
experience, logically oriented scholars, now with the support of heavy AI/AGI
technology, can do well without any academic “fatherhood”, let alone an ex-post legitimately criticized
fatherhood. The more so by adducing the rapid technological development
invalidates the import of earlier, even 5, or 10 years old insights. This can
be related to youngsters’ lack of respect for the knowledge and experience of their
parents, the more so of their grandparents, not to mention of generations of
people who with struggles and sacrifices have built our accumulated knowledge
and wellbeing. Their implicit fatherhood is the pseudo-religious Logos that is felt as implicit in the abused assumed
etymology of the word “Logic” as used today.
It is also
symptomatic that there is a spread rumor (see Internet browser on
<mathematics god language>) as if it were Galileo Galilei's quotation,
that he would have written that mathematics is the language of God. There is,
however, only one documented source, The Assayer, in which he really only claimed that it is the
language of science (natural science), without mentioning God. Further
theological aspects of the issue are found by searching the keyword
<mathematics> in my essay on Information
and Theology.
The contempt for philosophy and not only theology,
based on ignorance and secularism is also what guides smart authors of smart
articles in prestigious journals such as The
Economist. In an ambitious article
noted in one main Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet (Nov 19 2023) about the economic-political events in November 2023
in the OpenAI
organization, it writes, for
instance, referring to the events that are detailed below,
relating to the board and CEO of OpenAI:
The events at OpenAI are a dramatic manifestation of a wider divide in
Silicon Valley. On one side are the “doomers”, who
believe that, left unchecked, AI poses an
existential risk to humanity and hence advocate stricter regulations. Opposing
them are “boomers”, who play down fears of an AI apocalypse
and stress its potential to turbocharge progress. The split reflects in part
philosophical differences. Many in the doomer camp
are influenced by “effective altruism”, a movement worried that AI might wipe out humanity. Boomers
espouse a worldview called “effective accelerationism”, which counters that the
development of AI should
be speeded up.
So, the difference
between doomers,
among whom many readers would like to see myself included, and boomers, would
reflect “in part” philosophical differences.
Both doomers and boomers could be influenced by “effective altruism” (that I have already considered in a section of my text on Information and Theology).
What is not said is that both of them may be projecting their desperation,
respectively their hopes, in lesser or greater capabilities of “democracy”.
What is not spelled out is that the effective altruism, as represented by the
outspoken atheist
“moral philosopher” Peter Singer,
is a failed substitute of religion. Boomers do not seem to be influenced by
anything. Once upon a time they might have been denominated as being simply
optimists, while the further discussion in The
Economist indicates that psychologically and politically
they might be rather seen as entrepreneurs or “individuals who create and/or invest in one or
more businesses, bearing most of the risks and enjoying most of the rewards” in
this life, in view of absence of a future one. It was the strong concern of
investors that drove the dramatic development of the relation between board and
CEO of the OpenAI organization. So much for philosophy and money, forgetting
also the philosophy of technology, besides economics and politics.
Ego Inflation or philosophy behind “Powerful
Experiences”
I know of a
particular case, beside one documented on the Internet, in which an ego inflation may have contributed to
the total conversion of a thoughtful educated and intelligent man to
Christianity, a process that I characterize as a serendipitous, paradoxical
"right decision based on wrong premises". He found that since the
decision was right it doesn’t matter whether the premises were wrong. But it
discloses a defective understanding of the “system” and of the interpretation
of Christianity as illustrated in the essay on Conscience and Truth by former cardinal (and later pope) Joseph Ratzinger.
The same premises may lead to other related wrong decisions, including in
applications or implementations of the original decision, such as in
interpretations of Christianity when advocating and justifying USA’s use of
nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (justified for avoiding “worse”
consequences) or the handling of the conflict between Israel and Palestine,
ultimately illustrated by the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, or as I show, between Russia and Ukraine. The Israel-Hamas war offers a good example of
defective natural intelligence that obviously undermines the developments and
evaluation of AGI, as illustrated by a (here slightly edited) communication I
received from a self-avowed Christian engineer and scientist who felt strong
sympathies for Israel:
[N]ow we touch on a
question that cannot be solved by philosophy. Regardless of all philosophies,
there is a reality that cannot be philosophized away. For example, in some
cases you have to make decisions, which regardless of which decision you make,
have negative consequences for people and society. And making no decision at
all can lead to even worse consequences
[...]
It is easy to sit in
your best armchair with a cup of Darjeeling tea and a slice of toast with
Cooper's Oxford Marmalade and comment on [others'] actions. And weigh the
different options against each other. When you are in her situation, it is not
so easy to play wise and good. Then one is forced to
confess color.
[R]eal life shows how we humans can be faced with terrible
decision situations where whatever we decide leads to negative consequences.
Still, a decision must be made. Not making a decision at all may lead to even
worse consequences. Trying to play well in situations like this usually doesn't
work.
Sitting in one's
armchair and thinking beautiful philosophical thoughts that have nice Latin
names (that make oneself appear wise and good, etc.) can certainly be done. But
reality is sometimes more complicated than our theories about it (the kind of
philosophy I now call "mental masturbation"). Over the years, I have
become increasingly negative towards intellectual people, which led me to
define the term "stupid-intelligence".
It is the self-avowed Christian engineer and scientist who, commenting
my suggestion to read about the philosophy of science implied in West
Churchman’s DIS, revealed what it
goes under the phenomenon of Ego-inflation
when writing that he cannot afford the time and effort required to read it:
As for Churchman, I'm
not fundamentally uninterested. I just feel too old to get into a new area. Or
rather, I don't know whether I'm interested. I would have known that if I had
had the time to get into his way of thinking. That's one of the disadvantages
of aging. Now I get to die without knowing whether I had undervalued his
thinking.
To which I answered
tersely while suspecting that I witnessed ego-inflation: “I would rather say
that you get to die without knowing whether you thought and acted correctly
about certain fundamental questions." The problem may have not been only
his own ego-problem of having missed something, but rather the ultimate
consequences for others, of his missed understanding. Otherwise: “who cares
whether he (knows that he) has undervalued somebody’s thinking?”.
It is a similar
coarse conception of knowledge and “philosophy” and a-philosophical pragmatism
or common sense, or process of conversion or decision by unconscious
emotion in face of powerful experiences, that has "divinized"
violence and wars, including the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
order to avoid supposed “worse consequences” (for me and/or others than the
bombed?). It is also a way to do away the theological (Christian) concept of
“sin”, and relativize a defective understanding of love, as when stating, for instance (transl. from Swedish) “Without truth,
love risks being reduced to a syrupy drug. And without love, the truth risks
becoming an icy regulation”. This statement, which per se may legitimately
states the Christian dialectic between charity and justice, is understandable
in view of the present daily tendency to use and abuse the word truth as
mathematical formal truth, and love as covering everything sexual and “nice”,
while ignoring the problem of Reason and Gender. But, besides the typical logicist
(logical positivist) assumption that regulations or logical rules only need to
be complemented with separate vague “love”, it is also a simultaneous denial of
the Christian primacy and essence of
love (Matthew 22:37-40, esp. Galatians 5.14) coupled to a subjectivist implicit perception of the
meaning of truth. It is a “truth” that, opposite to the Catholic need of a
Church, relies only upon a Protestant personal reading and interpretation of
the Bible, eschewing the supposed logical positivist “psychologism” in relating the whole question to depth psychology
as in the former cardinal and later pope Joseph Ratzinger in his essay Conscience and Truth.
It is also this
contemptuous attitude to philosophy that allows the ignorance of the meaning of
“powerful” as already painstakingly discussed in the context of “the sublime”.
It is also this kind of ignorance that allows for the accusation of “psychologizing” when one does not know how psychology originated in
philosophy, and further, that historically philosophy appropriated the realm of
theology, while the latter is offset by cheap acknowledgment of being a pious
Christian believer who quotes the Bible. This when, in fact, one is a logical positivist who not only legitimately distinguishes but also separates facts of science from values
and religion that is soon reduced to scientism (or logical positivism),
politics or sentimental art experiences, such as in a sentimental impact of Portuguese “fados” and of music played in Nazi concentration camps (see
here
and here).
It is a reduction that I comment in my essay on Information and Theology. All possibly paired with alibis like
assuring affirmations of having deep religious beliefs aside scientific
practical work, as it is may be allowed even within logical positivism.
A separation or facts
of science from values is paradoxically also a disclaimer of the engineers’
responsibility for the consequences of their work and possible failures (so
long as they are on the payroll and get paid by somebody). This is so because
the engineered products, including “tools” (including nuclear weapons such as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) can be said to have been always “right” but were
used in the wrong way, equivalent to that they should not have been used (before being tested in the right way), or
should not be have been given to people (other than us or our allies!) who
could use them wrongly (e.g. in the case of weapons). An example I have
personal experience of is in the context of repeated groundings of the aircraft
Boeing 737 MAX 9, the latest in January 2024 (historical overview here).
A knowledgeable aircraft wizard assured me that the problems were not really
technical but rather managerial, being a consequence of the Boeing’s management
in later times having prioritized economic interests before technical ones. It
is easy to imagine how disclaimers are going to work with engineering products
like AI/AGI that are less “concrete” than aircraft.
The separation we
talk about, implies a contempt for philosophy that fits the protest and
rejection of being labeled at all; as, say, logical positivist or logical
empiricist. The answer, then is “I am not logical positivist, I am only my
name, (say) John Smith”, picking an opinion here and an idea there. This then
happens without realizing that this also has a labeling name, eclecticism, and that by the (father’s) family name one is labeled
as a member of a family, which in turn is labeled by the name of the father, as
Christians acknowledge having a common Father that makes them brothers. Others
unconsciously may assume that their family is only their Mother
(and half-brothers) who loves all her
children obtained (“eclectically”?) from many fathers (many cultures having a special contemptuous
and cursing denomination for such behavior), according to the conceptions that
I illustrate in my introduction to Reason and Gender.
It is only gods, geniuses or “logicists”
who without any outer references, have an innate skill (often related to high
IQ) to connect logical Leibnizian networks of empirical data (logical
empiricists), who dare believe that they can create their own individual
a-historical “-isms” and create an own logically consistent “Leibnizian” system
of thought and unconscious feelings. They live without a family and without a history, since the renounce to the evaluation
of “-isms” is also an implicit contemptuous renounce to the supposed “obsolete”
thoughts of our forefathers whose errors and achievements are the base of our
ongoing life. They do not foresee that their own present work and conclusion
will be contemptuously rejected or outright ignored by others within few years.
Unconsciously they rely on other “-ism” such as the mentioned eclecticism and state individualism, where the state, often confounded with society or one
of its scientific subcultures,
is the family of those without family. They do not realize that in relying on
their own logical networks without references to earlier authorities it is like
they were gods editing their own “bible”, and forgetting that the Bible relies
on God (and historical accounts). And they forget that typical logicists who do not understand the meaning and limitations
of language from which logic is extracted (and not the other way round) reject
the Bible itself because of logical contradictions. Or abuse the Bible by
ignoring them, reading the Bible as the devil does. These considerations lie
behind the insight, highly relevant for understanding the present essay in face
of the issue of AI/AGI, that the crushing amount of
references and apparent complication of its argumentation are not necessary for
a reader who is guided by the Bible instead of treatises on mathematical logic. This fits a key statement of Blaise Pascal
in a relevant section of his famous Pensées
(§ 251) which, in order to be properly understood must be read and studied in its context, readable on the net (preferably in original French because of orthographic misspellings in translation):
Other religions, as
the pagan, are more popular, for they consist in externals. But they are not
for educated people. A purely intellectual religion would be more suited to the
learned, but it would be of no use to the common people. The Christian religion
alone is adapted to all, being composed of externals and internals. It raises
the common people to the internal, and humbles the proud to the external; it is
not perfect without the two, for the people must understand the spirit of the
letter, and the learned must submit their spirit to the letter.
Otherwise, it
requires advanced secular ingeniousness to conceive tests of AI-AGI products
beyond the example of my essay on the Ukraine-conflict. I mean tests
sufficiently pedagogical in order to put into evidence their possibly dangerous
limitations, exemplified by the AI creation of original jokes, overviewed in
e.g. an article in Time
magazine in January 2022,
being an issue that expands on the Internet as it can be perceived by browsing
with strings like <artificial intelligence AI humor humour>.
One such test of AI limitations was illustrated by Anders Q. Björkman in the
Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, December
2-3 2023, “Jag hetsar AI:n – och då
händer något” [I provoke the AI – and then something happens]: it
is the request that the AI tells an own joke. It fails, but the journalist
refers to the Swedish National Encyclopedia, as defining humor as arising from
"the collision between (at least) two human rule systems. To
the extent that the collision turns out to be apparent or explicable from a
third rule system, there is a case of humor"
What is interesting
here is that humor is conceived as depending upon rule systems. As such, if
rule systems are synonyms for logical Leibnizian networks it also illustrates
the spontaneous psychological relief experienced with the insight into the
relativity and insufficiency or framing statements in only logical terms. I
read somewhere that the German philosopher and theologian Ernst Troeltsch indicated that humor may have similar influence as
religion in fostering humility by means of a downplaying of the importance of
the big Ego (that is inflated by logic). And yet we are far from understanding
humor if we consider the difficulty in understanding a standard work on humor
in the world’s literature: Henri Bergson’s book Laughter. I claim that the process of understanding, and evaluate exceeds the scope of this
essay, but returns us to the broad
philosophical (including the psychological), and theological issues suggested
in The Design of Inquiring Systems. A
meaningful curiosity, however, can be mentioned here is that Bergson emphasizes
that it is easier to laugh collectively,
which can be seen as implied in humor’s downplaying of the individualizing Ego.
It is the afore
mentioned separation between facts of science from values of religion (nowadays
profane democratic “core values”) that the aforementioned Churchman struggled
to counter in his whole work, at the (academic survival’s) cost of renaming God
(in his The Design of Inquiring Systems) with
the acronym GOD - Guarantor of Destiny, which
in turn allowed an academically acceptable, watered down further (mis)use of the term, while “divinizing” a priestly role for, and
responsibility of the Designer. That
is, a divinized “Design” which in turn is a misunderstanding and abuse of the
Kantian role of aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment, as addressed in my text on computerization of society, and in a commentary to Gunnela Ivanov’s doctoral dissertation relating to the democratization
of design.
David Noble and “The
religion of technology”
In 1998 the historian
and “critic of technology” David F. Noble published the book The Religion of
Technology, a subject that from a
(for me) controversial “leftist” perspective recalls the more politically
neutral idea of Richard Stivers’ book Technology as Magic:
The triumph of the irrational. What is of immediate
interest here is Noble’s historical account of the reports and thoughts about
AI up to about the year of publication of his book, as it is found with the
title “The immortal mind: Artificial Intelligence” on pages143-171. In Noble’s account,
the “powerful experiences” surveyed in the above section are not a revelation
but only a triviality that accompanies the development of science and
technology. Nevertheless, he does not linger on the reason of the main involved
phenomenon that he expresses as follows (p. 145, my italics):
Descartes’ peculiar
obsession [with geometry and arithmetic, closer to God; my note] became the
principal philosophical preoccupation for three centuries, as diverse thinkers
sought to comprehend the mechanisms of human understanding, the categories of reason,
the phenomenology of mind. Moreover, in
the mid-nineteenth century, mathematics
became not just a model for pure thinking but the means of describing the
process of thought itself.
But why it did just became? Thinking and feeling like a historian he was, Noble does not
dwell on a philosophical criticism of Descartes as related to theology, and why
it would have prevailed. In other words, Nobel’s argument allows him to
dispense the expansion of his thought in the direction of philosophy of
science, and the painstaking work of placing Descartes in a wider context as in
Churchman’ s DIS (pp.18, 22, 37,
61-62, 218, 263, 274, 276). It would have spared him to develop or envelope
further his thought in the direction of Marxist thought, which he does not perceive and foresee that, in lack
of theological insight, would in turn reinforce
faith in, and commitment of capital to technoscience in business and industry.
As when reading his concluding affirmative quotations from other authors (p.
208):
The religion of
technology, in the end, “rests on extravagant hopes which are only meaningful
in the context of transcendent belief in a religious God, hopes for a total
salvation which technology cannot fulfill…By striving for the impossible, [we]
run the risk of destroying the good life that is possible.” Put simply, the
technological pursuit of salvation has become a threat to our survival…
[…]
Transcendence…means
escape from the earth-bound and the repetitive, climbing above the everyday. It
means putting men on the moon before feeding and housing the world’s poor…The
revolutionary step would be to bring men down to earth…But respite from our transcendent
faith in the religious machine requires that we “alter the ideological basis of
the whole system.”. Such an undertaking demands defiance of the divine
pretensions of the few in the interest of securing the mortal necessities of
the many, and presupposes that we disabuse ourselves of our inherited
other-worldly propensities in order to embrace anew our one and only earthly
existence.
Despite my admiration
for Noble’s historical accounts, his conclusions are a temptation for an
understanding, despite of it all, of the motives for USA’s McCarthyism or Second
Red Scare. It can be seen as a
reenactment of the Inquisition and its problems, except for Democracy (with capital D) being seen as
a substitute for God, as explained by Tage Lindbom in his book The Myth of Democracy. The same question reappears in Nobel’s apparent “Marxist cultural analysis” that would be concretized and lead to the Cultural Marxism. What is
interesting for the argument here is not Nobel’s “quoted conclusions” above,
but his gathering of the historical arguments that he witnessed during the
formative years of AI development. Among others:
The reduction of
human thought to mathematical representation made imaginable the mechanical
simulation or replication of the human thought process. For once, the mysteries
of the immortal mind were rendered transparent and comprehensible… The thinking
person might then be joined by the thinking machine modeled upon the patterns
of human thought but independent of the thinking person. [p. 148.]
Confronted by the
limitations of mechanical analog computers while overseeing the operations of
MIT¨s Differential Analyzer, the most advanced computation machine of its day, [Claude] Shannon suggested speeding up and simplifying the
system by substituting electromagnetic relays for machined parts, using Boole’s
binary arithmetic to describe the electrical network. By using the Boolean
system, invented to describe the laws of thought, to describe the operation of
electric circuits, Shannon laid the groundwork for the electrical simulation of thought – the foundation of electronic
computers. [p. 149.]
With his minimalist
definition of machine intelligence, [Alan] Turing had deftly sidestepped philosophical
discussions about the actual meaning of mind and thought; his materialist
approach dismissed at the outset any discussion of the existence of an
autonomous mind or a soul, which had preoccupied Descartes and Boole. (Turing
had by this time become an avowed atheist). [p. 151.]
Nearly all of the
theoretical developments that made possible the design of computers and the
advance of Artificial Intelligence stemmed from military-related experience.
[p.152.]
[Allen] Newell and [Herbert] Simon wrote: “The vagueness that has plagued the
theory of higher mental processes and other parts of psychology disappears when
the phenomena are described as programs.” [p. 155.]
The generally
recognized father of what became A-Life [Artificial Life] was the mathematician
John von Neumann, the “main scientific voice in the country’s
nuclear weapon establishment.” Toward the early end of his life, suffering from
terminal cancer, von Neumann earnestly devoted himself to weapons development,
advocating the use of nuclear weapons and favoring a preventive nuclear war. At
the same time, he began to ponder the fundamental logical similarities between
life and machines…[p.165.]
Buttressed by
government funding and institutional support, A-Life advocates shared with
their Artificial Intelligence colleagues and arrogant impatience with
criticism. [p.169.]
In short, Noble
purport to show how religious and dangerous fantasies have invaded the
imagination of many people who were the pioneers of computer applications
related to AI. The new (and last?) wave of AI/AGI-hype in mass media, business,
finance, education and research that inundated and sucks in vain the energy of
society starting 2024 after the launch of ChatGPT and its competitors, can be
easily explained as a resonance
with the “spiritual” but not religious,
and still less Christian historical aspects illustrated by Noble. Or then yes,
they are “religious” in the sense of the famous quotation attributed to
Chesterton that “When men stop believing in God
they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything” [# 53]. The more so in anything
that stimulates the human spirit, whatever it happens to be, or thought,
feeling, sensation of intuition, in disarray with the rest of the psyche. In order to appreciate them properly without
underestimating their human dignity we may see them as particularly gifted in
one specific aspect of their personality, recalling the controversies and
discussions of “Ashkenazi Jewish Intelligence” (see e.g. here, here, here, here,
and here).
Regarding the AI colleagues showing “arrogant impatience with criticism” I may
confirm or debunk this affirmation depending upon possible reactions to the
present text of mine. Arrogance, leading to accusing critcs
for “psychologism”, is the psychological sign of what
psychologists have indicated as “Ego inflation” as mentioned above and below in
my text, and more provokingly in other texts such as on Logic and Rape. It may also be seen a sign of arrogance what a
logically and mathematically gifted (“eclectic”) colleague once wrote me about
his unwillingness to be classified as being near some tradition or school of
thought (e.g. “positivist”):
I've never liked
labels either. To be placed in compartments. I feel that there is a snobbery in
this. A way to show one's great learning by being able to label everything and
everyone. I like the rebellious Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz when he says
that there is no psychology or psychiatry, only biography and autobiography.
That is, a novel way
for people who against their will may be classified as “positivists or logical empiricists” of accusing people for “psychologism”,
that there is no psychology (and consequently, e.g. no Carl Jung). Never mind
that controversial and (notwithstanding his merits, philosophically and
theologically) very problematic Szasz,
appears himself to contradict this attribution according to an insert
(accessed July 22, 2024) in the webpage of The
Thomas S. Szasz, M.D. Cybercenter for Liberty and
Responsibility:
Please
note: Neither Thomas S. Szasz, MD, nor Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D., are
"anti-psychiatrists." We both believe in psychiatry between
consenting adults. We are opposed to institutional psychiatry and coercion. We
are not opposed to contractual or consensual psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or
counseling, what have you, as long as the designated client is able to fire his
or her therapist at any time. Obviously we do not
consider drugs as medicine for behavior. If people want to take drugs to
control the way they think, feel, behave and perceive, by all means they should
be free to do so. See Szasz's important work: Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared
A paradox that
confirms the ultimate failure of the human psyche that is dominated by
Ego-inflation is what happens in the technical realm of (necessarily
AI-related) Virtual Reality – VR. I have already struggled to expose, and only refer
to it by means of the two linked words that follow in this sentence, the
mind-blowing “spiritual-philosophical” and phenomenology-related (Pierre Levy)
deconstruction down to the phenomenon of death, of the concept of not only
truth but also of “reality” itself, as I earlier suggest both in the context of “debate” and of theology.
And this happens while modern secular man paradoxically also appreciates and
discusses fiction but finds absurd e.g. the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation. See an excerpt from a text that a doctoral student
interested in Kensei philosophy and Kensei engineering for applications of VR sent to me in August 2023
calling my attention upon this trend:
Kansei tends to assert -- in line with traditional
Buddhist and Shinto philosophy -- that the distinction between human subjective
experience and the outside world is illusory, and therefore inauthentic. Death
seems incomprehensible, and frightens us, because we cannot imagine a world in
which we have no subjective experience, even though it is ultimately illusory.
Technology can be designed, using a method known as kansei
engineering, to reduce, or even eliminate, a person's sense that his
subjective experience is distinct from the objective environment.
