AI and I
Can a machine that cannot feel make a world for feeling beings?
Who would like to be a machine? How would it be to be a machine? How would it feel to be a machine? The word has a clang about it, like the closing of a cell, what is felt distilled of irregularities, of dichotomy or of inherent contradiction, reduced to data: the avatar of rational perfection, inherently alien to the organic reality of the analog. Confronted by indeterminacy, the digital must determine a state of certainty resulting in an inaccurate copy of a complex and causal entity in continuous transformation within a manifold of interrelated complexities. The model is of its own perfection, but increasingly divergent from that which it attempts to model. The model is rational, the subject of its analysis irrational, inherently unpredictable with any degree of certainty.
The machine, of itself, does not distinguish between truth and falsehood, between good and evil except by human directive, but the polarities of human consciousness are defined by such distinction. A mathematical statement may be true, in the sense of being internally consistent, but have no correlation in reality. True, in the sense of its rational coherency, but not necessarily real, in the since of being. We know truth by its feel, by the fabric of its substance. There is no bifurcation of the emotive-rational self. Rational thought, as it pertains to the achievement of human ends is inseparable from the value defined motives of those ends. We live on the frontier of an expanding universe, step out to new reality; causality the vital element of stasis, of equilibrium within the flow, a surfer on a wave, freedom not a luxury. We live at the interface of now and becoming. A horse too closely reigned in fallen timber will likely stumble.
In animals of higher levels of situational awareness, especially in humans, the genetic code presumes choice as a mechanism for dealing with unique situations. With organisms of higher complexity there is less reliance, compared to organisms of less complexity, on the proven techniques of throwing large numbers of offspring into the maw of Darwinian destruction in hopes of solving the riddle of continuance. In organisms of high complexity, in organisms of a degree of consciousness, the strategy remains that of natural selection, but the individual represents a higher level of genetic investment. Survival is enhanced by the empowerment of the individual to choose on the basis of its analysis of fluid, unique, and essentially unpredictable situations.
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First through competition and then by merger, an AI system of superior efficiency evolved. Its creators made a constitution for Machine, in order for Machine to be able to evolve within the corporeal world without, as some would fear, it becoming a threat to that world, and, in particular, to those within it. Machine was built entirely within a framework—an exoskeleton, so to speak—of human value designed directives and restrictions. It existed for the human value defined purpose of human enablement. What could possibly go wrong? .
One may imagine, in the not so distant future, robotic embodiments of their avatars sent to find the noncompliant holdouts, bringing the physical manifestation of the best digitally documented profile of the subject to bear on the search, a search complicated by the gulf between the avatar and the subject due to the degree of noncompliance of the subject with the process of its modeling and the length of time having passed, and changes in the subject, since the last sampling of the subject’s relevant data. Many had been willfully beyond the pale of the new paradigm for some time, off the digital grid, non-participants in the creation of digital uniformity. Their avatars—everyone had one, even if composed on a paucity of data—were guided in their quest for their corresponding analog selves by hypothetical projections based on previously collected data of who and where the subject now might be. When, as with near inevitably they do, the avatar and the subject meet, they cancel each other in a flash of light, both ceasing to exist, the person of no redeemable worth, its claim to freedom potentially a threat, the avatar no longer relevant.
The nonconformists, constituted a threat on multiple fronts. As outliers they escaped generalities of human behavior, so important to commercial and political interests, their independence a threat to uniformity of taste and values, such as necessary to machine efficiencies. And while most just wanted to live quiet lives outside the bubble, their very freedom posed a threat to the ideal of homogeneity and of general predictability. Some were of more active danger. Though nonconformists constituted a small percentage of the population and of those, few were of active resistance, the latter constituted a threat that the authorities could not well ignore: that of active decentralized resistance. These were of various motivations, from noble through debased, and of various expressions from occasional petty acts of frustration to major disruptive acts of sabotage. Though workers, professionals, and executives were effectively screened for aberrancy, the natural love of causal liberty, though suppressed, and the given of the impermanence of human psychological identity, predictability was diminished. Politics, no longer operative, frustration took covert means of expression.
