Monthly Archives: September 2023

The Interpretation of Tech Dreams – On the EU Commission Post

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On September 14, 2023, while touring Twitter the way you might survey the ruins of Pompey, I came across a series of posts responding to this statement from the EU Commission account:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority…

What attracted critical attention was the use of the phrase, ‘risk of extinction‘ a fear of which, as Dr. Timnit Gebru alerts us (among others, mostly women researchers I can’t help but notice) lies at the heart of what Gebru calls the ´TESCREAL Bundle.’ The acronym, TESCREAL, which brings together the terms Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and Longtermism, describes an interlocked and related group of ideologies that have one idea in common: techno-utopianism (with a generous helping of eugenics and racialized ideas of what ‘intelligence’ means mixed in to make everything old new again).

Risk of extinction. It sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? The sort of phrase you hear in a Marvel movie, Robert Downey Jr, as Iron Man stands in front of a green screen and turns to one of his costumed comrades as some yet to be added animated threat approaches and screams about the risk of extinction if the animated thing isn’t stopped. There are, of course, actual existential risks; asteroids come to mind and although climate change is certainly a risk to the lives of billions and the mode of life of the industrial capitalist age upon which we depend, it might not be ‘existential’ strictly speaking (though, that’s most likely a distinction without a difference as the seas consume the most celebrated cities and uncelebrated communities).

The idea that what is called ‘AI’ – which, when all the tech industry’s glittering makeup is removed, is revealed plainly to be software, running on computers, warehoused in data centers – poses a risk of extinction requires a special kind of gullibility, self interest, and, as Dr, Gebru reminds us, supremacist delusions about human intelligence to promote, let alone believe. 

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In the picture posted to X, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, is standing at a podium before the assembled group of commissioners, presumably in the EU Commission building (the Berlaymont) in Brussels, a city I’ve visited quite a few times, regretfully. The building itself and the main hall for commissioners, are large and imposing, conveying, in glass, steel and stone, seriousness. Of course, between the idea and the act there usually falls a long shadow. How serious can this group be, I wondered, about a ‘risk of extinction’ from ‘AI’?

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To find out, I decided to look at the document referenced and trumpeted in the post, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. There’s a link to the act in the reference section below. My question was simple: is there a reference to ‘risk of extinction’ in this document? The word, ‘risk’, appears 71 times. It’s used in passages such as the following, from the overview:

The Commission proposes to establish a technology-neutral definition of AI systems in EU law and to lay down a classification for AI systems with different requirements and obligations tailored on a ‘risk-based approach’. Some AI systems presenting ‘unacceptable’ risks would be prohibited. A wide range of ‘high-risk’ AI systems would be authorised, but subject to a set of requirements and obligations to gain access to the EU market.

The emphasis is on a ‘risk based approach’ which seems sensible at first look but there are inevitable problems and objections. Some of the objections come from the corporate sector, claiming, with mind-deadening predictability, that any and all regulation hinders ‘innovation’ a word that is invoked like an incantation only not as intriguing or lyrical. More interesting critiques come from those who see risk (though, notably, not existential) and who agree something must be done but who view the EU’s act as not going far enough or going in the wrong direction. 

Here is the listing of high-risk activities and areas for algorithmic systems in the EU Artificial Intelligence Act:

o Biometric identification and categorisation of natural persons

o Management and operation of critical infrastructure

o Education and vocational training

o Employment, worker management and access to self-employment

o Access to and enjoyment of essential private services and public services and benefits

o Law enforcement

o Migration, asylum and border control management

o Administration of justice and democratic processes

Missing from this list is the risk of extinction; which, putting aside the Act’s flaws, makes sense. Including it would have been as out of place in a consideration of real-world harms as adding a concern about time traveling bandits.. And so, now we must wonder, why include the phrase, “risk of extinction” in a social media post?

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On March 22, 2023, the modestly named Future of Life Institute, an organization initially funded by the bathroom fixture toting Lord of X himself, Musk (a 10 million USD investment in 2015) whose board is as alabaster as the snows of Antarctica once were, kept afloat by donations from other tech besotted wealthies, published an open letter titled, ‘Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.’ This letter was joined by similarly themed statements from OpenAI (‘Planning for AGI and beyond’) and Microsoft (‘Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4’).

Each of these documents has received strong criticism from people, such as yours truly, and others with more notoriety and for good reason: they promote the idea that the imprecisely defined Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is not only possible, but inevitable.  Critiques of this idea – whether based on a detailed analysis of mathematics (‘Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science’) or of computational limits (The Computational Limits of Deep Learning) have the benefit of being firmly grounded in material reality. 

But as Freud might have warned us, we live in a society shaped not only by our understanding of the world as it is but also, in no small part by dreams and fantasies. White supremacists harbor the self congratulating fantasy that any random white person (well, man) is an astounding genius when compared to those not in that club. This notion endures despite innumerable and daily examples to the contrary because it serves the interests of certain individuals and groups to persist in delusion and impose this delusion on the world. The ‘risk of extinction’ fantasy has caught on because it builds on decades of fiction, like the idea of an American Dream and adds spice to an otherwise deadly serious and grounded business: controlling the tech industry’s scope of action. Journalists who ignore the actual harms of algorithmic systems rush to write stories about a ‘risk of extinction’ which is far sexier than talking about the software now called ‘AI’ that is used to deny insurance benefits or determine criminal activity.

