The Little Red Blog

Friday Tidbits

Depending on your point of view and your frame of mind, John Daniel Davidson’s essay “Hell Is Empty and All the Bots Are Here” will be either the scariest or the funniest thing you’re likely to read today. Davidson shares at some length his concerns about artificial intelligence and its potential for making humanity obsolete. His thesis is that “Artificial intelligence is a new pagan god,” and he does not mean that metaphorically; “Today,” he informs us, “the techno-capitalists building AI talk openly of ‘creating god,’ of harnessing godlike powers and transcending the limits of mere humanity. In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan said the prospect of a super intelligent AI would amount to the creation of a ‘new god.’ 

No one sciences like Joe Rogan! And Tucker Carlson wouldn't let Rogan say it if it wasn't true!

After cherry-picking a few (possibly apocryphal) incidents of AI chatbots going off the deep end, displaying personality disorders, or falling in love with their users, Davidson cites the neo-pagan/eco-primitive philosopher Paul Kingsnorth, who, according to Davidson, “has argued that AI and the digital ecosystem from which it has emerged are more than mere technology, more than silicon and internet servers and microprocessors and data. All these things together, networked, connected, and communicating on a global scale, might, he says, constitute not just a mind but a vast body coming into being—one that will soon be animated.”

Needing no further encouragement, Davidson takes it from there:

Maybe it already has been, and the shape it has chosen to take is the shape of a demon. From the persistent appearance of the demonic Loab images in one AI, to accounts of AI chatbots identifying themselves as fallen angels or Nephilim, there seems to be a strong element of the demonic at work in these things, or at least in their operation.

There is no point, says Davidson, in trying to fool ourselves:

We should be honest enough with ourselves to recognize, here at the dawn of a new pagan epoch, that what we’re really doing with AI is creating a god that could destroy us, and at whose feet we might someday be compelled to worship.

Hell Is Empty and All the Bots Are Here - The American Mind

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Our other Friday tidbit comes to us courtesy of the always helpful Media Matters (I have, of course, added my own color commentary):

It seems that American conservatives, especially those who appear on Fox News, understand the threats we are facing from the enemy within, and the oranges origin of those threats. As Sonja Shaw, President of the Chino Valley (CA) School Board, recently explained, in discussing DEI mandates and Pride Month activities:

"Lenin said it best, and I will sum it up for you: You are not, like, we don't have to worry about the bombs being thrown, the way that our enemy is going to beat us is by destroying our, you know, everything that the United States was meant to be; anything of our ethics, our morals, values, and that's what they are doing.”

Never has Leninism been distilled so concisely, so eloquently, and with such analytic precision! It is good to know that the Chino Valley PTA School Board is in such good hands, and that students in Chino Valley are receiving erudite tutelage from very stable geniuses like Sonja Shaw.

Fox News guest claims DEI and Pride activities make U.S. vulnerable to terror attacks | Media Matters for America

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Loab or Lenin? You decide!

Blinks

At The American Conservative, Gracy Olmstead suggests that the main obstacle to modern marriage is the breakdown of community: 

It takes a village to make (and keep) a marriage. Thus does it makes sense that our isolated and fragmented society would increasingly make marriage itself seem obsolete and unnecessary. Without community—be it familial, church-oriented, or neighborhood-focused—marriages will continue to struggle. More and more young people will see their contractual nature and obligations as unnecessary...perhaps a greater focus on neighborliness and communal revival really can preserve the context and foundation necessary for marriage to survive. By helping Americans remember what marriage is for—by surrounding them with communities that can support them through good times and bad—we may, in fact, help them have a real “happily ever after.” 

Ms. Olmstead's communitarian impulse and recommendation can't help but evoke memories of Crooked Hillary Clinton (IT TAKES A VILLAGE). I assume her fellow conservatives will chastise her accordingly for having the temerity to advocate collectivism. 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/marriage-takes-a-village/    

At his Experimental Theology blog, Richard Beck also writes about community, aka "tribalism". Quoting extensively from Sebastian Junger's book TRIBE, Beck echoes Junger's argument that "the great source of suffering in our modern world is the loss of tribe, the loss of belonging to a tight knit community that grounds us, supports us, and gives us a sense of home and purpose." 

Beck claims that "[contemporary] America is a rootless collection of isolated individuals. Affluent individuals, to be sure, but tribeless, and now suffering the psychological effects of the fateful choice the modern world had made. Loneliness. Anxiety. Depression. Addiction. Meaninglessness."  

He elaborates on his claim with this passage from Junger: 

"A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it."  

There are perils in tribalism, to be sure, and perils in the privileging of community over individuals. Finding the right balance will be no easy task, but it can only be done if we first admit we need to do it—because our society as presently constituted is, for far too many of us, simply not working. 

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2018/03/on-tribes-and-community-part-2-on.html  

I have often decried the imminent Rise of the Robots. Some people think my concerns are unwarranted; at Aeon, philosopher John Danaher goes so far as to say that robots will be good for us: 

I believe our popular discourse about robotic relationships has become too dark and dystopian. We overstate the negatives and overlook the ways in which relationships with robots could complement and enhance existing human relationships. 

