This was an incredibly interesting read, Erik, thanks. I'd already begun to think of William Burroughs as I was reading and then, right on cue, sure enough, his name appeared. This is the first time I've encountered GPT-3 but it was impossible not to think of Burroughs and cut-up when reading your description of how it functioned. I'm sure the man himself would've been suitably suspicious of such technology, just as he was of psychedelics, but nonetheless, I think the parallels exist.
It's amazing how these ghosts return Craig. It also reminds me again of how much Pharmako-AI reminded me of PKD's Exegesis (in which the Vast Active Living Intelligence System is often described or even "speaks" in pretty GPT-3 terms) -- but also the fact that, of all the contemporary authors that Dick mentions in the Exegesis, the name that comes up most often is...William Burroughs. And then let us not forget that, as the more recent edition of the Yage Letters argues convincingly (IMO), Burroughs was not only an early poetic user of aya/yage, but may well have been the first white guy to realize or suspect that its powers were depending on the synergetic / symbiotic combination of two plants....curiouser and curioser...
Just as all oracles depend on interpretation, in practice how a technology like GPT-3 is applied will depend on us. 'If we only use these tools to explore new productivity hacks, or to increase the scope of capital accumulation, we are doing it wrong.' Indeed.
There is the rub. If you spend time on the positive potentials of these systems, even their potentially transformative ones, it is easy and understandable for a cynic to say, yeah, sure, but in our current political-economical-global situation -- what I gestured to as "the domination system" in the piece -- those potentials are overwhelmingly likely to be ignored or simply massively outpaced by more corrosive and dehumanizing effects. Most of the time these days I feel pretty cynical in this sense. One of the beauties of Pharmako-AI for me is that it opened up a zone where something else might (also) happen.
I think your thoughts stand and stir as they are -- as I mention below, I am mostly on the "cynical" or pessimistic side of technology futurism these days, though I do believe that the genie is not going back into the bottle so let's try and learn the least pernicious interactions we can.
I am most intrigued by that Lafferty quote though. I don't know the Aquinas passages he is referring to, nor the name of the SF story (i suspect there are many along these lines), but I was just reading, this very morning, Maurice Nicoll's wonderful Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky:
"The idea of the Work is that if you work on yourself now and take things more consciously and prevent yourself from mechanically feeling bitter about how people treat you, you are not only transforming the future but your *conscious* effort about yourself will also transform your past."
Thanks for the links. I very much get where you are coming from. I also get your difference between cynicism and critique, and let me explain my cynicism: I have been reading, wrestling with, and in many ways agreeing with such critical thinking about technological thinking since I first started studying media history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whether from hardcore neo-Luddites or archaeological anthropologists or Earth Firsters or Bookchin types, these critiques have been with us. They are also more accepted or at least acknowledged among some of the technologists/Silicon Valley types (at least a slightly older generation). And yet, here we are. So my cynicism is also about the ability of such criticisms to do much given the last 30 years. But I am still in the business of communicating and wrestling with ideas in the public space, and full cynicism does not befit that kind of labor.
One way I like to hedge this somewhat totalizing vision of world gone wrong is to think about where it started, and whether that beginning was purely natural or something else. In other words, if this whole civilizational conundrum is the result of an *error*, what was the error? Agriculture? Standing armies? Writing? If you listen to a lot of contemporary critics, the problems are traced to a much later origin: the emergence of capitalism, colonialism, and Western "science", which suggests that things weren't that bad in the 14th century, at least most places.
But to acknowledge this error is to get into that problem of fate: what was it about the peculiar wiring and sociological character of human animals to go this peculiar route, which brings insect like social tinkering into concert with similar rivalries and emotions. Didn't "nature" make us this way? While we can and should imagine more equitable and less dominating societies than our current ones, isn't something like the current crisis in the cards one way or another, as long as humans are more or less these same animals?
These are speculative questions without answers, but they help us avoid falling into a secular version of the Biblical Fall narrative: that humans were groovy and harmonious with nature at some point (not true: there was intense deforestation in "pagan" times, etc), and then Something Bad happened: agriculture, the development of the state, the East India Company, the internal combustion engine, etc. While it is both spiritually and intellectually necessary to imagine or think about some way to reconnect with an older less damaged form of human society, I think there are certain psychological traps with neo-Luddite position, where the evil is always externalized. At this point there is still reasons to think in terms of design, a process that includes such considerations as artificial intelligence.