This failure of the
human psyche also means the incapability of spiritualization such as in
mathematics and in biblical exegesis in approaching ethical issues. This is
exemplified in a program of the Swedish public television (SVT2) in the series
“Idébyrån”, broadcasted on May 2nd, 2024, with the
title Ondskan i oss [The evil
in us, available until Dec. 10, 2024] introduced with the questions:
Why do we behave
wickedly? What drives us there? We humans are constantly starting new wars, in
Sweden children are used to murder children, we hate each other online, and old
people are cheated of their savings. What drives us there?
A theologian, an
author and a psychiatrist discussed during half an hour but nobody seriously
adduced the role of religion in general or of Judeo-Christianity in particular.
The theologian, Natalia Lantz, had a background in her doctoral dissertation
with the title The Hypertemple in Mind: Experiencing Temple Space in Ezekiel,
The Temple Scroll and Mishnah Middot, an approach that seems to be related
to Barbara E. Mann’s Space and Place in Jewish Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012) which analyses
the historical meaning of space in Jewish communities in relation to
contemporary critical theory, which Lantz introduces as follows (the links are
mine):
In this study I
perform a theory driven close reading of selected sections of Ezekiel (chs. 40-48), the Temple Scroll (cols. 2/3-13:8, 29:3b-47:18) and Mishnah Middot, in order to explore how the architectonic
descriptions of the temple in these works may have been used to create temple
space in the minds of their immediate audiences. I combine Critical Space
Theory and narrative as virtual reality to hypothesize the audiences’ immersion
and interaction with temple space against the background of these three
different engagement contexts. […] I argue that these architectural
descriptions simulated a temple space that could be experienced
virtually, alike modern day computer simulations that
temporarily disrupt the conditions of the physical reality […]
That is:
“…experienced virtually, alike modern-day computer simulations…”, which borrows
a prestigious technical-spiritual interpretation, or a theology where a
“spiritualization” of biblical exegesis may explain the unbelievably absent
theological perspective in the Swedish television program on “The evil in us”,
in the country that often is considered as the most
secularized of the world. The religion of technology? And it is
this sort of academic neo-theology that I show may explain what happened in the Israel-Hamas war where (the
denial of) the Judeo-Christian God or devil appears as having been substituted
by (the denial of) the Holocaust.
Autism, or “Mathematical computer-oriented
Minds”?
The following is a
digression along the lines of the previous sections on cultural lobotomy, the
human psyche, driving forces behind technology, and ego-Inflation behind
powerful experiences.
It deals with the
kind of decisions based on logic and “facts” and unconscious emotion that in
the future can be taken more easily with an apparently undebatable
ChatGPT-support, and without having an idea of what systems thinking is about.
This has also divinized relativity theory, quantum physics (“it works”), music and luminaries such as the
“divinized genius” Albert Einstein, and others such as Richard Wagner, all of them often with their own theological musings
(here, here, here
and here).
There are many logical-mathematical manipulators whose thought process is described in
the study of the foundations of mathematics by Jan Brouwer.
There are also information and computer geniuses or more generally engineering geniuses like the
historical Vannevar Bush (that I quote and comment elsewhere, without relating him as I could to the mention of
Claude Shannon above) who could as well be characterized also particularly
gifted humans such as great writers, musicians, dancers, poets, artists,
sorcerers, or now computer wizard or "mental acrobats". They include
those who are named “Tech bros”
(cf. The Economist, July 17th 2024), following dark etymological roots in the “Bro culture”,
or other analytically-logically gifted pundit who can be indiscriminately
confounded with “mental fireworks” of smart analytically gifted luminaries of
the business world, such as Peter Thiel,
or (in my view) reductionist
psychologist such as Jonathan Haidt and his “moral foundations theory”. What sometimes is opportunely ignored or
disregarded are meaningful aspects if not troubles of their personal lives.
They can also have read the Bible very carefully, being able to quote selected
pieces of text that either support their own interpretation of its message, or
show perceived contradictions which supposedly (logically) demonstrate its
irrelevance (cf. “Even the Devil Quotes Scripture”). They display capabilities that recall the “savant syndrome”. It is worth noting that this latter denomination is
a "politically correct" shortening an earlier one: idiot savant, which can be
misinterpreted when ignoring that etymologically idiot, as in the world idiographic, derives from the root
idio, with a dictionary meaning as "only one's
own": personal, separate, distinct, unique, also sometimes qualified,
respectively in Dictionary boxes on Google and in Wikipedia, that it really means (if one does
not deepen the meaning of “wisdom”):
"A person who
has an exceptional aptitude in one particular field, such as music or
mathematics, despite having significant impairment in other areas of
intellectual or social functioning; or a person who is extremely unworldly but
displays natural wisdom and insight."
“Savant syndrome is a
phenomenon where someone demonstrates exceptional aptitude in one domain, such
as art or mathematics, despite social or intellectual impairment.”
It is important to
remark: “Having significant impairment in
other areas of intellectual or social functioning; or a person who is extremely
unworldly…”. If we forget the further talk about a misunderstood “wisdom”
this may, simply or not so simply, mean arrogance or hubris in believing and
being believed to be extremely “intelligent”. This to the point of pathological narcissism that is socially
and politically supported by a society that is imbued by dependence upon,
and admiration for analytical-technological power. Or, this to the point that a
whole society keeps wondering about the advent of super-human computer
intelligence and about the difference between humans and machines that have an
own “consciousness”, having own legal rights and possibly being loved and love
as humans. Which is something that should disclose the spiritual-religious
content of the feeling, instead of suggesting its reducibility to the
physicality of a machine.
At the same time,
this “savant syndrome” can be related to the psychoanalytic concept of infantile omnipotence and grandiosity, which in turn explains why many senior adults can
feel dependent upon the help of children and grandchildren in the interaction
with computers, cellular phones and digital gadgets in our progressively
computerized society. Grandchildren can appear “intelligent” for easily
grasping manipulations (pressing of keyboard keys) of digital gadgets or games
as far as the gadgets work as digital games and do not require knowledge about
social structures such as required, e.g. when implementing the payments of bills.
This is also a rationale for Internet addiction, when adults continue to behave as children, in
search for “own alternative worlds”, which are games following logical
relations with a logic that does not relate to the adult world and to other
psychic dimensions. Logic works so long it can dispense of language from which
it is derived, despite of this being contested by enthusiasts of logic and
formal science.
It is interesting to
note the relation to lobotomy in the case of the savant example of Kim Peek,
who is reported to have had a “condition in which the bundle of nerves that
connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing”. I will propose another
analogy to the “cultural lobotomy” and “savant syndrome”: the likewise complex
but very modern term autism.
It is qualified in Wikipedia as a neurodevelopmental
disorder, soon argumentatively adjusted to be seen as a particular
neurodevelopmental “order”, as in a broadcasted program
(March 12, 2024) at the Swedish public television SVT in a series on
“Personality” where both autism and ADHD
were seen as human diversities, or just different capabilities. I see this language manipulation as a postmodern
relativism, as when dysfunction or disability tend to be renamed as a
(functional- or ability-) diversity. All
this while the American Psychological Association, APA, still defines them as
for dysfunction (updated April 19, 2018) as “any impairment, disturbance, or deficiency in behavior or operation”,
and disability (updated November 15, 2023) as “a lasting physical or mental
impairment that significantly interferes with an individual’s ability to
function in one or more central life activities, such as self-care, ambulation,
communication, social interaction, sexual expression, or employment. For
example, an individual with low vision or blindness has a visual disability.” A
more complex historical example than of such a destiny than the above mentioned Kim Peek is William James Sidis, an American child prodigy with
exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills, born to Jewish emigrants from
Ukraine and an also exceptional father Boris Sidis, who lived a problematic short life
dying in 1944, aged 46.
My point in this
section will be to show how this sort of autism or diversity finds a legitimate
expression in the captivating biography of the tragic life of the ultimate
modern champion of logic, Kurt Gödel,
by Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge
of Reason. The Life of Kurt Gödel (2021), reviewed in Swedish by Helena Granström in Axess, No. 6, 2021. Granström
remarks that Gödel felt that his incompleteness theorems demonstrated the “human ability to sense the truth,
even when it escapes the grasp of our formal methods”, thanks to a sort of
intuition. This must be seen as a coarse psychological speculation without a
psychological theory, which is indeed subsumed in my discussion of Computers as embodied
mathematics and logic.
But not all appears
as outright autism of whatever. In a book by Paul Hoffman, Archimedes’ revenge:
The joys and perils of mathematics, published in 1988
during one of the hype periods of artificial intelligence, which was not yet
hyped with the addition of neologism as artificial general intelligence. The
title itself refers to the frustrating “Archimedes’ cattle problem”. The point I want to make may be also enhanced by
reading and meditating upon at least the Wikipedia account of a later book by Hoffman, with the revealing title
The man who loved
only numbers, published in 1998.
Keeping to Hoffman’s
first mentioned book, it is interesting to note that besides the understandable
lack of reference to G. Leibniz in his extensive 11-pages word index, he has
the following kind of disclaimers, which position his understanding of mathematics
and logic (pp. 2-4, 159)
:
Many books have been
written about the philosophical underpinnings of mathematics, about the extent
to which it is the science of certainty, in that its conclusions are logically
unassailable. Many other works have rhapsodized at length about the nature of
infinity and the beauty of higher dimensions. Such philosophical and poetic
excursions have their place, but they are far from the concerns of most working
mathematicians. In this book I give a glimpse of some of the things that
mathematicians, pure and applied, actually do. […]
With fundamental
questions about number and shape still unsettled, it is no wonder that there is
much disagreement and confusion about that the computer -- a very complex
mathematical tool – can and cannot do. I have tried to stay clear of mushy
metaphysical issues about the nature of man and machine in favor or presenting
what little is known about the theoretical limits on computing. […]
Much ink has been
spilled in the philosophical literature on what the absence of judgments means
in terms of a machine’s ability to think, but the pursuit of such intriguing
speculations would take us too far afield.
This does not prevent
Hoffman from, deep in the book (p. 168), speculating about using Boolean
algebra in e.g. representing the state of two people’s being friends and not
being friends, irrespective of the meaning and measurement of friendship. The
problem is extended to his discussion of democracy when stating that indeed,
mathematics demonstrates the theoretical futility of creating a perfectly
democratic voting system, as illustrated in USA politics (analysis by Zachary B. Wolf and Renée Rigdon on July
20 2024 in CNN’s “Why Matters newsletter”), even if disregarding its dependence
upon big interests - big donors’ money. He refers (pp. 5, 223) to the
“wrestling with the mechanics of setting up a democratic nation”, and refers to
the “Nobel prize-winning work of the American economist Kenneth Arrow”
that shows that achieving the ideals of a perfect democracy is a mathematical
impossibility. Never mind about the problem of Arrow’s conception (“impossibility theorem”) indicated by e.g. West Churchman, and about the myth of democracy, while the attention is focused on its mathematics.
And Hoffman spends pages (e.g. 237f.) referring to books applying game theory
to conflicts in the Old Testament between God and human beings, including
game-theoretic implications of omniscience, omnipotence, immortality, and
incomprehensibility. Not to mention the pondering (p. 144, 211) that “a machine
state is like a mental state” and the pondering about the difference between
electronic components in a computer and neurons in the human brain.
All this shows how
the hubris of artificial intelligence, even early long before the success of
today’s so-called general artificial intelligence, grew from the apparent
self-imposed limitations of reasonable people who were certainly not mentally
impaired, if yet possibly living and thriving in a sub-culture. The problem
then is not that they were autistic in simple, raw medical clinical sense. In
analytical psychology there is the conception of Psychological Types, which may be seen as vulgarized in the culturally and historically
uprooted Five-Factor Model of
Personality. A better variant is popularized in the book Surrounded by Idiots, and others by the author and management consultant Thomas Erikson with
the DISC assessment tools. In these popularizations of types the question is the interplay between variants of
mathematical statistics and especially cluster analysis, in mathematical approaches to personality
psychology, in oblivion of its “philosophical assumptions”. Otherwise, the question in
analytical psychology is of the interplay between thinking, feeling, sensation
and intuition in relation to consciousness and the unconscious, and psychic
development is the capacity to achieve a balance among them in the so-called
process of individuation. Such conceptual constructions are not more absurd
than the mathematical ones as in, say, quantum physics, if philosophical pragmatism is taken seriously. They
have a theological counterpart in the Bible’s famous Corinthians 12:14ff :
“Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is
given for the common good. To one there
is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of
knowledge by means of the same Spirit. […]”
The cultural problem
appears when a specific constellation of aptitudes are
awarded improper high value by society at large, when represented by industry
including the weapons industries, finance and academia in a secular
technical-industrial culture developed after the scientific revolution. As in Wikipedia’s
quotation from William Whewell’s Philosophy of
the Inductive Sciences: it is the (my italics) “the transition from an implicit
trust in the internal powers of man's
mind to a professed dependence upon external observation”. It is the external
observation of empirical experiments that are assumed to verify results of
mathematically conceived relations to earlier external observations. Society
and its politics begin to reward mainly thinking seen as equivalent to
mathematical-logical ability while mathematics and logic undergo changes in
themselves and in their functions, subservient to only indirect external observation. “Indirect” here means that the
observation is made on observable consequences of hypothesized mathematical
constructions built on more primitive and intuitive concrete observations. An
insight I all this requires a deep understanding of the foundations of
mathematics, which I touch upon in my Computers as embodied
mathematics and logic. If the reader needs here to get a mind-blowing
feeling of this conceptual, more than physical world he/she can (try to) read
the improbable professional activity of quantum (also informational)
physicist and Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger. A follower in the same tradition is the Swedish
physicist Sören Holst in his paper on The Magical Quantum
World (trans. site by
Google Translate), in which he
unknowingly confirms Richard Stivers’ book on Technology as Magic. It is an activity which consequently evades informed
political democratic control, other than financial-commercial and military. And
this can be seen as inflating the self-confidence if not outright arrogance
(“ego inflation”) of seduced mathematically and logically gifted scientists who
are overvalued by “democratically” selected political leaders and managers who
strive, or rather hope, for profitability and economic-industrial-military
power (cf. “it works”) in a society in a cultural crisis being driven by the
Western world.
An important
additional aspect of the computerization and implementation of AI-AGI related
to the prestige of mathematical computer-oriented minds is that, as I write in
my essay on The Meaning of Human-Computer
Interaction, the whole can be seen as a non-reversible social experiment
that seems to diffuse a sort of “dementia”. It incapacitates the daily life of an increasing
part of especially the elders who will be “promoted” to being considered as
mentally handicapped in their “human-computer interaction” at gradually earlier age, and made dependent upon
the routine help by children and grandchildren. Another way to see it is to
observe that an increasing part of the population will not simply and only “serve”
as clerks or workers the other part, but will serve itself by means of (following
laborious instructions learned about) tools and machines that this decreasing
other part of the population designs and manufactures by means of other
machines that are designed and manufactured by them themselves. In this
“mindless” process of technical-logical development with logic with only syntax but blurred unsolved, semantics and pragmatics, it would take quite a period of time up to April
2026 after my writing of most of the text in this article, to reach an example
of consequences. It is the fuss about the “dangers” of Anthropic’s Claude language model, which together with the initial commentaries of it would deserve an article by its own. A reading of
Wikipedia’s updated article on Anthropic and in The Economist should be enough for
understanding the difficulty of understanding what is all about and the
long-time consequences of unbridled (forget democracy) mathematical-logical
thinking, and its industrial economic-political consequences. This requires
going back to the avoided question of motivation or grounds of mathematics and
logic, as in my paper on Computers and embodied mathematics and logic.
And nobody is able or
willing to determine the net amount of unemployment and decreasing “social
checks and balances” resulting from the process (see among all the other
references to “unemployment” in the present text), which can be illustrated by
the case of “self-checkouts” made possible by digitally readable international article numbers, that result in decreasing number of “others-serving” cashiers and personnel.
For the rest I
recommend a reading of the Wikipedia account of the famous theoretical
physicist Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”, especially the
section on his “final years”, beyond his plunging into “mysticism” and references to literary-religious works like the
Hindu sacred text Bhagavad Gita, while his scientific brother Wolfgang Pauli in a complex relationship with Carl Jung tried to unravel meanings of quantum physics, a relationship that I myself try to unravel in my
text on Quantum physics, computers &
psychology.
A footnote for
completeness: an older general medical-neurological study evading, however philosophical
aspects (published in 1989) addresses the problems of this
section. It is related to the earlier mentioned “idiot savants”, and is
authored by Darold A.
Treffert in his book Extraordinary
People: Understanding Savant Syndrome.
Antinomy? – Non mathematica/computer-oriented minds
The following is an
expansion of an excerpt from my essay on Computers
as embodied mathematics and logic, which is presented later here below, and recommended to be read. In it the analytical
psychologist and author Carl Jung
testifies his difficulties in accepting some ground statements of equality in mathematics which could be interpreted as
stupidity or dementia.
What is not easy to
understand is that, especially the mind of an inwardly, heartily “psychologist”
perceives that here is a problem in that, for instance, “Two objects that are not equal are said to be distinct”
and “The truth of an equality depends on an interpretation of its members”. The problem arises in that neither two human
beings are ever equal, nor indeed even two (“physical”) objects are “equal”, depending upon the meaning of physics, object,
and of equality. For an introduction in going deep into the question including
what an “object” is, the whole work of the philosopher F.S.C. Northrop may be helpful, and not
only his The Logic of the Sciences and
the Humanities and inspiration for my dissertation on
quality-control of information.
The easiest way of catching the complexity of all this, I think, is to
understand the problem of the societal introduction of personal identification
number – PIN, that I survey in my paper on The meaning of
human-computer interaction and cannot reproduce here.
It is meaningful to remember that PINs or camp serial numbers were tattooed on
the skin of prisoners in concentration camps during the second world
war. What is not easily understood is that PINs (assigned by whom) are a first
step in facilitating a disintegration of the conception of a human being
through an identification through an equalization of human objects (not subjects)
who are represented by numbers, in groups that are also represented by numbers
of elements assigned (by whom) to each group. It is possible that it is this
kind of insights that lie under the fact (accounted for here below in the present text) that
the psychologist Carl Jung, whose particular mind was absorbed by the “subject”
rather than “object” of the individual
human being, stands as a historical typical “non-mathematical” mind. It may
also be the core of the psycho-social resistance against the introduction of personal
identification numbers - PINs as evidenced in the USA in the societal debate about the
historical report on Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens, when
earlier basis of identification were date and place of birth, names of the
parents, and possibly dwelling address. Today one may discuss the ethics of the
Israel-Gaza war in terms of numbers, say 1400 killed Israelites vs. 41000
killed Palestinians as per September 2024.
It is this approach that seems to make it natural for us today to find it
reasonable to see millions of people as numbers in HCI, and to launch atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (but not yet in Ukraine or Russia) with a total
of estimated about 150.000 civilian
deaths compared to a number of otherwise dead allied soldiers of less than
20.000. And this is repeated today, I claim, in the Israel-Hamas war, where the
Biblical injunction of “eye
for eye, tooth for tooth” of Exodus 21:23-25, with the help of
technology is substituted by “30 eyes for an eye and 30 teeth for a tooth”, or
16.000 children for 100 children. Numbers of objects can also be stuff for what
I see as semantic statistical exercises, as when PM Netanyahu in his talk to
the USA Congress as recorded in The Times of Israel, explains
that “Three thousand
Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel. They butchered 1,200 people from 41
countries, including 39 Americans. Proportionately, compared to our population
size, that’s like 20 [twenty] 9/11s in one day”.
What
is not perceived in this kind of numerical “rational analyses” may be a tragic
analogy to the pride of a whole world for a gigantic rational piece of naval
engineering like the “Titanic”. A whole constructed navigating
world that does not foresee its meeting the iceberg, as many today see climate warming, if not a third nuclear world war.
Fiction literature may have come closest to depict the feelings in such a
setting by characterizing them as Kafkaesque.
All this is in turn
part of “disinformation”
campaigns that rhetorically I claim “do not exist”, such as “Netanyahu’s claims before the US Congress: Facts
of falsehoods?, and ”Fact-checking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s address to Congress”.
The meeting between
the two different minds
It is easy to not
perceive that this may be the core of the whole present text, above and below,
with the difference that the humans meeting AGI are meeting an inanimate object
that embodies mathematics and logic, which in turn “animates” those humans who
interact with the “machine”. All this raises questions that are confusing and
may misdirect the present ongoing thoughts as they relate to several other
papers of mine with different attack points, some of them already mentioned
such as Computers as embodied mathematics
and logic, The meaning of man-machine interaction, Computerization as abuse of
formal science, Information and Debate, Disinformation as a myth, Logic as
rape, Information on: Christianism or atheism, all of them found in my archived collection. Thinking
about all this amounts to think about “everything” while the question
approaches the psychological problem that motivated Carl Jung to “meet” his
senior colleague psychologist Sigmund Freud by developing the idea of Psychological Types.
Keeping close to this
last mentioned approach I wish to limit myself by reporting some personal
experience in my mail-dialog with an extremely mathematically gifted and widely
well-read colleague whose spontaneous “lectures” to me on e.g. quantum physics
raised my admiration as in meeting a musical child prodigy, such as in arranged
YouTube flash mob
or smart mob
“improvisations” (example here, others here).
The dialog proceeded up to the point that I perceived in him a dose of
sentimentality that could be an unconscious reaction to an extreme formal
mathematical-logical rationality such as found in the fields of quantum
physics, computers and AI, tempting me to apply amateurish Jungian analysis. It
could resemble a reciprocal amateurish psychoanalysis with phenomena of transference
and countertransference, which also recall the phenomenon of video game addiction. I found that in the best case it could turn into a
phenomenon catalogued as paragraph number 213 in my reference (in Information
and Debate) to the classic The Art of
Worldly Wisdom.
213 - Know how to
Contradict: "An affected doubt is the subtlest picklock that curiosity can
use to find out what it wants to know. Also in
learning it is a subtle plan of the pupil to contradict the master, who
thereupon takes pains to explain the truth more thoroughly and with more force,
so that a moderate contradiction produces complete instruction."
As I expressed it in
the interaction with my colleague, however, this required my own evaluation of
the reciprocal “existential” needs. It begins to resemble a professional
psychotherapeutic relation or ultimately the situation following from a formal
Christian marriage where moral emotional commitment requires a lifelong
faithful dialog and alternating roles of “teacher and pupil” expressing
reciprocal love. Such an approach is related to the whole question of Reason and Gender. It all can also be valid regarding a meaningful
relation between genuine friends (cf. here
and here)
or between the author and readers of a serious text. In such a context,
unfathomable paradoxes about such those who kept me awake for several days, and
I describe in greater detail in my paper on information about the Israel-Hamas war. An illustrative example is also the phenomenon of
computer-games, as illustrated by the history of the computer video-game Minecraft, which is conceived
and designed by extreme “mathematical minds” beginning with its original
creator Markus “Notch” Persson, but was later submerged in the morass of feelings
and passions of the (still partly mathematical) economic, and political
society. Swedish readers can perceive this drama in a special radio program at
the radio’s program #1 (P1) broadcasted on July 27 2025 at 8:05 a.m. It starts telling about the vicissitudes of the
Minecraft’s original creator Markus Persson, and all this in “happy disregard”
for the intellectual subtilities of academic criticism of “virtual reality” as an
expression of gnosticism, which was seen as standing at a base of the ongoing
societal impact of video-gaming.