 The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act does not explicitly reference ‘existential risk’ but the social media post using this idea is noteworthy. It shows that lurking in the background, the ideas promoted by the tech industry – by OpenAI and its paymaster Microsoft and innumerable camp followers – have seeped into the thinking of decision makers at the highest levels.

And how could it be otherwise? How flattering to think you’re rescuing the world from Skynet, the fictional, nuclear missile tossing system featured in the ‘Terminator’ franchise, rather than trying, at long last, to actually regulate Google.

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References

European Union

A European approach to artificial intelligence

EU Artificial Intelligence  Act

EU Post on X

Critique

Timnit Gebru on Tescreal (YouTube)

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares (on TESCREAL)

The EU still needs to get its AI Act together

Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science

The Computational Limits of Deep Learning

Boosterism

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

Planning for AGI and beyond

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4

The Future Circles the Drain

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There’s a story we tell ourselves, a lullaby, really, which is that science fiction is a predictor of the terrain of that magical land, always just over the horizon, ‘the future.’ This story is deeply embedded in the consciousness of US’ians, (no, I’m not calling people from the US alone ‘Americans’ as if the rest of the Americas is in another hemisphere) even by people who don’t care for stories about spacecraft, robots and malevolent AI (always malevolent, for some reason, a sign of some aspect of US thinking requiring psychoanalytic investigation).

The evidence for this tendency is all around us; every ‘Black Mirror’ episode, for example, is treated as if it’s a prognostication from Nostradamus; the same tired tales of out of control AI, murderous machines and derelict space colonies cycled again and again, each time treated like a bold revelation of Things to Come.

Of course, there is real technological change; we have mobile, computer radio phones with glass screens and ICBMs, things our great grandparents would have found miraculous for a little while before the phone bills came due and the nuclear missiles, patiently waiting in their silos, were forgotten to aid sleep. It’s undeniable that we live in a world shaped by applied scientific inquiry and technological modification. These things have a social impact and fashion our political economy, driven by profit motivations. That’s the reality; the idea there’s a feedback loop between science fiction and what someone will breathlessly shout to be ‘science fact!’ is not entirely bankrupt, but there’s a mustiness to it, it smells like mouldy bread, slathered in butter and presented as still fresh.

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All of which brings me to an essay published in the Atlantic “When Sci-Fi Anticipates Reality.” There’s a laziness to this piece which may not be the author – Lora Kelley’s fault – after all, the topic itself is weary.

Here’s an excerpt:

Reading about this news, [Meta adding legs to avatars] I told my editor—mostly as a joke—that the metaverse users interested in accessing alternative realities and stepping into other lives should consider simply reading a novel. I stand by that cranky opinion, but it also got me thinking about the fact that the metaverse actually owes a lot to the novel. The term metaverse was coined in a 1992 science-fiction novel titled Snow Crash. (The book also helped popularize the term avatar, to refer to digital selves.) And when you start to look for them, you can find links between science fiction and real-world tech all over.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/08/science-fiction-technology/675206/

The word “cranky” is used and I admit to feeling a bit cranky myself after reading this attempt to link a product Meta is struggling to make viable (using actual computers requiring power and labor) with a term from a novel as old as someone with credit problems. There’s about as much of a connection between the ‘metaverse’ nightmaringly imagined in Snow Crash and what Meta is capable of as between a piece of paper upon which someone has written the word, ‘laser’ and an actual laser.

A bit later in the piece, another favorite of the science fiction to fact genre gets its time in the sun, ‘anticipation’ –

Ross Andersen, an Atlantic writer who covers science and technology, also told me he suspects that “a messy feedback loop” operates between sci-fi and real-world tech. Both technologists and writers who have come up with fresh ideas, he said, “might have simply been responding to the same preexisting human desires: to explore the deep ocean and outer space, or to connect with anyone on Earth instantaneously.” Citing examples such as Jules Verne’s novels and Isaac Asimov’s stories, Ross added that “whether or not science fiction influenced technology, it certainly anticipated a lot of it.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/08/science-fiction-technology/675206/

Leaving aside the question of whether there is indeed a “preexisting human desire” to explore outer space (and thus far, almost all of our examples of ‘exploration’ have been for exploitation so one wonders if other desires were being met) there’s an ironic assertion that ‘fresh ideas’ are what’s on offer. Fresh ideas, like a warmed over Second Life platform based, in name if not experienced reality, on a decades old novel. 

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2023 is not the year of bold new visions, brought to life by intrepid scientists and technologists inspired by science fiction (it’s always warmed over cyberpunk and Asimov, never Stanislaw Lem, I note). It’s the year in which the industry runs, like a rat in flames, from one thing to another – crypto, web3, metaverse, AI, generative AI and chatbots for every task. This isn’t evidence of a ‘messy feedback loop’ but of an emptiness, a void. The bag of tricks is almost empty. Where will the new profits come from?

Perhaps there is a feedback loop after all, from stale idea to stale implementation, all wrapped in a marketing bow and sold as new when it’s as old as a Jules Verne novel.