IT WAS SOMETIME ABOUT THREE YEARS AGO that I realized how many times a week I was hearing or reading someone use the term "algorithm" as if something being related to one (or what they labeled as one) was some kind of guarantee of enhanced reliability. I have a feeling that easily a majority of those who used the term couldn't define what it means, no more than they could "data" as they also used that very limited term in a similar fashion Something which still strikes me as extremely bizarre though powerfully suggestive. I'd love it if someone would compile a representative sample of very specific mathematical and scientific terms that enter into pop culture in a way that totally mashes them even as they bestow an aura of being in the know.
2. The fact that individuals bind themselves with strong emotional ties to machines ought not in itself to be surprising. The instruments man uses become, after all, extensions of his body. Most importantly, man must, in order to operate his instruments skillfully, internalize aspects of them in the for of aesthetic and perceptual habits. In that sense at least, his instruments become literally part of him and modify him, and thus alter the basis of his affective relationship to himself. One would expect man to react more intensely to instruments that couple directly to his own intellectual, cognitive, and emotive functions than to machines that merely extend the power of his muscles. Western man's entire milieu is now pervaded by complex technological extensions of his every functional capacity. Being the enormously adaptive animal he is, man has been able to accept as authentically natural (that is, as given by nature) such technological bases for his relationship to himself, for his identity. Perhaps this helps to explain why he does not question the appropriateness of investing his most private feelings in a computer. But then, such an explanation would also suggest that the computing machine represents merely an extreme extrapolation of a much more general technological usurpation of man's capacity to act as an autonomous agent in giving meaning to his world. It is therefore important to inquire into the wider senses in which man has come to yield his own autonomy to a world viewed as machine.
3. It is perhaps paradoxical that just, when in the deepest sense man has ceased to believe in - let alone to trust - his own autonomy, he has begun to rely on autonomous machines, that is, on machines that operate for long periods of time entirely on the basis of their own internal realities. If his reliance on such machines is to be be based on something other than in unmitigated despair or blind faith, he must explain to himself what these machines do and even how they do what they do. This requires him to build some conception of their internal "realities." Yet most men don't understand computers to even the slightest degree. So, unless they are capable of very great skepticism (the kind that we bring to bear while watching a stage magician) can we explain the computer's intellectual feats only by bringing to bear the single analogy available to them, that is, their model of their own capacity to think. No wonder, then, that they overshoot the mark; it is truly impossible to imagine a human who could imitate ELIZA, for example, but for whom ELIZA's language were his limit. Again, the computing machine is merely an extreme example of a much more general phenomenon. Even the breadth of connotation intended in the ordinary usage of the word "machine," large as it is, is insufficient to suggest its true generality. For today when we speak of, for example, bureaucracy, or the university, or almost any social or political construct, the image we generate is too often that of an autonomous machine-like process.
I have repeatedly had to point out that computers are constructed to imitate some of the simpler activities that human minds engage in, they are models, metaphors of human minds. Yet people have been convinced to turn that around and define human minds by what those unthinking machines do. That is in part due to stupidity on the part of some people, it is, however, very much an expression of ideological motivation on the part of others, even some of whom should certainly understand the difference. A computer is no more a thinking entity than an abacus or a simple electrical circuit, of the kind that computers are made of.
But that habit of attributing unrealistic powers to artificial entities didn't start with computers, it is an ancient habit of thought among human beings, one which the modern materialistic-scientistic ideology pretends it has surpassed and buried when it is merely a different species of the same genus. In fact, it is a very strong expression of the same thing.
In some sense the very model of social or political constructs for which we generate an autonomous operation and existence is science, try pointing out, as I have many times, that science consists of what the human community of scientists accept as science at any given time, including all of those theories, claims and ideas which will soon or later be discarded, some of which are allowed to do enormous harm before they are discredited and discarded and you will meet with anything from baffled confusion to enraged fury. I don't think that that confusion exists to that extent, or at least in a way that can elicit such emotional rage when you talk about the model of the physical sciences, mathematics, to which there would seem to be little popular emotion attached. I wonder if it is because with science there is an investment in the successful technological applications to which successful science can be made real to people in a way related to what Weizenbaum discussed in these sections of his introduction.
But I do know that the rage is in no small part the product of the ideological apparatus that has been constructed around science, as a "thing" that is not actually any more real than the social and political construct which is made of the consensus of science at any given time. Atheist-materialist-scientism requires that there be an autonomous entity which doesn't exist, science as an independent, even held to be an objective machine for generating truth even a sort of meta-truth that is more true than true. I have identified a number of gods, even creator gods that atheism creates to explain phenomena that science can't identify the origin of, natural selection, random chance, probability (not to be confused with actual mathematical probability but as a supreme creative agent, even, in some of the most insane claims of such a-theology, creating jillions of universes and the vastly improbable first organism of life on Earth). There are others.
Joseph Weizenbaum was right that it is tragically ironic that just as people are putting their faith in machines as artificial, man-made intelligences, so many of us have been talked out of having the slightest faith in human minds. I think a good part of that is the work of the sciences that never have and never will follow the rules of science, especially psychology and other allegedly scientific treatment of minds, individually and collectively. While perhaps unintended, it was not by mere chance that it was a machine mimicking a routine of psychology that revealed how gullible the early, mostly university based users of DOCTOR and ELIZA were.
But I think what we are seeing is that far from building a culture in which human beings are freed from ancient, animistic superstitions, the modern culture of materialism has destroyed any faith in the real possibility of freedom except as an expression of the attempt to satisfy appetites, consumers of products sold for the profits of those in a position to produce, often the ones who have control of machines, especially computers. It is that industry in satisfying appetites in what might be one of its most subtle and seductive forms, seductive because it seems to be entirely voluntary while being so manipulative, "social media" the algorithmic collection of data and peddling "other similar content, etc. that have produced the insanity of present day media-fascistic culture of which Trump is merely the floating baby balloon as a masthead as it heads straight for the rocks.
Far from being made free by the rejection of religious belief modernism is beset by more subtle and base and stupid material gods that make those of the ancient pagan pantheons seem believable. Those gods are most like the ones described in the rather condescending (perhaps racist) literature concerning the "cargo cults" in post-war scientific anthropology. I'd have to go back and read that literature again but if my memory serves me, I think that's a valid suspicion.
Note: If you don't like me calling disreputable science (discontinued science) such as abounds in psychology and anthropology, science, without scare quotes, it's not my fault. I don't get to decide what is science though I have stopped letting "science" off the hook by pretending that science that does get thrown on the enormous heap of discontinued science was never science with all the rights and privileges and enormous power (and lasting effects) accorded to science by modern academic and legal and political culture. If you don't like that, tell the sci-guys to tighten their requirements according to their PR promotion of science. Eugenics was and still is science, it is still as much a part of science in 2021 as it was when scientists were sterilizing racial minorities and poor people and drawing up lists of who to kill. I wouldn't count on those not starting up again as they appear to have when the for-profit imprisoning of migrants in Georgia was reported to have done within recent memory.
I am posting this tonight because Monday is going to be really busy for me.
You’re making me reconsider why the Hebrews banned graven images, and Frank Herbert’s backstory to “Dune” included a jihad (lots of Islamic threads in that book, decades before we had heard of it in America) that destroyed machines that think like a man. And not because of some “Terminator” scenario. We do ourselves in by trying to recreate ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI gotta go off and think on this post.