LOL. If one of the themes of this article is the danger of relying on AI to interpret and control our behavior I can offer no better example than Unherd’s moderation software. I just posted a bland comment, full of praise, devoid of any remotely objectionable words, on Giles Fraser’s article and it is currently awaiting moderation.
Perhaps whoever wrote the code for that software had a deep hatred of adverbs.
Yes, I’m aware of that feature but my comment went to moderation the moment I posted it so clearly the software didn’t like something.
Anyway, my comment now appears beneath Giles’s article so I guess the human moderator approved it. The spirit of Christmas is alive and well.
Matt B
2 years ago
A good article, as usual. Boris Johnson’s talents were limited to spotting the public wish for Brexit and delivering on paper. However, the equal danger to democracy of EU-style technocracy snd pervasive China-style AI is China-style government lying – a charge levelled against Johnson by bitter opponents but now increasingly by his allies.
Is he up to the job of keeping enemies down and finishing what he started as, like AI, he appears by the day to have no vision or integrity? Public patience is thin: he benefited from a shambolic anti-semitic clown heading Labour at the last election, a double act with a faceless Blair clone now in his shoes. The choices for their replacements are few (Truss?): they tend to be sidelined or sacked. Hopes of using power clawed back from Brussels seem to be shrinking. No parties are rising to the task, while half their members, the civil service, the EU, US, sizeable media and business try to reverse the vote. AI is but one part of the risky Dali-esque picture of twisting perceptions while sidelining electorates. Reversing so many democratic votes centred on this issue through subterfuge would not be lost on the voting public.
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt B
Saul D
2 years ago
A lot of the current political themes are about liberty and sovereignty. Are we free to make our own mistakes, or compelled to follow a set of rules even if we believe those rules to be mistaken.
Modern times are increasingly about laws of compulsion (‘You must…’) rather than more traditional laws of prohibition (‘You must not…’). The machine-view of the world (where we’re all cogs in administrative processes) is compulsion, compulsion, compulsion. Another piece of paper must be completed to prove compliance or the machine will break.
Compulsion takes away sovereignty. It takes away agency and independence. it creates systems of continual inspection and oversight to check the rules are being followed. Compulsion demands time and expense, and is horribly inefficient. If machines ruled the world, would you actually want to comply with their rules, or choose tolerance and live-and-let-live?
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
As the picture so sharply shows, AI is Demonic, I also clicked your link to other ‘Art by AI’, and yes it is demonic too – but what really was striking is the link you give to ‘Headless’ which says the name is inspired by
“Acéphale, Bataille’s infamous secret society”
And some bits on this group -man, and concept:
“L’Acéphale the secret group sought to rekindle the Sacred through activities and rituals within a small hidden group. Merging occult tradition with ancient primitive religions.”
“n 1928’s The Story of the Eye, Bataille, or Lord Auch, explores his primordial obsession with the homologies between, inter alia, eyes, eggs, bull testicles, sun, orb. and Earth—homologies which create one semiotic chain that apophatically maps the Bataillean aesthetic.”
“Secondly, we can see Caillois’ figure of Lucifer in the light of further specific differences with Bataille’s activities around the College in the late 1930s. In 1936, Bataille created a review as well as a small group, or secretsociety, called Acéphale, which espoused a form of tragic Nietzschean Dionysianism in the face of fascism.”
That he was involved in the Frankfurt School too – pure Satanism… ‘That Hideous Strength’ is the dystopia for the modern times – CS Lewis’s great Si-Fi Novel. One of my all time favorite books as it actually describes the coldness, and everydayness, of evil, and its constant work to take over absolutely – a necessary book, and also a good read.
Mary, what you see is a gimps of what is behind the veil, when you researched this…. I have been around a lot – a great many weird places and people, good and evil – and evil really exists, it really does. Satan’s greatest strength is his ability to make people not believe in him, and with the help of the dark side of humanity, he is getting better at it every day, wile growing greatly in strength.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, and Musk perhaps, and millions in the dark working on AI – the strength of this movement, the sheer power of the few who drive Tech/Social Media is frighting – they are ‘off’, scary, the world is moving fast, and not well…
I’m not sure I would put those four men in the same bucket. Zuckerberg and Gates are putting off the evil vibes, but Dorsey lately has a haunted/obsessed/about to go around the bend look in his eyes. He’s starting to remind me of Howard Hughes. And I like Elon Musk. Maybe I shouldn’t, but ever since he gave California the finger and moved his company to Texas, and more recently started feuding with Elizabeth Warren on Twitter, I find him amusing.