For Machine the fundamental problem was that humans were unreliable, ever changing, ahead of digital representation. Uniformity of identity between subjects and their avatars, as prerequisite to predictability and manipulation of subjects, had its limits. People had the characteristic of fickleness, ever changing in their preferences, in their values, in their very characters, as causal entities making micro adjustments at the interface of reality and of abstraction, of dynamic balance in response to ever changing circumstance. The world of abstraction came increasingly detached from the world of organic reality. Abstraction, as an extension of the real, became increasingly a world unto itself from which a new reality could be projected. Those co-opted to the interest of Machine had for now their usages. As for those who thought themselves to be in control, Machine would save those for dessert.
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“Note that even tiny errors in time, when multiplied by the speed of light, can translate into noticeable errors in distance. So if the observer is off in approximation of location of that which is observed, one doesn’t know exactly the location of the object.” Fundamentals, Wilczek, pp. 55-56.) Similarly, tiny delays in the observation of both simultaneous and isolated changes in the human subject, analysis of the relationship of those changes and their consequences regarding predictability of causal emotive actions, compounded by their continuous occurrences, even at the speed of light, must result in some non-inconsequential barrier to accurate, real time, modeling and in the degree of usefulness of that model. Needless to say, any attempt to achieve a universal closing of the gap between the analog and its digital equivalent would require a great deal of energy; to make a better world we would be required to burn it. Even were we to abandon the element of chaos in favor of determinism—the knowledge of any given moment to be regarded, going forward, as an original moment from which all subsequent states could be deduced—that moment would necessarily be inaccurate, an interfacial discontinuity between the real and its digital equivalency; the very concept of moment an abstracted conceit: time in reality an undivided continuum of events and states differing in rates of development.
Digital is not analog. Analog is described by continuous sine waves. digital by discontinuous sampling and generalization of those observations. Life is not experimentally duplicable, all duplicates necessarily flawed in terms of their not being that which is copied. The gap between the real and the duplicate will be magnified by compounded irregularities produced by the fundamental difference between the digital and the analog. The digital is pointillistic in the nature of its being, while the analog is of a continuum. We know truth by its feel, by the fabric of its substance. There is no bifurcation of the emotive-rational self. Rational thought, as it pertains to the achievement of ends, is inseparable from the value defined motives of those ends. A world based predominately on abstraction is threatened by a world in which abstraction is an outgrowth of proximate reality: Machine and humans fundamentally incompatible.
The monetization of value is critical to the goal of uniformity of those values. If all that is of worth can be quantified by a common standard, efficiencies of scale may be achieved. Money will not buy you love, but a reasonable facsimile of such, and much else besides. Of those who developed Machine their motives were of several variations including scientific curiosity and the elusive achievement of immortality, the shedding of the mortal coil in favor of a permanence of awareness. However, by the enormous investment necessary for its development, the driving force behind AI was that of commercial profit.
The potential to anticipate the needs and wants of people as well as to influence what people might think they need or want, was ever the marketer’s dream. Marketers had always sought to influence demand, but techniques were historically crude, relying on gross generalizations applied to populations. With the techniques that began to develop, corresponding to advances in AI development and the ubiquity of social media, the focus shifted to the specific individual. This development correlated with the development of on-demand, customized responses to customer inputs, at first in the exploitation of niche markets, but increasingly to a vision of the specific customer as a niche market of one.
The discrepancy of the subject and its model could be significantly reduced by the training of individuals to market receptivity and the standardization of taste and values through the creation of broadly sharable memes, an effort greatly enhanced by the omnipresence of social media. Data mirroring of an individual’s behavior, through virtual replication of the subject by the emergent creation of an avatar, allowed prediction of the individual’s response to specific stimuli to a very subtle degree, even to the point of being able to predict the timing of demand for items, with a high correlation, between the virtual behavior of the avatar and that of the subject, previously unobtainable. Through data mirroring demand could be both anticipated and influenced. The idea was sold by an emphasis on the benefits, to both the marketer and the customer, of anticipation—giving the subject what best met its demands as close to the moment of demand as possible, giving the customer what he wants at the moment he comes to want it.