In this context of
meeting between two different minds, but within one same person, I will also
mention an exceptional writing by a person, colleague of mine, whom I met
around the year 1980 while I still was assistant professor at the dept. of
mathematics and later computer science (in Sweden also “datalogi”) at Linköping University.
This colleague of mine named Anders Beckman with whom I lost contact with for
his having left the university, wrote a research report of 26 pages, dated
August 1980 with the title Varför jag inte kan vara
datalog: en diskussion av värderingar [Why I can't be
a computer scientist: A discussion of values; catalogued as
LiTH-MAT-R-80-40, ISSN 0348-2960]. He struggles throughout the whole paper with
what he could not name except for “values”, and I have identified as the
relation between formal science and the rest which is now being forgotten with
the hype of AI, and barely identifiable in papers such as (in Swedish) Per
Flensburg’s Den stora
tankestriden inom informatik [The great battle of ideas in informatics; see also here].
On page 22 he writes
something that has been symptomatic for many students of mine, namely the
difficulty of grasping the meaning of West Churchman’s epochal book on the Design of Inquiring Systems. In
mentioning that the researcher’s personality influences his activity as
researcher he writes (my translation and italics):
For example, I have
had difficulty reading C. West Churchman, without
being able to give any reasonable explanation. However, I have gradually
realized that Churchman and I have completely different values on issues that
are important to me, such as gender roles and related questions about human
value, and that these values are noticeable in his work. Being aware of this
allows me to decide whether the differences in values affect my assessment of
the value of the work.
I perceive a sort of
anti-climax in the obscure conclusion, which can be just a peculiarity in the
constitution of Beckman’s attitude, may have contributed to the drama of his
simply leaving both the discipline and the university. It can be seen as a sort
of “academic tragedy” in the sense that a deep thinking by a promising computer
scientist is so committed to truth and
ethics as to change the whole
orientation of his future life. In fact, as I see it, he had met and sensed the
challenge of overcoming the whole problem of the foundations and meaning of
logic and mathematics, and of the orientation of modern mathematized science
and technology as related to philosophy. In philosophy, however, he gets
submerged in M. Heidegger,
a man who might have written on Why I cannot be a Christian, but could
not write about Why I cannot be a Nazi.
Cf. further on “Theology without God”, in my Information
and theology, which in turn suggests that the meeting between the two
different minds is made difficult by the absence of a religious and perhaps
Christian attitude.
To a lesser degree
the same phenomenon is described by a former student of mine and later
professor Erik Stolterman who in his sort of blog on “interaction design, HCI, philosophy of design and
technology & society”, in October 2012 wrote:
One of the books that has had the most influence
on me is "The Design of Inquiring Systems: Basic Concepts of Systems
and Organizations" by C. West Churchman. The book was published in 1971. I
probably got my copy in the early 80s. The reason why I read the book at that
time was not primarily because I wanted to, but because my teacher at that
time, Kristo Ivanov, who would later become my PhD adviser was a big fan of
Churchman. […] Thinking back on the time when I read the book and
also met Churchman and heard him talk about his ideas, I am quite sure that I
did not really understand what the book was about. Actually, now, even without
reading it, just by looking at the List of Content I am quite sure I understand
the book much better than ever before. […] The book was so difficult at the
time when I read it. At the same time I loved to read
it. I am not sure I really understood it at all. Right now, I am so
looking forward to read it again, now that my old copy has magically surfaced.
I perceive this also
as a sort of anti-climax with obscure conclusion from the meeting of two or
more different minds in the same person, about the use of the lessons in the
book. One can easily guess what this drama driven by big fans of “design”
(which I foresaw early as expressed in a paper on The Systems approach to Design) consciously
or unconsciously means in the psyche of people, and what this leads to for
those who are or will be obliged to develop or mostly use human-computer interaction including AI in their daily work. In particular, it
also means inability to connect the problem with philosophy, and ultimately
theology. As when in a whole chapter of the book on The Design way: Intentional
Change in an Unpredictable World the authors borrow Churchman’s use in his book The Systems Approach
and its Enemies (1979, p. 98) of the
playful acronym GOD standing for the “Guarantor of Design”. All this while in
that book and its earlier DIS (cf.
above) Churchman had mentioned and discussed dozens of times God and guarantor
without acronyms. Then the acronym turns out to be a way to deviate thoughts
into the unforeseeable results of our development and use of technology, all
this through a sort of alluring aestheticism and divinization of the “Designer”, who often is the
very same reader of the book on the design
way, to whom are applied the attributes that have philosophically
characterized Genius. And this goes on continuing, unheeded, to avoid
discussion about what overhyped intelligence as related to wisdom and theology is or should be, to begin with. As I
suggest in my paper on the digitalization of society. Another way to see psychologically and ultimately
theologically a failed “meeting between different minds” is the failed
understanding of 1Corinthians 12:4-11 containing the well-known core-text: “Each person is
given something to do that shows who God is. Everyone gets in on it, everyone
benefits”. Everyone needs each other, even if in today’s culture some get
higher status and higher incomes, mainly because industrial technology and
finance are progressively mathematized. I know from my experience in technical
universities that even among engineers there are those who are not
logically-mathematically minded, and in their careers tend to avoid the need to
practice such disciplines. All contribute to the common good; if they succeed
to “love their neighbors”. If there is no love of neighbors, it can mean contempt
of neighbors who are differently (i.e “less”) gifted.
And the other way round for those to happen to have such mathematical-logical
gifts but (more seldom) do not find the opportunity to develop and practice
them, and end in feeling unhappy. Once upon a time, before today’s obvious feminism and “equalization of genders or sexes”, it was common knowledge that women in general felt
allergic to technology and “pressing of buttons”, giving precedence to other
areas of primary “humanistic” interest. Today it all is object of controversial
societal polemic on “heritage vs. environment”, and of ad-hoc rationalizations.
It is, however,
important to note what is not so evident in secularized western countries
championed by the example of Sweden: that theology as related to the analytic
psychology of wisdom is not only a matter of pious faith, but rather an
arguable basis for all ethics including professional ethics of all geniuses or
designers, financers, manufacturers, sellers, profiteers and users of (if not
affected by) their products. It is the reason for my toil in expressing related
thoughts in papers on information and theology, applying them to the cases of disinformation, personal conscience, and information on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
It is this
misunderstanding of the basis of ethics that, for instance, makes a young Danish feminist famous for her activism motivated by her being victim
of revenge porn,
and for re-discovering after a longer stay in hospital the dictionary meaning
of economism, while ignoring its philosophical meaning, and all because of her ignoring the historical
philosophical debate on utilitarianism. If she minded about Christianism, she and her
enthusiastic readers would recognize in her wish (e.g. in an interview at the Swedish radio on 16 and 18 May
2025) for “giving priority to our
relations to other human beings” the concept of love that is the core of the forgotten Christian doctrine. An
ulterior proof that this is not understood is the announced research of
substituting AI care for human terminal care in hospitals (and homes?), in
order to improve their economy in face of the cost and scarcity of manpower.
Ultimately, however,
I guess that the basic problem of the “meeting between different minds” it is
intimately related to the problem mentioned above about Psychological Types as exposed in
analytical psychology, and superficially popularized in various late modern
contexts such as by Thomas Erikson’s book Surrounded by Idiots. The scientifically
technical core of the problem can be simplistically seen to be the divorce,
i.e. not only distinction but also the programmatic separation between
logic and feelings or between logic and common language. It appears to be
programmatic since I remember reading Florian Cajori to whom I return below, mentioning about mathematical notations that the
introduction of Greek letters in the history of mathematical notations was
motivated by the need to prevent distracting psychological associations in the
minds of reasoning mathematicians. In my own life-experience I recognize the
difference between youngsters’ proficiency in logical-mathematical thinking,
and aged people gradual dislike and associated failures in it, which lure to
equate it to beginning of dementia in the manipulation of digital devices. Historically
it can be exemplified by the treatment of the Theodicy or of the source of
evil, which has tormented my mind after writing of my later papers on the wars
in Gaza and Ukraine, and which is documented in the polemic between
Leibniz and Voltaire, as in Leibniz on the Problem of Evil (and see also “Best of all possible worlds”).
Artificially intelligent artistic production?
Extending the
question of powerful experience
we come to the problem of how to frame the question of AI/AGI influence and
use in artistic production, where art stands for the production of powerful
experiences and more than so. In the cultural history of the Western world and
its philosophy, art has been powerful in the sense that Kant and post-Kantians
have related it to Kant’s synthesis of the Third Critique or Critique of Judgement that I have considered in an earlier essay on Computerization as abuse of
formal science. In our context the
matter has already been noted in the cultural world and even mentioned above,
but here it will be inspired by an article on (my trans.) “Artificial music is the future’s melody” published in the major morning newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (30 December 2023),
written by Björn Ulvaeus,
presented as a Swedish musician, singer,
songwriter, and producer best known as a member of the musical group ABBA. The hype about this
issue is illustrated also by the fact that the following day, another author,
Ebba Bonde, wrote an article dealing with the AI-manipulation of
pictures/images having, however, the typical uncommitting and advertising title
“The use of AI is as much a danger as an
opportunity”.
Ulvaeus starts by
acknowledging that we all are influenced by what we have listened to in our
lives, that he does not know where his inspiration comes from, and he expresses
a deep gratitude for the miraculous mystery of music’s mere existence, without
referring to his otherwise well-publicized atheism (that prevents thanking
God). He assures the readers, however, that “we do not need to feel shame for
having difficulty with the definition of what music is”. He notes that sounds
have a remarkable ability to influence our “feelings”, and to penetrate in our
“unconscious”. In this way he proceeds without feeling shame for having
difficulty with definitions, this time not only of music but of feelings or the
unconscious, which happen to have been main matters of struggles for
theologians, philosophers and psychologists for centuries. Giving up these
struggles, the ongoing drive for computerization of society, focused here on
AI, is combined with an aestheticizing post-modern abuse of Kantian aesthetics
that has been renamed DESIGN. In this
perspective Ulvaeus as musician and songwriter is a designer. It all follows unconsciously the steps of the likewise
abused post-Kantians Nietzsche and the academically often referred, if not
namedropped, Heidegger. I have written about this in the essay on Computerization as abuse of
formal science, with the alternative
earlier title of “computerization as design of logic acrobatics”. It deals now
with the acrobatic use of AI, when its users admire the circus acrobatics of
computer scientists turned into craftsmen.
Therefore, the text
proceeds swiftly to state that up to now songs that we love have come from
humans how have dug deep in their psyches, experiences, sorrows, triumphs,
fears, losses and endeavors. “But now has appeared a new type of composer,
eager to learn by means of “deep learning…with a neural network that loosely
resembles the human’s, but not yet.” Ulvaeus tells about being introduced to Google Deep Minds “Music AI incubator”, which he felt was an overwhelming experience that
seems to have made him mainly if not only aware of the importance of finding
solutions for protection in “AI-training” or “prompting” from infringements of
artistic copyrights related to sound, style, genre, voice, instrumentation,
melody and lyrics.
But the reader of his
article senses some sort of insight in what follows:
Songwriting is an
intuitive and deeply human activity, and the big question is whether an AI
model can create something that reflects the humanity behind a song, and
whether that actually matters to the listener. Is there a depth to what a human
can create that an AI cannot replicate? If so, can we appreciate that depth? Do
we care? Or will our brains fill in the blanks and make us think we're hearing
something that isn't there? - Musical experience is subjective. And isn't the
only thing that matters what comes out of the speakers and the effect it has on
the listener? Whether it was created by AI or a human? Or?
[...]
The Abba story made
our "Voyage" avatar concert in London possible. It is a human story of hard
work, triumph, disappointment, joy, love and sorrow. [...] It is so organic and
full of contradictions and crossroads where we could have taken a different
path that I cannot help but cling, perhaps vainly, to the hope that it could
not have been artificially created.
[...]
If AI, through the
lens of language, can learn everything a human can know about the innermost
nature of the world? Can the creative process itself be replicated by AI? The
process by which ideas born of curiosity and imagination are realized and push
the boundaries of the human art world.
[...]
Will AI help us
create great new work or make us obsolete? Personally, I think we will learn to
coexist, as we have always done with other technological inventions in the
world of music.
To start from the
end: “we shall learn to coexist?”. So, it is not AI that will teach us to do it
by structuring our “relationships” by loving each other? As I claim that it
will not write my
essay on the Russia-NATO-Ukraine
conflict? Nor it will make labor unions superfluous by teaching “us” what to do
about conflicts of interest, greed, hate and unemployment? And Ulvaeus refers
to the assumedly prophetic Yuval Noah Harari who means that AI has “hacked” the operating system
for the human civilization. So much for prophecy and for knowledge about
operating systems, as it transpires in Harari’s Can mindfulness save us from the menace of artificial intelligence? An unthought prayer to an imaginary God apparently
cannot compete with “mindfulness”, since it is reported that Harari is “derisive about the great religions having anything to
offer” and
“to the best of our scientific knowledge, all these sacred
texts were written by imaginative Homo sapiens. They are just stories invented
by our ancestors in order to legitimize social norms and political structures.”
That
is, “to the best of his knowledge”, which also fits what has been called
Sweden’s official religion of atheism, also practiced in a Swedish philosopher’s book on so-called fake news (while ignoring The
Myth of Democracy),
which are related to the consequences of AI/AGI. Harari’s “mindfulness”
promisingly should have meant that “we better understand our minds before the
algorithms make our minds up for us” but it seems to either ignore or counter
everything that the most mindful students of the mind have come up, beginning
with the analytical psychology that e.g. Jordan Peterson adduces as I myself have done in my
writings. The problem, however, is
defectively posted to begin with, since it does not address the question of the
meaning and function of art as necessarily done in philosophy, as suggested in
my essay on the influence of Immanuel Kant in the conception of societal computerization as an abuse of formal science. And regarding music Ulvaeus’ understanding misses
the primary meaning of art as human communication, communication between humans
closely related to love, whose corruption becoming visible in this discussion
of AI in art is surveyed in my preface to Reason
and Gender. Not to mention the
missed history and meaning of music in religion and theology as indicated in my
essay on Information and Theology.
Concerning “avatars”
as in avatar concerts it is possible
to identify the same tendencies of dehumanization of human relationships as
outlined about 2D-Lovers in “The technological turn” of my Reason
and Gender.
For the rest, I claim
that the above approach to artificially intelligent artistic production
exemplifies the same dehumanization process that I noted above in the context
of the hyped Turing Test, about which I express that the less one understands
and feels what a human being is, the more he will be equated to a machine, an
avatar, an ant or whatever, as in the Holocaust. The decline of culture and
civilization coupled to an undervaluation of philosophy and theology will
necessarily become visible in the discussion of more abstract issues such as
art. Consequently one will not be able to understand
neither what Plato writes about the effects and importance of music (Republic, 398b-403c,
but esp. 424b-c) nor music’s role and effect in the paganism, atheism,
and future of our youth.
More generally one
will not be able to understand the meaning of difference between an original
work of art and a copy of it which stands at the heart of the (infringement of)
copyright. Original means that something is (problematically established to be)
not consciously and openly influenced by, or rather generally recognized as
similar to a prior human creation. In terms of analytical psychology, however,
two or more works of art can be influenced or inspired by an archetype that
belongs to the collective unconscious and as such legitimately common to
humans. This problematizes the concept itself of copyright at a more basic
level than the erudite and politically oriented famous work of Walter Benjamin,
The work of art in
the age of mechanical reproduction. It puts in evidence
the economic-political core of the creation of copyright, while it can be
questioned in spiritual terms as it was in earlier times e.g. among musicians
who freely “borrowed” and lent from each other and from themselves, justifying
it by seeing that their own imagination and creativity was a gift from God. Or,
as I heard once the world-famous tenor Plácido Domingo respond to somebody in a broadcasted interview who
praised his voice, by uttering that it was not his own merit but a loan from
God who could at any time take it back.
Of course, what is
said in this context about “artistic production”, may be extended to all
intellectual production, as when AI-applications are “trained” in reading books
and the whole Wikipedia. In the absence of morals, it will be necessary
to spend lots of time and money in fighting, praying, and philosophizing a lot
about the philosophy of law in courts regarding the fact that AI applications
read and use Wikipedia and other people's work for free, trying to sell it and
create their own profits. For instance Mark
Hetherington who is introduced as “Wikipedia administrator for over 15 years”, answers in Quora the following about “Is scraping data from Wikipedia legal?”:
All Wikipedia text is available under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
(CC-BY-SA). So long as any reuse follows the terms of that license, that reuse
is also legal. The terms obviously include attribution (credit the original
author[s]) and sharing alike (license any derivative works with the same
license).
Images and media are licensed separately.
While most are available under free licenses, including CC-BY-SA, some are not.
Some are used on Wikipedia without license under
US fair use law, an exception to copyright. Your reuse may or may not be able
to use those media depending on your jurisdiction and whether fair use applies
to your application of those images in its new context. For example, commercial
reuse of Wikipedia content would likely not qualify for fair use in the same
way as it worked for the free encyclopedia.
I myself come to
think of my own indignation and feeling of revolt in that my mentor West
Churchman’s mentioned book The Design of
Inquiring Systems (1971) is not being reprinted and is not made available
on the Internet, while a direct request for it had not even been answered (as per
January 2024) by the owners of its
copyright. It is an eloquent example of the unethical disinterest for
disclosing truth, while also negating the supposedly “holy” democratic right of
freedom of expression, all under the silent mantle of narrow political-economic
(dis)interest.
Return to The Design of Inquiring Systems
Well, the definition
of wisdom is controversial. In way of summary: it all is about chapters 2 and 5
of part 1 of DIS, while ignoring or
not understanding the whole of its 16 chapters in both parts 1 and 2 of the
book. In particular, it is worth
mentioning that in AI and AGI the emphasis is on chapter 2, the building of
fact nets, and not on chapter 5 since the AI community is not specifically
designing and performing scientific experiments and creating or establishing
facts, but only selecting them, in oblivion of the intellectual challenge
illustrated in Steven Shapin's
famous A Social History of
Truth. This is a phenomenon
that I observed during many years of teaching at universities: most readers
understand the book up to chapter 4 or chapter 5 discussing empiricism, but
later they seem to get gradually lost, up to the point of confessing that they
cannot see the necessity and meaning of the second part of the book with the
last 7 (where appear the references to Carl Jung and analytical psychology) out
of its 16 chapters. For many the final result is that when discussing the
book’s content, they testify that yes, they have read it, and that they already
“know” it, assuming that it does not influence their pre-conceptions on the
AI-issues, and their conclusions.
This is not to
“divinize” West Churchman who, in my opinion, got limited by his need to
survive academically by fitting in the USA academia
(also here), and for reasons of the problematic relation between
science, theology and politics that I survey in my text on Information and Theology. I think that he basically did it by his
repeated relating to the academically divinized philosopher Immanuel Kant that
I comment upon in my essay on the ongoing computerization of society. Kant also deserves and important place in
Churchman’s latest major book, The
Systems Approach and its Enemies, in chap. 4 on “Logic: A Theory of
Reality, or Kant for Planners”. In my view, Kant along his numerous followers
such as Jürgen Habermas, diverted the development of many scholars, including
one among Churchman’s most knowledgeable and faithful students, Werner Ulrich who, by the way, authored the best biographical
documentation of his thesis advisor, accounted for in the summary of Churchman’s influence on me.
On the basis of the above I wish
for the time being to emphasize one basic conclusion. The possible if not
probable result of the use of AGI is that it will suffocate debate by cementing the past and what (and where)
has been written or said up to now, both in terms of choice of, or availability
of data (measured and created, or chosen by, and available to, or affordable
for whom?), imposed way of thinking (as illustrated in my Logic as Rape) and of affordable technological base. An alternate
simple formulation found in an article in The Economist (Nov 9th 2023) in the context of Hollywood actors’ strike reflecting
a fear of the technology is
The process of ingesting everything and then
spitting out an average may lead to a stylistic and conceptual regression to
the mean, says a literary agent, who sees similarities with the algorithms on
social media that help propagate the most pedestrian views.
AGI may work for contexts of basic natural science
isolated from human interaction, as is the case of established classical
physics such as in astronomy (but even then, not necessarily in quantum physics). It will cement what has existed up to now around us
or around those who supply or have control over the environment that has
produced the data for unknown uses, and have control over the equipment. It
will even include logic manipulations (deductions and inductions) in e.g. large
language models LLM (soon "very large language models" VLLM?) of what
is electronically recorded as having been said, written or heard up to a
certain moment about "something" with no agreed-upon definitions, and
finally selected by unknown GPT "trainers" for known or indeterminate
uses. It will keep lots of people busy in a difficult rebutting of what has
been easily said or written by anybody with the help of AGI-GPT. It may be seen
as a loudspeaker or broadcaster of it all to all of us, or to selected
audiences. All this coupled to the difficulties if not impossibility of genuine
debates as I try to survey in a text on Information and
Debate. From the teachings of the most serious research on
the history and sociology of science, one is neglecting every insight into the
fact that most of the ongoing scientific work is based on confidence in the
truth of others that from now on will not be known, as masterly illustrated by
earlier mentioned Steven Shapin in The
Social History of Truth. It is an image that revives the mind-blowing
concerns raised already in 1967 by Russell Ackoff’s article on Management Misinformation Systems, which also clarifies
the pitfalls of offering ready-made "recipes" on how to solve known
problems using known methods:
Five assumptions commonly made
by designers of management information systems are identified. It is argued
that these are not justified in many (if not most) cases and hence lead to
major deficiencies in the resulting systems. These assumptions are: (1) the
critical deficiency under which most managers operate is the lack of relevant
information, (2) the manager needs the information he wants, (3) if a manager
has the information he needs his decision milking will improve, (4) better
communication between managers improves organizational performance, and (5) a
manager does not have to understand how his information system works, only how
to use it. To overcome these assumptions and the deficiencies which result from
them, a management information system should be imbedded in a management
control system.
DIS deals just with what is or should be management,
control and system. To understand the difficulty of understanding DIS it is helpful to consider how it is
ignored it in an apparently “encyclopedic” review by K. Lyytinen and V. Grover
“Management
Misinformation Systems: A Time to Revisit?” (J. of the Association for Information
Systems, 2017, vol. 18, 3) who rely on ad-hoc terms including (in our
context) tautological “intelligence augmentation” as stated in
“We identify significant shifts in research on
decision making including the role of abduction, data layering and options, and
intelligence augmentation.”
In terms of DIS,
AGI that in the best case may work as a profitable "user manual" of
AI, implies increased dependence upon available data that unknowingly may be
fake data, misinformation and
disinformation, and upon computer
technology, including dependence upon those who own and can afford the data and
technology. In other words: DIS
chapters 2 and 4 on Leibnizian Inquiring Systems: Fact Nets, chapter 3 and
chapter 5 on Lockean Inquiring Systems: Consensus, which probably is the
last chapter understood by most readers, and is the coupling to their blind reliance upon the “myth of democracy“
(more on this myth below and in my essay on the Russia-Ukraine conflict). This will
be to the detriment of partly chapter 6 on Kantian Inquiring Systems:
Representations which is the
dogma of most contemporaneous philosophers,
chapter 7 and 8 on Hegelian Inquiring Systems: Dialectic - the illustrative chapter 8 being usually
understood and liked by most labor unions, Marxists and leftists but never by
AI/AGI developers whose products often should but are never allowed to produce conflicting stories or explanations, and chapter 9 on Singerian Inquiring Systems: Measurement and Progress – unconsciously
accepted if yet not understood in detail by most scientists. Plus the whole part 2 with its 7 last
chapters starting with chapter 10 on the three basic models or imageries of
inquiring systems. It implies emphasis on Democritean Imagery or
Mechanism, and Carneadean Imagery: Probability
(Statistics) to the detriment of Aristotelian Imagery: Teleology or goals, which is already
applied earlier in chapter 3 on the teleology of The Anatomy of Goal Seeking, and I would outright relate to Aquinian theology with the consequent teleology and
(analytical) psychology. The rest of part 2 introduces the problem of implementation recalling the question of
The Researcher and the Manager, plus
the question of religion, theology,
psychology and faith, the challenges to teleology, and the dimensions of
inquiry that are developed in the next published book The Systems Approach and its Enemies.
