The Valley Below

The result of all this “intelligence” // (A rant)

In these final days of the holy month of Ramadan, I am publishing this “rant” on “AI” and technology. It is a long rant, cobbled together, rambling, error-prone, and possibly shouty at times, but with the enthusiasm of madness, rather than anger, I believe. I imagine it as tribute to the darkening moon, as well as Ogoh-ogoh, which is today in Bali. Ogoh-ogoh is when the demons (called ogoh-ogoh) go howling and yowling in the streets, causing violence and uproar, to be brought out, burned up and chased away for the next year. I didn’t get any photos today as we moved around our neighborhoods, but (oops, these probably are NSFW) here is the fabulous vibe.

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I am not anti-tech. I am not anti-AI. But writing something like this feels like writing against a deluge of history, imagining the words scattered and lost in a roaring flood. (Relatable?) Sometimes purgation itself is a good thing, the locals seem to believe. There are demons in the street, I can hear them this moment, their words and their hyper-active laughter, their growls and groans and spat curses, the frantic drumbeats of their chaotic mission, accompanied by frequent pyrotechnics. So.

Tech serves only the one in posession of tech.

(Who is that one?)

For the one in possession of tech, it makes things possible on different scales then pre-tech. Colonial and then industrial-scale genocide are examples of this, as are vaccination and virality.

Communication tech (from carved writing in stone, all the way up to algorithmic social media and/or “AI”) doesn’t just convey power over bodies, but over hearts + minds, in ways that are not well-understood. (And at tech-enabled massive scales.) It grants someone (the one in possession of the communication tech) the power to sway populations.

I am not anti-tech; I blog. (Even written language, as I wrote, I consider to be tech.) I have an iphone and an induction cooktop, I use tech all the time. I am even a tech lover. (Again, I blog.) But the use of technology (especially tech that creates new needs, i.e. luxury tech) builds a kind of ethical scaffolding (ἕξις or hexis, an active condition, disposition, or habit) for a narcissistic comportment in the world. Implicit in the building of tools, even the simplest ones, is the thought that the material exists only to serve the user. Technology progressively (re)defines the world as “material”. It serves the appetites of those who can pay for it (or invest in it). Every tech is an example of this, but it’s especially poignant when the “material” is alive, as with “factory-farmed” animals. Whether a chicken is mere material, or something in itself, has become irrelevant in the (modern western, but increasingly global) day-to-day world, built by human technology.

Of course, it’s already happening: techno-fascism is the not-long leap of turning humans into “material” too.

I am also not anti-artificial intelligence. I just have a different idea of what artificial intelligence means, than the people who are setting (and selling) the terms of the conversation.

To discuss “what is artificial intelligence” would first require a discussioin of intelligence. I’ve seen no evidence or argument that what is being sold as “AI” even resembles intelligence. What paradigmatic “intelligence” are the “AI"s being tested against? What are the “benchmarks”? We are left to gauge the purpose of it by observing what it does. (This idea, “The purpose of a system is what it does”, is straight out of Aristotle too.) As far as I can tell, the benchmark of a language model is, to convince users that it’s reliable. That it doesn’t (often because it has been specifically censored) spit out a disturbing or offensive response. That when a user feels like double-checking, it matches extant data, until a user is convinced not to double-check anymore. It doesn’t matter whether the response is “true” or not, there is no available parameter for that, because “the true” is not present in the extant data. “The true” is not present in the sum total of the internet, or ten thousand internets. “The true” is not a statistical regurgitation of ten million all-over-the-place opinions.

For “AI”-generated content, the “benchmark” (as far as I, an observer, can discern) is to convince people to keep watching, to keep scrolling, to keep using. The more people it convinces, the more money it makes, the more successful it is. And bonus, the proprietary “AI” has become an indispensable source (a medium through which to interpret the world) for an entire population.

This is not knowledge, it has nothing to do with knowledge. My prediction is (to predict this seems trivial) that the holistic result of all this “intelligence” will be insanity. And then, war. Well, more war, and worse. Anyway, it strikes me as a contradiction.

Intelligence doesn’t cause or profit off of war. Intelligence doesn’t cause or promulgate insanity. Intelligence doesn’t harm the weak. Intelligence without empathy isn’t intelligence. Intelligence isn’t complacent in the face of suffering. Intelligence doesn’t perpetrate or propel people toward self-harm, genocide, or extinction. When there is a cultural consensus on intelligence, according to which intelligence does these things, that is a sign of immanent catastrophe. So even if I am all alone in doing so, I reject that definition.

Here are some “benchmarks” for artificial intelligence I would (conditionally) accept.

• Peace.
• Justice.
• Health (global ecological health, including human health, including individual health, embodied and psycheic).
• Vaccination against fascism.

Where is the “AI” that prioritizes these? Not just in its words, but its actions?

1. That “AI” would be far more resource-intensive than it would be profitable. 
2. It wouldn’t produce reliable or universally-agreeable results, because while these are the most important human pursuits, they pose difficult (perennial) problems. The fantasy of a facile, universalizable, standardized answer is propaganda for fascism. 
3. Good results would lead to less reliance on the technology, less engagement, and therefore less profit. 
4. Therefore it will not be attempted, let alone made.