Andrew McDonald
2 years ago
‘The slow collapse of social meaning into computer-legible pattern..’ – excellent insight, and very widely applicable, as anybody with a mobile phone will attest.
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
And the really funny bit is the adoption, by the technocratic class, of the language of algorithmic processing. For example, EU representatives continually call the EU a “rules-based organisation” or a “rules-based order”. But as any Comp Sci person will tell you, anything “rules-based” can be coded. if your processes are all “rules-based”, why do you need a caste of very expensive apparatchiks to implement them? Algos will do just fine – will not be vulnerable to human corruptibility, and will be a damn sight cheaper. And… very possibly this has already been happening (in secret of course). I mean, has anyone noticed how Charles Michel looks and sounds like a 44/46 chromosome clone of Martin Schulz? Is there a zygote bank somewhere deep in the bowels of the EU where they are growing these people I wonder?
Fran Martinez
2 years ago
If you have ever lived in a country with an unworkable bureaucracy you will realise that the problem is not who makes the rules but the very fact that the (very rigid) rules exist, and that they might or might not have any connection to reality. As a tendency to control with rigid rules every aspect of life expands, we will soon find it very uncomfortable to live normal lifes. It doesn’t matter if the rules comes from Stalin, Hitler or some AI algorithm. This is why Common Law is so powerful, it involves people and common sense. Unfortunately, the UK Government seems to be running away of its own tradition going ever for more specific and intrusive laws.
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
The point being missed is that the algorithmic ecosystems are holding up a mirror to us, in fact a myriad of mirrors, and we are now seeing ourselves and our natures through prisms and distortions, in ways we never have before in human history.
That we might not like what we see, is on us.
That we allow what we see to alter us, is on us.
And it is neither here nor there.
…
MACBETH:
Why do you show me this?—A fourth? Start, eyes!
What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?
Another yet? A seventh? I’ll see no more
…
…
RICHARD:
A brittle glory shineth in this face.
As brittle as the glory is the face,
(He breaks the mirror.)
For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.
BOLINGBROKE:
The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed
The shadow of your face.
…
Last edited 2 years ago by Prashant Kotak
Andrew Horsman
2 years ago
Man seems, again, to have gone down something of a dead end in his search for meaning. How will he escape this time?
Peter LR
2 years ago
My question on “humanised” AI is will it ever be able to create an original joke?
*the AI urge to protect us from the genus homo, less it offend the Homo Wokians
Judy Johnson
2 years ago
I wonder how Peter Singer would comment on this article.
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
The is a classic in the genre of underemployed arts graduates writing nonsense about tech. It strikes me most people have no idea how AI works, it is fairly banal. The level of understanding reminds me of the all too common attitude that a computer is crashing out of some bad will rather than the incompetence of the programmer.
AI is just a tool like a hammer, using statistics that form the most part have been known about for a century or two. Often it is overkill for what we need, most systems are just glorified crud and data logging and earlier more primative forms of tech are just as capable of dystopian ends. We can smash up a house with a hammer or we use it to help build one. If our current use of technology is tending towards dysotopic that is a reflection if the social and economic system we live in, not the tools we use.
Mary is one of the better tech writers here and this article had nothing to do with the mechanics of how ai works. It’s all philosophy. Your comment would be appropriate on some other articles written about AI but not this one.
Do tech writers work for Swedish conceptual ‘artists’? Looking at her CV she’s never actually built anything but just talked and written about it a lot. The best tech writers actually have technical skills and were not glorifired former PR copywriters. I am not sure why people care so much about what journalists write when their profession is not a serious one, it is at best entertainer and at worst BS salesman.
“nothing to do with the mechanics of how ai works.”
