Chatbots Gone Wild!

Although I’m not paying much attention to breathless reports about imminent strong AI, the Singularity, and computers already able to “model” human cognition and perform “impressive” feats of creativity (e.g., responding to prompts and creating “artworks” — scare quotes intended), recent news reports that chatbots are harassing, gaslighting, and threatening users just makes me laugh. I’ve never wandered over to that space, don’t know how to connect, and don’t plan to test drive for verification. Isn’t it obvious to users that they’re interacting with a computer? Chatbots are natural-language simulators within computers, right? Why take them seriously (other than perhaps their potential effects on children and those of diminished capacity)? I also find it unsurprising that, if a chatbot is designed to resemble error-prone human cognition/behavior, it would quickly become an asshole, go insane, or both. (Designers accidentally got that aspect right. D’oh!) That trajectory is a perfect embodiment of the race to the bottom of the brain stem (try searching that phrase) that keeps sane observers like me from indulging in caustic online interactions. Hell no, I won’t go.

The conventional demonstration that strong AI has arisen (e.g., Skynet from the Terminator movie franchise) is the Turing test, which is essentially the inability of humans to distinguish between human and computer interactions (not a machine-led extermination campaign) within limited interfaces such as text-based chat (e.g., the dreaded digital assistance that sometimes pops up on websites). Alan Turing came up with the test at the outset of computing era, so the field was arguably not yet mature enough to conceptualize a better test. I’ve always thought the test actually demonstrates the fallibility of human discernment, not the arrival of some fabled ghost in the machine. At present, chatbots may be fooling no one into believing that actual machine intelligence is present on the other side of the conversation, but it’s a fair expectation that further iterations (i.e., ChatBot 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.) will improve. Readers can decide whether that improvement will be progress toward strong AI or merely better ability to fool human interlocutors.

Chatbots gone wild offer philosophical fodder for further inquiry into ebbing humanity as the drive toward trans- and post-human technology continue refining and redefining the dystopian future. What about chatbots make interacting with them hypnotic rather than frivolous — something wise thinkers immediately discard or even avoid? Why are some humans drawn to virtual experience rather than, say, staying rooted in human and animal interactions, our ancestral orientation? The marketplace already rejected (for now) the Google Glass and Facebook’s Meta resoundingly. I haven’t hit upon satisfactory answers to those questions, but my suspicion is that immersion in some vicarious fictions (e.g., novels, TV, and movies) fits well into narrative-styled cognition while other media trigger revulsion as one descends into the so-called Uncanny Valley — an unfamiliar term when I first blogged about it though it has been trending of late.

If readers want a really deep dive into this philosophical area — the dark implications of strong AI and an abiding human desire to embrace and enter false virtual reality — I recommend a lengthy 7-part Web series called “Mere Simulacrity” hosted by Sovereign Nations. The episodes I’ve seen feature James Lindsay and explore secret hermetic religions operating for millennia already alongside recognized religions. The secret cults share with tech companies two principal objectives: (1) simulation and/or falsification of reality and (2) desire to transform and/or reveal humans as gods (i.e., ability to create life). It’s pretty terrifying stuff, rather heady, and I can’t provide a reasonable summary. However, one takeaway is that by messing with both human nature and risking uncontrollable downstream effects, technologists are summoning the devil.

Scroll to the Bottom

Continuing from the previous blog post, lengthy credit scrolls at the ends of movies have become a favorite hiding place for bloopers and teasers. The purpose of this practice is unclear, since I can’t pretend (unlike many reckless opinonators) to inhabit the minds of filmmakers, but it has become a fairly reliable afterthought for film-goers willing to wait out the credits. Those who depart the theater, change the channel, or click away to other content may know they are relinquishing some last tidbit to be discovered, but there’s no way to know in advance if one is being punked or pleased, or indeed if there is anything at all there. Clickbait news often employs this same technique, teasing some newsbit in the headline to entice readers to wade (or skim) through a series of (ugh!) one-sentence paragraphs to find the desired content, which sometimes is not even provided. At least one film (Monty Python’s The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (1982) as memory serves) pranked those in a rush to beat foot traffic out of the theater (back when film-going meant visiting the cinema) by having an additional thirty minutes of material after the (first) credit sequence.

