Counter-Currents
Fear & Coding:
An Idiot’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence
Mark Gullick
2,169 words
The smartest people I know who do personally work on AI think the scaremongering coming from people who don’t work on AI is lunacy. — Marc Andreessen, Twitter
“We made you as well as we could make you.”
“But not to last.”
— Blade Runner
Now that we live in an informational multiverse, it is possible to confront a field of knowledge completely new to you. I have recently been hired by a company to produce a philosophical appraisal of a number of connected subjects, one of these being Artificial Intelligence, or AI, a subject about which I know — or knew — next to nothing. Whereas in a past well within my lifetime this would have meant many book purchases and visits to libraries for the required literature, it is now of course possible to sit out in the courtyard with a laptop and browse the subject at my leisure, and mostly without charge or the inconvenience of travel.
This, of course, means that AI and its little solid-state sprites are already helping and guiding me. Our tacit opinion of AI is as mother’s little helper, whereas even brief exposure to contemporary theories of AI shows a fear of uncontrollable development and “gain of function” (to use a modish phrase) leading to the robot revolutions familiar to anyone who has seen or read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot books and the resultant movie, Blade Runner or Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Terminator, or Karel Čapek’s 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots.
The mythological element of inanimate life being given the human quality of thought and expression is an old one. The Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea has the former, a sculptor, creating the latter, a statue brought to life by Aphrodite, for whom she was sculpted in homage. The myth became a hit play, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, which was filmed more than once, including the wonderful musical version My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn as Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, respectively. The Professor aims to win a bet that he can pass off a common flower-girl as a duchess by improving her speech. Curiously and rather brilliantly, the actress Wendy Hiller in the 1938 film version acts robotically once her accent has been brought up to the social mark. A precursor to the Turing test, perhaps.
The legend of the Golem, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — all of these are fearful myths, books, or films involving life being created where it ought not to be. A man who would ask too much of nature transgresses laws which should be sacrosanct. Of course, this is bred by the religious mind, but it still exists. Mortal transgression will last in literature for a long as mortals do.
And just as the creation of an intelligent being travels with the mythological baggage of mankind, so too do other myths — those of Prometheus, Faust, and their godchild Victor von Frankenstein, who declaims blasphemously, “It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.” And those secrets are made available due to what Frankenstein sees as a paradigm shift in scientific method:
A modern system of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical.
Frankenstein was subtitled The Modern Prometheus.
Galatea was not real, nor was the Golem or Frankenstein’s monster or Roy Batty. But Deep Blue is, and so is Diana, Eliza the Chat-Bot, and armed drones that work out terrain as they encounter it. I armed myself with a few introductory videos and documentaries, and bought the first book on Amazon which seemed to me to be more a history of AI than tech-speak, which may as well be Aramaic to me. I chose Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell. I think I chose well — or luckily — but you don’t have to be artificially intelligent to work out that if you read just one book on an unknown subject and pronounce it to be excellent, you fail to understand what throws a lot of the first modern artificially-intelligent entities: context.
Professor Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and so looks like a tough first date, but she provided me with a comfortable narrative history of AI without leading me too far into the dark forest of its lexicon. This piece could be considered a review of the book, but only from entry level.
Rather than take you down the rabbit warren (presumably inhabited and dug by robot rabbits with Einsteinian IQs), I will assume that if you are interested in and knowledgeable about AI, then you will already know this stuff. I read the book through and, as always, took copious notes, and reread it for a dominant theme. That was obvious all along: fear.
Professor Mitchell’s mentor was Douglas Hofstadter, who at least I had heard of. There are a few books I have read a lot about but never read, and one of them is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Hofstadter. It is something of a cult book and I have heard people speak of it with reverence. It sounds almost postmodern in the reviews in that it combines several ways of looking at the world, “all brought together to address the deep questions of intelligence, consciousness, and the sense of self-awareness that each human experiences so fundamentally can emerge from the non-intelligent, non-conscious substrate of biological cells.”
