The Emperor's New Code: Exposing the Empty Hype Behind the Latest "Apocalypse"
This isn't to say an apocalypse isn't possible, only that its source will be the usual suspects.
Slot me into the category of the antediluvian deniers who think AI has no chance of iterating itself into an entity of will and volition with the capability to rule humans. It ain’t happening — that, I’m convinced.
Many beg to differ, and no one more so than our favorite nutty uncle of a billionaire and autistic business polymath. Elon Musk, no less, has admonished the rabble repeatedly about the existential risk posed by unchecked AI to outsmart us mortals into subjugation, if not render us altogether obsolete.
Given my natural tilt to antediluvianism, I am more sanguine on the matter of technology-induced apocalypses than most. I am amused more than alarmed by Musk’s dire prognostication. I see no reason to be otherwise, given his poor record of prognosticating to date. Most everything Musk has proffered over the past decade has failed to materialize. (Aren’t we supposed to be on Mars or being ferried about in self-driving cars by now?) Nevertheless, I begrudgingly admire a man who defiantly flames out without regret. At the least our South Afrikaner import offers sound entertainment value, and that’s something.
(Sidebar: That Musk warns about AI’s existential threat while selling premium AI access for eight dollars a month offers further proof of the cross-purposes at which human thought operates. Further proof is offered by Musk’s lament of the impending population collapse and his singular exertions to repopulate the world while exerting with equal resolve to develop robots to replace humans.)
My rudimentary understanding of nature accounts for my sanguine demeanor. The created always suffers from insurmountable deficits, so it will always be at a loss in its quest to supplant the creator. AI is created, and humans are the creators. AI will never understand how it was created, as we can never understand how we were created. The created is never endowed with the power of the creator. Should AI ever ascend to a level of sentience, which some assume is an eventuality, and which I assume is an impossibility, it can only hypothesize on its existence as we do. Whether evolution or creation, the conception holds.
We are composed of matter, but we have no idea what constitutes matter or of time in which we exist. We think but have no idea what produces our thoughts. We are lost to the principles of our motions. We lose consciousness and dream, and we have no idea why, only that we know that this unconscious state is indispensable, salutary, and revelatory to our existence. Good luck with this alchemical endeavor to imbue a machine or a holograph with these essentials that escape us.
AI, like all technology, is a tool, and like all tools, it can help us either elevate or ruin. On the latter, I hold one fear specific to AI, one predictably existential because it is moored to an ancient, fantastical philosophy that has existed since Plato. It is the legitimizing of socialism.
Information and calculation have always been the confounding bugaboos, and ones the socialists themselves readily admit. If the elite among the intellectuals were only empowered with the ability to coalesce vast quantities of widely disbursed data and to manipulate the data with utmost precision, the elites could calculate human existence into perfection, so the socialists assure us. AI just might be the philosopher’s stone they have long sought.
The nineteenth century ushered in the dawn of scientific progress, rational enlightenment, and utopian socialist planning. It was the age of Darwin, Marx, Galton, and Freud. Intellectuals across the well-peninsulaed regions of Europe had convinced themselves that human reason could solve all problems, eliminate all suffering, and perfect all societies. The newly emboldened philosopher kings embarked on the hard labor of supplanting religion with science, educating the ignorant masses, and exalting the unassailable virtues of the intelligently planned social organization. Extinguishing poverty, crime, and conflict now resided within the realm of possibilities. The science was self-evident, intractable, and even morally admirable. We just need the right tools.
Few who orbited in this rarefied intellectual universe foresaw a Trojan horse containing a petard that would ignite the wave of unprecedented human destruction that followed in the twentieth century. The fatal error of this rabid rationalism – which, despite the empirical evidence of scorched-earth annihilation, remains as every bit as viable today as it did a century and a half ago – is its fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.
Rationalists assume that people are essentially logical creatures who act only after incisive calculation. They believe that if you explicate their best interest beyond reproach, the subjects will naturally choose this interest. When people act otherwise – irrationally or self-destructively – these actions are the product of a poor education or corrupted social institutions. Perfect education and reform the institutions and human behavior will naturally bloom into rational perfection. The view presents as reasonable and humane. Perhaps it would be if it were something other than a catastrophic misreading of human psychology.
But this time is different. The privation, despotism, and misery that occurred in previous attempts at a twentieth-century Utopia – the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia – will be eliminated. AI, with its embedded rationality, computational ability, and access to information, has finally enabled the blending of two historically incomparable, formerly immiscible variables – socialist egalitarianism and capitalist material abundance. Enable the planning elites with their masterplan and then insist, if not legislate, that humanity adhere to the elites’ interpretation of rationality.
At best it’s a fantasy masquerading as a dream. It has always been a cognitive blunder and a delusion of grandeur. Human behavior is as impervious to scientific calculation as the inanimate rock is impervious to reason. Carlisle’s reference to economics as the “dismal science” would be an appropriate opprobrium if economics were a science. It’s not; it’s always an exercise in logical exposition. Scientific calculation can offer insight into the “why” of our behavior yesterday, but it offers no insight into the behavior of the day, much less that of tomorrow. Economics can neither measure nor predict. It can only explain based on the a priori. AI changes none of it one iota. Calculate away with the latest technology, but it won’t be any more successful in planning an economy than had an abacus performed the calculations.
The problem is that we are more than rational creatures. We are emotional, spiritual, and often deeply irrational beings who will deliberately act against what others see as our self-interest for psychological reasons that are detached from logic. Sometimes we choose to suffer because the subsequent suffering feels more authentic than artificial happiness. Yes, it’s true. We will seek happiness in misery.