In still other words: it is the problem that I try to
approach in my earlier essays on the computerization of society and the human-computer
interaction. One of the late suggestive reports is the case of an
insurance company that trained advanced text chatbots to initially reject
the insured clients’ written requests for compensation based on their
particular insurance policy. It is thought provoking to imagine what this way
of thinking means for the medical safety of patients to be in the future served by commercial medical AGI
chatbots. This trend has already started and has been commented in Is ChatGPT Smarter than a Primary Care Physician? without a visible understanding of which is the basic
problem, besides moral and juridical “responsibility”, beyond an initial
comparison between the performance by ChatGPT and human clinical practice. Or,
in a medical report on This Drug works, but Wait till You Hear What’s in it, without an understanding of the difference between
statistics and a scientific theoretical “Why”, as explained by Churchman in the
book Prediction and Optimal Decision (chap 6 on “Objective
Probability” relative to statistical
population or group). I know of
statisticians who made up their living practically by writing physicians’
doctoral theses, since such theses consisted mainly of statistical work with
their available data. This is as medicine tends to become more and more result
of statistics on big data, and correlation a substitute of problematic
causation when the concept of cause itself is put in question as in advanced
quantum physics and philosophy of science. The whole is further complicated by
physicians themselves, e.g. in health care centers, giving in for smart
AI-sellers’ offers of “amplification” or computer “support” (that I comment in
the context of human-computer
interaction). They will illude
themselves that they retain a responsibility which in fact can be no longer
their own, being simply victims of the good old Hawthorne effect, seduced as they get for being the focus of attention
and by the novelty of being research subjects of fashionable AI. All this while
the first symptoms of AI-abuse in health care are being reported (in Medscape, November 20, 2023) in Accused of Using AI to Skirt Doctor’s Orders, Deny
Claims, followed by the expected uncritical hype-noise as in AI Tech Ready to Transform Doctors’ Working Lives, or by less uncritical hype
noise, which will suck a
few critics’ and many readers’ energy in sterile reading, analyses and
rebuttals.
It is obvious that in today’s scientific and cultural
milieu readers of these lines feel frustration in face of the perception of an
“enormous impossible” task of understanding all the above references as related
to the scientific and technical presently “dogmatic” bases of western
civilization. I claim that this stands at the heart of what I sense as being a
western cultural crisis. The crisis of understanding the bases of our own
western culture in analogy to the task of understanding Christianity as compared
to, say, Hinduism, Islam or Confucianism. Nevertheless, there are people who do
not shy away from such challenges. An example is the Swedish intellectual Ellen
Key who in launching in Sweden a sort of “enlightened feminism” did not shy away from embarking in a study of
Theosophy related to Buddhism and Anthroposophy. Other ambitious western
intellectuals may dwell also on Hinduism and “spirituality” (a for me
mind-blowing example found in Jan Olof Bengtsson’s
analysis) challenging Carl
Jung’s warnings (but cf. Harold Coward’s Jung and Eastern Thought) that a westerner who barely understands his own
Christian culture may hope for a simplified rational-logical understanding of
other complex cultures. I cannot allow myself to dwell further into this issue
here except for directing the reader to only one of the relevant places in
Jung’s collected works, vol.11 Psychology
and Religion: West and East, (CW11, §771 ff.). Otherwise, the mirage of
“spirituality” sinks into logic, mathematics, computers, and ultimately AGI. Or
it sinks into the morass of a logic structuring of “spirituality” as in the
“New Age”-counterculture of the 1970s as exemplified by “religious movements”
like Adidam (considered in Bengtsson’s analysis), related to the names of Franklin Jones, and further to Ken Wilber. A final split of the western mind in a “theory of
everything”, prior to a third world war?
I also heard of a student who meets analog problems as
the just mentioned reference to Theosophy and Buddhism when envisioning
critical hospital care by computer aided dying of patients through the study of
the relationship between Heidegger, death, and technology in Japanese philosophy and
engineering. More specifically, such things are focused in a field known as kansei engineering, accounting for "emotions,
affects, sensibility or perception” (whatever they happen to be and
interrelate) in line with traditional Buddhist and Shinto philosophy. All this
while in fact ignoring the whole body of analytical psychology as I explain in
the above-mentioned criticism of Key’s enlightened feminism. All this while AI
industry may also explore the market of combining “adult” robotic products like
combinations of “real dolls” with AI ideas like conversational AI platforms and advanced robotics.
I do not assume that e.g.
feminism needs to be a much more complex phenomenon than the ongoing
computerization of society. But I have already tried to explain (cf. above) why
writing and discussing serious matters is in general a hopeless task today. Regardless the paradox of my writing down
this just now, repeating then the error committed by Churchman when writing
and publishing the DIS to which I
referred above. Because of all this I rely upon some excerpts from some of my
earlier writings, starting from my article on The Russia-NATO-Ukraine Information Crisis where I quote what
Plato, before or "as if" presaging the advent of Christianity and of the
Bible, wrote (as in my available translations) in his famous Seventh Letter (341d, and 344c):
|
If I thought it possible to deal
adequately with the subject in a treatise or a lecture for the general
public, what finer achievement would there have been in my life than to write
a work of great benefit to mankind and to bring the nature of things to light
for all men? I do not, however, think the attempt to tell mankind of these
matters a good thing, except in the case of some few who are capable of
discovering the truth for themselves with a little guidance. In the case of
the rest to do so would excite in some an unjustified contempt in a
thoroughly offensive fashion, in others certain lofty and vain hopes, as if
they had acquired some awesome lore. […] |
|
For this reason
no serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the
general public so as to make them a prey to envy and perplexity. |
This insight is
summarized by the Latin locution Intelligenti pauca (“few words suffice for him who understands”), as well
as by the point in my essay Information and Debate on the difficulty if not meaninglessness of a
supposedly democratic argumentation on deeper issues. In view of the Quality of Information. Its meaning, however, goes deeper in the Bible as it
can be seen in the Bible Gateway by typing in the search field e.g. “whoever has ears”, and “ears eyes”, my own main choice being Matthew 13:1-23,
Lucas 8:4-15,
Mark 8:18,
and Acts 28:27.
I realize that my writing this text then is a paradox, and it all is an answer
to what is the conclusion of this paper for all those who do not want or cannot
read and understand the linked references. They might have been superfluous if
the population practiced some of the great religions, for us in the West
beginning with Christianity. It has been said that if people had followed at
least five or six out of the ten Commandments, the world’s situation would have
substantially improved, with or without AI-AGI.
The reader who feels
somehow impatient because of the length of this paper may now jump over the
following chapter 6 that contains occasionally commented (in bold font) further explanations and examples of
problems of AI in earlier papers of mine, going directly to chapter 7 on The open letter: "Pause Giant AI
Experiments".
6. References to ChatGPT in
other essays
In what follows below
I try to offset the hopelessness of discussing matters and references that are
difficult to read and understand, the more difficult in lack of motivation. I
do this by means of (sometimes heavily edited) excerpts from texts that I have
written as per July 2023, which when necessary are interpolated by my specific
comments in bold text style. They will be completed with my comments to answers
obtained from ChatGPT to some specific questions of mine. But let me start with
a somewhat "lofty" section out of Information
and Theology that matches the probable theological meaning of the Plato's
quotation above:
"Myths" of
Artificial Intelligence. The explaining away
of religion and Chesterton's "believing in anything" also opens the
way for believing in the future interaction with other planetary worlds in
outer space, and in artificial intelligence, AI, computers with self-consciousness,
whatever it is, will overpower the human mind, or that AI-robots should have
human rights, or that we will ultimately create the superintelligent robotical paradise on Earth, or whatever wherever. Or
believing in discussions about, say - machine consciousness and machine ethics ending in so called technological singularity.
All this without the
possibility of "debating" the matter because of myriads of
misunderstandings arising in part from faulty difficult definitions and
presuppositions, to begin with about the meaning of
intelligence. Buchanan's initial consideration says it all for those who
can understand: "In calling AI an experimental
science, we presuppose the ability to perform controlled experiments
involving intelligent behavior." I repeat, for emphasis: "perform controlled experiments involving intelligent behavior". I add: where
control is possible and advisable, as discussed by West Churchman in his book
that followed DIS, on The Systems Approach and its Enemies, especially
the chapter on "Logic: General", followed by "Logic. A theory of
reality, or Kant for planners." But who cares? ("Please give me a few
lines' summary because I have not the time to read all this stuff"…)
This phenomenon of misunderstandings and phantasies about AI is
revealed and, in a sense also "solved" in all its
complexity by what I regard as a fundamental work by Churchman by the time we elders met
the first wave of hype-enthusiasm about AI in the seventies. It was The
Design of Inquiring Systems: Basic Concepts of Systems and Organization that
I myself tried to expand and facilitate the reading of, by means of a Word and Issue Index, followed by a sort of
contextual evaluation in The Systems Approach to Design and Inquiring
Information Systems.
I think that with this kind of understanding it is not, anymore, a
question of whether AI in its many forms will be applied in modern society. It
is rather a question of forecasting the consequences and the possibilities of
counteracting the dangerous ones, becoming a problem that I considered in
my Trends in Philosophy of Technology, and ultimately a theological problem that motivates
the present text. The difficulties will be enormous, not only because the
academic devaluation of theology, and even philosophy in technical and
political context. Even when a professor of computer science
warns about overconfidence in AI in Swedish mass media (Dagens
Nyheter, October 7th 2018), he relies upon exhortations for the need
to be conscious about the system's limitations. The
warnings are based upon appeals to understand and to be conscious that we are still far from creating (an
undefined) intelligence at a human level with
the ability to feel and reason, evaluate, make moral
evaluations and explain what it is doing and planning
to do. All italicized concepts remain undefined, presupposing political,
philosophical and theological competence, understanding why we are "still" far
from "creating" artificial life and paradise on earth, understanding
the why of not to "believe in anything".
Even a most
sophisticated Italian mathematician, Paolo Zellini, who dedicated much of
his life writing about the philosophy of mathematics including computer
science, concludes his work with a rather inconsequential book, so far only in
Italian language, that vaguely warns about the Dictatorship of calculus. His barely outspoken
warnings are supported by reference to the extremely explicit ones by the more
popular sort of polymath Jaron Lanier. Lanier's limitations appear most clearly when
he introduces also provocative thoughts on virtual-reality that challenge
earlier elaborate condemnation by others as being deleterious gnosticism in computer
science. Despite positive ambitious reviews, Zellini's neglect
of theology, particularly of Christianity, leads him to miss the most relevant
historical aspects of the contribution by Jan Brouwer to the understanding of
the problems considered here.
It is symptomatic
that when we humans no longer believe in God, we happen to believe that we
(Nietzschean superhumans) are so godlike as to be able to create machines in
the track of ChatGPT that will transcend human intelligence and be substitutes
for God.
My comment: This excerpt illustrates how the hype of
AI and AGI may nourish itself upon the secular abandonment of the idea of GOD
and related theology.
All this while the modern
technological mindset can be envisaged as promoting the deconstruction or
destruction of the (cf. Martin Buber) “you-thou” by reducing it to a divinized
capitalized “It” as in the hyped “dialogue” of humans with a ChatGPT using Large Language Model tools – LLMs (see also here).
Language models are basically logic, and further: mathematical logic that
forgets the observation by the Jan Brouwer mentioned above (treated in my essay here)
in his study of the foundations of mathematics and logic, that logic was to
begin with extracted from language. It further opened to the tautological
consequence of the ambitions of mathematize logic into "mathematical logic" in order to finally being used as substitute
for language conversation between humans that logic was originally extracted
from. Humans then gradually leave the scene as unemployed, and the original
language conversations and negotiations turn into authoritarian LLM declarative
sentences sent through computer networks by a few to the many, plunging
everything into the problematic "human-computer interaction".
It is the kind of chat that
produces instances in Japan where individuals are reported to have fallen in
love or having developed so-called romantic or dangerously passionate feelings
(up to one documented suicide) for (with or without holograms
of) contrasexual (cf. LGBT), virtual or fictional characters,
sometimes referred to as "2D lovers"
or "waifu culture" (commented in depth by The New York Times, July 26, 2009).
It all to be related to the concepts of “3D lovers”
and Real Doll, or even more sexually
neutral “AI-powered characters” such as “Star”
and “Charstar” or “Character AI”. This phenomenon gained some attention in the media,
particularly with the emergence of vocaloid characters like Hatsune Miku in a perhaps more permissive Japanese culture
permeated by Shintoism. More information about the topic can be obtained in
connection with the Nijikon and Hentai
phenomena as well as fictosexuality and pansexuality, which paradoxically indicate the deep
gender-psychological and thereby theological implications o
human-computer interaction.
Such detours of
so-called human “sexuality” stand at the basis of the undermining of the
fundamental “I – You” relation whose “archetype” is the gender relation between
humans represented by man and woman. This undermining implies the sliding of
the You into an It and a consequent confusion
of pronouns that are illustrated by what happens lately in the computer field
of human-computer interaction or HCI with the
appearance of the device ChatGPT mentioned above. In fact, when I
inputted into the machine the question “Please explain which are the basic
databanks, whether including the whole Internet, which are used in order to
find and elaborate the answers in ChatGPT”, I initiated my question with a
“please” felt to be directed to those They (or a He
or She?!) who are (or were?!) “responsible” for its operation.
But I got the following answer from an I that could have been
a We but was an It, as
follows (my emphasis):
As an AI language
model, my responses are generated based on a mixture of
licensed data, data created by human trainers, and publicly available data.
I don't have direct access to databases or retrieve information from
specific sources in real-time. I have been trained on a
diverse range of data, including books, websites, and other texts, to develop a
broad understanding of human language. My purpose is to assist
and provide information to the best of my abilities, regardless of the specific
sources of my training data.
This is, of course,
the problem of responsibility in human interaction that is
today exasperated also in the introduction of the “autonomous” technology
represented by the ramblings of so-called artificial general intelligence AGI where no longer is questioned what intelligence
is or should be.
My comment: All this highlights the question of “WHO”
is ChatGPT or whatever future actor in the expanded field of Artificial General
Intelligence. It is closely related to the question of "Whose
responsibility", which in turn tends to be easily transformed into an
essentially juridical law-question (as Portuguese-speaking readers can hear at
an interview with Brazilian computer scientist. Silvio Meira, here and here), while the source
of the problem is found at the basis of what fact, logic, and intelligence is
all about as related to ethics. Today there are (too) many brilliant minds (as I show in my essay
on computerization) who are tempted to discuss, in an extremely
logically structured way, matters that they should understand better, recalling
again Plato's quote above. In general, the problems created by AI and AGI are
translated into assumed future solutions designed by the process of assumed
ideal democracy. For the rest It is unclear to me what the last sentence means
with “regardless the specific sources of my training data. This considering
what was reported by Reuters (Oct 17,
2023) regarding China’s Ernie 4.0 generative AI model
(China’s ChatGPT), stating that the prior week, Beijing had published proposed security requirements for firms
offering services powered by the technology, including a blacklist of sources
that cannot be used to train AI models, beyond copyrighted material. Long after
writing this latter sentence I read about the suddenly
(January 2025) extra hyped “revolutionary” Chinese DeepSeek a candid section on
“Concerns, Censorship,
Security and privacy”, that were not much publicized for earlier
American-Western AI products. I have seen little having been said about that
kind of things in neither ChatGPT, nor its contenders Google’s chatt-AI Bard and Gemini. Symptomatically, Wikipedia’s article
on Gemini quotes a couple of professors who in the context of
comparing these AI-products “cautioned that it was difficult to interpret
benchmarks scores without insight into the training data used”. All this while
extensive censorship was exerted on the news about e.g. the Russia-Ukraine
conflict, as remarked in my paper on it. But Fei-Fei Li (author of The worlds I see – curiosity, exploration and
discovery at the dawn of AI) at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered
Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI) is reported in a newspaper (Svenska Dagbladet, December 9, 2023) to “emphasizes the
importance of an ethical AI development”. I am sure that many perceive such
entrepreneurial wording as well-meant uncommitted buzzwords, as the title of
the newspaper article, “AI is controlled by humans - for better or worse”,
identical to similar stuff found
on the net. The involved dazzling successful personalities,
however, as well Jensen (Jen-Hsun)
Huang co-founder and president of Nvidia Corporation, certainly deserve
to be problematically listed among the computer geniuses I introduce in my
above-mentioned paper on Computerization.
But there is more to it. After having written most of
the above about Reason and Gender, in March 2025 I had to complete with the
following, which introduced a new chapter in my text on the subject, with the
tile Teenager’s suicide allegedly caused by
AI-chatbot. The rest of the chapter with my
comments, because of reason of space in this present paper, can be read at this link to the
chapter in Reason and Gender. And now to the
mentioned introduction of the chapter:
What follows is The Japan Times’ summary article published on March 18, 2025 about a teenager’s suicide that was already
described in detail in an article published on November 11, 2024 by the Privacy
World Blog, and regarding a
case filed in Florida’s Federal Court on October 22, 2024. The teenager’s
mother Megan Garcia (but not her son’s “stepfather”?!) is also interviewed in a
YouTube video An AI chatbot killed my son. I take the required space here below, because
it qualitatively illustrates the possible if not probable long-run consequences
of the downplaying increasing problems in the relation between man and woman
under the mantle of a misunderstood “sexuality”. The suicidal teenager had
established a passionate relationship with the “fictional character” Daenerys Targaryen. All this against the background of
technological development represented here by AI and the doings-litigations of
the company Character.ai that presents itself rather “secretively”or exploitatively at Character.AI, which affects the minds of not only teenagers
but also of men and women, being a question of degree in face of psychic
nuances in the variations of the human mind. Now over to the Japan Times’ text:
[…]
From: Computerization as Design of Logic Acrobatics
And today the
ultimate consequence of this thinking is the recent and by now famous ChatGPT, which probably few computer scientists seem as yet
to understand what they are doing in terms of logical fact nets or Leibnizian Inquiring Systems. They are
basically logical operations performed on the contents of the assumed “facts”,
including facts about functions of devices that are stored and retrievable from
the total Internet.
I think that those who feel compelled by their
conscience to unravel this tragic mental confusion can only do this by relating
computer science to mathematical logic and empiricism, or logical empiricism, along the guidelines outlined by West Churchman in
his The Design of Inquiring Systems repeatedly
mentioned here, for good reasons. In
particular it is a question of what follows from the conceptions of chap. 2 on Leibnizian Inquiring System: Fact nets
(logical networks), and chap. 5 on Lockean
Inquiring Systems: Consensus. That is, consensus within the community of
Pre-Trainers (the PT in GPT, people selected by somebody), which establishes
the sources and selection of facts to be or not to be networked and
Generatively Transformed. The former fact nets are intertwined linguistic manipulations, and the latter consensus is the manipulated factual
sentences, declarative knowledge that in turn will trigger physical devices when it
all happens to be politically trusted wherever found in the Internet by those
who can afford the search for their own entertainment, profit or purposes. And
the first purposes unfortunately, and
ultimately, will be the purposes of automated warfare, and “killer robots” or lethal autonomous
weapons (see also here)
that will be certainly called "defensive". That is the core of GPT
& Co, which is supposed to revolutionize and save or at least to win the
world, it all seasoned with more or less intellectually and politically naïve
warnings for “Existential risk from artificial general
intelligence”. Whatever
existential means in its relation to religious.
Not knowing or
understanding what intelligence is or should be, the door is open for limitless
fantasies about the next if not ultimate hype of Artificial General
Intelligence including the
construction of the above mentioned Theory of everything (and its philosophical counterpart here). Therefore, many will start hoping not
only to be able to ask any question and get
the answer, but also to ask the computer to do anything and having it done, such as trusting self-driving vehicles without even having understood the problems of auto-pilots
or problems of scientific experimentation and theory-building, or technocratic
planning being replaced by a sort of ex-post
pre-training as in the elaborations of GP - Generative Pre-Training. Whose training
and responsibility? In terms of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine it is like asking ChatGPT or Bing what to do in order
to solve and stop the conflict by applying a thinking that I have provocatively
and rhetorically called Logic as Rape in the form of a ChatGPT instead of an inquiring system. Cf. West Churchman’s
“Logic: A Theory of Reality, or Kant for Planners” in his earlier mentioned
book The Systems Approach
and its Enemies (chap. IV). In other
words, a revival of the fantasies about the HAL 9000
fictional AI “character” or of the older idea of Frankenstein ‘s monster.
All this without
understanding what it all is about, as illustrated in Jordan Peterson’’s short
video on ChatGPT with the title of The dark side of AI. If one has the time it is
possible to extend the experience by comparing it with Chris Hrapsky’s video on
The limits of ChatGPT and
discovering a dark side. It is not a question
of increasingly faulty intelligence as suggested in an ambitious essay: The age of stupidity. (It is written in Portuguese, but with one main
reference in English about The negative Flynn
effect). It is more than
so, it is a gradually increasing cultural crisis, affecting the population’s
intellect, becoming more visible in the affluent western world where it is not
masked by material privations. Ultimately, we can consider interaction in terms
of the sort of “archetype” of interaction mentioned in my essays on Reason and Gender and Computerization. A CNN news report on a related event, The man who married a
hologram related to the
phenomenon of Nijikon may give a hint of what is to come, stating that “Researchers say such events are
indicative of broader technological trends and social phenomena”.
The late and perhaps
ultimate consequence of short-circuiting the human and social element together
with the consequent debate in the increasingly inclusive logical processes is
the expanding phenomenon of polarization of parties, misunderstandings, conflict
and violence. They could follow from the ChatGPT’s sociopsychological choking
of debate by forcing strong secularized Lockean
consensus that was mentioned above. In its bland realistic and immediate form it may be disinformation and ransomeware and, in particular, Ryuk under the general
labels of Cyberattacks
and its counterpart Computer security.
My comment: Still worse it may be if the information
is perceived as so overwhelming, the more so when it is much more difficult to
question and demonstrate that a declarative sentence is wrong (cost of
measurement and gathering of data, hidden definitions and environmental
systemic conditions) than to just formulate a supposed factual reality upon the
basis of available collected data. I illustrate something related to this in my
essay on Information and Debate with the rhetorical
questions of “Why Not?” (exemplified with divorce, homosexuality, polygamy,
etc.).
The
“apocalypse” of debate is pre-announced in the development of artificially
intelligent “chat-bots” that are envisaged to allow anyone, in a sick society, to
discuss with them, as announced by META-Facebook on August 5, 2022 regarding “BlenderBot
3: An AI Chatbot that Improves Through Conversation”.