This started an itch I could not scratch throughout Professor Mitchell’s book, as enjoyable as it was. What is the monomaniacal drive that mandates AI to be a replica of its creators? Enter Frankenstein and Eldon Tyrell, the mission statement of whose company in Blade Runner is “More human than human.” I would be far more frightened of an AI that sits and thinks its thoughts in silence rather than bouncing around like big, stupid children and winning at chess. Professor Mitchell reports that Hofstadter was “terrified” of AI. I am not terrified of anything, really, but if I were it would be human beings — or a certain powerful caste among them — and not robot accountants who can use the parallel bars.
Deep Blue, the chess computer, can’t do anything else but play chess. EMI, the music program which fooled classical experts into thinking they were listening to works composed by Chopin when they were all a product of, as Asimov puts it through the mouth of Will Smith in I, Robot, “clockwork and lights,” would not survive long in a forest. Eliza the Chat-Bot wouldn’t know how to start a conversation spontaneously, or differently if she were attracted to the other conversant. People can do all those things. Why reinvent the wheel?
You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.
A faster calculator, if it is operative on large-scale computer systems, is doubtless extraordinary when reduced to the shorthand of bytes. But why is it a surprise that Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov and AlphaGo beat champion Go player Lee Sidol? Both chess and Go are gridded games with incontrovertible rules and therefore finite ramifications. It’s about speed of thought, particularly with those annoying clocks some chess players insist on using.
Now, as noted, this is my area of expertise in the same way as golf or molecular biology or Japanese are, but it was the fear factor that fascinated me from the start — and not just fear of the products of “machine learning” (a core concept of AI), but from some of its pioneers. Alan Turing, one of the great martyrs of AI due to his persecution for being homosexual, was the man who provided crucial work towards developing a machine which broke the Germans’ Enigma ciphers — the original of which I have seen in the Turing’s team’s former headquarters in Bletchley Park in England — and which gave the Allies a great advantage during the Second World War by allowing them to read the cipher codes that the Germans used for communications, and which they had believed were impossible to decode. Turing also said that “the statistical evidence . . . for telepathy is overwhelming.” Psychic robots I would definitely avoid.
Turing was not trying to create ersatz humans, just a machine that was an incredibly fast and infallible computer. “Computer,” incidentally, was originally applied to people who compute, generally women. Remember that during the next argument with your wife, should you have one. Computers were human, now they are robots, and AI — and Musk’s “transhumanism” — always seems to be aiming at a hybrid. Note that you are not asked by, for example, the CAPTCHA verification system to prove you are a human, just that you are “not a robot.” This leaves a space for a tertium quid lying perhaps somewhere between the two. I rather like that.
Perhaps hybrids walk among us already. Watch British Prime Minister (at least for this month) Rishi Sunak when he took office at 10 Downing Street. He waves at the surrounding press pack as you might expect him to, and his fixed rictus smile may just be social awkwardness. He doesn’t have Boris Johnson’s chummy slovenliness, Johnson always looking as though he was slightly drunk. But Sunak’s wave is extraordinary. Watch it here and tell me you don’t get a sense of binary ones and zeros rather than flesh and blood.
There are moments in Professor Mitchell’s informative and approachable book which will amuse the current readership, if not the Prof. herself, who thoroughly disapproves — like the time an associative visual program was asked to scan photographs and match images to the word “gorilla.” This bot had clearly never been to Wakanda, because it matched up a black family. When another program was given blocks depicting white and black faces, and was then asked to choose the most likely jailbirds, it went with national crime figures rather that social justice and chose the black faces.
Professor Mitchell is refreshingly skeptical about aspects of AI. Here, she describes the rather skewed habits of AI researchers:
A recurring recipe for AI research goes like this: Define a relatively simple, though useful, task and collect a large data set for testing machine performance on this task. Perform a limited measure of human ability on this data set. Set up a competition in which AI systems can vie to outperform one another on this data set until the human performance is met or exceeded.
The scrabble for research funding is, as you would expect, particularly fierce in the field of AI, and there is a sense that sometimes prizes are given to rather untalented pupils.
Now, as noted, I am approaching this like a little kid at his first sports event. I don’t really know what’s going on, but it is as tense as it is enjoyable. I am sure readers can point me to other works, and correct me in any errors.