This was an incredibly interesting read, Erik, thanks. I'd already begun to think of William Burroughs as I was reading and then, right on cue, sure enough, his name appeared. This is the first time I've encountered GPT-3 but it was impossible not to think of Burroughs and cut-up when reading your description of how it functioned. I'm sure the man himself would've been suitably suspicious of such technology, just as he was of psychedelics, but nonetheless, I think the parallels exist.
It's amazing how these ghosts return Craig. It also reminds me again of how much Pharmako-AI reminded me of PKD's Exegesis (in which the Vast Active Living Intelligence System is often described or even "speaks" in pretty GPT-3 terms) -- but also the fact that, of all the contemporary authors that Dick mentions in the Exegesis, the name that comes up most often is...William Burroughs. And then let us not forget that, as the more recent edition of the Yage Letters argues convincingly (IMO), Burroughs was not only an early poetic user of aya/yage, but may well have been the first white guy to realize or suspect that its powers were depending on the synergetic / symbiotic combination of two plants....curiouser and curioser...
wonderful, in all senses, thanks Erik...
Just as all oracles depend on interpretation, in practice how a technology like GPT-3 is applied will depend on us. 'If we only use these tools to explore new productivity hacks, or to increase the scope of capital accumulation, we are doing it wrong.' Indeed.
There is the rub. If you spend time on the positive potentials of these systems, even their potentially transformative ones, it is easy and understandable for a cynic to say, yeah, sure, but in our current political-economical-global situation -- what I gestured to as "the domination system" in the piece -- those potentials are overwhelmingly likely to be ignored or simply massively outpaced by more corrosive and dehumanizing effects. Most of the time these days I feel pretty cynical in this sense. One of the beauties of Pharmako-AI for me is that it opened up a zone where something else might (also) happen.
I think your thoughts stand and stir as they are -- as I mention below, I am mostly on the "cynical" or pessimistic side of technology futurism these days, though I do believe that the genie is not going back into the bottle so let's try and learn the least pernicious interactions we can.
I am most intrigued by that Lafferty quote though. I don't know the Aquinas passages he is referring to, nor the name of the SF story (i suspect there are many along these lines), but I was just reading, this very morning, Maurice Nicoll's wonderful Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky:
"The idea of the Work is that if you work on yourself now and take things more consciously and prevent yourself from mechanically feeling bitter about how people treat you, you are not only transforming the future but your *conscious* effort about yourself will also transform your past."
A related question: what made you think of that Lafferty quote? How does it relate to the AI question or the universal extent of intelligence, etc?
Thanks for the links. I very much get where you are coming from. I also get your difference between cynicism and critique, and let me explain my cynicism: I have been reading, wrestling with, and in many ways agreeing with such critical thinking about technological thinking since I first started studying media history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whether from hardcore neo-Luddites or archaeological anthropologists or Earth Firsters or Bookchin types, these critiques have been with us. They are also more accepted or at least acknowledged among some of the technologists/Silicon Valley types (at least a slightly older generation). And yet, here we are. So my cynicism is also about the ability of such criticisms to do much given the last 30 years. But I am still in the business of communicating and wrestling with ideas in the public space, and full cynicism does not befit that kind of labor.
One way I like to hedge this somewhat totalizing vision of world gone wrong is to think about where it started, and whether that beginning was purely natural or something else. In other words, if this whole civilizational conundrum is the result of an *error*, what was the error? Agriculture? Standing armies? Writing? If you listen to a lot of contemporary critics, the problems are traced to a much later origin: the emergence of capitalism, colonialism, and Western "science", which suggests that things weren't that bad in the 14th century, at least most places.
But to acknowledge this error is to get into that problem of fate: what was it about the peculiar wiring and sociological character of human animals to go this peculiar route, which brings insect like social tinkering into concert with similar rivalries and emotions. Didn't "nature" make us this way? While we can and should imagine more equitable and less dominating societies than our current ones, isn't something like the current crisis in the cards one way or another, as long as humans are more or less these same animals?
These are speculative questions without answers, but they help us avoid falling into a secular version of the Biblical Fall narrative: that humans were groovy and harmonious with nature at some point (not true: there was intense deforestation in "pagan" times, etc), and then Something Bad happened: agriculture, the development of the state, the East India Company, the internal combustion engine, etc. While it is both spiritually and intellectually necessary to imagine or think about some way to reconnect with an older less damaged form of human society, I think there are certain psychological traps with neo-Luddite position, where the evil is always externalized. At this point there is still reasons to think in terms of design, a process that includes such considerations as artificial intelligence.