So artificial intelligence, according to me, is not present in this “discourse”. Except inasmuch as any number of artists and writers and poets have always provided artwork-based interpretations of intelligence, of what it looks like or what it is, going all the way back to the (pre-human?) invention of artifice. Religious texts offer interpretations of intelligence, and state constitutions and laws, and music, and mathematics. They are all artificial intelligences. The intelligence of a dancer. Ptolemy discerning the intelligence of stars. Intelligence understands and makes room for itself as plural – it is neither an absolute, nor a scattered infinite of particulars, but worlds within worlds. Like a jungle, or an animal, or a coral reef. Or even, something like Ocean.

Technology does not and never has had a monopoly on intelligence, no matter the propaganda they’re injecting into our feeds. Tech’s monopoly is on control.

Just so, peace remains ever beyond the reach of technology, because peace is not imposed as control. That is the violent fantasy of fascism.

The easiest and therefore the only path to (techno-)fascism is through insanity. This appears to be the “benchmark” and the purpose of what is currently called “AI”, because this is by-in-large what “AI” (in a mutually-servicing arrangement with algorithmic social media) does. It turns people into users, turns users into the used, and turns the Earth into a ball of flaming garbage. A junkies’ den. This is our new politics, or lack thereof. Other “use-cases” – (e.g., if it can practice and propagate anti-fascism as hexis, as an active condition) – will be rare, if not merely accidental.

Because technology is essentially narcissistic and only accidentally good.

It requires education as a precursor, with subsequent active intention and effort, for a human person to be healthy and good. Education if successful puts us on a path toward (empathy, as David said) sensing the depth of the full breadth of the world, as well as our own depths, and sensitizing us to our limits and boundaries in these contexts, rather than imagining ourselves to be little kings. So education was needed to temper technology. American education, including its incentive structures, has done almost the reverse. Not just by emphasizing STEM and pumping money into innovation, but also using standardized testing to measure children’s worth. By design, even our education has been in service to tech.

As I’ve mentioned before, my only political view is (public, obviously) education. Education is the living soul of (human, obviously?) politics. All else in any political constitution should be organized to protect and serve education. While the end (telos) of education is active inquiry into the discovery, expression, and interpretation of justice, as the end (telos) of politics, of what it means to be just.

That is the secret teaching of “philosopher kings”, by the way – that education alone must rule.

(Here I offer yet another on-the-fly-interp of Plato’s Republic. I say it to acknowledge the hubris of it, but also to express gratitude for the ancient technology that has somehow educated me, though any errors are my own. And I might change the word order tomorrow. Wink emoji.)

(Here I note further, as my “rant” fizzles out, that I never intended to write on the Republic for my blog, not even in oblique terms. This blog is a constant meditation on the Phaedrus, I stubbornly maintain, where we find ourselves in a quasi-mystical meta-political realm. However, here as in the Phaedrus, politics is fully capable of accompanying us outside city walls, presented and represented by its – ugliest and most beautiful – faces.

For me at least, a reference to the Republic is a reference to the past. Lol, that’s also hubris. I hope very soon to get back to more direct engagement with the textual object of my adoration, beginning with some remarks on “the chariot”. However, I’m very bad at promises. The best way for me NOT to do something has always been for me to promise to do it. I would be a very bad employee of myself. Deadlines are unnecessary, we are worlds-building, after all. So no promises, just surprises.)

This flashed across my incredulous and hungry eyes today. Okay. Islamaphobia, they say. But in another way (from another perspective of Islam) this is the truest tattoo you could ever get. It’s like getting a giant tattoo of “asshole” across your chest.

We were laughing about it, because things suddenly seemed very funny. “Oke Jeki, go hunt it like a cicak (gecko),” my husband said. And we just couldn’t stop laughing, it was just so funny. These are the useful idiots of the basilisk.

All it has are its useful idiots.

Mask firmly engaged: these long posts always strike me as narcissistic. For example, imagining all the time it would take someone to read these words, and still posting them. So I guess one thing I’m wandering-around-about-on-here is the possibility of whether you can fight narcissism with a narcissistic act. This is what poetry is, and anyone who has ever experienced a glimmer of the joy of writing knows this, even if they won’t admit it, that poetry is engagement of a deep (and hopefully redeemable, if somehow self-defeating) narcissism.

I control every little blip that’s on here, almost.

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Tomorrow is Nyepi, Bali’s silent day, so the demons fly away. For twenty-four hours we’re not supposed to make noise or use electricity, and internet and celular are often down. Even though I guess nowhere else celebrates Nyepi, I can still say Selamat Nyepi, have a nice Nyepi. Even from a distance, to imagine an island (a party island) that is totally peaceful, no cars or motorbikes or airplanes, with birdsong taking over the entire sky, as if everybody has suddenly disappeared, an empty day that darkens down quickly to unlit night, so that it disappears from the satellite photos, is also an effect. So just imagine the sound of Bali without humans. That’s where we will be, when the purification rites are over, and I’m not posting on my blog.

Thanks for reading, if you got this far. Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🔥🌑✨

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