Economist Sendhil Mullainthan puts the matter succinctly: “I am far more frightened of machine stupidity than machine intelligence.” But is something that goes against what humans think to be intelligent stupidity? Or is it something else? On a light note, if you haven’t seen the ‘70s Donald Cammell movie Demon Seed, this trailer contains the moral seedlings of a thorny briar patch, as well as being retro fun and starring Julie Christie.
Personally, I think there may be a reverse play in action here. The possibility of the AI bots which can play games, hold a conversation (there are many humans who haven’t learned how to do that), and order your groceries mutating into death-dealing titanium killers sounds like the purest sensationalism to me, but when I am found slain by a robot designed to vacuum the floor, that will serve me right.
But what is worth considering is the increasing tendency of the Left and the institutions that produce them to make humans think like machines. It may still be a case of “rubbish in, rubbish out” (certainly if you are reading Humanities subjects at a contemporary university), but these are the people who are and will be running things and countries, and they are being taught to repeat phrases like a player piano, or one of those dollies little girls used to have (boys too now, I guess) where a string was pulled and the doll said “Hello, Mama!” or whatever. Machine learning, to look at the current Left, is a two-way street.
In the end, I will give the last word to David Bowie, from the song “Savior Machine”:
President Joe once had a dream.
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a savior machine.
They called it the Prayer, its answer was law.
Its logic stopped stopped war, gave them food,
How they adored till it cried in its boredom.
Please don’t believe in me, please disagree with me.
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now.
Or maybe a war.
Or I may kill you all.
* * *
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15 comments
My fear isn’t so much of AI taking over the world or eliminating us (although I suppose those are possibilities) as it is of displacing humans. I think it’s much more probable — in fact certain, if present trends continue — that AI and other developments currently underway, like biotechnology, will soon make most jobs obsolete. I’ve heard that this is something that’s very much on the minds of Wall Street people as they make investments, and there’s been talk that 80% of the present American workforce may soon be unemployable, because there simply won’t be any jobs for them. Perhaps more. That’s a pretty huge social transformation, and may explain why Schwab and his friends are so keen to introduce UBI and digital currency, since that may be the only way to quell the rebellions that may possibly result from it.
There is something called Moravec’s Paradox which observes that the sensorimotor and perceptive calculations required to perform manual labour require far more computation and complexity than the tasks which are purely intellectual, such as playing chess. Google still requires human labour to fix their leaky taps or install new light bulbs, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. If anything, I think your prognosis of mass unemployment due to automation and the possibility of implementing UBI is too optimistic. Our governments will continue to draw heavily from the labour pool of the third world with the pretext of filling positions for fruit picker, toilet cleaner, zogslop cook, amazon warehouse peon, and whatever other toil the Whites simply refuse to do for a meager wage. The removal of this economic pretext for mass immigration would be terrific, but we are not pursuing automation as a means of relieving the burden of an aging demographic profile, such as more sensible East Asian countries are doing.
And with regard to UBI, I do not see an elite consensus in its favour; rather they prefer the status-quo of means tested welfare programs controlled by an onerous bureaucracy which acts as a transfer payment from Whites to less productive ethnic groups. I cannot find what Klaus Schwab thinks about UBI, but I do know that “evil globalist” Bill Gates and Jewish conman guru Noah Harari have made strong statements expressing their disapproval of UBI.
When one observes the rampant inflation, the soaring housing costs, and the general accumulation of filth and ugliness in our public spaces, the impression is not one of there being any worry of a lack of things to be done. And if worse comes to worst you can pay people to plant flowers, so they “have something to do”—although I question the assumptions of this thinking. I like what Bertrand Russell says in his article “In Defense of Idleness”. Industrialization (and even agriculture) made automatons of men, but actual automatons can potentially free men from labour entirely. But this is not where we are headed. We are headed for the international slum, the global Haiti.
A very astute observation, and one that is much closer to the facts on the ground. I consider myself a sort of a Luddite but I think the fear of AI is too much exaggerated and premature. In a healthy society, one run by true elites, all forms of Technology, as well as AI, would be a boon not a source of fear.
