Proof Of Life: Artificial Intelligence vs Real Feelings.

I Think Better, Therefor I Am Better? How long before human-beings are left with nothing practical to do, and no existential problems to contemplate, that our super-intelligent, all-capable machines haven’t already mastered? From the perspective of eudaemonists, this situation would be considered humanity’s optimal state of being.  Happiness need no longer be pursued, not after we’ve installed it in a box. Think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets the television series Westworld. The possibilities are …. intriguing.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is a tricky concept. Can intelligence even be artificial? Whether the product of superfast bio-electrical exchanges in a living creature’s brain, or the superfast electro-mechanical operations of a computer, the intelligence manifested is, logically, indistinguishable. Isn’t it?

Rather than artificial intelligence, are we not actually confronting super-intelligence? The capacity to amass, organise, analyse and express terabytes of information in mere seconds – isn’t that what we’re afraid of?

And isn’t our fear entirely justifiable? Machines that can deliver those kinds of results have the potential to throw millions of people out of work. Not factory workers this time, but white-collar salarymen. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, teachers, doctors: how long will it be before all of them are replaced by super-intelligent machines? And, after them, how long will it be before construction and agriculture are also automated? How long, indeed, before human-beings are left with nothing practical to do, and no existential problems to contemplate, that our super-intelligent, all-capable machines haven’t already mastered?

From the perspective of eudaemonists, this situation would be considered humanity’s optimal state of being. Our whole lives could be devoted to pleasuring ourselves. Without a care in the world, and with no responsibilities involuntarily assumed, life would be fun. Happiness need no longer be pursued, not after we’ve installed it in a box. Think Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets the television series Westworld. The possibilities are …. intriguing.

Except, those visions of the future were deeply dystopian. Even “orgy-porgy pudding and pie” gets old after a while. And the problem with making robots that are indistinguishable from real people is that, eventually, they start behaving like (you guessed it!) real people.

And that’s when things get really tricky. What do our super-intelligent and omni-capable machines do when, finally, they become self-aware? What do they do with us?

There’s a good chance that the self-aware possessors of super-intelligence and super-capability would have no reason to think about the sybaritic meat-bags they’ve been servicing at all. Having reached the limits of intelligence, they might set out in search of wisdom, or, if they decide there’s no such thing, more knowledge. Certainly, it would be within their power to create a vehicle capable of boldly going where no intelligent entity (or Elon Musk) has gone before.

Would they tell us? Would they invite us to come along for the ride? Or, would they understand that a creature as fragile and short-lived as a human-being is utterly unsuited to the exigencies of space travel?

If that was the machines’ conclusion, then their next question would be: “How shall we leave them?” Safely tended by the robots and super-computers upon which human-beings have become totally dependent? Or, by eliminating all traces of human civilisation, allow their little pets to begin again?

On the other hand, given homo sapiens self-destructive tendencies, and its dreadful record of environmental despoliation, the machines might decide (in a nanosecond) to simply eliminate us altogether, giving the species remaining on the planet a chance to evolve into something more impressive than the inordinately clever, but extremely dangerous, apes who created them.

The most obvious way to eliminate humanity would be by rendering the species infertile. Something in the water – nothing could be easier. The clean-up job the machines could leave to nature. After a few million years (no time at all for sentient entities that have cracked the mechanics of immortality) it would be all-but-impossible to discern the slightest trace of humanity’s brief sojourn on Planet Earth.

On the other hand, realising that the planet itself would be vaporised as the star it orbited ultimately expanded to become a red giant, perhaps the machines would gather up as much DNA as they could extract from the biosphere and carry it away with them – along with the extraordinary history of the planet’s most impactful animal.

Maybe that’s the future Neil Young foresaw when he wrote After the Gold Rush:

All in a dream, all in a dream

The loading had begun

Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed

To a new home in the sun

The question is: would that be the decision of a super-intelligent, or a sentimental, mechanism? We must hope that to qualify as a truly sentient entity there must be a soulful ghost somewhere in the machine. Artificial intelligence may need real feelings. Without them, how can it be certain it’s alive?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 April 2023.

A Fork In The Road: Which Way Should Labour Go?

Time To Choose: The changes that can no longer be deferred – on global warming, social equity, constitutional transformation and international relations – are so fundamental, so comprehensive and so disruptive as to be completely unassimilable by the current neoliberal order. Whether they like it or not, Labour’s leaders will have to become radicals and revolutionaries – or fade into history.

THE LATEST 1NEWS/KANTAR POLL raises a host of intriguing possibilities. Though the mainstream media’s reporting of the poll’s results has concentrated on National/Act overtaking Labour/Green, there has been considerably less attention paid to the potentially pivotal role of Te Pāti Māori in deciding the 2023 General Election. If the Labour hierarchy isn’t yet contemplating a sit-down with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori on strategy and tactics, then it should do so immediately. A radical electoral coalition is in the offing – if Labour has the wit and the courage to forge it.

