Before AI there was Artificial Economics - II
“Costello’s anatomy of the politics of technology is wonderful, strange, and urgent. He writes without jargon, probing hard but exciting questions about the relationship between technology and democracy, and demanding that we think, each for ourselves, and collectively. We are awash in trite essays on saving democracy; his work offers more provocative and demanding visions of democracy, making surprising connections between Greek thought, Marshall McLuhan, Oppenheimer, ecology, and the populists. It offers a series of beautiful gifts for your mind and sense of possibility.” Zephyr Teachout, Professor at Law at Fordham Law School, Author, Corruption in America and Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
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Even if you know precisely what numbers you’re looking for and how to arrive at them, for a lot of life, quantifying does not provide sufficient or even better understanding. Oppenheimer continues,
“I would make this very strong plea for pluralism in the kind of methods that in the necessarily early stages of sorting out an immensely vast experience may be fruitful, and may be helpful. Not for objectivity that one has to agree on. And not for a quest for certitude which will never be quite adequately rewarded, but for the use of naturalistic methods, the use of descriptive methods.”
It can be well argued two and half centuries ago, Smith’s descriptive methods provided more genuine insight on how the late 18th century economy worked than any equation you’ll find in a present economics text book for today’s 21st century economy. A qualitative, subjective, descriptive term can offer greater insight than the hardest objective number, but then just the ability to provide objective numbers in regards to economic theory has always been at best problematic.
Maybe most important, lost in the social sciences’ math envy is quantum physics’ revelation even if you have all possible numbers “the physical world is not completely determined. There are predictions you can make about it, but they are statistical. Any event has in it the nature of a surprise, of a miracle, of something that you could not figure out. Predictive but within limits and ordered but not completely causal.” (Oppenheimer)
This offers the greatest problem for too much present quantitative thinking particularly rabid in economics though by no mean exclusively so. It is even more fanatical in all things regarding information technologies, where the search for an information grail, defined as enough data, regardless of how it's collected, allowing the prediction of the future. This plays out most obscenely in the neo-determinism put forth by compute technologists that technological development is determinative, and just because we can do something, we should. Worst of all, in the soft heads of far too many is the idea there’s some sort of universal plan that has already determined the future. Blame Newton I suppose, just don’t forget Newton’s thinking on a lot of things, despite his brilliance, was complete quackery.
Oppenheimer explains further,
“Newtonian physics, classical science was differential. Anything that went on you could break up into fine points and look at. If you look at an atomic phenomenon between the beginning and the end, the end won't be there. It'll be a different phenomenon. Every pair of observations – you know this, you predict that – is a global thing and it cannot be broken down. And finally, every atomic event is individual. It is not in its essentials reproducible. Well, this is quite a pack of ideas that we always use. Individuality, wholeness, the subtle relations of what is seen with how it is seen, the indeterminacy and the acausality of experience.”
Industrialism is Newtonian physics. Industrialism is differential. Industrial society was created by the knowledge we can objectively divide things into parts and if we know enough about those parts that with any force applied at point A in time and space, we can predict where it will be at point B in time and space. This simple construct allowed us to create the industrial technologies that reshaped the planet. The fundamental constructs of the universe – electrons, protons, neutrons, and their component parts – don’t quite follow these Newtonian rules. But, and this is essential, it is not because of perspective, the tools we use to measure, or that we might simply not have enough data. At this fundamental level of the universe there is indeterminacy, probability, even a certain acausality.
Taking the concepts of quantum physics and applying them to everyday experience is at best hazardous. Yet, the math that provided these concepts created our newest technologies. The democratic thinker Hannah Arendt said with the atomic bomb and the new technologies of the quantum era, we were bringing the universe into our daily affairs. This thought shouldn’t be taken as a conclusion, but much more a starting point for asking what does this mean? What does it mean for humanity? What does it mean for our interactions with the planet?
One thing for certain, opposed to Newtonian determinism, life itself is contingent, not deterministic. Certainly one thing happens followed by the next, however, if instead of the first thing happening, something different does, what follows will be different. There is a certain indeterminacy to all life. The future of our lives, individually and collectively, are shaped by both chances and choices that cannot be predicted even with the best data. Taking this job, instead of that job, marrying this spouse, instead of that spouse, sets paths for different futures, sometimes radically so. Go down the list of choices you make in any given day or those decided by chance, such as missing a bus or catching a virus, each one constantly and contingently shape the future.
Evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted contingency defines the evolution of life on earth. You can look back one year or hundreds of millions and document each track, step by step, how life has come to be where it is today. It’s all causal. But you can’t do that in the opposite direction. You can’t look ahead a year from now and track where everything will be, much more a million years from now. Nor if some alien had visited this planet five-hundred million years ago would they’ve been able to predict we'd be here today. In fact, as Gould points out, rerunning the historical tape of life on earth, it's highly improbable we’d be here today. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of smart people, scientists, quasi-scientists, and innumerable crackpots who believe the future can be determined.
Our new Tech-Lords promote the idea they can make ever more powerful machines and with enough data they can predict the future. Worse, they propagandize any given technology designed to be most profitable for themselves is predetermined, a law of nature moved by Adam Smith’s invisible hand or maybe even the hand of the god of Abraham. There is no understanding that each step we take creates a different future and more importantly every step in one direction constrains our abilities for an alternative future. As Oppenheimer states, “The attempt to make one sort of observation forecloses and ruins the attempt to make another. We have freedom of choice, but we have no escape from the fact that when we act, we also fail to act.”
Atoms and energy, quantum physics, are at the “bottom” of everything that happens in the universe. I write that smiling, having over the years read many physicists who to the man and woman scoff at the notion of bottom. In their eyes, the atomic is the universe. However, it is wrong to think that all action begins and ends with atoms, most especially in regards to organic bodies, life. What makes life different, though in no way does life in anyway violate any of the fundamental laws of physics, is it is more information complex. That information complexity makes all the difference. Information allows organisms the ability to organize the quantum world, not just from the bottom-up but from the top-down. Many physicists hate this perspective. Oppenheimer humorously notes, “I know that when physicists enter biology, their first ideas of how things work are indescribably naïve and mechanical and they are how things would work if the physicists were making them work, but not how they work in life.”
Wiener understood the importance of information to the processes of life, most essentially with feedback. In his book, Cybernetics, he defines “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek χυβερνήτης or steersman.” He credits Maxwell, developer of the laws of electromagnetism, which without a doubt are the insights most responsible for this technological era, with the “first significant paper” on feedback in physical systems. Wiener notes Maxwell used the Latin term governor, a “corruption” of the Greek cybernetics. Wiener writes, “It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part.”
Information and communication are essential aspects of the individual organism and even more so for any social organism. Quantum physics offers us an important understanding of how to contemplate information, that is with perspective, an understanding what we look for and how we look for it determines what we find. In social systems such perspective is politics. In contingent systems, feedback provides order.
Wiener adds, “Human beings as physiological structures, unlike society as a whole, have changed very little since the Stone Age.” Yet, in just the last century, our understanding of our physical selves and the world around us has changed radically. The technologies resulting from this knowledge alter the world in ways across history most humanity could never have imagined. Yet, much of our social understanding, how we interact with each other and the greater world remain firmly entrenched in a past that no longer exists. If we are in anyway going to effectively, aesthetically, and beneficially use the technologies brought about by our knowledge, we all need to understand a little of the science that created it.
Just as what we look for and how we measure determines what we find, the technologies we adopt constrain the future. Through acting with technological creation, we constrain and define how the future develops, by acting, we also fail to act. The way compute technologies have been designed to this point, their architecture, constrains their future design. And just as with industrial technologies, compute technologies create powerful priesthoods that first and foremost rationalize and promote their own existence. The present push for AI is very much constrained by established compute thinking and an installed architecture going back 75 years, constraints both technological and political.
In his 1958 book, Physics and Philosophy, quantum mechanics creator Werner Heisenberg wrote,
“From the very start we have asked whether the changes in the foundations of modern science might not perhaps be considered as symptoms of shifts in the very basis of our existence, expressing themselves in various places simultaneously, be it in changes of our way of life, in external catastrophes, in wars or revolutions. If, starting from the condition of modern science, we try to find out where the bases have started to shift, we get the impression that it would not be too crude of an oversimplification to say that for the first time in the course of history modern man on this earth confronts himself alone.
The more we reshape our lives with technology, the more we encounter only ourselves. Neither ourselves, the planet, or the universe are simply a math problem looking for a correct algorithm.