What
is most symptomatic is its forgoing to mention the possibility of
religion being a necessary basis of meaningful consensus: charity and respect
for the human being, where respect does not mean “tolerance” in the sense it
does not matter what somebody thinks so long it does not bother me or
"us". It means that we all want to help each other to reach a common
truth and good. One opportunity for getting convinced about this is to study
very carefully the most ingenious analysis I have seen of the breakdown of
debate vs. political correctness, or whatever you want to call it, in Ian
Buruma's bewildering article, related to the #MeToo issue, "Editing in an age of
outrage", in Financial
Times, March 29th 2019. (Swedish
translation "Det ska fan vara
publicist när Twitterstormen viner" in Dagens Nyheter, April 14th 2019.) Ultimately, in the future, in analogy to the
problem of self-driving
vehicles, people may have to discuss mindless texts
that are generated by artificially intelligent agents such as improved GPT-2:
"GPT-2
generates synthetic text samples in response to the model being primed with an
arbitrary input. The model is chameleon-like—it adapts to the style and content
of the conditioning text. This allows the user to generate realistic and
coherent continuations about a topic of their choosing..."
and
will be drained of their intellectual energy as human drivers will be drained
of their skill and intelligence in order to avoid incidents with the
self-driving vehicles. [Test
a simplified GPT-2 here,
linked at from here.]
In order to
limit the volume of text in this article, this case study is presented in its
original form, as a separate article on Information on Christianism and Atheism. In it I make the observation that discussions
on religion vs. rationality can be seen as a poor reenactment and analogy of
the misunderstood and endless theological debate on the Filioque,
subject of great
controversy between Eastern and
Western Christianity that serendipitously deals with the meaning of Spirit. where today the most analytically or rhetorically gifted and
persevering party seems to win the game. Here I can specify that my choice of
the adverb serendipitously referring to the discussion of the
meaning of Spirit can be relevant for the ongoing debate
on Artificial Intelligence and especially Artificial General Intelligence –
AI/AGI, if intelligence is related as it should to the discussion of the human
intellect. It seems to me absurd to imagine that a deep-going “world-wide”
discussion on the Filioque among educated intellectuals should
have been going on for centuries without having a bearing on other intellectual
questions and on how to think and behave.
My comment: What will
happen with the lawful responsibilities in using self-driving vehicles, or
automated weapons, and the labor market upheavals with the introduction of AI
and AGI in industry, commerce and government, is or will make its appearance in
the lame warning gathered under the Wikipedia title of Existential Risks
from Artificial General Intelligence.
From: Computers as Embodied
Mathematics and Logic
The reports in The Economist and Wikipedia(should) say it all, reminding also
cases of analog analytical logical-mathematical giftedness such as of Adam Neumann and the related business WeWork, and Sam Altman as related to general artificial
intelligence (Open AI, ChatGPT,
etc. as per April 2023) and its financing, or
sheer analytical financial genius of a Bernard Madoff.
[plus
the following that were included in the essay’s later versions]
My own annotations
on my copy of Carl Jung's book Memories,
Dreams, Reflections recorded
by his associate Aniela Jaffé,
indicate that I first bought and read it in April 1975 but happened to
definitely relate it to this essay of mine in July 2023. The book is
interesting especially because it tells about the
author's psychological interpretation of his understanding and feelings in
meeting mathematics. Such feelings, when experienced by common educated people
can easily be dismissed for being caused by lack of giftedness or sheer
stupidity. The complexity of Jung's account requires literal quotations (cf.
pp. 43 ff., 340 ff):
[…] I felt a
downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was
a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know
what numbers really were […] they were nothing that could be imagined, mere
quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were
now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became possible
to hear them, so to speak. […] No one could tell me what numbers were, and I
was unable even to formulate the question. […] But the things that exasperated
me most of all was the proposition: If a=b and b=c,
then a=c. even though by
definition a meant something other than b, and, being different, could
therefore not be equated with b,
let alone with c. Whenever
it was a question of equivalence, then it was said that a=a, b=b, and so on.
This I could accept, whereas a=b seemed to me a downright lie or a fraud. I was
equally outraged when the teacher stated in the teeth of his own definition of
parallel lines that they met at infinity. […] My intellectual morality fought
against these whimsical inconsistencies, which have forever debarred me from
understanding mathematics. Right into old age I have had the incorrigible
feeling that if, like my schoolmates, I could have accepted without struggle
the proposition that a=b, or that sun=moon, dog=cat, then
mathematics might have fooled me endlessly – just how much I only began to realize at
the age of eighty-four. All my life it remained a puzzle to me why it was that
I never managed to get my bearings in mathematics when there was no doubt that
I could calculate properly. Least of all did I understand my own moral doubts concerning mathematics.
In a later section of
the book, in the chapter "On life after death", Jung introduced some
exceedingly complex ideas about the relation of human death to the realm of
consciousness vs. the unconscious or "the intermediate stage between unconscious
and conscious cognition". It would take us too far in this our context but
the following extracted comment (p. 341) may give a taste of the relation to
mathematics:
Ideas of this sort
are, of course, inaccurate, and give a strong picture, like a body projected on
a plane or, conversely, like the construction of a four-dimensional model out
of a three-dimensional body. They use the terms of a three-dimensional world in
order to represent themselves to us. Mathematics goes to great pains to create
expressions for relationships which pass empirical comprehension. In much the
same way, it is all-important for a discipline to build up images of
intangibles by logical principles and on the basis of empirical data, that is,
on the evidence of dreams. The method employed is what I have called "the
method of the necessary statement". It represents the principle of amplification in the interpretation of dreams,
but can most easily be demonstrated by the statements implicit in simple whole
numbers.
My point with these
quotations is to suggest that mathematics because of its very nature introduces
unconscious processes in the human mind while surreptitiously merging them with
ordinary conscious ones, an example being the mathematically opposite of Jung,
the earlier (and below) mentioned Robert Oppenheimer. It all recalls what has
been considered in this essay about both the aforementioned Brouwer and Zellini, as well giving a hint of the ultimate mysteries of
quantum physics (more on this above and below) in the relation between psyche
and matter. An alternative equivalent conception presented in my Information
and Theology is the balance
between the inner knowledge of human psyche vs. natural science and knowledge
of the outer world. This role of the unconscious and inner knowledge of the
human psyche related to (the aesthetics of) mathematics and logic also explains
the problems of addiction (not only of children, but also of “childish”
adults), including computer addiction, the overhype of virtual reality, and the success of mathematical-logical minds in all
sorts of modern endeavors including mathematized technoscience
or white collar crime. The latter is most brilliantly exemplified by the
genius of Bernard Madoff and by the fact that “Internet AI personalities” such
as Tom Bilyeu at Impact
Theory and Emad Mostaque:
see here a logical
conversation between them with the ambitiously alarming title How Ai will disrupt the entire world in 3
years - Prepare now while others panic. The latter have strong opinions
about AI there is a penchant for bold entrepreneurship and/or interest in
“volatile” activities, financial and others, as hedge fronds. And much entrepreneurship with empty talk about AI may
be conscious or unconscious attempt to commit “white collar crime”. Who is
capable to discuss the degree of consciousness vs. unconsciousness in order to
determine culpability and whether it will be considered as financial crime?
The technical mind
has been colorfully exposed in studies of the philosophy of science in the
tradition of Jacques Ellul.
Some of the deep approaches in the latter’s “anarchist” tradition (examples here, here,
and here),
however, have sometimes missed the point when they lose the connection to broad
Christian theology, philosophy and its derivate (Carl Jung’s analytical)
psychology. This appears in the following (below) de-contextualized excerpt from one of the deep approaches to Cybergnosticism, (a term further explained here). The text of the excerpt her below is
followed sometimes by my own notes in italics in square brackets in order to
not leave everything to the general “Comment” at the end:
[J]ust like alcoholics and drug addicts,
game-addicted children are now regularly treated by psychologists and
psychiatrists in order to get rid of their addictive behaviour,
[Yes, but how effective in this treatment
on what grounds, and why, since it may by then used for treating all “addicts”,
and how should they be defined and identified, since they may be even
scientists?]
[M]any videogames take advantage of techniques similar to those used by
the military to harden people emotionally. [Yes,
but what kind of the treatment of these hardened people would be allowed and
recommended by the military leadership vs. ex-post by e.g. the “Veteran benefits fof PTSD”
or equivalent organizations?]
As the driving force
of la Technique is, according to Ellul, the crave for absolute efficiency in
all human endeavours. [Ellul himself is quoted in Wikipedia from his book “The Technological
Society” as writing: “Not even the moral conversion
of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be
good technicians. In the end, technique has only one principle, efficient
ordering. What about the difficulty, to begin with, in defining “efficiency” vs. “effectiveness”,
the more so when it is not even recognized that the difference lies in the
conceptualization of the systemic boundaries of (whose?) craves.]
It was Eric Voegelin’s intriguing and much-debated thesis, that there is
a deep-seated disorder in our civilisation rooted in
a ‘gnostic’ sentiment of alienation and discontent with reality perceived as
evil, in the con- sequential ‘gnostic’ turn away from this reality [Psychologically, or how else, is a
“sentiment” to be defined, compared with, say a thought, intuition or
perception?]
Arguably, we cannot get at the real motives and ideas behind the
computer phenomenon in general, and the cyberspace and virtual reality
sub-phenomena in particular, nor arrive at a proper understanding of their
roots and future direction of growth, unless we take into account these mighty
metaphysical driving forces and motivations […] [How about metaphysical forces and motivations, if not within the frame
of a religion’s theology?]
It is my thesis that the roots of cyberspace and cybergaming must be
investigated in a much wider context than is done in these and other similar
works so as to clarify and make comprehensible the motive background and
worldviews of the key personages of the field. [What about the difference between (here) “roots” vs. “forces and
motivations” in the previous paragraphs].
They rest ultimately
only upon the criticism by Gnosticism
and overworked erudition and rationalism (paradoxically, an apparently own “gnosticism”) of the one “political philosopher” Eric Voegelin. Wikpedia summarizes, as it follows some of his critics’ opinions, which
match my own impression from my readings and comment of Voegelin in another context of Information and Theology:
[C]ritics have proposed that Voegelin's concept of Gnosis
lacks theoretical precision. Therefore, Voegelin's gnosis can, according to the critics,
hardly serve as a scientific basis for an analysis of political movements.
Rather, the term "Gnosticism" as used by Voegelin is more of an
invective just as "when on the lowest level of propaganda, those who do
not conform with one's own opinion are smeared as communists.”
That is, “smeared as gnostics”, as I heard one of his followers smeared Carl
Jung, based on Voegelin’s readings of second-hand texts on him (as contrasted
to e.g. Jordan Peterson’s practice as first hand reader of original texts).
Until further notice I assume that the Jung's attitude mentioned above is
motivated by his psychic inclination to watch upon the unique (psyche) instead of "playing
God" or suffering an “Ego inflation” by imagining oneself as understanding
mathematics seen as God’s language, and searching general "laws" of
nature where the human being himself tends to be “abstracted from” or is
regarded as only an object of an undefined or pantheistic "Nature". A
concretization of these thoughts is suggested by problems and the history of
debates on the world’s first societal introduction of personal identification number - PIN in Sweden (as a
number = “John Smith”), followed by national identification numbers all over the world as
I explain in my essay on The Meaning of Man-Machine Interaction. It is meaningful to remember the practice of tattooing a number on the
skin of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, followed today by the increasing
use of PIN’s, not the least for
(who’s?) control of the population by means of face recognition systems and biometric identifiers. All facilitated by alleging a struggle against “terrorism”. And all
this while never reflecting upon the meaning of or relation between identification and
individuation, and never reflecting upon
the phenomenon, in certain corrupt political regimes, of governmental
production of false “identification” documents, including vehicle registration
plates. When faith and allegiance
is rested on an assumed Democracy and technology instead of on God, then the
unavoidable failures of democracy imply a dependence upon anonymous human power
whose policing of citizens offsets the loss of judgment caused by the
computerized technological logical bypass of the network of multiple human
judgments.
The extension of
these problems reaches the import of the whole issue of my text on the
consequences of the computerization of society which follows the conclusions of
the present essay, and that I rhetorically named Computerization as Design of Logic Acrobatics but somebody else could have called On the Digitalization of
Society. A concrete manifestation of the latest problems of
computerization, which at the same time illustrates the psychic derangements of
mathematical thought as suggested in Jung's account is the open letter Pause Giant AI Experiments: We call on all AI
labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more
powerful than GPT-4. By
August 2nd, 2023 when I accessed it, it had gathered more that 33000 signatures
based on what I consider as a legitimate fear that is paradoxically based on
wrong premises. It reminds an analog "moratorium" that I recall in my
essay on Trends in the Philosophy of Technology. They are wrong "Leibnizian" premises as I
explain in my paper on Artificial General Intelligence and ChatGPT.
My comment: these
name-related cases illustrate the destructive power of minds that are powerful
in terms of (unbridled) rationalist analytical logical-mathematical capability,
which reach their psychic apex in the
field of quantum physics and personalities such as Robert Oppenheimer
with his symptomatic “mysticism”, and most recently in the field of computer
science that embodies and rewards mathematics and logic. Jung's difficulties
illustrate a mind's struggle in accepting a way of mathematical thinking that
opens the road for abuse of human "Leibnizian" thought when applied
to matters that require a whole human mind. It is an abuse that was not feared
at the time of the polymath Leibniz himself (1646-1716)
before the breakthrough of the misunderstood, all-encompassing and mathematized
natural science. The mathematization of natural science was later extended to
all science, forgetting the purpose and meaning of divorcing thought from associated
feeling and intuition, and partly even from sensation by means of mathematical
notations as historically conceived in the work of Florian Cajori. In common life it,
as knowledge of “God’s language”, can lie behind tendencies toward Narcissistic personality
disorder, especially the empirically verified subtype High-Functioning/Exhibitionistic.
If I had been a
faithful enthusiast of Freudian psychoanalysis rather than of Jungian
analytical psychology I would have recurred to counter such accusations of psychologism for being examples of the criticized concepts
of resistance and rationalization, as it is done by the stout defenders of the theory
of evolution,
or of fact resistance (or of alternative facts, as opposed to my dissertation on quality of information) as well as by the defenders of its opposite, intelligent design. An example is given by an analytically gifted
colleague who read an early version of the present paper and wrote to me (here
in a slightly edited anonymized form):
I don't think that
your justification for equating logic with rape is justified. It's relatively
easy to defend oneself against bad logic, it is enough to answer a little
nonsensically and on a high tone, and everyone will understand that the
dialogue has broken down and no one is right. It's worse with bad psychology.
When a person psychologizes another person by putting himself above and judge
the other, it is not possible to defend oneself because whatever the second one
says, the first one will not answer immediately but will also psychologize the
answer. The other can never defend himself against it. There is a good example
of this in your debate article.
On further
reflection, I find that one could rewrite your "rape" article by
replacing all mentions of "logic" with "psychology" or
"psychologizing". Then it will be much more accurate. Psychology as
rape.
Oh really? “The other
can never defend himself against it”?
Defend himself from a psychological
attack? What about defending oneself by complaining for psychologism?
And how can one defend himself from a logical
attack, a “logicism” with perfect
logic using undefined ambiguous terms that are applied in indeterminate or
inappropriate circumstances? It is the same logic and mathematics that
motivated a cultured mathematician like Paolo Zellini to write (in Italian) The Dictatorship of
Calculus, along the lines of
another book translated into English, The Mathematics of
the Gods and the Algorithms of Men. It is here that
appears the question of power vs. love mentioned above in the form of the power
of logic for handling physical nature when there is no room for talking about Spirit. This is the case of Blaise
Pascal’s famous talk about esprit de géometrie et de finesse (check here and e.g. “geometry” in his work, also here),
long before Jung conceived the psychological types and its more or less mindful, criticized derivates. It is the power of mathematics and logic that allows
to manipulate and force spiritless nature, up to the rape of nature represented
by (climate warming and) the application of quantum physics for nuclear weapons, while humans are seen mainly if not only a part of
nature. It is to do what “we” want, it is coarse “pragmatism” while erudite “critical pragmatism” goes astray in the “crisis of western philosophy”,
refers to “ethics” but does not dare to try to be applied to ongoing
controversial societal problems such as consumption of drugs and wars like the
latest in Ukraine. There is no talk about integrating matter with spirit,
Christian Spirit instead of anthroposophic spirit, or
feminine with masculine instead of caring for LGBT. At this point I do propose that such behavior can be seen as an analog of rape with no possibility of divorce, only of keeping silent. It would correspond to not being able to axle with
the responsibility to frame a “convincing” counter-argument, because of
weakness or stupidity. The extreme situation is the rape committed in the case
of abusive popular problems of daily human-computer interaction that I explain
and concretize in an essay with the specific title of The meaning of human-computer
interaction, and lately if not
finally in the analysis of artificial general intelligence (AGI/AI). The refusal, inability or impossibility of framing a
counter-argument turns the whole event into a “rape”. Silence is taken as a looser’s agreement, mediocrity or stupidity.
From: The Russia-NATO-Ukraine Information Crisis
“[G]eneral
artificial intelligence” (GAI), in the form of the latest hype of ChatGPT is
seen as a super-human (again, “godly”) intelligence to which human democracy
will politically have to submit itself despite of cheap warnings for the need
of (paradoxically) “democratic control” in face of “existential risks of artificial
intelligence”.
Or the assumed brilliant future of ChatGPT (Chat
Generative Pre-trained Transformer) that “was
tricked to endorse the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine”.
I myself wanted to complete
such possible criticism by using the latest (as per June 18, 2023) hyped
computerized tool ChatGPT – OpenAI (see also here, version at the same date).
On June 17, 2023 I
put the following two questions to the available ChatGPT, and got the two
subsequent answers (below) from the site https://chat.openai.com. They put in evidence the disregard of the core
issues in my text and its references. Elsewhere I mention why ChatGPT itself could not write my text.
Its creators, unless they only wanted to market a profitable product, should
understand that neither AI nor AGI
could have written this text since they instead should have been trying to
apply the earlier mentioned Design of
Inquiring Systems.
My two questions and
respective answers were:
(1) Which are the causes of the conflict between Russia,
NATO and Ukraine?
(2) How to solve the conflict and achieve peace between
Russia, NATO and Ukraine?
(1) Which are the causes of the conflict between
Russia, NATO and Ukraine?
ChatGPT:
The conflict between Russia,
NATO, and Ukraine has its roots in a combination of historical, political, and
security factors. While it is challenging to summarize all the causes
comprehensively, here are some key factors that have contributed to the conflict:
Historical context: The historical relationship between Russia and
Ukraine has been complex and intertwined. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union
until its dissolution in 1991, and there are historical and cultural ties
between the two countries. The legacy of this shared history has shaped their
interactions and perceptions.
Ukrainian independence and alignment: After gaining independence, Ukraine pursued
closer ties with the West, including aspirations for European integration and
possible NATO membership. This shift in alignment has been viewed by Russia as
a threat to its sphere of influence, particularly in the context of its
historical ties to Ukraine.
Crimea annexation: In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, a region that
was previously part of Ukraine. The move was widely condemned by the
international community, as it violated Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial
integrity. This event significantly escalated tensions between Russia and
Ukraine, as well as between Russia and NATO.
Eastern Ukraine conflict: Following the annexation of Crimea, pro-Russian
separatist movements emerged in eastern Ukraine, leading to an armed conflict
between Ukrainian government forces and separatist groups. The conflict has
resulted in thousands of deaths and a humanitarian crisis in the affected
regions.
Geopolitical competition: The conflict can also be seen within the
broader context of geopolitical competition between Russia and NATO. NATO's
expansion eastward, closer to Russia's borders, has raised concerns in Moscow
about encroachment and a perceived threat to its security. Russia has expressed
opposition to NATO's presence in countries it considers part of its sphere of
influence.
Ethnic and linguistic divisions: Ukraine is a diverse country with different
ethnic and linguistic groups. The divisions between ethnic Ukrainians and
ethnic Russians, particularly in eastern Ukraine, have played a role in
exacerbating tensions and fueling the conflict.
Energy dependence: The issue of energy dependence has added
another layer of complexity to the conflict. Ukraine serves as a transit route
for Russian gas supplies to Europe, and disputes over energy pricing and supply
have at times strained relations between the two countries.
It's important to
note that the causes of the conflict are multifaceted and intertwined, and
different perspectives exist on each side. The complexity of the conflict
underscores the need for a comprehensive and nuanced approach to finding a
peaceful resolution.
(2) How to solve the conflict and achieve peace
between Russia, NATO and Ukraine?
ChatGPT:
The conflict between Russia,
NATO, and Ukraine is a complex geopolitical issue with no simple solution.
However, I can provide you with some general principles and approaches that can
contribute to the resolution of conflicts and the achievement of peace. Please
note that these suggestions are not specific to this particular situation and
may not address all the intricacies of the conflict at hand. Here are some
steps that could be taken:
Diplomacy and dialogue: Encouraging diplomatic efforts and open
dialogue between all parties involved is crucial. Diplomatic negotiations can
help foster understanding, address concerns, and find common ground.
Mediation and international involvement: Engaging neutral mediators or international
organizations, such as the United Nations or the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), can facilitate negotiations and provide a
platform for discussions.
Confidence-building measures: Implementing confidence-building measures can
help create an atmosphere of trust and reduce tensions. These can include the
withdrawal of troops from certain areas, establishing demilitarized zones, and
implementing arms control agreements.
Respect for international law and agreements: Upholding international law and respecting
existing agreements, such as the Minsk Protocol and the Budapest Memorandum, is
essential. All parties should be committed to honoring their obligations and
finding peaceful solutions within the framework of international law.
Addressing underlying grievances: Understanding and addressing the underlying
grievances of all parties involved is important for long-term peace. This may
involve addressing historical, cultural, economic, and security concerns
through negotiation and compromise.
Economic and humanitarian assistance: Providing economic and humanitarian aid to the
affected regions can help alleviate the suffering of the local population and
create conditions for stability. This can include support for reconstruction,
development projects, and assistance in meeting basic needs.
Public diplomacy and communication: Engaging in public diplomacy efforts can help
shape public opinion and build support for peaceful resolutions. Promoting
accurate information, fostering understanding, and countering misinformation
are essential components of this approach.
Long-term conflict resolution: Developing a comprehensive and sustainable plan
for long-term conflict resolution is crucial. This may involve addressing
broader regional security concerns, promoting economic integration, and
fostering people-to-people exchanges.
It is important to
recognize that the conflict is complex and deeply rooted, and the path to peace
will require sustained efforts from all parties involved. The suggestions
provided here serve as general guidelines and should be adapted to the specific
dynamics and challenges of the Russia-NATO-Ukraine conflict.
My comment: this use and response of Chat-GPT
illustrates some of the reasons for why the ChatGPT could not have written the
kind of text in my essay of the Russia-NATO-Ukraine conflict. Even less so when
it is not designed with the intention of relating to the "Hegelian
Inquiring Systems" mentioned above. That is: it is not intended to use as
much as possible the same data or "facts" in order to also support a
counter-story with different if not opposite conclusions to those of the initial
main story.
From a first specific question put to ChatGPT
My question:
Please explain which
are the basic databanks, whether including the whole Internet, which is used in
order to find and elaborate the answers in GPT.