This also put me in mind of Paul Harvey radio broadcasts ending with the sign-off tag line, “… the rest of the story.” Harvey supplemented the news with obscure yet interesting facts and analysis that tended to reshape one’s understanding of consensus narrative. Such reshaping is especially important as an ongoing process of clarification and revision. When served up in delectable chunks by winning personalities like Paul Harvey, supplemental material is easily absorbed. When material requires effort to obtain and/or challenges one’s beliefs, something strongly, well, the default response is probably not to bother. However, those possessing intellectual integrity welcome challenging material and indeed seek it out. Indeed, invalidation of a thesis or hypothesis is fundamental to the scientific method, and no body of work can be sequestered from scrutiny and then be held as legitimately authoritative.

Yet that’s what happens routinely in the contemporary infosphere. A government press office or corporate public relations officer issues guidance or policy in direct conflict with earlier guidance or policy and in doing so seeks to place any resulting cognitive dissonance beyond examination and out of scope. Simple matters of adjustment are not what concern me. Rather, it’s wholesale brainwashing that is of concern, when something is clear within one’s memory or plainly documented in print/video yet brazenly denied, circumvented, and deflected in favor of a new directive. The American public has contended with this repeatedly as each new presidential administration demonizes the policies of its predecessors but typically without demonstrating the self-reflection and -examination to admit, wrongdoing, responsibility, or error on anyone’s part. It’s a distinctly American phenomenon, though others have cottoned onto it and adopted the practice for themselves.

Exhaustion from separating the spin-doctored utterances of one malefactor or another from one’s own direct experience and sense-making drives many to simply give up. “Whatever you say, sir. Lemme go back to my entertainments.” The prospect of a never-ending slog through evidence and analysis only to arrive on unsteady ground, due to shift underfoot again and again with each new revelation, is particularly unsatisfactory. And as discussed before, those who nonetheless strain to achieve knowledge and understanding that reach temporary sufficiency yet remain permanently, intransigently provisional find themselves thwarted by those in the employ of organizations willing and eager to game information systems in the service of their not-even-hidden agendas. Alternative dangers for the muddled thinker include retreating into fixed ideology or collapsing into solipsism. Maybe none of it matters in the end. We can choose our beliefs from the buffet of available options without adherence to reality. We can create our own reality. Of course, that’s a description of madness, to which many have already succumbed. Why aren’t they wearing straitjackets?

The Purse Seine

Here’s a term I daresay most won’t recognize: the purse seine. My introduction was as the title of a poem by Robinson Jeffers. More generally, the term refers to a net drawn between two fishing boats to encircle a school of fish. The poem captures something both beautiful and terrifying, drawing an analogy between a fishing net and government power over human populations gathered into cities (confined by economic necessity?) rather than subsisting more simply on the bounty of nature. Whether Jeffers intends a traditional agrarian setting or a deeper, ancestral, hunter-gatherer orientation is unclear and probably doesn’t matter. The obvious counterpoint he names plainly: Progress (capital P).

My own analogy to the purse seine is more pedestrian: cloth masks strung between two ears and drawn over the face to encircle the breath in futile hope of impeding the respiratory virus that has impacted everyone worldwide for the last two years (needs no name — are you living under a rock?). Like a seine allows water to flow through, cloth masks allow airflow so that one can breathe. Otherwise, we’d all be wearing gas masks and/or hazmat suits 24/7. And therein lies the problem: given the tiny particle size of the pathogen, cloth and paper masks are akin (yes, another analogy) to using a chain-link fence to hold back the wind. That’s not what fences (or face masks) are designed to do. More robust N95 masks do little better for the very same reason. Gotta be able to breathe. Other pandemic mitigation efforts such as social distancing, lock downs, and vaccines suffer from similar lack of efficacy no matter how official pronouncements insist otherwise. The pandemic has come in similar, unstoppable, year-over-year waves in locations/states/nations that took few or no precautions and those that imposed the most egregious authoritarian measures. The comparative numbers (those not purposely distorted beyond recognition, anyway) tell the story clearly, as anyone with a principled understanding of infectious disease could well have anticipated considering humans are a hypersocial species packed into dense population centers (compared to our agrarian past).

