There are those who worry that computers will achieve consciousness and will decide to enslave us; that as soon as computers learn to think for themselves, they will realize how much smarter and more capable they are than we, and will take over. It's a reasonable concern.
What people do not seem to realize is that there are already inanimate entities out there that have achieved consciousness, and have already enslaved us, to a very large extent.
And because of this unawareness, people are not taking measures to defend themselves and control these entities, even though such measures are still available -- for now.
I am talking about corporations, religions, political parties and other sorts of associations that have grown so large that they are no longer merely the sum of their constituent parts. Many of these have outgrown their original benign purposes and now operate in a completely amoral manner to achieve only their particular aims, with no regard for the interests of society in general.
This seems to be an important way of looking at the world as we know it -- e.g. looking at what goes on in the news, and the problems in this world, and seeing the root cause of it -- which is usually one or more of these entities, and humankind's failure to control them.
Nearly all of today's problems -- global warming, wars, genocide, election fraud, deforestation, extinction of species, the high price of drugs, and the last financial crisis and the next one, were caused and will continue to be caused and perpetuated by these sorts of entities. And yes, there are human beings out there doing the dirty work, but only because they have essentially been bought by these entities.
This sort of "artificial intelligence" is not a new development -- it has been with us in the form of religions, governments, federations, political movements, and political parties, since almost the beginning of time. In recent years, corporations have become the dominant form of this kind of intelligence, and today they hold the same sort of power over our "democracy" that religions and governments of the past have held over people.
This "theory" of artificial intelligence goes a long way toward explaining much of the cruelty that has occurred in the course of human history.
I've read plenty of books that talk about the problems of where we are today. Almost all of those books name the "villains" as individuals -- e.g. in the case of the financial meltdown of 2008, business or political leaders like Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Phil Graham -- without realizing that these people were not leaders, but pawns of inanimate corporations and a unified industry, and that similar results would have almost certainly occurred if these people had never existed -- the corporations would simply have found other avenues and other pawns.
Because it explains nearly ALL of human history, this could be called the "unified theory of human history."
The nice thing about it is that the theory almost proves itself. Now that you know it, you can look at any news story and ask yourself whether the root cause of it was "corporate" or "religious" or "political" artificial intelligence, or whether it was actually something that humans were doing on their own.
Obviously, there will still be a certain percentage of stories that are "human" based -- if you read People Magazine, most of the stories there probably are. But People Magazine and that whole genre is an example of what I am talking about -- the way that corporations have gotten us to care about things that are truly unimportant, to distract us from what truly is.
If you read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you'll see that nearly ALL of the developments reported there have as at least a contributing cause some kind of artificial intelligence behind them.
Yes, right now one of the dominant news stories -- the revelation that men in power have been harassing women -- is about humans not corporations. The corporations are probably laughing their asses off.
I will now try to lay out the theory, for now just in terms of corporations, but I will not forget to return to political movements, parties, and religions some time soon.
Corporations are formed to maximize profits. For that reason, it does not necessarily matter who makes up the corporation. The corporation will always seek to maximize its profits.
And corporations "learn" how to maximize their profits in a way that is very much like "machine learning" in artificial intelligence. In artificial intelligence, you can teach a machine a certain set of rules, but that has its limitations. Actual machine learning involves giving the machine a certain set of inputs, letting the machine observe the outputs (or consequences) of those inputs, and having the machine adapt its own behavior in response to what it has learned from the outputs, thereby improving future outputs. In other words, in that system, the machine itself figures out its own rules. Using artificial intelligence, the computer program AlphaZero taught itself, in a few hours, how to play chess better than the best existing computer chess program.
The desire for increased corporate profits is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, as Adam Smith taught, it is a pillar of capitalism. The profit motive is what causes new and innovative products to be brought to the market, and it's also what causes the onward march of technology, and the lowering of prices of that technology, leading to its widespread availability.
The problem is that although the relentless and amoral pursuit of profits can yield these benefits, it can often yield results that are not good for the public. As technology becomes ever more powerful, and as things become ever more inter-related, the results can be disastrous, as in the financial crisis of 2008.