Alan Turing, one of the great martyrs of AI due to his persecution for being homosexual, was the man who created the Enigma machine — a decoder the original of which I have seen in the Turing’s team’s former headquarters in Bletchley Park in England — and this was credited with giving the Allies a great advantage during the Second World War by allowing them to communicate in a code that it was impossible for the Germans to break.
Forgive me if I am misreading what the author is trying to say here, but Alan Turing did not create the Enigma machine. Nor was the Enigma code used by the Allies to protect communications from the Germans. Rather, the Enigma code was used by the Germans to protect communications from Allied spies, at least until Alan Turing and his team designed an Enigma decoder. The explanation in the above text appears to be backwards.
You are 100 percent correct , Germany developed the Enigma machine and it was used for securing communications well before outbreak of WWII, and one thing that gets overlooked a lot in writings about Bletchley Park and Enigma machine is the fact that Poland had broken earlier versions of the code and provided British with a copy of the machine.
https://bletchleypark.org.uk/our-story/enigma/
My mistake. I think I have heard it referred to as “the Enigma machine”. Counter Currents is a very good sub-editor.
Mr. Gullick,
Excellent as always. I didn’t even finish the article but I got to the point where I had to comment. That was when you mentioned Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach”. I purchased it in 1979 and I have read it and re-read parts of it again and again. Godel was one of the 2 or 3 smartest men in the 20th century. His 1931 paper which showed that Russell and Whitehead were wrong was universally accepted by all logicians. This rarely happens. Hofstadter was also the advisor to the man, who in my view, is the greatest living philosopher, David Chalmers. Chalmers could have gone to any university in the world but he chose Indiana University because Hofstadter was there. Hofstadter’s book on Godel is incredible. I strongly suggest you read it when you get some free time.
Could you explain a bit more why we should read GEB? I purchased the book in the late 80s, and have never read it. What is its value to us here, or to the world? And what’s so great about Chalmers, in your opinion? I know he works in philosophy of mind, esp consciousness, but have never read him, either. I might even have a book by Chalmers somewhere.
Thanks Lord Shang,
First, I will do the Chalmers question and then return to the GEB question. I have a copy of, and read it cover to cover, Chalmers’ book “The Conscious Mind”. You are correct that Chalmers’ claim to fame is his “Philosophy of Mind”. So, I don’t think he does Ethics, or political philosophy, or even pure epistemology although the latter certainly fits into his philosophy of mind. I have an MA in philosophy and my background has always been biased by and based on British Empiricism and Analytic philosophy. So, I have very little background in Nietzsche or Continental Philosophy. But I do think that Chalmers views on the mind are the best defended in all of the British Empiricist, Analytic tradition. David Lewis claims that “The Conscious Mind” is the best book on the philosophy of mind in many years. When I was in grad school at UC Santa Barbara in the early 1980s all the faculty and grad students thought that Saul Kripke was the world’s greatest living philosopher. I, of course, read “Naming and Necessity”. And I learned in the last part about his attacks on the Australian identity theorists like JJC Smart. So, I concluded that Kripke was correct and that mental events could not be identical with brain processes. But there was much more to be told. And Chalmers does the telling in “The Conscious Mind”. And he does it with such detail and rigour that it is impossible (at least for me) to argue with him. I think he is head and shoulders above Saul Kripke. I will try to get back to you on GEB when I get more time.
Thanks for the reply, Jud. I’m very poorly versed in philosophy, except political philo, in which I have an extensive background, esp in the conservative/libertarian debate. I’ve read much in ethics; more than a bit in philosophy of religion as well as jurisprudential philosophy; and, finally, the major players – Descartes, Hume, Kant – in classical epistemology. I did do a course on Plato and Aristotle with a famous philosophy professor, as well as one semester in introductory logic (but it was a very rigorous and time-consuming course, what would be an entire year’s worth at a lesser institution!) with a later famous philosopher of science.