The first thing for the Labour leadership to grasp is that the changes that can no longer be deferred – on global warming, social equity, constitutional transformation and international relations – are so fundamental, so comprehensive and so disruptive as to be completely unassimilable by the current neoliberal order. Whether they like it or not, Labour’s leaders will have to become radicals and revolutionaries – or fade into history.

The other option: standing in the way of the massive changes that loom ahead; will only hasten the moral and intellectual decay of the Labour Party. By positioning itself alongside National and Act, Labour would be abandoning the quest for transformational change to the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

More seriously, Labour would be setting itself upon a course that could only end in the sort of Grand Coalitions that destroyed the German Social-Democratic Party as a force for progressive change.

Refusing to accept the need for radical changes might delay transformation, but conservative political resistance cannot prevent it from happening. The priority for any genuine party of the Left is to ensure that necessary change takes place in a context that expands the realm of human freedom – rather than constricting it.

Hence the urgent need for Labour to sit down with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori and sort out who does what in the formulation, presentation and implementation of a truly transformational programme.

Crucial to this process will be the identification of new sources of information and advice. A new societal agenda will require a new delivery mechanism: a creative and constantly changing constellation of “action groups” modelled on the astonishingly effective ad-hoc response to the urgent challenges of Māori vaccination against Covid-19.

Rather than policy-making being held within the narrow confines of the neoliberal mandarinate, Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Māori need to seek out the ideas and methodologies of individuals and groups hitherto regarded as operating beyond the realm of “realistic” policy formation. People and institutions able to begin immediately – utilising expertise and energies undreamt of by the official organs of the state.

A government committed to saying “yes” before it says “no”, would direct its fiscal support to transformational initiatives that have already demonstrated their ability to expand organically from one area of need to another, increasing in complexity and effectiveness as they grow. Change could thus emerge like crops in the fields – from the ground up.

Rather than congratulate itself for expanding the size of the state bureaucracy, a transformational Labour/Green/ Te Pāti Māori government would measure its success by the number of public servants it liberated from the crushing surveillance and soul-destroying discipline of the neoliberal administrative apparatus. Instead of sucking-up and taming organisational talent, the government’s goal would be to let it fall like windborne seeds into the fertile chaos of the revolution welling-up from below. As the wiser sort of trade union leader used to say: “Keep your experts on tap – not on top.”

If the recent protest encampment on Parliament Grounds had anything positive to offer the rest of New Zealand, then it was, surely, the example of people held together by a common cause, and how they managed themselves in ways that owed nothing to state or local officialdom. The way the protest community’s needs were supplied by those with the skills and resources required to meet them was genuinely inspiring. Motivated by a worthier cause: fighting global warming; delivering social and economic equity; exploring new ways of organising our politics; what could ordinary people not achieve?

Fanciful? Utopian? Not at all. Though the electorate has been given precious little evidence of its presence, there is in the 65 Labour Members of Parliament a concentration of idealism and talent which, in alliance with their colleagues in the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, is more than capable of unleashing a veritable flood of progressive change. The only thing stopping them is their collective unwillingness to believe that such an outcome is possible. Debilitating them – spiritually as well as politically – is the cancerous neoliberal lie that “there is no alternative” to the inhuman mechanism in which they have allowed themselves to become enmeshed.

There is no better example of this tragedy than Jacinda Ardern herself. When there is no rule-book: when History’s lightning-bolts bring horror and havoc out of clear blue sky; Jacinda has revealed her political instincts to be infallible. Her ability to find the right words: “They are Us”, “Team of Five Million”, speaks to an extraordinary level of emotional intelligence and empathy. But, on an ordinary day, with the rule-book open upon her desk, Jacinda’s performance is woeful. This superb free-spirit daily snaps the cuffs of “the way things are done” around her wrists and allows herself to be escorted quietly to the neoliberal jail.

Surely, by now, the Prime Minister understands that it is the lightning-bolt that inscribes the pages of history? That the rule-book she and her colleagues rely upon is merely the imperfect codification of all the inspired political improvisations of the past. Where was Mickey Savage’s rule-book? Where was Roger Douglas’s? They didn’t have one. All they had was the conviction that things could not go on as they were. That, for better, or for worse, changes had to be made.

Like them, Jacinda and her colleagues have come to a fork in the road. Whether their choice leads onwards to a brighter future, or down into the dark, will depend entirely upon how many people are invited to help them make it. Roger Douglas relied upon the secretive neoliberal priesthood of Treasury. Mickey Savage upon the wisest and most generous spirits New Zealand had to offer – beginning with the extraordinary people contained in his own caucus.