Everyone has deep psychological needs that are detached from rational calculation. We will embrace destructive behavior because it offers a sense of power or autonomy. It can be defiant when we feel constrained by conformity. Sometimes we act on impulse, instinct, or unconscious drives that operate below the level of rational awareness. We sabotage our happiness (contentment might be the better word) not because we lack knowledge but because we choose to undermine others’ intentions if it is the only path we know to declare our independence.
Our inclination to favor the irrational has devastating implications for Utopians. If people refuse to behave rationally, then rational social planning cannot create perfect societies. If human behavior is driven by unconscious psychological forces, then educational and institutional reform will fail to eliminate antisocial behavior. If someone chooses suffering over happiness for existential reasons, he remains unswayed by promises of material improvement. Rationalist reformers are trying to solve human problems with tools that are fundamentally inadequate to the task. AI is fundamentally inadequate. The elite rationalists are like doctors trying to cure mental illness with surgery or engineers trying to fix human relationships with mathematics.
The critique goes deeper than simply highlighting the limitations of rational planning. This excessive reliance on reason actually exacerbates human problems. When we try to live purely rational lives, we sever ourselves from our own emotional and spiritual depths. We become trapped in our own heads, unable to feel genuine emotions or authentically connect with other people. We lose touch with the sources of meaning, beauty, and transcendence that enrich our lives. Rationalism imposed from the outside not only will fail to improve the human condition, but it will impoverish it.
When we view ourselves as nothing more than complex machines governed by physical and chemical laws, we lose our sense of dignity and moral responsibility. If all human behavior can be explained in terms of genetics, neurology, and social conditioning, if we can be captured by mathematical computations, concepts like free will, moral choice, and personal accountability are rendered meaningless. Why should anyone feel guilty about his actions if those actions were determined by forces beyond his control?
But AI will perfect our understanding of human existence, the apologist asserts. They point to the science of the day for evidence. Neuroscientists say they can see decisions emerge before we are aware of them, algorithms can predict behavior with uncanny accuracy, and genetic markers can link life events. Color me skeptical, but, nevertheless, this knowledge still fails to stimulate greater rationality. On the contrary, rebellion is often the reflexive response. (I know it is with me.) Rationality has nothing to do with rebellion. We rebel because it expresses a yearning to be free, even if that means siding with fabrications over truth. Every little rebellion reminds us that we can change our habits if we desire and that the choices we made yesterday needn’t limit us today.
In these modern efforts to find the best solution with sensors, algorithms, and data analysis, we feel dissociation ballooning. It should be easier to achieve goals with the profusion of efficiency apps and measuring algorithms. Instead, more time is wasted organizing preferences, curating feeds, seeking the right influencers, and searching for the best optimization tools. The tools purported to facilitate choice compound the problem, adding more choices that need to be managed.
What hell this efficiency imparts. Do these things every morning, use these strategies to accomplish goals, commit to the habits, and you'll maximize your potential. Count every step, eat this many calories from this kind of food at this time of day, move in this way and in this amount, formulate a daily plan at the break of dawn, avoid the Internet for a specific amount of time, write a set number of words a day. The tools come with support groups, apps, and trackers. Everything you need to be successful, and it’s all carefully thought out and proven by science. Still, these optimized people often seem the least happy, as if they’ve created prisons for themselves. Excessive efficiency suffocates us because it fails to consider human messiness, unpredictability, and the liberating relief of inefficiency.
And what if planned perfection were possible? Who would want it? Perfection is a form of death. The perfectly satiated person would be finished, whole, and mostly still. Life needs imperfection. It's how energy manifests and people self-actuate. Thankfully, perfection is of another world, but the pursuit of perfection is of this one, and that’s good enough.
That atheism is a bedrock of rationalism is no coincidence. Atheism teaches that there were no objective moral truths or transcendent sources of meaning. If this were true, then moral values were simply human constructions that could be changed at will to serve political purposes. The combination of these ideas created a perfect intellectual foundation for totalitarian politics. Why do intellectuals overwhelmingly side with atheism? It’s no coincidence.
If we are merely biological machines, we have no inherent dignity or rights that would limit what can be done in the service of social goals. If reason is the only legitimate source of authority, then intellectuals and planners have the right to override individual preferences and normative traditions. If moral values are arbitrary social constructions, then any action is justified if it serves the supposedly rational goals of the elites.
You refuse to cooperate, to act sufficiently rational for the planners to achieve their rationally perfected socialistic goals; you’re the problem that must be corrected. It doesn’t matter if it’s the social planners of the old Soviet Union or the social planners of a modern Western democracy. Nor does it matter if it’s despotically or democratically imposed. People are as prone to vote themselves into bondage as they are to succumb to it by tyranny (and yet further evidence of human irrationality).
Question the elite rationalists, however seductive their argument. Shun the experts who suffer no consequences from their actions and who are cavalier about subordinating, and possibly annihilating, us to their whim. Be skeptical of compassion, and more so of social-justice warriors. Distrust others’ promises of utopia; elevate independence for yourself and others. Remember that psychic profit is every bit as rational to us as material profit, even when the two appear at cross purposes or even as insanity to those on the outside looking in.
Everything good has materialized organically through inefficiency and messy inconsistency. We have self-actualized through years, centuries, and millennia of our having experienced an infinite number of combinations and permutations of human action, all the while enduring a constant systole and diastole of victories and failures. Nothing good has ever materialized from an elite cabal, no matter how technologically endowed, forcefully stamping its imprimatur on mankind. Indeed, only misery has materialized.