The Politics of AI -- I
“There's a very real danger in this country of bowing down before the brazen calf, the idol is the gadget. I know very great engineers who never think further than the construction of the gadget and never think of the question of the integration of the gadget with human beings in the society.” – Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948
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In 1992, British journalist Adam Curtis did a wonderful series on 20th century technology and society called Pandora’s Box. One episode titled “A is for Atom” looked into the development of nuclear reactors. Near the end, Alvin Weinberg, former Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which housed the reactor and facilities that created the plutonium split to flatten Nagasaki, talks how decisions to widely implement nuclear reactors as electricity sources was made and carried out by a small group of “technologists.” In hindsight, he came to the realization these decisions made by a few were rightly the public’s to make, citizen decisions. Forty years later, he rhetorically asked, “Can modern intrusive technology and liberal democracy coexist?”
Quite clearly the answer to this question is no, though this needs qualification. What historically has been defined as “liberal democracy” is no way capable of providing citizen input and decision making on questions of contemporary technological adoption and adaption. No present issue makes this clearer than the development of the latest generation of compute technology marketed as AI. Knowledge of AI’s fundamental components, along with its system structures and functioning, are available to such a small technological priesthood it would make ancient Mesopotamian ecclesiastics blush. Instead of any understanding how the technology works, a necessity for any democratic engagement, the public receives all manner of false prophet pronouncements about yellow brick roads to the future.
This is nothing new from the computer industry, who have long sold soft dreams to a greater degree than hard realities about basic compute technology. The technology has already greatly impacted our lives, though not with new ways of living, compared for example to the difference between agrarian and industrial life, but more a process of digitizing what already exists. For example, compute technology didn’t invent the screen or audio, and lord knows it didn’t invent text. Yet, the last few decades, each has been transformed and electronically connected by networks spanning the planet.
In its short existence, compute technology has largely been valued for what all technology has mostly been valued from the first, replacing and/or enhancing labor, whether the physical labor of automating factory floors or the information labor of the office. The direct benefits, in the vulgar, the profits of our dominant value system, for digitizing these processes overwhelmingly flowed only to a few. Just as importantly, both the technologies and their gilded profit distribution created an unprecedented centralization of political and economic power, best represented by the growing dominance of ever fewer and larger corporations. Never discussed is how important a component compute technology has been in creating the current corporate globalized economy.
In many ways, besides people spending an inordinate amount of time staring into screens, one might be hard pressed to offer any changes in daily industrial life compute technology has wrought. Most especially, in regards to human social organization, outside the growing power of leviathan corporations, change is almost non-existent. Yet, this is not surprising as largely asocial technologists have sought foremost to replace human to human interaction with human to machine interaction. There has been no revolution in the creation of new associations, the social organization 19th century French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville found to be a necessary foundation for “liberal democracy.” In the last twenty years, what’s labeled social media is overwhelmingly a new means to inundate users with advertising, not in any way a restructuring of the physical, face to face, social organization of human society. To date, advertising is the super-abundant public content of this information revolution, and well, that ain’t no revolution. To Weinberg’s concern about liberal democracy, though it has been a source of not an insignificant amount of funding, it has had almost zero impact on this technology’s implementation and adaption. Despite the technologists’ incessant promises of ever greater individual control, leviathan corporations gain greater control of every aspect of human existence.
Seventy-five years ago, the great mathematician and engineer, Norbert Wiener, whose equations and ideas on system feedback are at the foundation of AI, stated, “If we want to live with the machine, we must understand the machine, we must not worship the machine. We must make a great many changes in the way we live with other people.” Yet, we’ve done the complete opposite. Technologists created a neo-theology around their creations. Their ignorance of history and culture detrimentally constrains their imaginations in both how we live with the machine and most especially how we live with other people. For democracy to have any future, we must understand the machine.