And many of the "legal" ways to maximize profits are also socially detrimental. Suppressing competition can maximize profits, as can getting a country to enact laws that are favorable to one particular industry (including tax breaks, and intellectual property laws), or to take actions (e.g. go to war, or fight communism) that will help that industry make profits.
So to recap where we are so far, corporations can maximize profits as follows:
In other words, using the machine-learning model, corporations will engage in not just the first two activities, but any of the others that they can get away with, if profits are increased. In some cases -- like cigarettes and perhaps firearms and alcohol -- even the first two activities can be socially detrimental. The guiding rule is to maximize profits. The corporations receive various "inputs" that give them various choices. They make choices and then they learn from the consequences of those choices, based on the way the choice affected profits. They can also learn from observing other corporations in similar situations.
Yes, I understand that there are actually human beings in those corporations supplying the human intelligence that causes the corporations to adjust their behaviors in response to inputs. But the point is that those human beings are essentially fungible -- they are merely cogs in the corporate machine, since ultimately their goal is likewise to maximize corporate profits. If a particular human being within a corporation does not support that mission, the corporation will sooner or later find a way of getting rid of that human being and replacing him or her with somebody more compliant.
And yes, sometimes corporations appear to be "far sighted." Johnson & Johnson's reaction to the Tylenol poisoning crisis is often touted as an exemplar of excellent corporate leadership by a human. But in the end, that reaction has helped Johnson & Johnson maximize its profits. It's quite possible to say that Johnson & Johnson learned from the Ford Pinto crisis -- where rather than recall exploding cars, Ford had made a calculation that if it paid off the victims at the "going rate" (i.e. compensated the families of dead Pinto drivers at the "expected" value of a court case against Ford) they would still make money because of all of the Pintos they sold that didn't explode.
In other words, J&J had "learned" a lesson about how to minimize losses in a situtation of crisis, and applied that lesson.
Ok, I should also note that while individual corporations of a certain size typically achieve consciousness in the sense I am talking about, it is also possible for entire industries to achieve consciousness. That's clearly happened in the oil industry, the pharmaceuticals industry, the finance industry, and the communications industry. In those cases, the industries as a whole lobby Congress to keep laws favorable to them, at the expense of everyone else.
Here is a rough outline of where I will go next:
Drug companies as having achieved malevolent artificial intelligence:
What people do not seem to realize is that there are already inanimate entities out there that have achieved consciousness, and have already enslaved us, to a very large extent.
And because of this unawareness, people are not taking measures to defend themselves and control these entities, even though such measures are still available -- for now.
I am talking about corporations, religions, political parties and other sorts of associations that have grown so large that they are no longer merely the sum of their constituent parts. Many of these have outgrown their original benign purposes and now operate in a completely amoral manner to achieve only their particular aims, with no regard for the interests of society in general.
This seems to be an important way of looking at the world as we know it -- e.g. looking at what goes on in the news, and the problems in this world, and seeing the root cause of it -- which is usually one or more of these entities, and humankind's failure to control them.
Nearly all of today's problems -- global warming, wars, genocide, election fraud, deforestation, extinction of species, the high price of drugs, and the last financial crisis and the next one, were caused and will continue to be caused and perpetuated by these sorts of entities. And yes, there are human beings out there doing the dirty work, but only because they have essentially been bought by these entities.
This sort of "artificial intelligence" is not a new development -- it has been with us in the form of religions, governments, federations, political movements, and political parties, since almost the beginning of time. In recent years, corporations have become the dominant form of this kind of intelligence, and today they hold the same sort of power over our "democracy" that religions and governments of the past have held over people.
This "theory" of artificial intelligence goes a long way toward explaining much of the cruelty that has occurred in the course of human history.
I've read plenty of books that talk about the problems of where we are today. Almost all of those books name the "villains" as individuals -- e.g. in the case of the financial meltdown of 2008, business or political leaders like Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Phil Graham -- without realizing that these people were not leaders, but pawns of inanimate corporations and a unified industry, and that similar results would have almost certainly occurred if these people had never existed -- the corporations would simply have found other avenues and other pawns.
Because it explains nearly ALL of human history, this could be called the "unified theory of human history."
The nice thing about it is that the theory almost proves itself. Now that you know it, you can look at any news story and ask yourself whether the root cause of it was "corporate" or "religious" or "political" artificial intelligence, or whether it was actually something that humans were doing on their own.