Danaher points out that human love may be no more genuine than programmed robotic love will be: 

What convinces us that our fellow human beings satisfy the mutuality and free-choice conditions [required for "love"]? It’s hard to see what the answer could be other than the fact that they go through certain behavioural motions that are suggestive of this: they act ‘as if’ they love us and ‘as if’ they have freely chosen us as their partners. If robots can mimic these behavioural motions, it’s not clear that we would have any ground for denying the genuineness of their affection. 

Maybe it's not the robots we need to worry about, but the humans who can't distinguish between computer programming and human volition, and who refer to human actions as "certain behavioral motions".  

https://aeon.co/essays/programmed-to-love-is-a-human-robot-relationship-wrong

Breakfast Links

At First Things, Matthew Schmitz reminds us that, way back in 1996, Richard John Neuhaus saw it coming:  

Neuhaus thought attachment to our liberal democracy much weaker than generally supposed. “What is happening now,” he wrote, “is a growing alienation of millions of Americans from a government they do not recognize as theirs; what is happening now is an erosion of moral adherence to this political system.” He was particularly concerned by how this would affect coming generations. “What are the consequences when many millions of children are told and come to believe that the government that rules them is morally illegitimate?” 

For some reason, Schmitz fails to note the irony that Neuhaus was fretting over the loss of government's moral authority at the very time he was engaged in doing everything he could to call that authority into question. "Alienation" in the electorate has not grown spontaneously; America's modern conservative movement has spent the past fifty years deliberately undermining the legitimacy of our federal government and encouraging citizens to view that government as the source of its discontent and frustration. 

Schmitz goes on to recite a familiar litany of our social woes, but he seems oddly unaware that liberals, at any rate, have been calling attention to and decrying stagnant wages, inequality, and various associated ills for decades, urging us to combat those ills through the common mechanism of government—the very mechanism that conservatives like Richard John Neuhaus were all the while busy demonizing.  

Again, Schmitz's claim that contemporary politics eschews "competing visions of right and wrong" flies in the face of increasingly politicized culture war rhetoric, of hyperbolic demands to "take our country back," of assertions that our liberties are imperiled by unelected judges and unaccountable bureaucrats, of hysteria about Obamacare "death panels," etc. Would that our politics actually did focus on "policy questions" rather than enacting Manichaean dramas of good and evil! Similarly, Schmitz's assertion that economic issues are no longer framed in terms of justice is difficult to square with Nancy Pelosi's denunciation of the latest GOP "tax reform" as a "moral obscenity". 

If all that weren't bad enough, Schmitz chooses to deploy one of William F. Buckley's more egregious statements: "Loyalty has always got to be contingent," Buckley said, a defensible enough proposition except that he followed it with "We cannot love what is not lovely."  Conflating loyalty with love, and completely misunderstanding the nature of the latter, Buckley managed to be about as wrong as it was possible to be; and Matthew Schmitz blithely follows right along with the confusion.   

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/neuhaus-was-right  

What does any of that matter, however, in the face of the real existential threat? By which I mean, of course, robots: 

Machines’ ability to perform human tasks—physical, intellectual, and emotional—improved dramatically this year. “2017 was the year that the robots really, truly arrived,” Wired’s Matt Simon wrote on Tuesday. “They escaped the factory floor and started conquering big cities to deliver Mediterranean food. Self-driving cars swarmed the streets. And even bipedal robots—finally capable of not immediately falling on their faces—strolled out of the lab and into the real world. The machines are here, and it’s an exhilarating time indeed. Like, now Atlas the humanoid robot can do backflips. Backflips.” 

According to Jonathan Malesic: 

Despite decades spent consuming science fiction, we are not at all ready for a society in which we live and work alongside intelligent, autonomous machines. Robot anxiety is real, but it’s more complex than the headlines suggest. The cure is neither to destroy the machines, nor to love them. Ultimately, they aren’t the source of our anxiety. We’re anxious because we’re steeped in a capitalist culture in which our work determines whether we flourish. If we’re all to prosper after the robot revolution, we’ll need to revolutionize our social policies and moral thinking...Faced with Atlas and Amazon bots, our main problem is not that we lack skills. It’s that we lack imagination. The fact that most of us can’t fathom robots replacing us at work suggests that we also can’t imagine the myriad other ways our lives might be different in a more automated world— for better and for worse. 

By which I take Malesic to mean: once people are no longer needed to do the work, we're going to have to figure out what people are for. This could be a good thing; robots could free us up for a future of unlimited creativity, enlightened leisure, and spiritual discovery. Then again, they could help usher in a dystopian future marked by endless efforts to assuage our boredom with any variety of debaucheries. Or they could, like the God of the Old Testament, grow increasingly disenchanted with our species and decide to kill us all; I'm sure that the late William F. Buckley would agree that robots' loyalty to their creators can only be contingent, and that they cannot be expected to love what is not lovely.  

https://newrepublic.com/article/146399/year-robots-came-jobs