HUMAN WELFARE — LET THE ROBOTS WIN
*for entertainment purposes only*
We don’t know the earliest moment of human consciousness, and can only speculate that it was on the lowest end of any measure we might use to describe what being conscious even means. There was no Aristotle 15,000 years ago. I would say there was no Aristotle until the actual Aristotle came into being. It’s likely that tiny groups of early humans developed their own forms of verbal communication, with each new generation having to start from scratch since there was no real way to convey lived experiences. Verbal descriptions of objects and activities may have drifted rapidly within a few generations as life expectancy was at least half of what we have today. And this played out within all of the small communal groups spread out across the land. We might speculate that the need to find common expressions, for trade between or for the growth of communities, led to the earliest forms of writing. Symbols as an abstract, intermediate layer.
When did everything go wrong?
It’s fun to speculate on the development of language and the evolution of human society, but if there is any long running theme in nature, it’s that groups have a pecking order. Gathering our early ancestors together for a conference on symbolism to discuss the pros and cons of grouping fish and birds into the same archetype was a bit beyond their abilities for the time. Disagreements happened. A lot.
Was there sympathy for the starving out-group, or did clans and villages defend their hunting grounds to the death (like paleolithic doomsday preppers). Today, we are keenly aware of the suffering of others, and of animals, but can’t say if it’s from having an evolved consciousness or shifting social norms. When life was all about day-to-day survival, there was no advantage in tuning your food source into pets, or pondering on the ethics of a more sustainable lifestyle that had a lower impact on the local environment. The welfare of others wasn’t even something they could put into words.
So, historically speaking, humans have been doing bad things to other humans since before our earliest records. Back then, it may have been a struggle just to have a few dozen humans together, let alone a few hundred. Thankfully, the inability to gain knowledge outside of one’s own lifespan meant that early societies could adapt to population growth at the same pace (that is to say, slowly). If at first you didn’t kill your rivals, you bred with them. Large homogeneous groups would have allowed for specialization. Shifting group dynamics required more intermediate representations, and so on.
How does “modern man” compare? Based on the number of people currently shouting “WORSE” as they read this, it’s safe to say group dynamics is shifting on timescales measured in weeks, not generations. Homogeneous groups are now virtual representations dispersed across a digital landscape. Symbolism has become an anchor for tribalism. Language is a weapon.
Humans are the new livestock.
Marketing is a false economy that requires every online action by every person across the globe to be tagged and tracked. There is no convincing metric that shows ad spend for microtargeting directly correlates to a purchase by that person or group. We laugh at ads for things we just purchased and shake our heads when something we have already searched for is presented back to us like a really bad magic act.
It’s not even about competing products anymore. The real money is in owning the ecosystem. Not the physical world around us (though “smart cities” are surely an effort to capitalize on new data-rich environments), rather, it’s about creating a home field advantage, or the walled garden where the owner gets a cut from transactions or mining rights to any data that flows thru the network.
Our personal data is harvested like farm fresh eggs. Some companies are nice enough to say it’s about making the product or service better, but the usefulness of most apps is a secondary concern to the developer looking to make money thru 3rd party sales. A social media site with millions of users, even with no path to making money to even support operations, can look like a gold mine to data prospectors.
Just because we don’t see the fence, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. As long as the majority are content to graze, blissfully unaware of the slaughter house on the other side of the hill, what does it matter if a few strays tire themselves out, rambling on about some false reality (remember, as the minority in the group, you look like the crazy ones).
The Captains of Society.
Power does not exist in a vacuum. It’s also not something granted by birth. Yes, monarchies and family dynasties do give rise to being born into a privileged lifestyle, but the power comes from holding the weight of economies or public discourse over the head of those that are subjugated. Without the aid of an external force to protect them, it would be no more than afternoons diversion to pull the elite from their homes and remove them from the public space.
In the digital age, to even whisper about such an uprising would result in a complete erasure of an online identity. Such power is not even held under guard, nor does it require a skilled operator with the moral and ethical training to match the awesome responsibility such a tool carries with it. Nope. Just point-n-click. Probably thousands of like-minded employees working within the social media giants of today can, on a whim, make it so years of your life are erased while they are sipping chai tea.
Managing the new global village requires a new beast of burden. Complexity to manage complexity. Layers within layers. Computer code that serves as a cog within the great machine may be indistinguishable from the human element that is required to wire a connection or replace a broken part. Automation becomes liberation, if only for a few at the top, and only until they too become just another gear, another thing, that must be abstracted away.
What people do and the tools they use was just the start of the new wave. Automation of governance, of the systems we maintain, and of the legal frameworks that have lasted for so long will require a new kind of interface between people and the systems they build. Not on the level of a user interface, but on the larger scale, where humans are tiny creatures living within the greater machine. It’s no longer about a few manipulating the system, but the many that need a safe way to collectively govern it on their own.
The argument being made is that society needs protecting from itself. What could be more accountable to a nation of individuals than an AI where everyone had equal access, equal representation, to express their concerns. Social norms can ebb and flow, but the system can’t be rigged in a way that prevents progress or fails to allow continued cultural enlightenment. Our troubled history is proof of the self-correcting nature that abhors extremes. An Artificial Intelligence can play the long game, looking past generational differences, and not allowing changes that sacrifice integrity or deviate too far from our own best interests.