ChatGPT
As an AI language model, my
responses are generated based on a mixture of licensed data, data created by
human trainers, and publicly available data. I don't have direct access to
databases or retrieve information from specific sources in real-time. I have
been trained on a diverse range of data, including books, websites, and other
texts, to develop a broad understanding of human language. My purpose is to
assist and provide information to the best of my abilities, regardless of the
specific sources of my training data.
It's important to
note that while I strive to provide accurate and up-to-date information, my
responses may not always reflect the most current news events or developments.
News is constantly evolving, and new information can emerge that may change the
context or understanding of a given topic.
My comment:
This says it all. The “human trainers” are particular,
unknown people with their own (or the producing company’s) unknown ethical and
political convictions based on unknown facts. What they are implementing is a
sort of inductive process as described in Churchman’s Theory of Experimental
Inference but renamed “Machine learning”. Its basic
assumption, which underlines my observation of “cementation” is “that whatever worked in the past (i.e. strategies,
algorithms, and inferences) will most likely continue to work in the future.”
Unsaid: working for whom. See also Wikipedia’s list of “See
also” with reference to, among others,
“Automated machine learning” and “Big Data”. See also “Large
Language models” and “Artificial
Neural Network” including its extensive “See
also”.
From a second specific question put to ChatGPT
My question:
What can the NATO do
for achieving peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
ChatGPT
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization) plays a significant role in addressing conflicts and promoting
peace and stability among its member states. While I can provide some general
suggestions, please note that the situation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is
constantly evolving, and specific actions may depend on the current
circumstances. Here are some measures NATO can take to contribute to achieving
peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict:
1. Collective
Defense: NATO's core
principle is collective defense, stating that an armed attack against one
member is considered an attack against all. NATO can continue to reaffirm its
commitment to the security of its member states, including Ukraine, and
maintain a strong deterrent posture to discourage any further aggression.
2. Political
Diplomacy: NATO can engage in
diplomatic efforts to encourage dialogue and negotiation between Russia and
Ukraine. This could involve providing a platform for discussions, offering
mediation services, or supporting international organizations and diplomatic
initiatives focused on finding a peaceful resolution.
3. Support
for Ukraine: NATO can provide
political, economic, and humanitarian support to Ukraine. This assistance can
include military aid, capacity-building programs, training and advising
Ukrainian armed forces, enhancing cybersecurity capabilities, and facilitating
defense reforms to strengthen Ukraine's ability to defend itself.
4. Monitoring
and Reporting: NATO can continue
monitoring the situation on the ground through intelligence gathering,
satellite imagery, and other means. By providing accurate and timely
information about the conflict, NATO can contribute to international
understanding and help counter disinformation campaigns.
5. Economic
Sanctions: NATO member
countries, in coordination with other international partners, can impose
economic sanctions on Russia to exert pressure and encourage a peaceful
resolution. These sanctions can target specific sectors of the Russian economy
or individuals involved in destabilizing actions.
6. Confidence-Building
Measures: NATO can promote
confidence-building measures between Russia and Ukraine, such as establishing
channels of communication, implementing arms control agreements, and
facilitating exchanges and cooperation in non-military areas like culture,
education, and business.
7. Cooperative
Security Initiatives: NATO can explore
opportunities for cooperative security initiatives with Russia, aimed at
enhancing trust and reducing tensions. These initiatives can include joint
military exercises, information sharing on military activities, and dialogue on
shared security concerns.
It's important to
note that NATO's actions are often carried out in coordination with other
international organizations, such as the United Nations and the Organization
for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Resolving the Russia-Ukraine
conflict requires a comprehensive and multifaceted approach involving
diplomatic efforts, political will, and engagement from all relevant parties.
My comment: This example, compared to the Chat-GPT
answers given to the earlier question (above) “What can the NATO do
for achieving peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict? shows how the ChatGPT
machinery is biased in the sense that items 3, 4 and 5 imply direct support of
Ukraine. It disregards the main source of the conflict in that NATO being a
creation under the political and military influence of the USA would not in its
charter guarantee the exclusion or non-membership of countries neighboring
Russia or its “sphere of influence”. All this under the assumption of national
sovereignty and other considerations in my essay on The Russia-NATO-Ukraine Information Crisis, which for these
same reasons could never have been produced by ChatGPT. This is related to
neglecting, to begin with, the philosophy of the earlier mentioned Hegelian
inquiring system (IS) and abusing the philosophy of Leibnizian and naïve
Lockean IS.
This illustrates what was mentioned above, that the
possible if not probable result of the use of AGI is that it will cement the
past and suffocate future questioning and debate, also caused by the waves on
unemployment combined with automation that restrict the range of opinions. This
happens already today in that terminological neologisms and abuse of
prestigious and “mind-blowing pseudo-philosophical” words and acronyms of all
sorts are being used and abused in reference to AI and AGI in the press and in social media. See Swedish TV 18 Oct and
1 Nov. 2022, The Conference 2023: “Förstärkt Mänsklighet”
[Enhanced Humanity], covering e.g. “artistic practices involving emerging
technologies” and “organize
the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful”. The idea is illustrated in the journal The Economist’s article (Nov 9th 2023)
on “Now AI can write, sing and act, is it still
possible to be a star?” with the
under-title “The deal that ended the Hollywood actors’ strike reflects a fear
of the technology”, which indeed is fear of infringement of artistic copyright (cf. the Swedish event Tosbot commented in Svenska Dagbladet 1-2 December 2023; on Tosbot in English here).
Not only politically correct journalists who do not
even need to be educated in political science, foreign relations and diplomacy,
but even school children will be able, without understanding it, to use ChatGPT
in order publish a logically structured and credible essay with facts about the
salvific power of AI, e.g. in "How to solve the conflict and achieve peace
between Russia, NATO and Ukraine?" But it will be much more difficult if
not impossible to search for or finance research of dissenters who on their own
will be able to afford and formulate a counter-story like the above-mentioned
The Russia-NATO-Ukraine Information Crisis or a text like the present one.
Furthermore: there are many of those problems surveyed
in the above mentioned outline on Existential risks
from artificial general intelligence, starting with the upheavals of the labor market.
A few of them had been already noticed in research during and prior to earlier
"waves of optimism", exasperating the social games of reduction of
ethical, intellectual, and theological dimensions to politics of liberalism vs.
Marxism. They were outlined in the leftist approach of a timely doctoral
dissertation at my university on Work-oriented Design of
Computer-Artifacts (1988) as I comment it in my essay on Information and
Theology, where it can be seen as an example of reduction of
religion and theology to science and politics, or directly from
theology to politics.
7.
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
This document (cf. “See also” in Wikipedia), published on March 22, 2023 by a
community related to the above mentioned "Existential
risks from artificial general intelligence" was accessed on August 3, 2023 on the net with the subtitle "We call on all AI labs to immediately
pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4". My earlier references above to ChatGPT were to
the version for the general public, the free version GPT-2. The text of the
“Open Letter” in my adapted lay-out, is the following – in a smaller font size
- in turn followed at the end by my own comments:
-----
AI systems with
human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,
as shown by extensive research[1] and
acknowledged by top AI labs.[2] As stated in the
widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound
change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed
with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning
and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs
locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful
digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict,
or reliably control.
Contemporary AI
systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and
we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our
information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we
automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we
develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete
and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our
civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech
leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are
confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be
manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with
the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding
artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get
independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most
advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for
creating new models”. We
agree: that some point is NOW.
Therefore, we call
on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI
systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and
verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted
quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.
AI labs and
independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a
set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are
rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols
should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.[4] This
does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a
stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box
models with emergent capabilities.
AI research and
development should be refocused on making today's
powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable,
transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.
In parallel, AI
developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development
of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and
capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of
highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability;
provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and
to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability
for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and
well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political
disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.
Humanity can enjoy a
flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems,
we can now enjoy an "AI summer" in which we reap the rewards,
engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance
to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially
catastrophic effects on society.[5] We can do so
here. Let's enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.
----
Notes and references
[1] Bender, E. M.,
Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S.
(2021, March). On the Dangers of Stochastic
Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on
fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).
Bostrom, N. (2016).
Superintelligence. Oxford University Press.
Bucknall, B. S.,
& Dori-Hacohen, S. (2022, July). Current and near-term AI as a potential
existential risk factor. In Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics,
and Society (pp. 119-129).
Carlsmith, J. (2022). Is Power-Seeking AI
an Existential Risk?. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.13353.
Christian, B. (2020).
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and human values. Norton & Company.
Cohen, M. et al.
(2022). Advanced Artificial
Agents Intervene in the Provision of Reward. AI Magazine, 43(3) (pp.
282-293).
Eloundou, T., et al.
(2023). GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market
Impact Potential of Large Language Models.
Hendrycks, D., & Mazeika, M. (2022). X-risk Analysis for
AI Research. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2206.05862.
Ngo, R. (2022). The alignment problem
from a deep learning perspective. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.00626.
Russell, S. (2019).
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking.
Tegmark, M. (2017).
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Knopf.
Weidinger, L. et al
(2021). Ethical and social risks of harm from language
models. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2112.04359.
[2] Ordonez, V. et al.
(2023, March 16). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
says AI will reshape society, acknowledges risks: 'A little bit scared of this'. ABC News.
Perrigo, B. (2023,
January 12). DeepMind CEO Demis
Hassabis Urges Caution on AI. Time.
[3] Bubeck, S. et al.
(2023). Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early
experiments with GPT-4. arXiv:2303.12712.
OpenAI (2023). GPT-4 Technical
Report. arXiv:2303.08774.
[4]Ample
legal precedent exists – for example, the widely adopted OECD AI Principles require that AI systems "function
appropriately and do not pose unreasonable safety risk".
[5] Examples include
human cloning, human germline modification, gain-of-function research, and
eugenics.
----
We have prepared some
FAQs in response to questions and discussion in the media and elsewhere. You
can find them here.
In addition to this
open letter, we have published a set of policy recommendations which can be
found here:
We have prepared some
FAQs in response to questions and discussion in the media and elsewhere. You
can find them here.
In addition to this
open letter, we have published a set of policy recommendations
("Policymaking in the Pause") which can be found here, and has the following title and contents:
Policymaking in the
Pause:
What can policymakers do now to combat risks from advanced AI systems?
Contents:
Introduction
Policy
recommendations:
Mandate robust
third-party auditing and certification for specific AI systems
Regulate organizations’
access to computational power
Establish capable AI agencies
at national level
Establish liability for
AI-caused harm
Introduce measures to
prevent and track AI model leaks
Expand technical AI safety
research funding
Develop standards for identifying and managing AI- generated content and
recommendations
Conclusion
8.
Comment to the Open Letter (Proposal for moratorium)
If it is not disrespectful I would like to start by asking the idiomatic
"What are we to make out of this?" My spontaneous reaction, if not
response, is to think about a book that left in me a deep impression when I
read it more than forty years ago: William E. Akin's Technocracy and the
American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 (1977). I
perceive it as a painstakingly researched passionate life-work of an apparently
forgotten "Associate Professor of History in the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, Montreal".
Reflecting upon my
impression I drew the conclusion that in my present situation I cannot afford
to do what I should: write an analog of the book focused on the ongoing AI and
AGI-hype. In doing so I would be writing more than a doctoral dissertation on these
matters, including a connection to the history of bureaucracy seen, as AI, a system of logical rules working on
collected data, and related to technocracy as indicated in Wikipedia’s section
on “See also”.
On the other hand, as
I write in my general disclaimer in the link that initiates the list of “Contents” at
the beginning of present essay, such endeavor should not be necessary because
"it all" is already written in Akin’s above-mentioned book, the
problem being what Plato writes in my quotation above, and what is repeated in
later occasions in such books as, say, by Richard Stivers. Let's see some excerpts from Akin regarding
"technological unemployment" that a doctoral dissertation at my
university department translated into a Marxist analysis of the role of labor
unions under the title computer Work-Oriented Design
of Computer Artifacts (published as book here
and commented by me in the context of Information
and Theology). The political reason for the rise and establishment of labor
unions is today forgotten in the facile wishful thinking that technological
unemployment caused by AI-AGI will be avoided by adherence to “ethical standards” or offset by “universal basic income”. As if it were a substitute of religion, as expressed by pope Leo XIV:
“Sensing
myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV.
There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his
historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the
context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church
offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another
industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial
intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence
of human dignity, justice and labour”.
In doing so the Open
Letter trivializes the whole question of unemployment, which is not only
unemployment but rather a subversion of the societal relation between human
beings, a growing proportion of them being cut-off from expressing their
opinions in dialogues and discussions of everyday life as these deal with the
motives, results and improvement of daily work. And, if there is unemployment,
why those who are still employed do not profit of enjoying progressively
shorter working time, to be possibly compensated by an employment of the
unemployed? Yes, because those who are still employed, partly in operation and
development of AI-machinery, and their labor unions, prefer to continue working
so long as, or even longer than before, with a gradually increasing income,
“economic growth” that allows for a higher consumption of goods and services
such as gadgets, entertainment, drugs, holidays and tourism in their limited
“free” time. By the way, why the increasing demand of drugs that also cause the
development of criminal gangs and organized crime? This may be because “freedom” is not understood as
freedom from restraints in doing good or ethically better voluntary ideal
activities (as old retired professors finally try to do…), but freedom in doing
the misunderstood democratic “whatever I and we happen to want, or feel that we
need”. Behind all this there is also the problem of taxation of income, and
sales taxes, since the promises of welfare that help to keep governments in
power presuppose the financing of welfare. Not to mention the political mess of
tariffs on import and export of goods, and rates of interests
to the (owners of venture) capital and labor that develops and produces the
AI-equipment and its marketing.
This kind of
problems, which point to the historical worldwide debate of political economy
including Marxist thought, and criticism of Marxism, puts into evidence what I see as an infantilization
of the mass media reporting of societal problems that, exceptionally, happen to
be treated in selected texts. Examples are William Akin’s Technocracy and the American Dream (see below) and Christer Sanne’s
(English presentation and shorter texts here, archived here)
great opus in Swedish Arbetets Tid [The time, or duration, of work, Swedish
review here],
with its encyclopedic list of 14 pages of
references in several languages that can be
retrieved by this link
substituting its end thirteen times, from 7681 to 7695. Occasionally even
newspapers such as Aftonbladet on
June 20, 2024 can be deep-going as Mattias Beijmo’s article “Hur lite
kan vi arbeta – utan att må
dåligt?”
[How little can we work - without
feeling bad? Archived version here].
In it he relates the text-to-video model AI Sora and the Microsoft Copilot to the history of Swedish politics for law on working time limits in year 1919, plus trade union’s historical work by Rudolf Meidner and the Rehn-Meidner model of economic and wage policy, the whole completed with
comments by the economist Linn Spross
and references to intuitions in science fiction literature by Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture, and Iain Blanks series The Culture. What is not perceived
is that the whole is a deep question of cultural values, which as I try to show
in another context, ends as many computer and
information issues in a theology
of needs and duties vs. wants and sacrifices.
|
In other words, the
rationale of the need and impact of AI does away with the whole political,
economic and moral problem of the Western world as it may be seen as
represented by the motivation and consequences of the whole “scientific” work
of Karl Marx, relations between communism, socialism, and liberalism. It was
a work which in turn was a masterwork of unstated atheistic postulation of
modern logical empiricist science and technology allowing “analyses” by
logical and political means, whatever they theoretically and practically are
supposed to mean in the Marxist conception of the modern world. |
This leads in turn to a, in AI
ignored, unending criticism of criticism, or debate that may be exemplified by
the historian Paul Johnson’
s quote in Wikipedia on “criticism”:
in his 1988 book Intellectuals wrote that Marx "developed
traits characteristic of a certain type of scholar, especially Talmudic ones: a tendency to accumulate immense masses of
half-assimilated materials and to plan encyclopaedic
works which were never completed; a withering contempt for all non-scholars;
and extreme assertiveness and irascibility in dealing with other scholars.
Virtually all his work, indeed, has the hallmark of Talmudic study: it is
essentially a commentary on, a critique of the work of others in his
field."
Which is rebutted in a quote of
the Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff, with a hidden traditional suggestion of antisemitism
(cf. above references to “Ashkenazi intelligence”, once again, cf. here, here and here),
and so on, as outlined in my own essay on unending sterile “debates”, which will characterize unending debates about AI
and AGI:
Johnson's passage describing Marx as type of
scholar that is not in reality productive, drawing similarities to Talmudic
studies (Jewish studies of the Talmud). Arguably a racist statement.[6]Here Wolff describes Johnson's
book: "Criticism as malicious gossip [...] a right-wing tirade of rage is
vented against left-wing social critics, intellectuals in general, Jews, women,
and most of the others who compose the usual targets of such mentalities."
It is left unclear what are “such
mentalities”, if not simply political right wing in the play of reduction of religion, especially Christianism,
to politics, if not “science”.
The whole, forgetting Marx & Co., can be seen as further complicated by the
paradox of “time saving” allowed or promised now by AGI, leading to the
puzzling question quality of life and welfare, framed long before the
appearance of AGI, namely in an epochal book (for those who see the need and
want to think further) written by the professor of political economy Staffan Burenstan Linder and published in 1969, Den rastlösa välfärdsmänniskan: Tidsbrist I överflöd – en ekonomisk studie, further translated into English with the title The harried leisure
class (Columbia University
Press, 1970). See especially, to begin with, the chapter 6 on “the rational in
a growing irrationality”.
“[T]he many ramifications of the relationship between increasing goods
and decreasing time in our economy. As time becomes increasingly scarce, there
is a need to continually reallocate time among competing goals and needs.
Inevitably, values begin to change in the reallocation process and the whole
quality of life is altered.”
Returning to the Open
Letter, its key issue is that the requesting of moratorium surreptitiously subsumes a political democratic process
while assuming that its implicit technocratic view, expressed and supported by
computer scientists, can be reconciled with a misunderstood or ignored mythological democracy. It is a democracy that according to technocratic
"policy recommendations" mandates auditing and certifications, regulates
access to computational power, establishes
agencies and liabilities, introduces
measures to prevent AI-misuse, and expands
funding for AI safety research.
By the way, compare
all this with e.g. the implications of “How the data-center boom became a political
battleground” in The Economist (October 10, 2024).
Related to
mythological democracy’s lame “tautological voluntary and non-binding reliance
on experts”, it is then interesting to remark what The Economist (Nov 23rd, 2023) writes with reference to the above-mentioned “boomers”, in the context of Sam Altman’s return marking a new phase for Open
AI:
[Boomers] will worry politicians, who are
scrambling to show that they take the risks seriously. In July President Joe
Biden’s administration nudged seven leading model-makers, including Google,
Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, to make “voluntary commitments” to
have their AI products inspected by experts before releasing them to
the public. On November 1st the British government got a similar group to sign
another non-binding agreement that allowed regulators to test their AIs for trustworthiness and harmful capabilities, such as
endangering national security.
And now over to Akin
on technological unemployment (pp. 156-164.):
The charge of
technological unemployment was the most relevant economic issue. Far more
serious, lengthy, and passionate discussion took place over this question than
any other. It was the most difficult to resolve and perhaps of most lasting
significance. […]
Somewhat
surprisingly, the spokesmen for business were among those unable to present a
solid front when the issue first arose. Businessmen have never wished to admit
the existence of technological unemployment. Aside from the serious economic
problems involved, to do so raised equally important questions regarding the
social and moral values of capitalism, which both entrepreneurs and
corporations preferred to leave unmasked. It cut through and could potentially
destroy, their most cherished notions: their easy identification of
technological change and progress, their assumption that change was compatible
with stability, their belief in the social and moral value of work, the idea of
the self-made man and the theme of individualism, and the necessity of laissez-faire.
[…]
The vehemence with
which leading scientists and engineers repudiated the concept of technological
unemployment reflected their fear that it constituted a frontal attack on their
professional and social roles. Their disquiet was even greater than that of businessmen.
To them the benevolence of science and technology was indisputable. […]
The assurances of
scientists and engineers, that technology would continue to create new products
and industries, "each demanding an army of workers," also lent
support to the optimistic common-sense view despite the fact that it required
the same kind of blind faith. […]
Most businessmen […]
followed a mechanistic theory which held that technology reduced costs, thereby
creating greater product demand, which increased production, which in turn
necessitated higher employment. […]
To avoid serious
repercussions, the economy's well-being ultimately depended on constantly
increasing the level of consumption. […] The logic of those who argued the case
dictated that over the long run increasing purchasing power was linked to
economic growth. To insure minimum dislocations,
economic growth must match technological improvement. […]
As important as the
question of technological unemployment was, the broad implications of
technology for society was of even greater
significance for some. One of the most pressing issues raised was the effect of
technology on social organization. Was there a cultural lag that had to be
lessened or bridged? […] Did it require a technical elite to engineer society
as well as the machine? […]
One of the
shortcomings of the proponents of technocracy was their failure to reconcile
the technocratic view with democracy.
In other words: the
Open Letter is a replay or reenactment of the "philosophy" of the
technocratic movement with its problematically related social responsibility (c.f. also here and on Walter Rautenstrauch
here), the more so when computerization in general and AI in particular seldom
if ever can be analyzed for profitability in terms of cost-benefit analysis, but are valued in terms of saving costs of human
labor. And it is more than social responsibility, it
is a matter of human love in the sense of Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Matt. 22:39) It is not only a question of
"unemployment". A modern technocratic movement in its
computer-artificial-intelligence dress, does need neither the opinion nor a
dialog and even less an "impossible debate" with an untrained, not technically gifted and a
supposedly unintelligent workforce that meets the impossibilities of a "human-computer
interaction" that is, a
substitute of human language. It needs only the ultimate political legitimation
of a more or less mythological Democracy, It is a
Democracy that today does not display references to biblical quotations in
order to expect that new computer technology will create enough new influential
jobs and will need neither the Bible nor labor unions in order to allow a Universal basic income to an increasing world-population. And it is a
Democracy that is used as a dumping place for personal responsibility, as I
write in another theological context, and is done even by children in the context of climate global warming where the “researcher” is the scientist and the
“manager” is the politic body of democracy:
Politics, for
instance, often is also explained away by scientists and engineers who assume
that all would be alright if only politicians followed the scientists'
recommendations, as denounced in the famous paper by Churchman & Schainblatt The researcher and the manager. A
dialectic of implementation and its Commentaries.
More than so, the
Open Letter ignores not only the paradox of computerization not saving manpower
and time, not allowing more time for culture and relaxation, as surveyed
Staffan Burenstam Linder’s The Harried Leisure
Class, and in my text on the
Meaning of Human-Computer
interaction. It also mainly
ignores one main motivating force and commitments of the military-industrial complex as in the latest conflict
between Russia and Ukraine, and the sociology
as well as the political science lying behind the clash between duly
secularized socialism and liberal capitalism. A socialism with roots in the
absence of labor unions for countering the advent of atheist industrialization. Today it is like enabling to ask ChatGPT-2 (or the
later paid GPT-4) the questions quoted above in this essay about the causes and
the solution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while one main force of the
ongoing USA research may be to complement the logical-mathematical rape of mind
and nature by a quantum physics for nuclear weapons, with the human-computer
interacting AI rape of the human mind for design and implementation of
self-driving unmanned weapons as analogs to drone warfare (as here,
in Ukraine).
