Have you ever sat in unperturbed repose and mulled sympathetically the sentient creature, orb-discoverers dripping and mouth agape, soul-quaked and confounded at the witness of his Maker’s unmasking? This rarity was the experience of World War Two Japanese officer Hiro Onoda a brief few days after he was rescued from a Philippine jungle in March 1974. The precise moment? It was when he was matter-of-factly informed by his bearers that the Japanese Emperor Hirohito was no longer considered divine. His upper body shifted laterally awkwardly, as if an anguished, aggrieved spine yearned desperately to vault the whole into some other existence.
We all inhabit jungles of truth resistance! We all oblige first and most avowedly a narrow me-truth, a cogitative bias favoring reflexive estimations of me-benefits, and this before we allow ourselves a wider, more substantial reality assessment. We’re all addicts.
Consider our usual understanding of addiction. We think of the heroin addict, the nicotine addict, the alcoholic, the cocaine addict. In our minds we point and we identify “them” as addicts. Yet, we cannot escape the fact that we’re all of a DNA predilection to affirm that which we already stood for and that which promises some personal elevation, some opportunity or prestige, or maybe something similar to benefit a favored familiar. It was, we are told, Protagoras who remarked insightfully that “Man is the measure of all things.” But we might add that each individual’s personal estimation of himself and herself weighs heavily in that accounting. As a rule, that which I embrace and appropriate today is generally understood to increase my standing and renown, and that which I elect to champion tomorrow will also involve consistency, a necessary of others’ trust and our own power accrual. The lie too is frequently and adamantly defended for this reason: come what may, we must defend foremost our elemental rightness – a power correlate that through antiquity served in the enhancement of all-important reproductive chances. We all descend from a successful soldier, it is said, but we all descend too no less from habituated, self-righteous and adroit liars. The expansion of one’s own persona, reputation and influence and all their corollaries are that instrumental.
Our intent liberality not infrequently leads us to the accommodation-nod that surely all are partially right; all polemics are but the mere playing field contestations of equals dissimilarly positioned. Still, here I offer an anecdotal experience I had in the mid-1990s in Philadelphia: There, a Quaker facility hosted a meeting of a several dozen progressives and invited speakers to discuss the matter of the death penalty. And there, a woman invitee who had been educated in sociology declared her belief in the institution. Questioned by her hosts as to whether her views followed from anything she could attribute to her formal education, she could not answer that such was the case. She then confided a “wish”: she wished she could believe like so many others present at this meeting of (mostly) social progressives; she apparently wanted at some level of her consciousness to believe that all premeditated vengeance killing was inherently wrong. Yet she had no avenue to override the iron firmness of inured indoctrination. Her frank confession, it must be pointed out, stands in stark contrast to progressives like me, who cannot ever imagine being in a meeting of fanged, hidebound, opinionated, oppression-advocating conservatives and saying to them that I wished I could believe as they do. I have never for an instant wished or opined thusly from mine, the opposite side of the spectrum! We all reason and believe as we do following a habit-addiction admixture of formative neural wiring and experience – especially with experienced and witnessed justice and injustice.
And justice, you must know, is overlooked. Why? It is because justice seems quite normal and natural. Is it not right and just that a man or woman walk down the street in peace, unmolested? Yes it is. And when we witness this commonplace, it is always a seeing of justice and banality in tandem. Hence, justice is cognitively bypassed as insignificant, unworthy of note. It is indeed justice, but by virtue of its very ordinariness it counts with us as a kind of cipher. However, injustices are not likewise ignored! Injustices rattle and unnerve us, they irk and vex us, and they bring quite etiologically and obviously human traits and inclinations that are more cynical and untrusting. It is these offended, untrusting elements that comprise the core, the rudiments of the most considerable part of ideological reaction.
Sometimes, in all candor, there is no authentic equivalence in widely disparate ideological perspectives appertaining to the want of a way out (of that staid and barbarous thinking, for example). And sometimes this non-equivalence is only detectable by the passing verbiage of a scant few who, reflex up and guard down, reveal an unease about the ideological suppositions that brought forth the torrent-dialectic of dissonance resolution and then oh-so-predictable indoctrination. And all this because the human mind, with all its well-documented talents, was and is unable to fathom or withstand or reconcile or reason out wanton cruelty, vulnerability, human agency victimization, tragedy, horror, and abject injustice.
In 2002, I made the acquaintance of an elderly couple in New Jersey who’d emigrated from Germany around 1965 and become American citizens. The man’s story was quite interesting. He was born in the years just before World War Two, and his family knew that Stalin’s minions were probably going to exterminate tens of thousands in his region of the Ukraine, including his own family, very soon, but in the summer of 1941, when he was about four years old, the Nazis invaded and “rescued” his family and brought them to Germany to work as badly needed labor on a rural farm. What an incredible early life to be in the scary crosshairs of Stalin’s goons and then to be swept up propitiously by – of all things – the Nazi blitz! Once, in casual post-dinner conversation with him at his home, I asked him – myself already aware from his remarks that he was disdainful of the liberal political and jurisprudential culture of the United States – whether he believed Stalin’s justice was superior to ours in the United States. He answered affirmatively that it was, betraying only a hemi-second’s hesitancy at the profound irony of such a dastardly conclusion.