Although these are statements of the obvious, at least to me, I’ve broken my previous silence on the pandemic and surmise I’m probably tempting the censors and trolls. I’m not giving advice, and others can of course disagree; I’ve no particular issue with principled disagreement. Decide for yourself what to do. I do have a problem, however, with self-censorship (read: cowardice). So although this blog post is a rather oblique way of saying that the putative consensus narrative is a giant, shifting pile of horse pucky (disintegrating further into nothingness with each passing day), please exercise your synapses and evaluate the evidence best you can despite official channels (and plenty of water carriers) herding and bullying everyone toward conclusions that make utterly no sense in terms of public health.

Living in Perpetual Fear

Although disinclined to take the optimistic perspective inhabited by bright-siders, I’m nonetheless unable to live in a state of perpetual fear that would to façile thinkers be more fitting for a pessimist. Yet unrelenting fear is the dominant approach, with every major media outlet constantly stoking a toxic combination of fear and hatred, as though activation and ongoing conditioning of the lizard brain (i.e., the amygdala — or maybe not) in everyone were worthy of the endeavor rather than it being a limited instinctual response, leaping to the fore only when immediate threat presents. I can’t guess the motivations of purveyors of constant fear to discern an endgame, but a few of the dynamics are clear enough to observe.

First thing that comes to mind is that the U.S. in the 1930s and 40s was pacifist and isolationist. Recent memory of the Great War was still keenly felt, and with the difficulties of the 1929 Crash and ensuing Great Depression still very must present, the prospect of engaging in a new, unlimited war (even over there) was not at all attractive to the citizenry. Of course, political leaders always regard (not) entering into war somewhat differently, maybe in terms of opportunity cost. Hard to say. Whether by hook or by crook (I don’t actually know whether advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was suppressed), the U.S. was handily drawn into the war, and a variety of world-historical developments followed that promoted the U.S. (and its sprawling, unacknowledged empire) into the global hegemon, at least after the Soviet Union collapsed and before China rose from a predominantly peasant culture into world economic power. A not-so-subtle hindsight lesson was learned, namely, that against widespread public sentiment and at great cost, the war effort could (not would) provide substantial benefits (if ill-gotten and of questionable desirability).

None of the intervening wars (never declared) or Wars for Dummies (e.g., the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on drugs) provided similar benefits except to government agencies and careerist administrators. Nor did the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks or subsequent undeclared wars and bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere provide benefits. All were massive boondoggles with substantial destruction and loss of life. Yet after 9/11, a body of sweeping legislation was enacted without much public debate or scrutiny — “smuggled in under cover of fear” one might say. The Patriot Act and The National Defense Authorization Act are among the most notable. The conditioned response by the citizenry to perceived but not actual existential fear was consistent: desperate pleading to keep everyone safe from threat (even if it originates in the U.S. government) and tacit approval to roll back civil liberties (even though the citizenry is not itself the threat). The wisdom of the old Benjamin Franklin quote, borne out of a very different era and now rendered more nearly as a bromide, has long been lost on many Americans.

The newest omnipresent threat, literally made-to-order (at least according to some — who can really know when it comes to conspiracy), is the Covid pandemic. Nearly every talking, squawking head in government and the mainstream media (the latter now practically useless except for obvious propaganda functions) is telling everyone who still watches (video and broadcast being the dominant modes) to cower in fear of each other, reduce or refuse human contact and social function, and most of all, take the vaccine-not-really-a-vaccine followed by what is developing into a ongoing series of boosters to maintain fear and anxiety if not indeed provide medical efficacy (no good way to measure and substantiate that, anyway). The drumbeat is loud and unabated, and a large, unthinking (or spineless) portion of the citizenry, cowed and cowering, has basically joined the drum circle, spreading a social consensus that is very, well, un-American. Opinion as to other nations on similar tracks are not ventured here. Running slightly ahead of the pandemic is the mind virus of wokery and its sufferers who demand, among other things, control over others’ thoughts and speech through threats and intimidation, censorship, and social cancellation — usually in the name of safety but without any evidence how driving independent thought underground or into hiding accomplishes anything worthwhile.