Although the part about GANs is. A GAN is just a means for generating images, we choose the inputs and the settings. Yes, the output can be complex and unpredictable but this is no more myaterious than coding up a fractal or a physics simulation where we are uncertain of the outputs. It is just a means for people to generate images which may or may not be art depending on the user’s intent – just like Photoshop! – although they seem to resemble art more than the **** that comes out of most art colleges and academies these days.
“It’s all philosophy”
And how does this mean anything then? Philosophers have argued or disagreed for 2500 years without reaching any conclusion or resolving problems, how exactly does this guide any useful understanding of the technology or its effects?
This is a classic in the genre of STEM graduates writing nonsense about culture. It strikes me most people have no idea that meaning is not the sort of thing which “works,” like a hammer, but rather is what comes to light when one’s hammer breaks. The level of understanding reminds me of the all too common attitude that a human being is “crashing” out of some personal dysfunction rather than the incompetence of her governing elite.
…we could go on and on like this, until neither one of us knows which one is the robot.
You work out what’s wrong and fix it. I’m pretty sure all this verbiage about ‘meaning’ is complete nonsense to people who actually build things with hammers. Only people who don’t understand how things work have this magical animistic understanding of everyday items.
Besides, tools don’t have meanings, people invent them by how they choose to use them
Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Julie Blinde
2 years ago
Vaccine passes ae not intended to protect the vaccinated or at risk.
Nor are vaccine passes intended to protect the unvaccinated, they will be infected sooner or later anyway.
Vaccine passes are intended to slow the spread of omicron to within an estimated maximum and NHS limit.
Vaccine passes are intended to ‘encourage’ the non-vaxed to get jabbed. Nothing else will persuade them, so what can you do ?
Is it non-libertarian ? Yes
Is it the best option to avoid electoral oblivion ? Yes
Will Freddie have a conniption ? A confected one, yes.
Problem is, governments claim they are for protecting the at risk. So if they’re lying about that why wouldn’t they be lying about other things. And if they are, then doing what they say it’s a bad idea isn’t it.
LOL. If one of the themes of this article is the danger of relying on AI to interpret and control our behavior I can offer no better example than Unherd’s moderation software. I just posted a bland comment, full of praise, devoid of any remotely objectionable words, on Giles Fraser’s article and it is currently awaiting moderation.
Perhaps whoever wrote the code for that software had a deep hatred of adverbs.
The moderation software they use is abysmal.
did you make the correct prayers and offer a sufficient blood sacrifice to The Algodrithm ?
Yes, I’m aware of that feature but my comment went to moderation the moment I posted it so clearly the software didn’t like something.
Anyway, my comment now appears beneath Giles’s article so I guess the human moderator approved it. The spirit of Christmas is alive and well.
A good article, as usual. Boris Johnson’s talents were limited to spotting the public wish for Brexit and delivering on paper. However, the equal danger to democracy of EU-style technocracy snd pervasive China-style AI is China-style government lying – a charge levelled against Johnson by bitter opponents but now increasingly by his allies.
Is he up to the job of keeping enemies down and finishing what he started as, like AI, he appears by the day to have no vision or integrity? Public patience is thin: he benefited from a shambolic anti-semitic clown heading Labour at the last election, a double act with a faceless Blair clone now in his shoes. The choices for their replacements are few (Truss?): they tend to be sidelined or sacked. Hopes of using power clawed back from Brussels seem to be shrinking. No parties are rising to the task, while half their members, the civil service, the EU, US, sizeable media and business try to reverse the vote. AI is but one part of the risky Dali-esque picture of twisting perceptions while sidelining electorates. Reversing so many democratic votes centred on this issue through subterfuge would not be lost on the voting public.
A lot of the current political themes are about liberty and sovereignty. Are we free to make our own mistakes, or compelled to follow a set of rules even if we believe those rules to be mistaken.
Modern times are increasingly about laws of compulsion (‘You must…’) rather than more traditional laws of prohibition (‘You must not…’). The machine-view of the world (where we’re all cogs in administrative processes) is compulsion, compulsion, compulsion. Another piece of paper must be completed to prove compliance or the machine will break.
Compulsion takes away sovereignty. It takes away agency and independence. it creates systems of continual inspection and oversight to check the rules are being followed. Compulsion demands time and expense, and is horribly inefficient. If machines ruled the world, would you actually want to comply with their rules, or choose tolerance and live-and-let-live?