This Open Letter or
proposal for moratorium will obviously not stand alone. It was, for instance,
followed by a related AI Safety Summit in London 1-2 November 2023, leading to the so called
Bletchley Declaration (published by the government of the UK, officially
represented by the Department of Science, Innovation & Technology, Foreign
Commonwealth & Development Office, and The Prime Minister’s Office, 10
Downing Street). It contained, among others, the following typical policy
thoughts, to be expected to be recurrent in a plethora of coming AI conferences
around the world (my italics):
Particular safety
risks arise at the ‘frontier’ of AI, understood as being those
highly capable general-purpose AI models, including foundation
models, that could perform a wide variety of tasks - as well as relevant
specific narrow AI that could exhibit capabilities that cause
harm - which match or exceed the capabilities present in today’s most
advanced models. Substantial risks may arise from potential intentional misuse
or unintended issues of control relating to alignment with human intent. These issues are in part because those
capabilities are not fully understood and are therefore hard to predict.
We are especially concerned by such risks in domains such as
cybersecurity and biotechnology, as well as where
frontier AI systems may amplify risks such as disinformation.
There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either
deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant
capabilities of these AI models. Given the rapid and uncertain
rate of change of AI, and in the context of the acceleration of
investment in technology, we affirm that deepening our understanding
of these potential risks and of actions to address them is especially
urgent.
Yes, indeed: “These
issues are in part because those capabilities are not fully understood and
are therefore hard to predict”. “Capabilities” or especially risks not fully understood, or not at all understood?
This was the reason for the upheaval in the episode of the world-wide diffused
news in November 2023 of the sudden sacking and reinstatement of genius-wizard Sam Altman
from the position of CEO of OpenAI, the creator of (excessively?) successful of
ChatGPT. The news agencies repeated that the explicit reason given for his
sacking had been “unclear-vague” shortcomings in his communications with the
board. They did not dare to advance the hypothesis that the OpenAI investors,
employees and prospective clients were welcoming Altman’s optimism in
downplaying the “existential risks” of AI (see above) in contrast to the OpenAI
board’s eventual mounting political-ethical concerns. This may be an illustration of the coming ethical and political
struggles in the development and applications of AGI, which may be hopeless
if one considers the risk that today political Democracy is a myth. It is a myth hidden behind non-binding assurances that
vague, undefined and problematic “productivity-efficiency-effectiveness” (see
the “theoretical-conceptual framework” in hodgepodge here)
will be “responsibly” managed with expertise, following democratically decided
governmental rules after a rich dialogue with all affected parties, avoiding
the production of fake information or information implying “existential risks”,
controlling for protecting from access by extraneous irresponsible influence
from non-authorized personnel, it all guaranteed by security-safety measures,
etc. etc.
I repeat now from the
beginning of the previous paragraph: “These issues are in part because
those capabilities are not fully understood and are therefore hard
to predict”. “Capabilities” or especially risks not fully understood, or not at all understood:
For instance, the
technocratically avoided issue of unemployment of people that are simply sacked
and replaced by AI-AGI. Even in so-called intellectual work, mediocre
professionals may be replaced by AGI/ChatGPT, but they may also improve their
productivity with its help, while the best top-professionals may not improve
their performance because they, to begin with, were not reasoning only “logically-empirically”, as slow computers
without even taking stand in the debates about logical empiricism, with the consequence that they will not continue to
be rated as “best”.
Paradoxically this
defective understanding is hoped to be achieved by a future long series of
conferences. Cf. the above-mentioned AI
Safety Summit (never mind what the concept of safety or security is or
should be, as suggested above) that is only one conference in the first waves of
the “conference industry” in the increased hype of AI in years 2022-2023,
immediately followed by e.g. a conferences in London on November 9, 2023 Generative AI Summit, on November 27-28 AI World Congress 2023, and on November 30-December 1, 2023 on Delivering AI and Big Data for a Smarter
Future (also AI & Big Data Expo). In general, risks are not understood,
and AI/AGI are the latest reminder of that ongoing societal computerization,
which may be soon followed by news on applications
of mind-blowing computational
neuroscience, brain-computer
interface and the like,
employing, among others, neurophysiologists, with skills exemplified by the president of the Allen institute for Brain Sciences, and others
who are introduced as being e.g. a “neurophysiologist and computational
neuroscientist” and work on the “neural basis of consciousness”. That is:
whatever that means for even a highly educated democratically minded citizen
who will exert his democratic duties in future elections that will direct the
desirable future of national scientific efforts. It all can be seen as a
gigantic irreversible global experiment on humanity, as illustrated also in my
already mentioned paper on the meaning of human-computer interaction. Let me complete this section with replicating a
quotation from the epilogue of my paper on computerization and logic which I hope
may convey an image of the increasing scope of techno-science and of
computer-logical dreaminess, from the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
up to today’s super-human, divine intelligence. It can be seen either as a hymn
to a fantastic promising limitless technological progress (towards…) or as a
document of recurring naïve technocratic hype.
As an illustrative
tribute to the genius and naivety of the celebrated great engineer Vannevar Bush, I will terminate
with a quotation of his most famous prophetic article “As we may think” in The Atlantic Monthly issue of
July 1945, that I recommend to the readers for getting a time perspective on
the drive for computerization:
It is readily
possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance
with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of
premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out
conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no
more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.
9.
Case study: “Creating safe AGI that benefits all of
humanity”
On December 24, 2023
I accessed the Open AI’s policies and terms of use (effective December 23, 2023, previous versions here) for the European
Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, or UK, that were effective on December (for
others living outside the EEA, Switzerland or UK, see other terms of use). From the contents I made the following core
selection as material for the case study in the form of subsequent comments
along the above text in this essay, keeping most of the original layout except
of the font type:
Who We Are
OpenAI is an AI
research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial
general intelligence benefits all of humanity. For more information about
OpenAI, please visit https://openai.com/about. Our
Services are provided to you by:
.
OpenAI Ireland
Ltd, a company incorporated in the
Republic of Ireland with its registered office at 1st Floor, The Liffey Trust
Centre, 117-126 Sheriff Street Upper, Dublin 1, D01 YC43, Ireland and company
number 737350, if you are resident in the EEA or Switzerland.
.
OpenAI, L.L.C., a Delaware company with its registered office at 3180
18th Street, San Francisco, California 94110, United States and company number
7063675, if you are resident in the UK.
Additional Service-Specific Terms
Depending on the
specific Service or features you use, additional Service-specific terms and
policies may apply to your use of our Services. The key ones to be aware of,
and which form part of these Terms, are described below:
.
Usage Policies: these policies explain how you may use our Services
and Content.
.
Service Terms: these terms apply when you use certain Services or
features;
.
Sharing &
Publication Policy: this policy
sets out rules for when you share Content;
Using Our Services
What You Can Do. Subject to your compliance with these Terms, you may
access and use our Services. In using our Services, you must comply with all
applicable laws as well as the Service-specific terms and policies listed
above.
What You Cannot Do. You may not use our Services for any illegal,
harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you are prohibited
from:
.
Using our Services in
a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates anyone’s rights.
.
Modifying, copying,
leasing, selling or distributing any of our Services.
.
Attempting to or
assisting anyone to reverse engineer, decompile or discover the source code or
underlying components of our Services, including our models, algorithms, or
systems (except to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable
law).
.
Automatically or
programmatically extracting data or Output (defined below).
.
Representing that
Output was human-generated when it was not.
.
Interfering with or
disrupting our Services, including circumventing any rate limits or
restrictions or bypassing any protective measures or safety mitigations we put
on our Services.
.
Using Output to
develop models that compete with OpenAI.
Content
Your Content. You may provide input to the Services (“Input”),
and receive output from the Services based on the Input (“Output”).
Input and Output are collectively “Content”. You are responsible for
Content, including ensuring that it does not violate any applicable law or
these Terms. You represent and warrant that you have all rights, licences, and permissions needed to provide Input to our
Services.
Ownership of
Content. As between you and
OpenAI, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, you (a) retain your
ownership rights in Input and (b) own the Output. We hereby assign to you all
our right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output.
Similarity of
Content. Due to the nature of our
Services and artificial intelligence generally, Output may not be unique and
other users may receive similar output from our Services. Our assignment above
does not extend to other users’ output or any Third Party
Output.
Our Use of Content. We can use your Content worldwide to provide,
maintain, develop, and improve our Services, comply with applicable law,
enforce our terms and policies and keep our Services safe.
Opt Out. If you do not want us to use your Content to train our
models, you have the option to opt out by updating your account settings.
Further information can be found in this Help Center
article. Please note that in
some cases this may limit the ability of our Services to better address your
specific use case.
Accuracy. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are
rapidly evolving fields of study. We are constantly working to improve our
Services to make them more accurate, reliable, safe, and beneficial. Given the
probabilistic nature of machine learning, use of our Services may in some
situations result in Output that does not accurately reflect real people,
places, or facts.
When you use our Services you understand and agree:
.
Output may not always
be accurate. You should not rely on Output from our Services as a sole source
of truth or factual information, or as a substitute for professional
advice.
.
You must evaluate
Output for accuracy and appropriateness for your use case, including using
human review as appropriate, before using or sharing Output from the Services.
.
You must not use any
Output relating to a person for any purpose that could have a legal or material
impact on that person, such as making credit, educational, employment, housing,
insurance, legal, medical, or other important decisions about them.
.
Our Services may
provide incomplete, incorrect, or offensive Output that does not represent
OpenAI’s views. If Output references any third party
products or services, it doesn’t mean the third party endorses or is affiliated
with OpenAI.
My comments:
I see the policies
and terms of use mainly as an expression of goodwill, and mainly as a complex
juridical disclaimer based on two main concepts of service, and user. I
myself wonder whether OpenAI, without any notice has deleted my account (as per
January 2024) and started refusing my IP Address (I can no longer neither log-in nor sign up from my
regular IP address) because I have used its services for commenting them
criticizing AI as I showed above in my present text, as they perhaps were
judged to infringe the last paragraph above on “When you use our Services you
understand and agree”.
These policies and
terms of use can and must be seen and related to production-consumption, or means-goal,
or producer-consuming client, or scientist producer of a tool, or politician
user of the tool. I have already dwelled on the problems of this conception
focused on “tool” in my paper on The meaning of human-computer interaction, and for the purpose of space and time I must refer the
reader to this source in its section dealing with tool.
The core of the
problem, however, can be seen in the definition of producer, product and user
in terms of the explanation of the meaning of so-called morphological or
structural, functional and teleological classes as introduced in the earlier
mentioned DIS. It includes the
overview of complications, for instance, that one cause produces one effect,
but another cause or several other causes can also produce the very same
effect. But it is later realized that some of these productions can only happen
under earlier unknown external conditions that are under the control of others
who happen to be interested and motivated by the desire of seeing or having the
result, or motivated to sometimes prevent it, because of being motivated to
counter the happening of such result. And so on. In the middle of all this,
mathematics and its abuse has a special simplifying function as I consider it
in the section of my essay on the famous rejected parts of Jan Brouwer’s dissertation (rejected probably for the same
cultural reasons that overvalue mathematics and logic) about the foundations of
mathematics, where I write the following:
In presenting The rejected parts of Brouwer's dissertation, [Walter Peter] Van Stigt refers to Brouwer's interpretation of causality as
essentially mathematical: the ability to link events in the mind, to see
sequences and repetition of sequences in time, to link sensations as the
immediate source of awareness of time and discreteness. It is the source of
man's power to predict the future and interfere in the course of events. This
"intellectual or mathematical" way of looking at the world is not
only a one-sided concentration and interpretation of reality: by
ignoring and willfully removing aspects which deviate from the expected course
of events, man supplements and creates more regularity than exists in nature,
he makes the world linear or "one-sided". The regularity observed
in nature is due to the nature of the measuring instruments and physical
science has value only as weapon, not concerning life. It is clearly inferior
and has nothing to do with religion or wisdom. More in detail,
in Brouwer's own words:
"Man has the faculty, accompanying all his interactions with
nature, of objectifying the world, of seeing in the world causal systems in
time. The primordial phenomenon is simply the intuition of time in which
repetition of "thing in time and again thing" is possible, but in
which (and this is a phenomenon outside mathematics) a sensation can fall apart
in component qualities, so that a single moment can be lived through a sequence
of qualitatively different things. One can, however, restrict oneself to the
mere sensation of theses sequences as such, independent of the various degrees
to which objects are perceived in the world outside are to be feared or
desired. (The attention is reduced to an intellectual observation.) The human
tactics of "acting purposively" then consists in replacing the end by
the means (a later occurrence in the intellectually observed sequence by an
earlier occurrence) when the human instinct feels that chance favours the means."
What happens, then,
is that the reader may find the explanation tedious and will ask, as I have
many times asked, to summarize the whole thing I a few words. So, what happens
is what I already have tried to explain in the context of Information and Debate: People
feel that they have no time, no motivation or no capabilities to read such
texts. If they hear that the explanation in
summary is partly also found in Russell Ackoff’s and Fred Emery’s chapter
on Structure, Function and Purpose in
their book On Purposeful Systems (pp. 13-32), they may wish to get a summary of the
summary, in words that allow them to grasp the whole in a few hours, or
minutes.
But the summary,
which appears in DIS, (p. 59) is not
easily understood and accepted when it states:
Thus in the broader
viewpoint one cannot distinguish between science and its politics; it make no sense to the designer to say that science is a body
of knowledge and politics is people, and therefore the two must be different.
For the designer it is impossible to optimize the system of acquiring basic
knowledge without considering the political problems that such a system
generates. The boundaries of “basic research” expand into the area of national
policy making, and the client becomes larger than the scientific community.
And, in fact,
returning to text starting some lines above the last paragraph of the selection
out of “terms of service”:
.
1. Given the
probabilistic nature of machine learning, use of our Services may in some
situations result in Output that does not accurately reflect real people,
places, or facts.
.
2. Output may not
always be accurate. You should not rely on Output from our Services as a sole
source of truth or factual information, or as a substitute for professional
advice.
.
3. You must evaluate
Output for accuracy and appropriateness for your use case, including using
human review as appropriate, before using or sharing Output from the Services.
.
4. You must not use
any Output relating to a person for any purpose that could have a legal or
material impact on that person, such as making credit, educational, employment,
housing, insurance, legal, medical, or other important decisions about them.
.
5.
Our Services may provide incomplete, incorrect, or offensive Output that does
not represent OpenAI’s views. If Output references any third
party products or services, it doesn’t mean the third party endorses or
is affiliated with OpenAI.
That is an attempt to
express a juridical disclaimer, smart
lawyers editing a text that relieves the producer from risks, if sued. For me
it is analogy to a manufacturer of weapons who advises the buyer/client about
the use of the weapons. There are national laws that regulate such an industry
and commerce but there is also a world of arms trafficking and criminal possession
of weapons related to
international politics and conflicts. In our case it is a disclaimer that seeks
an assurance that weapons will not be given to, and used by children but only
used by “us” or by democratic and friendly people in friendly countries, and
only for self-defense, as only by Ukraine in the conflict with Russia,
disregarding all the complications that are suggested in my
essay on the conflict. And regarding the
above repeated text of numbered “terms of service” above:
1. The output may not
accurately reflect real people, places, or facts. [Who should and can do what
about that it may not be truth?].
2. They say that you
should [or must?] not rely on output from our services as a sole source of truth [but claims that it
is truth?].
3. You must
evaluate. [But how? – this may mean
understanding and applying the ignored DIS].
4. You must not use
any output that could have a legal or material impact. [We, who, “must not
use”, but how to know whether it “could” have impact?].
5. Our services may
be offensive. [But it probably intends to claim that “we” are not offensive].
And who are “we” and
who are “you”? Among the “we”, I can claim that I myself understand and follow
“musts” but who is responsible for the whole of “us” and of “you”, and what
does it imply to be “responsible”, for what, and to whom? To the state, in state individualism, which is often equated to “society”? All guaranteed
by the “myth of democracy”?
10. Conclusion: The
meaning of hype
All this up to the
point of raising the question of what “hype” does mean in our context. Today it
is not general popular knowledge to know about and relate to the historical
issue of Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of
the Popular Mind, as the beginning of crowd psychology, and at the edge of Groupthink, with its relation to the wiki-concept and to my own doctoral thesis on Quality-control of Information.
Regarding criticism and influence of the book The Crowd, Wikipedia mentions feelings of
power and security allow the individual not only to act as part of the mass,
but also to feel safety in numbers. Today
the safety in numbers may be in numbers of fellows on the net who share the
misunderstanding or belief, the number of nodes and hits in the Internet, or
the volume of big data.
For all its relations to Freudian psychology I think
that the message is better understood in the light of analytical psychology and
Carl Jung’s reflections in his Civilization in
Transition (Collected Works, vol, 10). I dare to mention my own association to the
particular chapter in the book (# 589-824) where Jung (mentioned by addicts to
the New
Age movement) analyzes “Flying
Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies”. In terms of philosophy of
science, this as well as the case of the technical hubris of the Titanic-case, may very well be fruitful, if yet apparently
farfetched analogies, recalling George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. A thoughtful book by the professor of sociology
Richard Stivers says it all: Technology as Magic:
The Triumph of the Irrational, including the
article on “The Case of the University”. It is a serious alternative to Arthur C. Clarke’s perhaps better known phrase “Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic” (see also here).
Never mind that the complexities of the philosophy of technology hide the basic
role of the psychic abuse of formal thinking. A reminder of the tragedy behind it all is the
tragic historic analogy is the Holocaust, based on a whole culturally advanced
nation’s deep popular, historic, and scientific “knowledge” of the minds,
behavior, and history of mainly Jews as an ethnic group. So many references and
so much, in part misleading, reading would not be necessary if, as Blaise Pascal
remarks in his Pensées, (1955,
§251) humans would “fall in love
for”, or accept and follow Christianity that unites psychological exteriority
with interiority, or follow at least some of the few great world religions.
I think that the
situation is very serious and the more so because the consequences, grave as
they can be, will not be perceived, except in the long run, in the same way as
cultures may degenerate and conflictual relations between people and nations
develop until exploding in murders and wars, historically even two world wars.
More recently we have the examples of the Russia-Ukraine
conflict and Israel-Hamas war. We have also cultural “civil wars” like feminism
(cf. our boomers vs. doomers mentioned earlier) where
the gregariousness of nationalism or sex-gender or analytical leaning attracts
individuals who have not a fully developed psychic identity (individuation) and
therefore easily achieve “meaning and identity” by melting with a group,
nationality, political Right or Left (or “Center”,) or a collective. Even with
no visible conflict, the consequence can be an oppressive passivation of
especially old, weak, ill or handicapped people who will not be able to further
their own opinions and interests, as in my illustration of difficulties and
limitations of the already mentioned human-computer interaction.
In the meantime, the
hype is invading our daily environment. I picked up a concrete simple example
in Sweden but I should have preferred to wait until another text appeared that
I saw much later in the Swedish design magazine Form, No. 2, 2024, p. 71, written by Björn Nordin, with the title “Människan och AI” [Humans and AI]. I propose Swedish
readers to also consult it after reading my analysis below because it
illustrates what is coming to drain or drawn us intellectually. By then I had
already, painfully, worked out my comments that follow, to the first mentioned
text that is an advertising brochure enclosed in and distributed together with
the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in
mid-December 2023, with the title (my trans.) AI or HI. I did not see an explanation of what HI is, probably human intelligence. It was produced by
the Swedish branch of the Universum Employer Branding Agency. In two pages (pp.4-5) it offers a series of
affirmations about AI. I will begin by displaying a short summary of the text
(my trans.), followed by the same text interspersed with my own commentaries
[with my emphasis in italics and in
square brackets] based on arguments presented earlier in this essay. The
brochure begins by telling that:
Already in year 1589
Queen Elizabeth I rejected a patent application for a knitting machine for fear
that it would put the population out of work, so concerns about the impact of
new technology on jobs are neither new nor particularly surprising. Already
today many types of basic counselling and customer service are now carried out
without human contact. The CEO of a firm, Futurion, calls AI "the super colleague who never sleeps", who knows
most languages, has a number of different degrees”, and at the same time notes
that many of the skills we were able to study in the past, AI is now able to
handle perfectly well on its own: only when it comes to managing human
creativity and critical thinking, however, it is not doing so well. The CEO
also finds that the demanded skills of the future will be very much about social and creative skills such as dealing
with people, the ability to put together broad and to come up with original and unusual solutions. New
roles and responsibilities will emerge. We will therefore have to learn and
re-learn, probably several times over.
It is too early to say what these new roles will look like, but there is
already a growing demand for technical
specialists in machine learning, prompt designers and AI developers.
Generative AI such as
ChatGPT cannot replace the creativity and
imagination of writers, designers and other creative professionals. It
requires a level of originality, emotion and expression that machines cannot
replicate, at least not yet. What do we do with the time left over? We don't
know yet. But if we can avoid spending evenings reading meeting documents,
getting help to tidy up the statistics for the presentation and getting an
editable first draft of a document in a couple
of minutes, we should reasonably have a lot of time to spare. The
transition from an eight to six hour working day is possible with increased use
of AI, however, it is important to note that it is not only a technological
issue but also a socio-economic and cultural one. Future changes in working habits are likely to be
influenced by a combination of technological advances, policies, and changes in
societal attitudes towards work and
leisure. Whatever the outcome, we can say that AI is here to stay, and if you
don't want to be left behind, you might as well jump on the bandwagon.
WITH MY COMMENTS:
Already in year 1589
Queen Elizabeth-I [but, please, mind
the difference between the worlds of 1589 and 2023, and why not mention also
the better studied luddites among whom I myself may be classified]
rejected a patent application for a knitting machine for fear that it would put
the population out of work, so concerns about the impact of new technology on
jobs are neither new nor particularly surprising. Already today many types of
basic counselling and customer service are now carried out without human
contact. [Already commented
earlier in my earlier text]. The CEO of a firm, Futurion, calls AI "the super colleague who never
sleeps", who knows most languages, has a number of different degrees”, and
at the same time notes that many of the skills we were able to study in the
past, AI is now able to handle perfectly well on its own: only when it comes to
managing human creativity and critical thinking [how to recognize that?],
however, it is not doing so well. The CEO also finds that the demanded skills
of the future will be very much about social
and creative skills such as dealing with people [not in chat bots!],
the ability to put together broad solutions [synonym to the earlier-mentioned DIS
“systems thinking?] and to come up with original and unusual solutions [how to recognize and classify them?]. New roles and responsibilities will emerge. We will
therefore have to learn and re-learn, probably
several times over [equivalent to
outweigh and repair short-term truths and solutions?]. It is too early to say what these new roles will look
like, but there is already a growing demand for technical specialists in machine learning, prompt designers and AI developers. [guess: what else?].
Generative AI such as
ChatGPT cannot replace the creativity and
imagination [what are they and
their relation?] of writers, designers and other
creative professionals [but cf. the earlier
mentioned infringement of artistic
copyright]. It requires a level of
originality, emotion and expression [what are they and their relation?] that machines cannot replicate, at least not
yet [remark this not yet].
