The problem is not
that robots will become more intelligent than humans but that humans will
become as stupid as robots.
Current debates on robotics and associated Artificial
Intelligence (AI) focus on either the low level issue on how robots may replace
human factory labour, or the high level issue on how AI endowed robots may
become even smarter than (extra-)ordinary humans (witness the latest GO-game
program that beat a champion player but note that simple rule-based games like
GO, while able to generate billions of possible moves, can nevertheless be
analysed and subjected to predictive algorithms).
On the low level issue we have known ever since the industrial
revolution, that machines are supposed to make our lives easier in that they
perform tedious and/or dangerous tasks. With regards to the latter, the
military applications excite the fancy of many a militarist even if it takes
away the number one reason for staging a war, i.e. to die for a cause. The
robot that cleans the house, cooks and serves the meals, changes nappies and
generally replaces the domestic slave is of course a nice idea that excites the
middle classes who lack the means to employ their own service workers – in the
knowledge that they ought to be able to mimic the upper classes in this
respect. Of course they are respectful of the machinations employed by the
oligarchs, monarchs and other super-stars of the cleptocracy, admiring their
vast celebrity resources from a virtual distance.
Ever since Descartes quite sensibly declared that humans are
nothing but biological machines, however sophisticated, scientists have sought
to design and build machines that edge ever closer to the human model – but as
Feynstein says ‘if I cannot make it I cannot understand it’. The main stumbling
blocks are, one, quantum-biology and two, language. Of course the two may be
intimately interlinked as for example studied in the field of bio-linguistics,
and whilst there is almost no empirical knowledge about how language can arise
from the brain, there are other far less discerning attempts to model language
by machine.
The most advanced of these attempts is so-called machine
translation which is based on statistical models of language use. Simply put,
the program will search for previous translations of the word(s), phrases,
sentences that serve as input, and voilà, you have the translation (and every
time somebody uses the translation machine, more data is added). This works
fine for metropolitan languages that have accumulated very large data bases for
such purposes. It comes down to the truism that many if not most ordinary
speech events (especially in written form) have been uttered again and again.
As such it’s no problem to convert the English sentence ‘what’s for dinner?’
into German within a fraction of a second – faster than a human translator
could do. Even so the permutations of even simple and often repeated utterances
can confound the translation machine. Cultural relativism is not easy to
program – just think about the cultural baggage the term ‘dinner’ has. Equally
the rules of complex syntax confound all computational
algorithms, hence practically all reasonably sophisticated sentences will be
translated into syntactical gibberish (just try to input this very sentence
into a translation machine, say for German, and then input the German to arrive
back at English, and see what the results are!)
There is however a time honoured way around all this cultural
and linguistic diversity, namely to apply a heavy dose of cultural and
linguistic imperialism. If we all think, speak and act the same, the
statistical probabilities will be very high that translation and knowledge
transmission can be programmed successfully – i.e., we all will behave like a
robot. The German language has a nice word for this process: gleichschalten (which Google Translate
renders as ‘to force in line …’). Nazi-Germany, by applying brutal force, tried
but failed. Now it’s the English world’s turn, using more subtle devices. No
wonder ‘dinner for one’ is one of the most watched English-language comedy
clips in Germany. Many a German speaker will simply adopt ‘dinner’ as a German
word just like the French accommodate ‘le weekend’.
English as a modern lingua franca is the medium of
globalization, comparable perhaps to how Latin was the scholastic lingua franca
in pre-industrial Europe. The consequences are clear: if all the world’s
scientists program AI in the English medium, progress will be rapid. As with
many science applications, the outcomes can be either beneficial or more often
than not turn out to be weapons of mass destruction. At the lower level we can
look forward to applications as described below (Johnson et al. 2016):
A researcher from Ryerson
University in Toronto studied the use of playful robots in language practice
for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). After recording interactions
between the learners and robots, the researcher concluded that robots enable
children with ASD to communicate because of their low stimulus levels and
predictable behaviors.
Note the advantage of ‘predictable behaviours’. Applied to
higher levels this should have alarm bells ringing, à la Chomsky who debunked
‘language as behaviour’ comparing it to fascist practices we just described in
German as gleichschalten as (to force
in line …). As such the danger of AI is not that robots installed with AI will
outsmart human intelligence but that the human intelligence of the masses will
be reduced to AI, as predictable human machines that operates on the level of
Pavlovian stimulus and response – the dream come true for the advertising
industry and associated demagogues. Wilhelm Reich explained all this very well
in his seminal Mass Psychology of Fascism.
The AI programmers will become science nerds that will create an Orwellian
nightmare in which the billions of human robots perform tasks at the pleasure
of a few human masters – who themselves remain aloof of AI. All the same there
will also be quite a few genuine robots that perform all the tasks even human
robots are unable to do, like assembling precision machinery that can land on
comets and do genome testing in three seconds flat.
The only hope is that the human masters themselves will
engender a group of revolutionaries who will liberate the masses from
oppression and restore their human intelligence to the level of shared social
justice and common wealth. That the human robots will rise up, Spartacus-like,
is an ever diminishing scenario exactly because AI is such an effective weapon
to control and subjugate vast masses of people. Just ask yourself why the
proverbial 99% remain utterly despondent in the face of an ever widening gap
between the very few super-rich oligarchs and the billions of the ‘prekariat’
(a term invented by a German sociologist in order to up-date the ‘proletariat’).
Only human intelligence can defeat the pseudo-intelligence that makes up the 1%
who use AI as well as age-old primitive violence in equal measure to maintain
the status-quo. Of course, in the meantime, there will be many a success story
à la Orwell’s 1984 whereby the lone
revolutionary reads The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism only to find that such
works are written by agent-provocateurs in order to catch people who might
harbour criminal thoughts against Big Brother. Note that in 2016 ‘Oligarchical
Collectivism’ is a very apt term to describe the global madhouse, or is it not?
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Estrada, V.,
Freeman, A., and Hall, C. (2016). NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education
Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