As the picture so sharply shows, AI is Demonic, I also clicked your link to other ‘Art by AI’, and yes it is demonic too – but what really was striking is the link you give to ‘Headless’ which says the name is inspired by
“Acéphale, Bataille’s infamous secret society”
And some bits on this group -man, and concept:
“L’Acéphale the secret group sought to rekindle the Sacred through activities and rituals within a small hidden group. Merging occult tradition with ancient primitive religions.”
“n 1928’s The Story of the Eye, Bataille, or Lord Auch, explores his primordial obsession with the homologies between, inter alia, eyes, eggs, bull testicles, sun, orb. and Earth—homologies which create one semiotic chain that apophatically maps the Bataillean aesthetic.”
“Secondly, we can see Caillois’ figure of Lucifer in the light of further specific differences with Bataille’s activities around the College in the late 1930s. In 1936, Bataille created a review as well as a small group, or secretsociety, called Acéphale, which espoused a form of tragic Nietzschean Dionysianism in the face of fascism.”
That he was involved in the Frankfurt School too – pure Satanism… ‘That Hideous Strength’ is the dystopia for the modern times – CS Lewis’s great Si-Fi Novel. One of my all time favorite books as it actually describes the coldness, and everydayness, of evil, and its constant work to take over absolutely – a necessary book, and also a good read.
Mary, what you see is a gimps of what is behind the veil, when you researched this…. I have been around a lot – a great many weird places and people, good and evil – and evil really exists, it really does. Satan’s greatest strength is his ability to make people not believe in him, and with the help of the dark side of humanity, he is getting better at it every day, wile growing greatly in strength.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, and Musk perhaps, and millions in the dark working on AI – the strength of this movement, the sheer power of the few who drive Tech/Social Media is frighting – they are ‘off’, scary, the world is moving fast, and not well…
I suspect Bataille was trying to “have a laugh” in a heavy-handed Parisian intellectual way. Humor that did not travel well!
I’m not sure I would put those four men in the same bucket. Zuckerberg and Gates are putting off the evil vibes, but Dorsey lately has a haunted/obsessed/about to go around the bend look in his eyes. He’s starting to remind me of Howard Hughes. And I like Elon Musk. Maybe I shouldn’t, but ever since he gave California the finger and moved his company to Texas, and more recently started feuding with Elizabeth Warren on Twitter, I find him amusing.
‘The slow collapse of social meaning into computer-legible pattern..’ – excellent insight, and very widely applicable, as anybody with a mobile phone will attest.
And the really funny bit is the adoption, by the technocratic class, of the language of algorithmic processing. For example, EU representatives continually call the EU a “rules-based organisation” or a “rules-based order”. But as any Comp Sci person will tell you, anything “rules-based” can be coded. if your processes are all “rules-based”, why do you need a caste of very expensive apparatchiks to implement them? Algos will do just fine – will not be vulnerable to human corruptibility, and will be a damn sight cheaper.
And… very possibly this has already been happening (in secret of course). I mean, has anyone noticed how Charles Michel looks and sounds like a 44/46 chromosome clone of Martin Schulz? Is there a zygote bank somewhere deep in the bowels of the EU where they are growing these people I wonder?
If you have ever lived in a country with an unworkable bureaucracy you will realise that the problem is not who makes the rules but the very fact that the (very rigid) rules exist, and that they might or might not have any connection to reality. As a tendency to control with rigid rules every aspect of life expands, we will soon find it very uncomfortable to live normal lifes. It doesn’t matter if the rules comes from Stalin, Hitler or some AI algorithm. This is why Common Law is so powerful, it involves people and common sense. Unfortunately, the UK Government seems to be running away of its own tradition going ever for more specific and intrusive laws.
The point being missed is that the algorithmic ecosystems are holding up a mirror to us, in fact a myriad of mirrors, and we are now seeing ourselves and our natures through prisms and distortions, in ways we never have before in human history.
That we might not like what we see, is on us.
That we allow what we see to alter us, is on us.
And it is neither here nor there.
…
MACBETH:
Why do you show me this?—A fourth? Start, eyes!