What to do we do with the time left over? [Left over by whom to whom? More automation in supermarkets leading to
less employees, transfer of tasks to customers, same length of queues]. We don't know yet. But if we can avoid spending
evenings reading meeting documents [why?], getting help to tidy up the
statistics for the presentation and getting an editable first draft of a
document in a couple of minutes, we
should reasonably have a lot of time to spare [again who are “we”, employers or fewer employees?] The transition from an eight to six hour working day
is possible [with the same amount
of manpower?]
with increased use of AI, however, it is important to note that it is
not only a technological issue but also a socio-economic and cultural one [and religious about greed, and political, cf.
labor unions?]. Future changes in working habits are likely to be
influenced by a combination of technological advances, policies, and changes in
societal attitudes towards work and
leisure [typical
ChatGPT-text, and what attitudes?]. Whatever the outcome, we can say that AI is here to
stay, and if you [cf. “we” vs. “you”] don't want to be left behind, you might as well jump
on the [whose?] bandwagon.
11.
Conclusion: Beyond the hype
ENOUGH WITH (TOO
MANY) COMMENTS. What are to make out of this nice streamlined text, streamlined
except for my own emphasis and commentaries? They must have been partly and
cheaply edited automatically by ChatGPT, such as many other coming published
texts that can be easily read and accepted but would require an attentive
reading and critical examination. It is like reading how the ChatGPT answered
to my questions about the causes of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine,
and compare them with what I write about in my paper on the issue. In contrast, we can expect the whole society to be
drowned in paying attention to an immense amount of such ChatGPT/AGI
advertising. The advertising will include the apparently more ambitious texts
such as the above-mentioned intelligently artificial artistic production. The stuff will be almost daily worldwide produced and
broadcasted also in documentaries on AI, in the coming explosive future of the
AI-industry.
In this perspective
the obvious real productive capabilities of AI/AGI invite to the creation of doomers’ dystopias that have already been related to the
meaning of the biblical “Tower of Babel” (Genesis 11:1-9). It means the breakdown of human communication
starting from the breakdown of archetypal communication in the family that I
portray in a text of Reason and Gender. It stands behind the mythological explosion of what
in another context I call mythological disinformation.
|
The meaning of such (dis)information is already obfuscated in
AI-produced responses to questions, as offered by Internet browsers that are
“trained” with/by unknown source materials including Wikipedia’s (whose
finances may be undermined), while the AI-answers undermine the basic
question of the identification, authority and responsibility of the source(s). The “user” of the
AI-supported browser is programmatically discouraged and gets gradually
disaccustomed from asking which is the (authority of) the unidentified
unknown and (ir)responsible source(s). |
What will follow is
the advent of increasingly complex human-computer interaction, of one additional universal, corrupt formal computer
language adopted, easily used and abused by the many but understood only by the
few who are gifted with a primitive mathematical mind dissociated from the
“world”. They may cause a collective schizophrenia, or cultural crisis or
lobotomy of the “crowd”. It will keep few in the crowd busy in trying
hopelessly to “debate” responding to unending “automatically” ChatGPT-produced
texts, including continuous AI-advertising, produced by lots of people, financing
institutions, businesses, employees who have vested interests in continuing to
foster the AI/AGI-hype that guarantees their own employment or
entrepreneurship. Including in science allied to business, and at universities,
such as in year 2024 Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry or in grandiose
pronouncements in international journals such as The Economist (November 18th 2024) “AI, science and society: Demis Hassabis and
James Manyika”. Recently a
colleague sent me the link to a text that we will see and tempted or feel
obliged to spend time reading in many other close versions and authorships in
the future, this one published under the aegis of “OECD AI Policy Observatory”
and “Existential Risk Observatory”: Artificial General
Intelligence: can we avoid the ultimate existential threat? And see what is claimed in The Economist (Nov. 20, 2024): “How AI will lead to a new scientific renaissance”.
We can expect a
mind-blowing future in trying to evaluate and debunk all claims, the latest
ones internationally endorsed by the scientific loudspeaker of the Nobel
foundation in the appointment of the Nobel prizes for year 2024 which became an
advertising for AI, showing that mathematization and logification in the form
of also AI hype is invading or had
invaded science itself as the rape of psyche and nature by the spirit and psychology of quantum physics, as shown
above when decreeing, centered on we or us or they, I repeat:
“success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history” but
ignoring that the myth of democracy attributed to doomers
will not cope with that “Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we
learn how to avoid the risks”. The question of we-they-who covers the political
problem since, as we all might suspect upon the study of daily conflicts as
well as past and present wars, “we” often project the source of evil on “them”.
Main technical AI-pioneers may often have a psyche whose emphasis on logic,
mathematics and physical nature of environment and mind, implies a downplaying
of valuations and feelings, (and who dares to think about love?). It can be expressed in categorical atheism and the
too common unproblematic acceptance of the, for many absurd, Turing test,
dampened in the late discussions of AI by the rhetorical substitution of
problematized “intelligence” by “smartness”. Again: “cultural lobotomy”. Conclusion: when AI pioneers refer to avoiding risks of AI, they may be
themselves one main risk, as Robert Oppenheimer suspected having been, long after the nuclear bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war. As when AI
pioneers should be seriously considering themselves being one main risk when
discussing the possibility of AI gadgets becoming smarter than humans,
acquiring consciousness, requiring themselves human rights, including the right
to the life that is not even accorded to human beings in wars, genocides or
controversially in abortions, and so on. But we should not be surprised if some
AI-gadgets renamed AI-humans will be finally renamed human beings, in a frame
of mind that up to now could be characterized as schizophrenic.
After writing the
main of this text I get a modest example of the consequences of the hype in
reading The Economist publishing on
August 8, 2024 an article “These are two new books you need to read about
AI” (excerpt below) referring to
the article published August 10, written by “the winner or The Economist Open
Future essay competition in the category Open Progress, (general nerd and
“boomer”?) Frank L. Ruta, responding to the question “Do the benefits of artificial intelligence
outweigh the risks?” with the peremptory
affirmation that “We need to develop AI that aligns with human values” (sic),
set against the book from year 1936 War with the Newts by (old “doomer”) Karel Čapek.
The article “These are the two new books” states the following:
In the past 12 months
at least 100 books about – AI - have been published
in America, reckons Thad McIlroy, a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly [check here, read August 14, 2024, archived here] and many multiples of that have been
self-published. At
the top of the pile are two new titles, which represent opposing sides of a
noisy debate: whether enthusiasm about
AI’s benefits should outweigh concerns about its downsides.
Analytical-logical
pundits (Sasha Luccioni’s example here, or here)
will claim things on the basis of their qualifications in terms of their verve
and networking (“marketing noise”), with no possibility to question their
competence as expressed in an overview of their overall scientific production
beyond hits for their names in browsers. Problems that would have required a
broad social systemic understanding of the causes of the problem will instead
lead to the discussion of whether continuously arising AI/AGI “tools” developed
by a few or many businesses may help to solve the problems. Simultaneously will
arise alarms for an AI-bubble, as around August 2024, in analogy to the earlier
Dot.com bubble. By that time there are few articles who more
directly treated the issue, besides the Social Science Encyclopedia, Reuters,
Bloomberg’s Goldman’s Top Stock
Analyst Is Waiting for AI Bubble to Burst, and Goldman Sachs Gen AI: Too much
spend, too little benefit? (a redacted version of the original report published
June 25, 2024 (32 pages).
A high rate of
unemployment caused by AI/AGI will at the same time disclose the high fraction
of present job opportunities that do not require humanity for their production,
but mainly or only routine computer-like routine calculation, mechanical
movements, and consumption of
demanded but unnecessary products (including future AI/AGI) that keep the
economy going. Promises for the above-mentioned “universal basic income”, the financing with credits for consumption, weapon
industries irrespective of global warming, will ignore economy, social
psychology and politics, the problem of human greed and of the difficulty to
practice the goodness of Christianity and major religions, all evidenced by
wars, cries for “democracy” and government intervention as substitutes of
morality, increased corruption, criminality and necessity of labor unions
related to communism and socialism.
The Faustian bargain
reminds that a good portion of science and technology could have been seen as
legitimate in facilitating everyday life at unknown costs (e.g. the problem of
(electric) energy supply for Generative AI is a
Climate Disaster, and How will we meet artificial intelligence energy demands?) but for whom? Credible long-term cost-benefit analysis
will not be possible, as little as it will be possible to check the accuracy of
statistical predictions of the future effects of new AI applications. When
facilitation and increased productivity will lead to more unemployment, to the
production of nuclear weapons and increased production of more lethal weapons
for ongoing wars, and cause continuous worldwide pollution, this will raise
claims of dangers and of climate warming, leading desperate souls to feel and
write analogies to the Industrial
Society and Its Future (see below). The
counterparts will claim to strive for and rely on future solutions by means of
“more of the same”, godly super-human intelligence that makes many humans
obsolete, confirming that it was Faustian hubris. It recalls the famous title
of Oswald Spengler’s famous book The Decline of the
West, which may also be
seen as a secular interpretation of, or one more steps
in the understanding of the Book of Revelation.
Atheists and those
who cannot surmount the difficulties of reading and interpreting the Book of Revelation can instead consider
the possibility of having in their minds an Icarus complex, despite vague doubts that
have been expressed as to the therapeutic value of such a diagnosis. It
displays, however, similarities with other better known alternative concepts, including the already mentioned
autism or other diagnoses as narcissistic personality
disorder. The description of the Icarus complex does refer
to the prominent American psychologist Henry Murray who
in turn has had his life story related to the
famous case of the American mathematician Ted Kaczynski, who is further described as
“a
mathematician who went on to be known as the 'Unabomber'. Between 1978 and
1995, Kaczynski murdered three individuals and injured 23 others in a
nationwide mail bombing campaign
against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the
destruction of the natural
environment”.
More
sophisticated than simple “luddites” and even activists in the crusade
against global warming, he must have felt an overwhelming crushing discomfort
in the contact with the technical-industrial society at the time, a feeling
similar to the one felt by many contemporaneous citizens who today live in
complex febrile megacity milieus but long for a simple life in contact with
nature. He authored his own description and interpretation of the Apocalypse in
the thoughtful book Industrial
Society and Its Future
(Wikipedia report here, printed book here). It is a manifesto and social
critique opposing industrialization, rejecting leftism,
and advocating for a nature-centered form of anarchism
that today would have a deal in common with the climate
and environmental
movements. I treat those commonalities with emphasis on climate in another
essay on Climate and apocalyptic global warming.
My point here,
however, is directed to those who have enough mathematical-logical leaning for
having been lured into an Icarus-complex, pathological narcissism, or denial of
possibilities to avoid the Apocalypse. Even if they do not have the reported
high mathematical genius and intelligence of Ted Kaczynski with an IQ at 167, better they choose a career in the AI-industry, like
the above-mentioned boomers who are
opposed to doomers. Doing so, becoming boomers, they may avoid
Kaczynski’s tragedy (to be compared with the above-mentioned William James Sidis’ claimed “impossible” IQ of more than 250, (recalling
an analog Swedish AI-hype-related cases, see here, here,
and interview here)
which may be possible if another more probable child prodigy, Kim Ung-yong had an IQ above 210. But it appears to be barely
possible when compared with “saint genius” Albert Einstein with an estimated IQ
of only 160, all this leading to studies of his brain, associated to what I have recalled as “brain mythology”. Sidis’s story recalls the need to problematize the
ignored ultimate meaning of IQ.
Such problematization fits doomers, his being a good
example of what even a pure mathematical-logical genius can lead to. It can
lead to an additional “logical” tragedy of crime and war such as the one I
recently described for Ukraine, which can be seen
as a logically motivated war between boomers and doomers.
But one may guess that the best solution is to upgrade the desperation of doomers and exhilaration of boomers to a better
understanding of how to avoid computerization as abuse of formal science, allied in the driving West to an active Christian
attitude. It would prevent the vain hope that
“democracy” will allow us the “freedom” of setting up more laws, more police
and an extended judicial system for forced control of the future use and abuse
of AI/AGI. It would also prevent us from seeing a coming AI/AGI as the saving
Messiah that leads us towards paradise, alternatively as expecting the
Apocalypse as an unavoidable tragedy.
Nevertheless, not
everything is prone to be misunderstood and perceived with cynicism. For
instance, the above mentioned “Christian attitude” can be perceived as
promising in its mobilization as announced in May 2024 by Intouch, (Salesian of Don Bosco, USA West) communicating the launching of the International
Salesian Commission for Artificial Intelligence (ISCAI), including two
interesting messages or the Pope Francis regarding AI on (1) “wisdom of the
heart” in social communications and (2) peace (respectively here
and especially here).
In the Acts of the General
Council of the Salesian Society of St.John
Bosco (official organ of
Animation and Communication for the Salesian Congregation) No. 440, pp. 38-57. Fr Gildasio
Mendes dos Santos, general councilor for Social Communication outlines in a
text from 24 July 2023 several guidelines for the education of youngsters in
meeting the challenges of AI. The question is whether AI-AGI research, in view
of the problems surveyed above, offers support for implementing the
insightfully formulated ambitions, e.g. (p. 46-47).:
Living digitally
affects the way we express ideas, create our communication policy, share
information, express ourselves, and see the world and the realities in which we
live. This requires great responsibility so that we can always communicate
without dominating, relate without controlling people, express ourselves
without the temptation of worldly power. We are also faced with challenges such
as individualism and relativism, malaises that take on the traits of
self-referentiality, indifference, lack of respect for nature, up to and
including various forms of violence. Sometimes, even unconsciously, digital
communication propels and leads people to situations of personal and group
conflict, even to forms of radicalism. This can lead to a digital identity crisis.
A kind of contemporary version of Plato’s “cave myth”. Instead of seeing the
shadows on the wall of a life happening elsewhere, the prisoner is forced not
only to observe himself, but also to see others showing themselves on social
media. This can transform us profoundly.
Long after writing
the main of this article, the Vatican published on 25 May 2026, a most
ambitious document in the form of a first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV with the
title Magnifica Humanitas, mentioned in its introductioin in Wikipedia
as being concerned with “preserving the human person in the age of artificial
intelligence”. Those who have followed my text will recognize many of the most
important points of the argumentation, and possibly some of its theological
roots that I attempted to summarize in my paper on Information and Theology, which followed after
the meanderings of Information and Debate.
For the rest, it is
symptomatic that I never found in the Swedish (and barely in international)
media an in-depth interview or discussion of the matters related to this text
of mine. That is: until February 2024 when in the Al Jazeera English (Europe) news channel, in “The AI Series”, Nobel
peace prize laureate Maria Ressa
interviewed and discussed with Urvashi Aneja (also here)
in Goa, technology policy researcher and founding director
of Digital Futures Lab, the subject How currents AI
developments impact the Global South (also here, plus additional text
here)
introduced with the following text, where “the Global South” refers to the view
from Goa, in Southeast Asia:
While many of today’s
headline-grabbing artificial intelligence (AI) tools are designed in Silicon
Valley, much of the k that fuels the boom is based in the Global South, raising
questions over who stands to gain from the technology and at what cost.
Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Maria Ressa and the director of the Digital Futures Lab, Urvashi Aneja, explore the impact AI is
already having on communities in the Global South – from labour
conditions to democracy and the environment – and why countries need to move
beyond “catching up with the North” when deciding what role AI can and should
play in their societies.
In another text, the very same Urvashi Aneja relates to the same
thought I had expressed above about the “cementing” of human thinking by people in
industry, business, finance and academia, living in sub-cultures or societies
in cultural crisis: ”Artificial intelligence is a
status quo technology, as it reproduces the future based on the past. […] The
current model of AI development concentrates power in the hands of a few. What
we need is a new model that puts public interest at the centre.”
I mean, it is
dramatically symptomatic that a finally welcomed such a more serious discussion
of AI/AGI should come from the “Global South”. It can also be seen as a part of
the “conclusion” except for that a new
model that puts public interest at the center must be seen primarily as the “old” forgotten model, an ethical and religious rather than
political question. As I suggest in my essay on Information and
Theology.
For the rest, in updatings of this paper up to April 8, 2025 I found
knowledge of main AI-problems surveyed in this paper in interviews, as in the
Swedish TV-program “Smartare än hjärnan” [Smarten than the brain], of psychiatrists Anna Lembke
and (also psychoanalyst) Robert Waldinger.
12.
Conclusion in one sentence
Long after writing
the main of the whole text, I got the feeling that the core of the whole
problem with AI-AGI consists of the consequences of a culturally widespread
misunderstanding of the essence and function of mathematics and related logic.
|
In one only
sentence I claim that this requires a further study and development of Jan Brouwer’s
(vs. David Hilbert’s) thought about the foundations of mathematics, as
implicit in Walter P. Van Stigt’s The rejected parts
of Brouwer’s dissertation on the foundations of mathematics, (Historia
Mathematica, vol. 6, 1979, pp. 385-404). This is suggested in my paper on
Computers as
embodied mathematics and logic,
and applied in the consequent Computerization and
abuse of formal science, whose latest
expression is the hype of AI-AGI. |
In order to do this it is preferable to have initially the mathematical
knowledge that is necessary in order to appreciate the texts referenced at the beginning of my mentioned paper on Computers as embodied mathematics and logic, and
its summary in Wikipedia’s Brouwer-Hilbert
controversy. This may, however, be
bypassed by those who are able to grasp the core of the issue that is found in
the most relevant text I know of and quote from the above-mentioned Walter P.
Van Stigt’s The rejected parts of
Brouwer’s dissertation on the foundations of mathematics, (Historia
Mathematica, vol. 6, 1979, pp. 385-404). In it, the criticism of the
Brouwer’s alleged “solipsism and mysticism” must be deconstructed by
understanding it as a reference to the Ego vs. unconscious in analytical psychology, which at time was not available. This can be
completed by the downloadable English translation of Brouwer’s Life, Art, and
Mysticism (Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 37, No. 3, Summer 1996) whose title already gives an indication
of why the matter “turns off” the interest of most typical mathematical minds.
My understanding is that this all requires an updating of Brouwer’s implicit
view of psychology up to the standards of analytical psychology as outlined in
my discussion of Conscience and Truth.
All this may lead to
understanding the need and possibility to develop further Churchman’s rather
abortive references to Carl Jung, in The
Design of Inquiring Systems (esp. pp. 262 and 271), somewhat amplificated
in the subsequent The Systems Approach
and its Enemies (pp. 130f, 170f). The core of the issue is, in other words,
to understand the ultimate reasons for, or rather causes of why Brouwer’s
advisor, prof. D.J. Korteweg at the University of Amsterdam required that
mainly the chapter 2 of Brouwer’s dissertation’s manuscript should be deleted
from its final version. I have a personal experience of this kind of academic
disciplinary struggles, both in the Swedish history of informatics as related to Umeå University,
and from my role as faculty opponent in the disputation of a controversial dissertation on computer science at Lund University. If I had not been familiar with the connection
between scientific method, philosophy and theology I could also have requested
the deletion of controversial parts of the dissertation for accepting the
invitation to being opponent. These struggles are a symptom of the problem of
inter- or multi-disciplinarity, and they have in turn been embodied in the
academic history of the systems approach at the University of California-Berkeley, as a latest
or last attempt to avoid the divorce between scientific disciplines,
philosophy, and theology.
It may be seen as why philosophy including philosophy of science, along with
theology, because of some interesting reason is explicitly and forcefully
rejected even by some late AI-sympathetic scientists such as e.g. the mentioned
Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Wilczek.
The rejection or oblivion of the connection to
theology is what explains the apparently paradoxical conclusions and consequent
invalidation of the supposed highest values of democracy as addressed in my
essay on Disinformation as a
Myth. It explains also the
inconsequential powerful rhetoric of facile criticism of AI based upon misled
analogies created by misled atheists who claim that “AI has hacked the operating system of human
civilization”. It was already
hacked by the time of the world wars, the Holocaust, and later for instance in
the conflict in Gaza with or without AI. In the Judeo-Christian tradition
one may refer to the interpretations of an unsentimental Apocalypse. In the Confucian tradition of the I Ching, an account of the life situation of hexagram §23 “Splitting Apart” offers, in the book’s analytic psychological interpretation
(foreword), an alternative for
the “Enlightened Europe”, according to the following excerpted words referring
to “the laws of heaven”:
[…] The inferior, dark forces overcome what is superior
and strong, not by direct means, but by undermining it gradually and
imperceptibly, so that it finally collapses. […] This
pictures a time when inferior people are pushing forward and are about
to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior men. Under these
circumstances, which are due to the time, it is not favorable for the superior
man to undertake anything. […] This suggests that one should submit to the bad
time and remain quiet. For it is a question not of man's doing but of time
conditions, which, according to the laws of heaven, show an alternation of
increase and decrease, fullness and emptiness. It is impossible to counteract
these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit
and avoid action.
Beyond the hype in
one sentence
Long after having written the main of the text above, on March 27 and
28, 2026, I heard at the Swedish public radio a program that deals with the
“impossibly” conceived consequences of the hype that, as foreseen, gradually
does not anymore appear as hype: AI-jätten Palantir – kan kristallkulan vändas mot oss själva? [56 minutes. My
trans.: AI giant Palantir – can the crystal ball be turned against
ourselves? Saved here].
Why “impossibly
conceived” consequences? Those readers of these lines who do not understand
Swedish would better understand “why impossibly conceived” by consulting the
Internet with and without AI-assistance with focus on the American company Palantir “that develops data integration and analytics platforms
enabling government agencies, militaries, and corporations to combine and
analyze data from multiple sources”, and its related chairman Peter Thiel. All compared to the American AI company Anthropic
whose co-founder Chris Olah
increased in notoriety by attending, as AI expert to the formal presentation of
the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas already mentioned above.
Then will the readers
of these lines understand how the hype of AI, ignoring that data integration
and analytics platforms were acknowledged problematic “statistics”, has melted
down in what today is vaguely understood in popular language as “philosophy”.
It now may include former religion and theology, psychology and all branches of
modern “knowledge” and art, whatever they happen to mean. In tune with the
modern understanding of a vague democracy as a substitute of God and gods. The
final result will probably be what I described as the reduction of former religion and theology to
politics as it appears in the
military-industrial complex, and in the
progressive intellectual breakdown of the logical structures of the Internet as
conceived in the phenomenon of platform decay or enshittification.
And, in June 2026, long after
having written the main of this text, why do we read in The Economist an article with the title: “Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers” ?.
To Fellow Engineers
Over lunch at a
Swedish embassy, the hostess asks an old engineer if he knows the difference
between a lady, a diplomat and an engineer:
- Do you know the
difference between a lady, a diplomat and an engineer?
The old man calmly
said yes and explained:
- The lady, when she
says NO, means MAYBE; when she says MAYBE, she means YES; and when she says YES she is not a lady.
- The diplomat, when
he says YES, means MAYBE; when he says MAYBE, he means NO; when he says NO, he
is not a diplomat.
- The engineer, when
he says YES, means YES; when he says NO, he means NO; and when he says MAYBE...
he's not an engineer.
That's it!
-------------
[Forwarded by a Brazilian colleague, from unknown source, translated
from the Portuguese]
Spoiler suggestion: The engineer is the only one who is supposed to deal
mainly with inanimate nature. And is supposed here to ignore statistical
probability and measurement theory, which introduce the MAYBE. The only
obligatory party in the engineer’s dialogue is the one who, YES, pays his (or
her but I do not advertise for being a feminist) monthly salary. And it has
been already recalled above that the German philosopher and theologian Ernst
Troeltsch observed that humor may have similar influence on atheists as
religion does, in fostering humility by downplaying the importance of the big
Ego that is inflated by logic of YES and NO.