Again, motivations and endgame in all this are unclear, though concentration of power to compel seems to be exhilarating. In effect, regular folks are being told, “stand on one leg; good boy; now bark like a dog; very good boy; now get used to it because this shit is never going to end but will surely escalate to intolerability.” It truly surprises me to see police forces around the world harassing, beating, and terrorizing citizens for failing to do as told, however arbitrary or questionable the order or the underlying justification. Waiting for the moment to dawn on rank-and-file officers that their monopoly on use of force is serving and protecting the wrong constituency. (Not holding my breath.) This is the stuff of dystopic novels, except that it’s not limited to fiction and frankly never was. The hotspot(s) shift in terms of time and place, but totalitarian mind and behavioral control never seems to fade or invalidate itself as one might expect. Covid passports to grant full participation in society (signalling compliance, not health) is the early step already adopted by some countries. My repeated warnings over the years of creeping fascism (more coercive style than form of government) appears to be materializing before our very eyes. I’m afraid of what portends, but with what remains of my intact mind, I can’t live in perpetual fear, come what may.

Offered Without Comment 11

From Ran Prieur (no link, note nested reply):

I was heavily into conspiracy theory in the 90’s. There was a great paper magazine, Kenn Thomas’s Steamshovel Press, that always had thoughtful and well-researched articles exploring anomalies in the dominant narrative.

Another magazine, Jim Martin’s Flatland, was more dark and paranoid but still really smart. A more popular magazine, Paranoia, was stupid but fun.

At some point, conspiracy culture shifted to grand narratives about absolute evil. This happened at the same time that superhero movies (along with Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings) took over Hollywood. The more epic and the more black-and-white the story, the more humans are drawn to it.

This is my half-baked theory: It used to be that ordinary people would accept whatever the TV said — or before that, the church. Only a few weirdos developed the skill of looking at a broad swath of potential facts, and drawing their own pictures.

It’s like seeing shapes in the clouds. It’s not just something you do or don’t do — it’s a skill you can develop, to see more shapes more easily. And now everyone is learning it.

Through the magic of the internet, everyone is discovering that they can make reality look like whatever they want. They feel like they’re finding truth, when really they’re veering off into madness.

SamuraiBeanDog replies: Except that the real issue with the current conspiracy crisis is that people are just replacing the old TV and church sources with social media and YouTube. The masses of conspiracy culture aren’t coming up with their own realities, they’re just believing whatever shit they’re told by conspiracy influencers.

Something that’s rarely said about influencers, and propaganda in general, is that they can’t change anyone’s mind — they have to work with what people already feel good about believing.

Let’s Be Evil, pt. 03

So far, this multipart blog post has trafficked in principles and generalities. Let me try now to be more specific, starting with an excerpt from Barry Lynn’s article in Harper’s Magazine titled “The Big Tech Extortion Racket” (Sept. 2020):

… around the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans began to develop technologies that could not be broken into component pieces. This was especially true of the railroad and the telegraph … Such corporations [railroad and telegraph companies] posed one overarching challenge: they charged some people more than others to get to market. They exploited their control over an essential service in order to extort money, and sometimes political favors … Americans found the answer to this problem in common law. For centuries, the owners of ferries, stagecoaches, and inns had been required to serve all customers for the same price and in the order in which they arrived. In the late nineteenth century, versions of such “common carrier” rules were applied to the new middleman corporations.

Today we rightly celebrate the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which gave Americans the power to break apart private corporations. But in many respects, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was the more important document. This act was based on the understanding that monopoly networks like the railroad and the telegraph could be used to influence the actions of people who depend on them, and hence their power must be carefully restricted …

For a century and a half, Americans used common carrier policies to ensure the rule of law in activities that depended on privately held monopolies … regulations freed Americans to take full advantage of every important network technology introduced during these years, including telephones, water and electrical services, energy pipelines, and even large, logistics-powered retailers. Citizens did not have to worry that the men who controlled the technologies involved would exploit their middleman position to steal other people’s business or disrupt balances of power.

I appreciate that Barry Lynn brings up the Interstate Commerce Act. If this legal doctrine appeared in the net neutrality debate a few years ago, it must have escaped my notice. While Internet Service Providers (ISPs) enable network access and connectivity, those utilities have not yet exhibited let’s-be-evil characteristics. Similarly, phone companies (including cell phones) and public libraries may well be eavesdropping and/or monitoring activities of the citizenry, but the real action lies elsewhere, namely, on social media networks and with online retailers. Evil is arguably concentrated in the FANG (or FAANG) corporations but has now grown to be ubiquitous in all social networks (e.g., Twitter) operating as common carriers (Zoom? Slack?) and across academe, nearly all of which have succumbed to moral panic. They are interpreting correctly, sad to observe, demands to censor and sanitize others’ no-longer-free speech appearing on their networks or within their realms. How much deeper it goes toward shaping politics and social engineering is quasi-conspiratorial and impossible for me to assess.