What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?
Another yet? A seventh? I’ll see no more
…
…
RICHARD:
A brittle glory shineth in this face.
As brittle as the glory is the face,
(He breaks the mirror.)
For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.
BOLINGBROKE:
The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed
The shadow of your face.
…
Man seems, again, to have gone down something of a dead end in his search for meaning. How will he escape this time?
My question on “humanised” AI is will it ever be able to create an original joke?
Yes, it already can. Search for “gpt-3 comedy” to get an idea.
I recommend that readers attempt putting well known politicians’ names into that Wombo dream app. Some truly monstrous caricatures can be created.
Homo-Erectus: You’re very brilliant, but you just don’t understand our patterns
Early Homo Sapien: And?
*the AI urge to protect us from the genus homo, less it offend the Homo Wokians
I wonder how Peter Singer would comment on this article.
The is a classic in the genre of underemployed arts graduates writing nonsense about tech. It strikes me most people have no idea how AI works, it is fairly banal. The level of understanding reminds me of the all too common attitude that a computer is crashing out of some bad will rather than the incompetence of the programmer.
AI is just a tool like a hammer, using statistics that form the most part have been known about for a century or two. Often it is overkill for what we need, most systems are just glorified crud and data logging and earlier more primative forms of tech are just as capable of dystopian ends. We can smash up a house with a hammer or we use it to help build one. If our current use of technology is tending towards dysotopic that is a reflection if the social and economic system we live in, not the tools we use.
Mary is one of the better tech writers here and this article had nothing to do with the mechanics of how ai works. It’s all philosophy. Your comment would be appropriate on some other articles written about AI but not this one.
“Mary is one of the better tech writers here”
Do tech writers work for Swedish conceptual ‘artists’? Looking at her CV she’s never actually built anything but just talked and written about it a lot. The best tech writers actually have technical skills and were not glorifired former PR copywriters. I am not sure why people care so much about what journalists write when their profession is not a serious one, it is at best entertainer and at worst BS salesman.
“nothing to do with the mechanics of how ai works.”
Although the part about GANs is. A GAN is just a means for generating images, we choose the inputs and the settings. Yes, the output can be complex and unpredictable but this is no more myaterious than coding up a fractal or a physics simulation where we are uncertain of the outputs. It is just a means for people to generate images which may or may not be art depending on the user’s intent – just like Photoshop! – although they seem to resemble art more than the **** that comes out of most art colleges and academies these days.
“It’s all philosophy”
And how does this mean anything then? Philosophers have argued or disagreed for 2500 years without reaching any conclusion or resolving problems, how exactly does this guide any useful understanding of the technology or its effects?
This is a classic in the genre of STEM graduates writing nonsense about culture. It strikes me most people have no idea that meaning is not the sort of thing which “works,” like a hammer, but rather is what comes to light when one’s hammer breaks. The level of understanding reminds me of the all too common attitude that a human being is “crashing” out of some personal dysfunction rather than the incompetence of her governing elite.
…we could go on and on like this, until neither one of us knows which one is the robot.
“what comes to light when one’s hammer breaks”.
You work out what’s wrong and fix it. I’m pretty sure all this verbiage about ‘meaning’ is complete nonsense to people who actually build things with hammers. Only people who don’t understand how things work have this magical animistic understanding of everyday items.
Besides, tools don’t have meanings, people invent them by how they choose to use them
Vaccine passes ae not intended to protect the vaccinated or at risk.
Nor are vaccine passes intended to protect the unvaccinated, they will be infected sooner or later anyway.
Vaccine passes are intended to slow the spread of omicron to within an estimated maximum and NHS limit.
Vaccine passes are intended to ‘encourage’ the non-vaxed to get jabbed. Nothing else will persuade them, so what can you do ?
Is it non-libertarian ? Yes
Is it the best option to avoid electoral oblivion ? Yes
Will Freddie have a conniption ? A confected one, yes.
Problem is, governments claim they are for protecting the at risk. So if they’re lying about that why wouldn’t they be lying about other things. And if they are, then doing what they say it’s a bad idea isn’t it.
Do you think they are maybe NOT lying abut anything ?
And what do you think is their motivation for lying ?