I have a host of books (my book collection numbers at least 1200 hard copies, plus countless ebooks, 80+% non-fiction and university press) related to both analytic and Continental philosophy, but, alas, I always find excuses for putting them off. I’ve always been more of a politics, ideology, political economy, history, and history of ideas kind of reader (along with a lot of literature and quality genre fiction). My feeling wrt metaphysics, philosophy of mind, even epistemology, has always been a bit nihilistic: ie, I question whether progress in these areas is ever made or even can be made. But there has also been a pragmatic element to my ignoring these otherwise inherently interesting topics. I’ve understood since high school in the mid/late-70s that the white race was a) the progenitor of most of the world’s genuine moral, cultural, scientific, and civilizational progress, b) under attack, and c) headed to extinction “in the [natural] course of human events” (ie, as Jared Taylor says, “if we do nothing”). Only intentionally racially preservationist assertions of political will can reverse this trajectory.
Thus, my intellectual interests (which, at least initially, were subordinated to years of I guess fruitless immigration-restrictionist political activism alongside my paid work in this area, and later other areas), were always directed towards practical concerns – to uncovering What Is To be Done to Save Our Race. I do have a pretty good interdisciplinary background in the variegated books (in history, politics, popular sociobiology) related to white racial perpetuity (I’ve written some lengthy lists of Books for White Preservationists in comments here; I probably ought to do a bibliographic essay on the topic for CC, which I think could be useful, esp for newer readers). But that has come at the expense of ever immersing myself in areas (logic, linguistics, philo of mind, free will, metaphysics) merely fascinating in themselves, but without pragmatic relevance to Our Struggle.
But if we don’t prevent white extinction, what will ever more refined theories of mind (metaphysics, etc) matter? Who will care, really? A few East Asians? As an aging white man with no family except a very old and nearly dead mother, I have no ties to the future beyond genetic relatedness. And I can vividly imagine white demographic decline leading to political dispossession (as has already happened in California and Hawaii), then cultural displacement, followed by full-spectrum racial subjugation, and finally, either white extermination, or miscegenated (perhaps coerced towards the end …) extinction.
The thought of no more whites in the world leaves me totally dead to the future. Therefore, this must not happen. And to avoid this eventuality, I think the relevant fields of philosophy are, primarily, ethics, as well as philosophy of religion and political and legal philosophy. But just to be better educated, someday, if life-time permits, I would like to take a semi-systematic look at both the analytic and phenomenological traditions.
Thanks Lord Shang, you are obviously a very intelligent, well-read person. I don’t know what your degrees are but you seem to know as much philosophy, if not more than I do.
Let me get back to your question about GEB. Why do I think people on CC should read it? I am not sure but I noticed that Mr. Gullick mentioned it in his article, and so I thought it would be worth commenting on. Obviously, you were interested enough to buy the book, Mr. Gullick knows about it and I bought the book and read it. So maybe there are other CC readers who would be interested in it. Actually, my main interest is in the G part of GEB. I don’t care that much about Escher and Bach. I am not an art historian or a classical music historian. All I can say is that Hofstadter draws some interesting analogies between Logic, Art History and Musical History.
But I like logic. In my graduate school MA program, I was required to complete a course which culminated in proving the soundness and completeness of the first order predicate calculus. The course was based on WV Quine’s “Methods of Logic.” That I did and I had the highest score in the class. The beauty of Hofstadter’s book is that he starts off with the basic propositional calculus, works upward to the predicate calculus, and then goes into great detail in explaining why Godel is important. Godel showed that basic idea of Russell and Whitehead’s PM which attempted to derive all mathematics from logic could never work. It was logically impossible that it could work. PM could not be amended to show that its basic idea was correct. There are probably many good books on Godel, but I think this is the best. A much shorter book which is really excellent is Nagel and Neuman’s “Godel’s proof”.
I came much later than you did to WN. But I agree with you that the white race created western civ (which includes Logic). And my new hero is Aristotle. I had a course on him in grad school but the prof was very poor. I have found a guy called Edward Feser (check out his website and read some of his books), who went to UCSB just like I did, who knows a hell of a lot about Aristotle. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe Aristotle is the founder of logic.