Much as I would prefer to believe that individuals possess the good sense to shift their activities away from social networks or turn their attention from discomfiting information sources, that does not appear to be the case. Demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces commonplace a few years ago on college campuses have instead morphed into censorious removal, deplatforming, and cancellation from the entire public sphere. Those are wrong responses in free societies, but modern institutions and technologies have gotten out of hand and outstripped the limits of normal human cognition. In short, we’re a society gone mad. So rather than accept responsibility to sort out information overflow oneself, many are demanding that others do it for them, and evil private corporations are complying (after a fashion). Moreover, calls for creation of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, rebranded as a Truth Commission and Reality Czar, could hardly be any more chillingly and fascistically bizarre. People really need someone to brainwash decide for them what is real? Has anyone at the New York Times actually read Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 and taken to heart its lessons?

Wind-Up Toys

I hate to sound a conspiratorial note, and you’re free to disregard what follows, but it seems worthwhile to take further notice of the rash of violence last week.

In a commentary by John Whitehead at The Rutherford Institute, blame for what Whitehead calls “America’s killing fields” is laid at the feet of a variety of entities, including numerous elected officials and taxpayer-funded institutions. The more important quote appearing right at the top is this:

We have long since passed the stage at which a government of wolves would give rise to a nation of sheep. As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we now have is a government of psychopaths that is actively breeding a nation of psychopathic killers. [links redacted]

While this may read as unsupported hyperbole to some, I rather suspect Whitehead tells a truth hidden in plain sight — one we refuse to acknowledge because it’s so unsavory. Seeing that Whitehead gave it book-length consideration, I’m inclined to grant his contention. One can certainly argue about intent, objectives, mechanisms, and techniques. Those are open to endless interpretation. I would rather concentrate on results, which speak for themselves. The fact is that in the U.S., Western Europe, and the Middle East, a growing number of people are in effect wind-up toys being radicalized and set loose. Significantly, recent perpetrators of violence are not only the disenfranchised but also police, current and former military, politicians, and pundits whose mindsets are not directed to diplomacy but instead establish “taking out the enemy” as the primary response to conflict. The enemy is also being redefined irrationally to include groups identified by race, religion, vocation, political persuasion, etc. (always has been, in fact, though the more virulent manifestations were driven underground for a time).

Childhood wind-up toys are my chosen metaphor because they’re mindless, pointless devices that are energized, typically by tightening a spring, and released for idle entertainment to move around and bump into things harmlessly until they sputter out. Maniacal mass killers “bump into” targets selected randomly via simple proximity to some venue associated with the killer’s pet peeve, so victims are typically in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uniformed police might be the exception. One might ask who or what is doing the winding of the spring. The pull quote above says it’s a government of psychopaths breeding yet more psychopaths. That is certainly true with respect to the ruling classes — what used to be the aristocracy in older cultures but now is more nearly a kleptocracy in the U.S. — and members of a monstrous security apparatus (military, civil police, intelligence services, etc.) now that the U.S. has effectively become a garrison state. Self-reinforcing structures have hardened over time, and their members perpetuate them. I’ve even heard suspicions that citizens are being “chipped,” that is, programmed in the sense of psyops to explode into mayhem with unpredictable certainty, though for what purpose I can only imagine.

The simpler explanation that makes more sense to me is that our culture is crazy-making. We no longer function well in a hypercomplex world — especially one so overloaded with information — without losing our grounding, our grip on truth, meaning, and value, and going mad. Contemporary demands on the nervous system have outstripped biological adaptation, so we respond to constant strain and stress with varying levels of dysfunction. No doubt some folks handle their difficulties better than others; it’s the ones who snap their springs who are of grave concern these days. Again, the mechanism isn’t all that important, as the example from Nice, France, demonstrates. Rather, it’s about loss of orientation that allows someone to rationalize killing a bunch of people all at once as somehow a good idea. Sadly, there is no solution so long as our collective attention is trained on the wrong things, perpetuating a network of negative feedback loops that makes us all loopy and a few of us highly dangerous. Welcome to the asylum.