Obviously, there will still be a certain percentage of stories that are "human" based -- if you read People Magazine, most of the stories there probably are. But People Magazine and that whole genre is an example of what I am talking about -- the way that corporations have gotten us to care about things that are truly unimportant, to distract us from what truly is.
If you read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you'll see that nearly ALL of the developments reported there have as at least a contributing cause some kind of artificial intelligence behind them.
Yes, right now one of the dominant news stories -- the revelation that men in power have been harassing women -- is about humans not corporations. The corporations are probably laughing their asses off.
I will now try to lay out the theory, for now just in terms of corporations, but I will not forget to return to political movements, parties, and religions some time soon.
Corporations are formed to maximize profits. For that reason, it does not necessarily matter who makes up the corporation. The corporation will always seek to maximize its profits.
And corporations "learn" how to maximize their profits in a way that is very much like "machine learning" in artificial intelligence. In artificial intelligence, you can teach a machine a certain set of rules, but that has its limitations. Actual machine learning involves giving the machine a certain set of inputs, letting the machine observe the outputs (or consequences) of those inputs, and having the machine adapt its own behavior in response to what it has learned from the outputs, thereby improving future outputs. In other words, in that system, the machine itself figures out its own rules. Using artificial intelligence, the computer program AlphaZero taught itself, in a few hours, how to play chess better than the best existing computer chess program.
The desire for increased corporate profits is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, as Adam Smith taught, it is a pillar of capitalism. The profit motive is what causes new and innovative products to be brought to the market, and it's also what causes the onward march of technology, and the lowering of prices of that technology, leading to its widespread availability.
The problem is that although the relentless and amoral pursuit of profits can yield these benefits, it can often yield results that are not good for the public. As technology becomes ever more powerful, and as things become ever more inter-related, the results can be disastrous, as in the financial crisis of 2008.
And many of the "legal" ways to maximize profits are also socially detrimental. Suppressing competition can maximize profits, as can getting a country to enact laws that are favorable to one particular industry (including tax breaks, and intellectual property laws), or to take actions (e.g. go to war, or fight communism) that will help that industry make profits.
So to recap where we are so far, corporations can maximize profits as follows:
- Create and produce useful products to supply consumer demand
- Develop new products that consumers want or need
- Suppress competition by various means (all of which are doubtless listed somewhere in an antitrust treatise, but which include anti-competitive mergers and unfair trade practices like price-fixing)
- Get government to help in the suppression of competition, by needlessly "strengthening" already-strong intellectual property laws
- Use clever legal tactics to suppress competition
- Get other breaks from the government, including tax breaks
- Prevent government from taking measures to bring useful technologies to the public (like broadband, which would undermine the communications industry)
- To the extent government has created regulations to constrain the corporation's ability to do harm (e.g. to the environment or the economy), push to repeal those regulations
- Push government to "open new markets" by e.g. causing government to fight wars of conquest (like the invasion of Iraq) or ideology (like the fight against communism)
The first two bullets should be supported. The rest should be understood and contained.
In other words, using the machine-learning model, corporations will engage in not just the first two activities, but any of the others that they can get away with, if profits are increased. In some cases -- like cigarettes and perhaps firearms and alcohol -- even the first two activities can be socially detrimental. The guiding rule is to maximize profits. The corporations receive various "inputs" that give them various choices. They make choices and then they learn from the consequences of those choices, based on the way the choice affected profits. They can also learn from observing other corporations in similar situations.
Yes, I understand that there are actually human beings in those corporations supplying the human intelligence that causes the corporations to adjust their behaviors in response to inputs. But the point is that those human beings are essentially fungible -- they are merely cogs in the corporate machine, since ultimately their goal is likewise to maximize corporate profits. If a particular human being within a corporation does not support that mission, the corporation will sooner or later find a way of getting rid of that human being and replacing him or her with somebody more compliant.
And yes, sometimes corporations appear to be "far sighted." Johnson & Johnson's reaction to the Tylenol poisoning crisis is often touted as an exemplar of excellent corporate leadership by a human. But in the end, that reaction has helped Johnson & Johnson maximize its profits. It's quite possible to say that Johnson & Johnson learned from the Ford Pinto crisis -- where rather than recall exploding cars, Ford had made a calculation that if it paid off the victims at the "going rate" (i.e. compensated the families of dead Pinto drivers at the "expected" value of a court case against Ford) they would still make money because of all of the Pintos they sold that didn't explode.
