| Just One More Instrument To Oppress Each Other With If computers become our rulers, they will nevertheless be in the hands of the powerful. If they seem to replace us then at last Rousseau's paranoid fantasy, that we were born free but somehow put in chains by someone other than ourselves, will turn out to (seem to be) true. But in fact nothing would have changed. There is no-one else there. Computers are us, we are computers, just as Rousseau's exploiters weren't anyone else, it was ourselves all along. Computers or not, if we allow the powerful among us to decide over us without regard to our own will, then we will be taking a step backwards. My friend told me there's a book, there are several, there are films too, describing the future in terms of there being no use for humans any more and that humanity or that which is specifically human in us is seen as being in the way of what is now regarded as paramount - information, data. Data that seems to have an autonomous life. Computers, robots and the sheer volume of data they can hold dwarfs anything humans can rival. The status of humans goes down, anything purely human doesn't give a good outcome. An example in the book apparently, was the Google Earth car, (the Google machine is one of the biggest algorithms?, no single person understands it, a huge team of people look after it guarding it like a beast at the centre of the labyrinth) the Street Google car going along, an automatic car, someone steps in front of it and it stops, it doesnt run them over. The car behind, driven by a human, crashes into it (and shunts it into the pedestrian) because the human being..., well the example said he was admiring the sunset but in fact he was more likely texting. The conclusion is that the human aspect is the gremlin in the works. The person is killed, an example of how humans would be better replaced by machines. One might though say that by preventing the one car crash, you turn the whole of society into a car crash in which instead of the one run over pedestrian, both her, her children and her children's children are doomed to servitude or even, apparently, extinction. We've been worrying about this for years, and now as research into Artificial Intelligence is progressing so well, people are worried about the future. People are getting ready to accept their fate and believe in this as an inevitable process. The answer that it ISNT better and therefore loses all its justification is a simple one, too simple for people. People see a computer controlled future containing the destruction and the end of humanity, and yet think its inevitable because its better. A bit of a contradiction. You could eradicate all car crashes by stopping us driving and make us drive in robot cars , saving 400 lives a year. You could end starvation by organising the food supply system. People think so because they presume that computers will have a better political will, a default position on politics that is better than the one we have. Similar to how pro EU believers, who accept the abolition of democracy, presume life is better under an unelected dictatorship, putting their faith in an imagined default position of that unelected dictatorship that they fancy, with no justification, to be better than what we provide ourselves by democracy. It is essentially a longing for paternalistic government, a longing for a big daddy who will make our decisions for us, a longing for totalitarianism. Better, cleaner and tidier, and less plagued by “human” failings than democracy. So they believe. It is an extension of the Rousseauan fallacy in a sort of reverse, where the OTHER is benevolent instead of malevolent. Infantile whichever way round it is. The truth is that it is US. We are both. But the system is different, it is the system of government and other powers that we arrange for ourselves, that determines what aspect of human nature gets the upper hand. People anticipate not being able to justify anything human at all. We are simply worse than computers. In other words they chose to believe that computers or robots will embody all thats good and that humans will be left embodying all that is bad. We will have invented a big daddy, a paternalistic governor, or master race, to live over us and rule us, and, some say, even to replace us. This is misanthropy writ large, but it is nothing new. Religions have often contained large doses of self hate, and sought to condemn large parts of human nature as sinfulness and godlessness. The current great surge in secular ideological puritanism is another version of that tendency, that seeks to condemn and ban aspects of human nature and communication. Puritans are normally autocrats, and autocracy is on the rise. The young bourgeoisie positively wallow in it. Misanthropy is actually rather popular. The left, which used to be founded on a postive outlook upon humanity, now has been redesigned by the bourgeoisie and includes a heavy dose of misanthropy to justify its political about-face to a stance that is more or less hostile to the poor. Middle class disdain for humankind is a curious component of a left wing outlook but it goes well with a desire to eradicate democracy and to exclude the ignorant (sic) masses from decision making (the EU). They declare them unfit to vote, ignorant and bigoted (sic), as if they themselves were not. It is easy to imagine that this same class will willingly usher in a robot dictatorship and will do so because they will picture themselves, as now, sitting by default at the top of the pile, with all things good preserved for them, nothing taken away, and the mob, the unworthy, kept at bay, rather nicely and very thoroughly by robotic instruments of power. In other words that it will be a dictatorship in their interests. One cannot help knowing that this is likely to be true. This vision of the future can most easily come to pass when, like now, there is a power inequality between the prosperous and the un-prosperous, who are treated increasingly as slaves/low paid , migrants, morally and intellectually unworthy of participation in the democratic process. After a quite brief heyday of democracy things have swung too far out of their hands and the world, an integrated international arrangement of the victorious, as it ever was, is controlled by a combination of the corporate powers and the bourgeoisie who interests it guarantees (and, where it cant guarantee them, transforms them by advertising and propaganda). Even elected governments have limited ability or even inclination to resist the global control of supply and demand plus the concentrated ownership of assets and raw materials of the one, and the vociferous “opinion-forming” of the other. We are priming ourselves for a non democratic world where decisions will be made by an imaginary logical necessity, a default position provided for us by computers and so seeming to represent a perfection of good sense and ...logical necessity, a dictatorship of information, whose divine right will come from a fallacy that it is in possession of all the possible facts and all the possible best interpretations of those facts. This default position will be first used to argue against democratic decisions, then to obviate them altogether. There will simply be no need, it will be said, for the inexpert input of an electorate. That is in fact already the premise of the EU government which believes itself uniquely best suited to manage the capitalist economy without any intervention of its 450 million citizens, and to find a balance between its needs and limited accommodations to the middle class will. It is an arrangement the middle classes of Europe are largely happy with, for now, (why wouldn't they be?) but it is not democracy. The role now played by the Deutches Bank will be played by a multitude of data intensive bodies that know best. In fact though, political decisions are always being made, but they are not presented as such, and that will contunue to be the case. The mass of people will believe in the divine right of data, those in the know will wield power as they have always done, covertly. We will be going backwards in time to the era in history when it seemed nothing other than necessary and right that those in authority over us should wield it absolutely and unquestioned, as they were the best suited for it. It will be a mistake that will take us some generations to realise. It is a development that doesn't need computers, the seeds of it are in our present conditions anyway, in the anti democratic tendencies of the middle classes and the corporate owner class. We will have gone full circle. At some point in the quite near future our children may be living in a world where very few people believe in democracy, where it will be thought of as a retrograde and regressive idea, one that represents the error and confusion of the human mind and the darkness of its heart. In fact, it will be the triumph of dictatorship that represents that shadow side of the human soul. copyright Gregory Motton 2018 |