Humanity and modernity: A balancing act

Dear Jovan
Dear Jovan,

Your post is predicated on the Greek wisdom that we can “know ourselves.” What if this societal fundamental assumption was wrong?

In our past, the earth was the centre of the universe and humans the top and unique species. Within the species, we viewed ourselves as individuals uniquely endowed as rational and ethical agents. We could emerge from Plato’s cave into the eternal light of truth.

“Modernity” has shown this lofty self-regard to be an illusion. Humanity may in fact be evolving biologically and culturally toward a “survival of the friendliest.” In this process, the survival of the social group, not the individual, is central.

As individuals, we seek meaning for inner stability. Reality, however, is chaotic – multicausal and unpredictable. We bridge this contradiction through illusions that preserve meaning while we are, in fact, unconsciously adapting. Adaptation by illusion rather than a rational process.

You write: “From time immemorial, we have been making choices using our brains (logos), our hearts (ethos), and our gut (pathos). Those choices, good or bad, were ours, and ours alone.” Good rhetoric, Jovan, but little else. Show me the underlying neural networks. Were we to apply current scientific knowledge about the inner workings of the self to these terms, they would dissolve like morning mist – terms best committed to the dust heap of intellectual history.
May I further remind you that hailed concepts like “liberty” are rather empty vessels? Locke, whom you place in the middle of your drawing, spouts these unalienable rights: Life, Liberty, and Property. Life is shorthand for economic choices; liberty for political choices; at this level of generality, property is entitlement – which contradicts both liberty and life. I could happily go on punching holes into this or any other system of classical values. Finally, remember Gödel. My conclusion? Rather than leaving Plato’s cave, we have to accept that we can’t separate ourselves from our shadows. They make us what we are. And it’s a mess.

Be what may, the classical system furthermore fails properly to address the core issue of “aggregation of individual choices.” For we are a hyper-social species and we must move in some way from personal choices to common action. How to we move from micro-choice to macro- or social choice? Is the process one of numerical addition (neo-cons) or an emergent property of the social system (Greber)? We have no proper answer – democracy is a weak reed on which to hang our understanding of the aggregation process.

So, two illusions thus underlie your system: the illusion of personal choice, and the illusion of rational collective choice. True, we have not fared badly so far. Yet remember: past performance is no indicative of future results.

You speak of the dangers of AI – “machines start to gradually replace our human agency to choose.” What else is new? Your Axial Age saw the emergence of the first social algorithms – religion. They have manipulated us for two-thousand years. The only question to me is: which works better today?

Consequences, oh! Consequences!

Let’s go back to individual choice. There is always a good and a true reason in what we do. “Modernity” is beginning to explore and laying bare this useful contradiction by recording action rather than proclaimed intention. You state yourself: “They started gathering enormous amounts of data and more importantly, they started gathering data about us – what we like, what we search for, what we purchase, where we go, and how we get there. The algorithms behind the machines came to know us better than we know ourselves.” Here, I’d say, tendentially we’ll be faring better with AI than from philosophers pontificating from personal experience.
The next step is more complicated.
AI does not limit itself to being descriptive. It ambitions prescription, i.e. to move individuals and groups or society as a whole in a revealed or preferred direction. At best, it influences and facilitates the social consensus building. So far, we know little or nothing about the aggregation process it uses. It is a dark hole.

This situation has consequences.

The immediate downside in my view is the base predictive error – overreach. AI’s knowledge about our choices may still be ruefully inadequate (it’s my sense, at the moment). The sorcerer’s apprentice story comes to mind. He knew how trigger but not how to stop the process: with AI, there is wizened wizard handy to stop the impending obvious error.

As influencer, AI is not much different from the influencing systems of the Axial Age – the religious systems. It shares with them the universal ambition. As it advances over time, it may target lesser groups and foster tribalism. We know little of the scalar potential here.

Malevolence is the main downside. A bully may get hold of the AI process to foster his own ends. Ever since the paleolithic, there has been tension between the social group and the bully. So far, we have succeeded in keeping them at bay. This was the speediest way.

The Axial Age codified our collective intent of getting rid of bullies by placing the influencer role in the transcendent realm. In the event, bullies took over the system. Religion came to underpin inherited authoritarianism – mainly based on fear all around.

With the ‘Enlightenment,’ we introduced the markets as a replacement for authority. Up to a point, it was chasing the devil with Beelzebub. The capitalists became the (hidden) kings. Today, we worship efficiency above all else. As a corollary, economic and political war was waged against the periphery (imperialism) and future generations (nature exploited as resource). Inequality accumulated to a breaking point.

There were short-term advantages, indeed: we slowed down the process of social choice. As calculating interest replaced subjective emotions, religious wars faded and we created a good life for many.

Today, AI can assist the bullies in setting up an authoritarianism of a different form altogether. No longer based on wholesale fear but on tailor-made inducements. We see its beginnings in China. A form of social eugenics. Humanity’s “goodness paradox” writ in code.

I’ll forego judgment in favour of further observation and deeper understanding. So, I’ll borrow Zho Enlai’s favourite answer to questions like yours: “too early to tell.”

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