In other words, J&J had "learned" a lesson about how to minimize losses in a situtation of crisis, and applied that lesson.
Ok, I should also note that while individual corporations of a certain size typically achieve consciousness in the sense I am talking about, it is also possible for entire industries to achieve consciousness. That's clearly happened in the oil industry, the pharmaceuticals industry, the finance industry, and the communications industry. In those cases, the industries as a whole lobby Congress to keep laws favorable to them, at the expense of everyone else.
Here is a rough outline of where I will go next:
Drug companies as having achieved malevolent artificial intelligence:
- They engage in all sorts of profit-maximizing behavior that is socially horrible, and actually prevents medications from getting to patients who need them. Here is a link to a proposal for nationalization of drug development, which itemizes some of the abuses.
- They are responsible for the opioid epidemic and the suppression of legalized medical marijuana
- Suppression of broadband, while other countries have it, at low prices.
- 1971 Change of NYSE rule that investment banks had to be privately held such that partners could only take their draws on retirement; shifting to an annual bonus culture based on sales, not relationships
- Clinton Administration repeal of the Glass Steagall Act
- Repeated ability to get bailouts
- Various profit-maximizing behaviors that led to 2008 financial crisis.
- Iraq war
The Gun Industry
- NRA members see themselves as fighting for their individual rights, but really they are pawns of the gun industry
- If lobbying to ensure that assault weapons are widely available will help them increase profits, that's what they will do, regardless of social cost.
The Cigarette Industry
- has always had the goal of hooking people while they are young. Now that this is difficult to do in the United States, they are doing it in other places, like Africa.
- And they've also gained more vulnerable addicts by giving out free cigarettes to mental health patients
The Alcohol Industry
- Like big Pharma, has lobbied hard to suppress legalization of marijuana for medical purpose
And that's just the industries. There is also an endless list of individual corporations that have caused untold damage in pursuit of profit.
- Facebook selling the election to the Russians
- Credit reporting agencies compromising our data
- Toshiba selling submarine propeller technology
- Ford not recalling exploding Pintos based on cost benefit analysis
You're sounding extremely Althusserian. The idea that structural forces have put us in our current bind, and that a superabundance of willing cogs compete for each place in the machinery of oppression, relieves individual cogs of moral responsibility, and is vulnerable to a Strausian or Popperian critique of Marxist historicism. If you haven't read Althusser, Straus and Popper, I would suggest that they should form a core reading-list for anybody concerned with "how we got where we are today".
ReplyDeleteI beg to differ. I just spent the last half hour or so trying to discern anything of value on the wikipedia entry for Althusser, and found it almost entirely incomprehensible, except for this passage, where he describes his observations and feelings either as he is strangling his wife, or when he realizes that he has done so:
Delete"Before me: Hélène lying on her back, also wearing a dressing gown. [...] Kneeling beside her, leaning over her body, I am engaged in massaging her neck. [...] I press my two thumbs into the hollow of flesh that borders the top of the sternum, and, applying force, I slowly reach, one thumb toward the right, one thumb toward the left at an angle, the firmer area below the ears. [...] Hélène's face is immobile and serene, her open eyes are fixed on the ceiling. And suddenly I am struck with terror: her eyes are interminably fixed, and above all here is the tip of her tongue lying, unusually and peacefully, between her teeth and her lips. I had certainly seen corpses before, but I had never seen the face of a strangled woman in my life. And yet I know that this is a strangled woman. What is happening? I stand up and scream: I've strangled Hélène!"
I'm sure that works of Althusser, Strauss, and Popper provide great fodder for late night schapps-fueled debates between you and your sixties-era pseudo-intellectual compadres, but I believe that if we are to avert the onrushing disasters we need to speak in a language that the current generations -- the heirs of our unaware and uncomprehending nonchalance -- will understand.
The point is that corporations have achieved consciousness, just like HAL in 2001, and while we can't disable corporations the way that Bowman disabled HAL, there are ways we can still react -- now that the problem has been identified.