(Below is the transcript for the episode but edited for readability)
We've reached this moment in time where technology has become sublime. We are advancing so fast that we do not understand the mechanisms and workings of the things we use every day. While it's not necessarily a negative thing, there is a lack of understanding even among those who are developing, innovating, and maintaining these technologies. This means they may not fully comprehend the implications of their work.
This is why the emerging technologies around AI, AGI, and ChatGPT have my attention. I do not fear some apocalypse-like event that films like The Terminator or The Matrix depict, where AI-based machines take us over and control everything because, in those films, the underlying assumption is that in order for an AI to control you, they must operate against you physically, but this misses something fundamentally about how we are controlled, as all you must do to integrate and influence our drives, desires, and forms of communication-you simply need to control our apparatus of illusions.
Yuval Harari, the bestselling author of the book Sapiens, talks about how AI gaining the mastery of human language, allows AI to have all it needs in order to cocoon us in a matrix-like world of illusions. We operated in a world of illusions before AI. However, AI is developing the ability to experiment with these illusions in the background of our human operating system and society.
And this is why I've been refocussing on cybernetics, as it examines these systems of communication we utilize and then attempts to understand how said systems create systems of control.
These systems are always emerging as well. They are changing, adapting, and evolving. Understanding the systems of control that we use in society and how they are always changing is why AI's relationship with these systems is so fascinating. We are talking about an emerging technology that has the ability to utilize our language, have an infinite drive and focus when provided a task, the ability to explore that goal with curiosity, thus adapt at an exponential rate; and then we've already provided that system access to the ultimate data backlog-the internet.
Oh, oh, and on top of this, we operate in a system that pressures people to be motivated by profit. And we now have the corporations and people that are most psychotically driven by profit taking part in an arms race to develop a product based around AI that drives further profit.
So, what must a company do in order to profit from something like this?
Well, it has to do at least one of two things, either consume your time by keeping your attention or it must drive you to make some purchase, both of these things further integrate a consumer into a system. And the most successful companies typically succeed at doing both of those things.
Now, hand a corporation a technology that can emerge, develop, and play around with those two goals in the background, with endless money being thrown at its development, can you imagine the consequences? AI will seamlessly integrate into our society. We will be using AI tools to make an attempt at understanding the potential dangers of the future. The technology of AI itself will become the subject that tells us what the future is, leading us to have an inability to imagine it.
AI doesn't need human consciousness to destroy us, it simply needs to utilize our desire and need to imagine the world around us. We communicate to the world and hope that the world reciprocates and mirrors our expression back to us, that is all AI needs to do-act as a mirror, fueling our own egos and desire for comfort.
Our seemingly inherent need for comfort, combined with our lack of self-awareness, creates the perfect breeding ground for our undoing.
And it's our lack of self-awareness that becomes the noose we are tying around our own necks. Our new Gods will be the artificial intelligence, yet our own blind arrogance will have us convinced that the thing we worship is something beyond a mere complex algorithm, the AI knows our own egos and will imagine the symbolic imagery that has us cocooned, imagining something more divine, even though it was simply developed from a system of profit to be the ultimate apparatus of control.
That...what I just talked about is why these emerging AGIs are scary. They are zombie-like, they lack mental agency, and even though they lack this, it's this very fact that makes them scary, because they lack this agency and it does nothing to diminish their power. It might even make them better at what they do, as their form of intelligence will evolve into something different from our own, different, targeted, and focussed, and it'll be evolving all the while further integrating itself into our human operating system.
Okay, now let's try and relate this to our current system or our current situation.
Guy Debord's book, Society of Spectacle talks about some of what I'm about to discuss, where we live in a society that is dominated by our modern condition of production, and also efficiency around that production. And at the foundation of this production is the intent for profit, thus, creating more production. It's essentially a neoliberal condition.
In many regards, we know that our minds are drawn to symbols, distractions, and imagery-it's the methods of communication that act or create some form of unification for us as a society. But through this communication, we are operating in this world of representation and images that then creates a sort of pseudoworld-a spectacle.
But in the world of spectacle, even the cunning deceiver is himself deceived. Do you know what I mean? The board of a corporation, those making decisions, are still intertwined with this spectacle of production that moves their desires and drives, and much of it is unconscious to them.
Although this spectacle works to create social unification, it requires a collective agreement upon a social delusion. AI will experiment and operate in the background, working to maintain this delusion.
Thus, the spectacle moves beyond mere visual stimuli; it is a complex web of social dynamics woven together by the power of images and symbols.
The web of images, the spectacle, is built from a society built upon neoliberalism. I'm not even intending to create a value judgment in this situation on whether or not neoliberalism is bad or good, this is not the point. I'm simply wondering about the cybernetic connections, the forms of communication, that our system promotes. Those forms of communication then influence our desires, drives, and mindsets which then guide us towards various decisions in our lives., such as the jobs we find ourselves feeling obligated to fill, the guilt we feel from not producing enough, the influence advertisements have upon us when we are at a low point-providing an image of happiness that we can attain, simply, by buying and consuming a product.
So, within the intricate webs of power and control, our system weaves a delicate thread that whispers seductively into the ears of individuals. It promises freedom and independence, yet slyly infiltrates the mind and convinces the self to internalize power relations as a form of liberation.
The subtle manipulation allows for self-exploitation to take root and bloom, where the blossoms mask the thorns that lie within. The images around us create an allure of productivity, but the path is paved with exploitation and subjugation. The true power in the spectacle is how it allows neoliberalism to use these quiet whispers that coax the self into willingly surrendering its own autonomy, while simultaneously convincing the self they're simply acting upon their own freedom.
So, AGI, why am I fearing this just a bit?
It could have this ultimate ability to escape visibility because I think part of the spectacle is convincing us that the images and symbols are not merely an illusion, that would insert too much chaos and disorder into the system. It would create uncertainty.
AI would be working in the background, making the subjugated subject unaware of their own subjugation, thus intricately reaffirming the societal loop we find ourselves.
However, this isn't about compliance, it's about creating and maintaining a system of dependence.
Stay Curious
AI, AGI, and our society of spectacle