2019-05-15
(Building on a prior thought about what underlying process might be getting hijacked in the “bad” scenarios of “fast” and “slow” AI, ie. conventional general AI and corporations, respectively.)
So what if “synchrony” is the thing that all our human intuitions have evolved to select for. Our laughter, our sense of belonging, our falling in love, our enjoyment of engaged conversations. Perhaps these all increase the synchrony of our collective endeavour of humanity. And in that, a process of converting an “other” into a “self” — something that lights up our mirror neurons, like watching a sports team (your sports team) working together on the other side of the airwaves, or speaking across the couch to a lover, or even across the corpus callosum to a self that’s lucky enough to already be in agreement.
We subjectively feel these human experiences as something more, but perhaps the universe fundamentally understands them only as a collective of matter, increasing synchrony with itself.
Ok, so if this is true, then what are the dangers? How can these intuitions that largely serve us well, that help us to create synchrony with our fellow human actors — how can this be hijacked?
I’m starting to wonder if that is what feels do dangerous about corporations. These are deeply inhumane creatures, operating largely with very different motives. Yes, we’ve encoded these motives in laws at our scale. But what emerges is perhaps above us. We have allowed these things to optimize according to rules that, if operating at a human level, would be undestood as psychopathic and anti-human: Pure profit maximization is condoned.
And that’s nothing new, but what is alarming is how these things can start to run with a life of their own, and seem to use humans as “peripherals” of sorts. They deploy people with certain skills and motivations that are perhaps altogether human and sincere. I sometimes imagine employees as some sort of sci-fi puppet on a stick, being thrust into our realm. These people are given autonomy, and they often act in good faith, but they are selected by the larger aparatus for this sincerity in which they operate. Their very authentic interactions can run cover for the very inauthentic mechanisms at the core of corporations — the profit maximization.
And back to synchrony. What I worry here is that the corporation has a very different synchrony that it is propogating in the world. It has its own patterns and logic, and they are not ours. They’re building something else. But when persons representing these larger interested interact with people, they feel like they’re increasing the synchrony of human processes. They feel like they’re pursuing very human goals, down in the trenches with us. All the participants experiences and intuitions might even be telling them “YES, we’re doing something pro-human. We’re becoming more aligned. We’re becoming in sync.” But on the backend, where the power is, there’s another order building.
It’s perhaps a little like how we imagine “fast” AI might go awry. If we were to meet one, we might feel it’s connecting with us on the front end. Its brows might furrow in the way that make us feel understood. It might respond in a way that we understand to mean it’s feeling for us, becoming aligned with us. But these are just the movements of servos and the motions of human projection. The servos are not evil — they are not good or bad. They are peripherals. They are serving something behind them.
The octopus is an interesting creature. It has a distributed brain that extends into its arms. It’s central brain gives loose orders, but the limbs actually do some of the work of knowing what to do. It seems to be a common curiosity, to wonder aloud how alien an octopus consciousness might be. But perhaps we already know. Perhaps we’re living in a system not unlike the octopus’. We are appendages of things above us — we process, and integrate, and make decisions. Maybe we can’t know what it’s like to be the octopus, but maybe our navigation of the corporate entities of capitalism tells us a little about what it’s like to be the octopus’ arms.