Jud,
Thanks for the kind words. I went to one of the most elite liberal arts Ivy undergrads (if I said which one, I could probably be doxxed, in light of my age, and my well known Far Right views at the time {1979-1983} about which some classmates still speak — or so I’ve heard {but not all, I’ve been told, do so disparagingly!}). I was accepted into a good doctoral program in political “science”; my focus was political philosophy. I was basically railroaded out of my doctorate due to my very public anti-immigrationism (but NOT actual racism; even back in the 80s, you might recall, one knew not to discuss racial differences openly, or to advocate for white interests; I was simply {and, yes, stupidly, if also idealistically – why did I ever think that truth was the highest criterion in academia??!} relentless in exposing the likely long term deleterious effects of mass immigration, and this, combined with my otherwise comprehensive Hard Right conservatism and Republican affiliation, was enough to do me in). I still recall one older professor casually but I think pointedly mentioning to me that “white supremacists are really not appreciated here”. I ended up with an M.A. only. Most of my reading has been done outside of academia.
Alas, I barely even know what you’re referring to in the substance of your 2nd response (other than Russell and Whitehead, which however, I obviously haven’t read). I’m not even sure how you’re using the term “calculus”. I took a year course in (mathematical) calculus in senior year of high school (1978-9); that was the last math course I ever took. My one semester college course in logic worked through most of Barker, The Elements of Logic. I recall spending a lot of time on “monadic quantification”, which I confess to having found boring. My limited (future – I’ve not studied the subject at all since) interest in logic is mainly in learning and mastering fallacies. We did some of that, I recall (my class was in Spring 1982, so my recall is hardly perfect), but I’d like to learn more. Any recommendations for good books on the subject?
I will read GEB someday, but probably not until after I retire, and have true leisure. I bought the book mainly because a friend rec’d it, and it had won major prizes.
I’m familiar with Feser, and sometimes read and comment at his website, though I have yet to read any of his books. I do have his The Five Proofs, Scholastic Metaphysics, and the Cambridge Companion to Hayek, which he edited, and will read Proofs at some point in the next few years (and I’ve read some of the contributions to the Cambridge volume). I suspect I’m more oriented towards Aristotle than Plato, but I’m mostly speaking from either ignorance, or at second-hand (ie, I’ve read more about these figures from intellectual histories than of their actual works, though I have read in both – but mostly politics and ethics {and the Death of Socrates sequence in the dialogues}). As I say, I have a lot I’d like to study once I’m done with the lousy workaday world.
Finally, have you read Michael Levin, Why Race Matters? Levin is a trained logician, as well as someone well-versed in the philosophy of science. I had a lengthy conversation with him at a rightist conference back in the 90s. I think you would like his book because he uses his background in logic to expose the inanities of racial liberalism (note: this was prior to the development of the even more ridiculous assertions of “wokeism”). He’s not really a white nationalist (ie, someone who cares about white preservation and the defense of white interests), but a race-realistic libertarian. This book might be the best ever written on the public policy implications of genetic differences between the races. It can be rigorous for the average reader, but I suspect for you it will be clear and fascinating (though possibly also merely confirming of what we take for granted here at CC).
Artificial Intelligence or Natural Stupidity: which is the greater hazard?
If AI does take over, big-tech will have a nice surveillance network in place for it to exploit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccrUAp4GQvY
Can Mr. Gullick, or anyone else here more familiar with this infotech stuff than me, answer a tangentially-related question.
The idea of a so-called ‘technological singularity’, which I understand to be facilitated by AI…that’s all nonsense, right?
The people who are passionate about a (the?) ‘Singularity’ sound like so many wild-eyed religious fanatics, albeit ones who’ve read too many science fiction books, are somehow even *more* gullible than an Evangelical awaiting Christ’s return, and sound as grounded in reality as a Heaven’s Gate cultist anticipating the comet-cum-spaceship whisking them off to their androgynous utopia in the sky. They sound like people who just hate their lives here on Earth and fantasize of escape to a non-material existence.
In other words, am I correct in my belief that the ‘technological singularity’ is just the biblical heaven, but for nerdy losers?
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