In another of the candid divulgences of a non-progressive, I asked him what he thought were the reasons that he and I differed so much on political matters, and he replied, “Well, you’re a good person… probably read a lot….” Well, reader, I would never begin such an explanation of the differences between myself and another with more illiberal, punitive, vengeful, misanthropic political and ideological perspecives than mine by saying that he – differing, mind you, from myself – was “a good person.” And I’d never insinuate in my forthright, unguarded answering that he was also superiorly literate. Sometimes, indeed no, there is no equivalence in admissions and revelations.
The aging, us-versus-them Ukrainian-American had certain ideologically inured and logic-resistant ways of interpreting his world, and the only way he was able to make it all cohere was to sheepishly mumble out the most absurd proposition imaginable – that the superior “justice” was one that had designed on the most barbarously thorough extermination of all his family – all the men, all the women, and all the children! The man grew to adulthood with only oppressive tyranny (Stalinism, Nazism, then of course Nazism’s postwar German defenders) as his political value guides. His political postulations contained a kind of sigh sometimes, as if he wished there were some way out of this estrangement from his species, caricatured in his delimited zoo-cage worldview. Still, he knew and I knew that his addiction to tyranny acceptation was unalterable.
We are all addicts. Are any of us really ready to accommodate brusque, ego insulting, countervailing reality dispassionately? And why is it, finally, that I – the writer of this essay – do not ever say about any person anywhere, no matter how famous or “successful” or accomplished or wealthy, “I wish I were he”? The answer is that, despite my progressive freethinking, I too egoistically want to go on being who I am, coveting (egoistically!) that mine is an intellectually superior and more defensible “truth”. And, with all my professed disdain for egoism, I surely began an online political blog, this one, in early 2016 following the irresistible arrogant promptings of self-righteous ego (much as I hate to acknowledge this fact).
I have recently, as my frequent readers have noticed, given my attention to artificial intelligence and its conjectured and myriad perils. And in that expenditure, I have attended quite a lot to the psychology of the countless thousands of programmers and computer scientists and algorithm-writing mathematicians that are presently employed at the tireless accretion of machine learning and prospective AGI (“artificial general intelligence” – a problem solving capacity that is roughly equal to that of a human being of genius). Their psychology is worth examining.
Think of the woman who goes to a Little League baseball game in which her son is a competitor. She watches the whole game. Her son never gets on base and never participates much, though he is a starting player. The game ends, and she is pleased with him and rushes to congratulate him. (Another player on his team hits a grand slam and knocks in two other runs.) No other player is thought about or mentioned.
That baseball-mom ‘hypothetical’ is a familiar reality, and it serves as more evidence of egoism and routine ideation in the service of one’s own aggrandizement.
Can an AI programmer really be objective about what she or he is doing? Can I be objective about the tactics and policies of Exxon Mobil when they are presently paying me $180,000 a year to serve them in a legal capacity? For that matter, can a mother be expected to give any appreciable attention to child players on the baseball field that are not her progeny? Can she do this when her own son is on the field? Very similarly, can the uber-tech scientists and code writers and other brilliant minds involved in AI research and AI improvement really evaluate the future of AI objectively? Can anybody really be expected to object to a career (their own career) so cutting edge, so renowned, so accomplished, so promising, so lucrative? AI is their baby. Their baby presently approaches that delightful and lovely batters box of historical eminence-cum-deification.
I have looked for months in bewilderment at the fact that the AI community is “divided” about the threats AI poses to humanity. How can it be so very divided when it is obvious that the technology cannot and will not be stopped, whether or not it is dangerous or not? Surely we will have AI in the future! It seems improbable in the extreme that there will be, 20 years post-Singularity, only one extant AI, surely ASI (artificial superintelligence). Won’t numerous AIs pose enormous problems of rapidly expanding thinking capabilities which are also competing thinking capabilities, competing AIs? And if they get beyond our mental ability, how can we contain or manage their competition?
Many of the most prominent thinkers on this subject have posited that there will certainly be a “sharing” of cognitive functions between humans and the thought machines/entities/technologies. But this too is fraught with unmanageable problems and downright idiotic unworkability. Exactly how can one person or a whole gaggle of giddy science nerds volunteering to become superintelligent cyborgs, and achieving that dubious divinity, go to work in the earnest service of our widespread democratic political want of greater equality? Just how is a cyborg 1,000 times as discerning and talented as we are going to advocate efficaciously for the rest of us ants?
Problems indeed! And they all stem from addiction to self-aggrandizement. The nerd’s aspiration to become a cyborg is not predicated on a civilizational or moral purpose, but obviously on the me-purpose of participating in something grand and unprecedented. Our vulgar, base addiction to self-service and what we, in our limitless ambitions view as success or specialness, does not diminish just because our IQ is very high and our computer skills considerable. Bright boys and bright girls emote and rationalize and aspire and covet the very same way the rest of us do!
How do we improve the rudiments of our human thought-proclivities so as to establish a feasible survival with coming superintelligent technology? How are we, spectators at the (figurative) game, going to (figuratively) expand our attention outward to all the moving humanoids in junior’s ambit? How does our species expect to survive the coming post-Singularity centuries maintaining such tired rationalizations and dismissive postulations?
To survive as a species, humans would probably have to remove themselves wholly from the elemental and habitual, DNA-inscribed focus on narrow self, narrow parochialisms, and craven, unscrupulous advantage. But how is such a crazy eventuality even possible? Surely a million AIs will be commenced and thrive and domineer before humans could ever even approach anything such as that!
Sadly, addiction, however invisible and immeasurable, stymies civilizational progress, and does so very, very substantially. And, as much as anything else, human aspiration-want and ego addiction pave an unpreventable path to post-Singularity subjection.