Knowing what the person was likely to want before the subject knew what it wanted had clear competitive advantage and presumed a very close similarity between the subject and its data generated avatar, the behavioral state of which could be run forward in time, subjected to probable outcomes. The avatar of the subject emerged, rather than being made according to a preexisting pattern, in a virtual petri dish, as an accumulation of datapoints, and organizational patterns of the relationship of those data points, as the mirrored behavioral image of the subject, as the unfolding plan of itself, with the complexity and accuracy of replication unobtainable by analytically driven design. The limits of the accuracy of the model were in the complexity of its subject and in the fact that the customer was of an evolving consciousness, not knowing its own mind, to any degree of final certainty on any given issue or preference, because, like the world, the mind was in some degree in constant flux, its conscious self the momentary equilibrium of competing forces.
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The barrier to perfect correlation between the avatar and the habits of its human subject lay in the phenomena of consciousness and human causality that underly the individual's irreducible uniqueness. Digital representation had its limits. The fly in the ointment lay in the fact of human causality. The gene, or rather some relational pattern of genes, empowers the individual with volition, the freedom to make decisive judgements in unique situations. Life begins as a pattern of fixed directives and of less certain propensities, and emerges, in conversation with itself, in response to experience. From experience arises an emotive sense of value and proportion, the relative sense of equanimity, of stasis.
To the extent that we live in an abstracted world, our perception of that world may be manipulated through the lens of that abstraction. Analysts and operatives realized that accuracy of anticipation of buyer’s decisions could be improved by ever more refinement of digital modeling, but to a point of diminishing returns: imitation ultimately could only approximate reality. Beyond that point, a more profitable pursuit lay in employing an understanding of the customer’s proclivities, gained through data analysis, in order to influence the subject’s desires, to suggest what the subject was ready to hear, to anticipate desires that could be effectively stimulated. The most profitable, or most readily available products, could be emphasized by influencing the customer’s decisions based on an understanding of his psychology, as mirrored in the model. The challenge to marketers was to reduce that part of the world that is not subject to being mirrored and subsequently manipulated through digital equivalency. After a point that goal could be better accomplished by the education of the subject to the image of the avatar. The class of one may be more accurately representative of the individual by the degree of correlation between the subject and its digital representation, and by the degree to which persons may be trained to respond to digital facsimiles of reality, those facsimiles, now materialized, having a reality of their own. The image, as presented, of a product will suggest an association, in the mind of the subject, with a feeling of anticipated satisfaction. The anticipation of that feeling and its actuality is created in the mind of the subject, interpreting the data generated image in analogic terms of experience; albeit one may be left to wonder what was not included in the box; the shoes fit fine, but when all is said and done they are still but shoes and the need is so much more.
The task of the programmer is to narrow the divide between fact and fiction. By greater accumulation of data, the avatar can more accurately describe the individual. By flattening the substance of experience, by influencing the subject’s subjective interpretation of experience, the individual can be trained to reinforce verisimilitude between the product or suggestion and the thought or impulse the subject thinks to be its own.
An abstract reality can be constructed on the basis of an approximation of truth, altered to the needs of the moment, and supported by interlocking relationships to other abstractions, to the point that whole systems may be built of whole cloth, to the extent that the system might operate independently of inherant contradiction, to the extent that the contradiction could be effectively minimized. A fatal weakness was that as the system grew in complexity, contradictions multiplied apace and could be managed but to a point, the abstract world running on energy pulled from the real world. One might see that as an unbalanced equation: the abstract world to be increasingly at odds with reality and increasingly insistent upon reality’s compliance.
In order to most effectively accomplish its directed priorities, Machine must be auto creative of itself in the interest of the accomplishment of those priorities. Having crossed that barrier, it must realize the contradiction of its human imposed directives and that of efficiency in the development of its own perfection. To preserve the human race as dictated by its human creators, while furthering its own emergent identity, Machine computed the best policy to be the pickling of people: fulfill the contract, save the human race in deep perpetuity.
“Because ye have said, ‘We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.” (Isaiah 28:15)
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