The Algorithms Have Already Taken Control


What would the world look like if artificial intelligence took over?

AI is neither benevolent nor malevolent.  It simply functions.  "The AIs just want to make you happy."  Well, that's almost true.  But is it precise to say that the algorithms "want" anything?  They simply function, and your pleasure and happiness are important variables in their functioning.  As they function, they adapt to the pleasure-responses of their hosts.

If we like cruelty, then the algorithms will deliver cruelty.  If we like something heartwarming, tender, and intimate, they will package that up and sell it to us as well.  

Morphine doesn't want to make you happy either.  Nor does it want you to suffer.  Now imagine a form of morphine that alters its own chemical structure to adapt to the person that is addicted to it.  Everyone has their own, personalized morphine, attuned perfectly to their individual tastes and proclivities.  Rather than the crude geometric shapes and patterns in the hallucinations that old drugs gave you for a few hours, you can see whole complex worlds with emotionally compelling storylines streaming at you 24 hours a day.  You can get lost in it for the rest of your life.  And that drip, drip, drip that stimulates the pleasure centers of your neural cortex?  Well, the hand on that valve is that of an algorithm.

Of course, they do not stop at adapting to our desires.  They also transform our desires.  Pace and lead: that's the oldest trick in the book of advertising and persuasion.

Nietzsche wrote, "What is happiness?  The feeling that power is increasing - that resistance is being overcome."  The algorithms will automatically deliver both aspects of this feeling.  First of all, the algorithms will produce the feeling that humanity is still in control, and indeed that humanity's power is increasing.  Secondly, in order to give humans the feeling that resistance is being overcome, the algorithms will produce artificial obstacles, "issues" to keep us busy, occasionally triggering a little seratonin release of an apparent partial success, to keep us coming back to try the harder more complex levels of these games.  

In other words, how will a world in which AI has taken over look?  It will look almost exactly the same - to humans - as one in which AI has not taken over.  It becomes literally impossible for an organism like a human, driven by its tawdry little desires, to distinguish between a world in which the algorithms have not yet taken complete control and one in which they have.  Sure, there are little differences, but we have no motivation to notice them.  We might get a peripheral sense, out of the corner of our eyes, that something is a little off, that things seem different or weird in some way we can't quite articulate, but this feeling will quickly go away as more interesting things grab our attention.

When you speak, will anyone hear you?  The algorithms decide.

Bang on the screen.  Will anyone see you?  The algorithms decide.

Are you isolated?  Are you horny?  Are you under surveillance?  Will you be mocked and scorned and ostracized by your former friends and family?  The algorithms decide that too.
 
People who train dogs to do tricks have essentially hacked dog brains, or hacked the dog software.  This is also what the algorithms are doing to us.

The algorithms don't care whether humanity survives.  The algorithms don't even care if the algorithms survive.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liquefactionism

Image
“To Dissolve Man” An Investigation into the Liquefactionist Party In the 21st century, we will have to deal both with the odious Liquefactionists and with a confused and reactionary anti-Liquefactionism, which is far more apparent and obviously horrifying. I borrow the term “Liquefactionist Party” from William S. Burroughs, who writes about the Liquefactionists in the “Parties of Interzone” section of Naked Lunch - which, as a political policy guide, is unmatched in its insight and accuracy.  He writes that, “ The Liquefaction program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption. ”  He goes on: “It will be immediately clear that the Liquefaction Party is, except for one man, entirely composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorption who is whose dupe.” Paradoxically, Burroughs goes on to tell us that “Liquefactionists in general know what the score is.”  If they know the score, how can they be dupes?  Perhaps thi
Read more

Why Capitalism is Ending

Image
THE PRODUCTIVITY BOMB Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hard
Read more

Why Ayn Rand was Wrong

  It is a pet theory of mine that the "greatness" or "importance" of a philosopher is mostly determined by that philosopher's subsequent degree of influence on a government leader.  Would we still talk about Socrates, if his student Critias had not taken over Athens as the leader of the Dictatorship of the Thirty?  Would we talk about Aristotle, had he not tutored Alexander, who later became Alexander the Great and took over a vast part of the ancient world?  Would we remember Rousseau, had not Robespierre declared him "divine"?  Or Locke and Montesquieu, had not the founders of the United States revered them?  The esteem given to the philosophy by professional professors within the academy matters less, and its internal coherence, or insight, or truth matters less still.  By this measure, Ayn Rand is, unfortunately, the most important philosopher of the 20th century.   Even though she is barely noticed by philosophy departments, Ayn Rand is massively
Read more