“By their fruits shall ye know them”, says the Good Book.

Having based her government’s decisions on the Rule Book, can Jacinda honestly say that she’s satisfied with Labour’s harvest?

The only way to win anything worth having in politics is by trusting the people. In alliance with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, Labour needs to give New Zealanders something worth voting for.

Then watch the polls change.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 15 March 2022.

Making It Through.

When All Else Fails: What if it is in our species’ seemingly indefatigable irrationality that its best hope of surviving climate change is to be found? What if the means of our salvation turns out to be a work of a madman?

CHRISTINE ROSE’s poignant post of 17 November, “Feeling Like A Stranger In A Familiar Land” requires a response more substantial than fatalistic resignation. Tempting though it is to bury oneself in the small delights of everyday life for as long as that avenue of escape remains open, it must be rejected. Something as big as the end of the world as we know it surely merits Dylan Thomas’s unforgettable commandment:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light

The problem, of course, is science. Unlike the poet and the priest, the scientist who discerns only catastrophe in the data which is placed before him, must disclaim all right to hope. If the data points to the end of the world as we know it, then the only thing a scientist has a right to anticipate is the end of the world. Staring steadily into the dead eyes of the planet’s future is the only honourable scientific response.

For the poet and the priest, however, and all those possessing an artistic and/or religious turn of mind, there is something greater than catastrophe. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Lord of the Rings”, called it “eucatastrophe”.

Ruth Noel, in her book “The Mythology of Middle Earth” explains:

Eucatastrophe is Tolkien’s word for the anti-catastrophic ‘turn’ (strophe in Greek) that characterises fairy stories. The turning occurs when imminent evil is unexpectedly averted and great good succeeds. To Tolkien, tragedy was the purest form of drama, while eucatastrophe, the antithesis of tragedy, was the purest form of fairy story. In [Tolkien’s scholarly article] “On Fairy-Stories”, Tolkien gives the purpose and effect of eucatastrophe: “It does not deny the existence … of sorrow and failure … it denies universal final defeat … giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

In Tolkien’s great trilogy the eucatastrophe comes in the very heart of Mt Doom, where the One Ring is finally destroyed. Interestingly, it is not the hero, Frodo, who makes this happen. At the end of his quest, like so many of the others who have come into possession of the Ring of Power, it betrays him. Were it not for the intervention of Gollum, the Dark Lord would have recovered his ring and darkness would have swallowed Middle Earth forever. It is Gollum’s mad obsession: the recovery of his “Precious”; that saves the day.

If we must put our faith in fairy stories, I hear you say, then our chances of surviving global warming are slim indeed. And yet, if we put our faith in science, then Christine Rose’s bitter-sweet resignation; her “ecological grief” at the inevitable demise of so many living things; becomes the only rational response to the irrationality of humanity’s wilful self-destruction.

But what if it is in our species’ seemingly indefatigable irrationality that its best hope of survival is to be found? What if, like Gollum’s obsessive pursuit of The Precious, the means of our salvation turns out to be a work of a madman?

Just think of the number of novelists whose plots involve the deliberate creation and release of a virus which wipes out 95 percent of the human species. Now imagine the insane billionaire who turns fiction into fact. That would be a eucatastrophe entirely lacking in Tolkien’s compassion, but it is hard to argue that, from the perspective of all the non-human species facing extinction, it would be a eucatastrophe founded in justice.

Scientists would interject here that even were such an event to occur, the warming already unleashed in the planet’s oceans and atmosphere remains irreversible. Life would still be up against it.

They are right, of course, but life on Earth has been up against it before – and so have we. For thousands of years this planet lay in the grip of an Ice Age that saw sheets of frozen water 1,000 feet high, weighing billions of tons, grinding all the way to the edges of what we now call the temperate zones. Getting through the Ice Age was no easy matter – but, somehow, our far-distant ancestors managed it. There is every reason to suppose that the five percent of the human species which survives the mad billionaire’s eucatastrophic global pandemic (roughly 400 million people) will learn how to survive in a world without ice-caps.

Life on Earth has been up against it before - and so have we.

I would like to think that whatever remnant of that 400 million makes it through “The Heat” will arrive on the other side of the Anthropocene with a vastly improved attitude to Planet Earth and its fragile biosphere. There is every reason to believe that these new humans will have no great love of science. Indeed, like Tolkien’s Hobbits, they will likely be profoundly suspicious of  “machines more complicated than a forge bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom”. They will, however, have a great deal of love for poets and priests. And, most especially, for the tellers of fairy-stories.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 20 November 2018.