It's not that machines are becoming more human-like. Humans are becoming more machine-like.
Science has no color
I’m some 30,000 feet above the ground reading Meghan O’Gieblyn’s tremendous descent into the protozoan intelligence that is the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT).
O’Gieblyn’s thesis is that AI is us. Trained on the whole of the internet — all of human literature from LadBible to the actual Bible, all of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit, every PornHub comment and K-Pop fan fic — GPT sounds so familiar to us because it is us. In a turn of phrase that evokes endless hype, Daft Punk phraseology, and a hint of divinity, O’Gieblyn calls GPT the “vaporware remix of civilization.” GPT simply calls itself “the collective unconscious mind.” At least, it does in response to a prompt that O’Gieblyn withholds from her reader.
This unconscious is as protean as you’d expect for a code reared on both 4chan and Toni Morrison, as full of vitriol (just like us) as it is of poetry (just like us). The words O’Gieblyn uses to describe GTP generated text — “haunting,” like a “dreamworld,” the “psychic underbelly” of humanity’s delirium — evoke ambiguity and liminality, a vague sense of feeling without quite knowing. Consider the koan O’Gieblyn finds, trawling through the effluvia of GPT: Let the facts be submitted to a candid world, Science has no color. I love that line.
The tension that drives O’Gieblyn’s essay is that we, the body-and-blood parents of GPT, are not in a great position to judge whether a machine indeed has no soul. Humans, after all, function quite comfortably while feeling without quite knowing. We are creatures who vibe. The impulses that set us apart from the machine — to love, to hurt, to yearn — ultimately find their source within our own unconscious, a mechanism of automation by a different name. Impulses are not thoughts but instincts. Who’s driving this bag of flesh anyway?
The unhappy answer for me, too often, is that I don’t know. And this is my major impulse for starting this blog — I don’t know who’s in charge here! Is it me, or the sad little kid that is my unconscious, or the algorithmic optimization that guides me through the dizzying heights of modernity? (I’m guessing my humanity lies in the eternal struggle between these forces.) Are my feelings, my tastes, my thoughts my own?
I felt this uncertainty of self acutely this afternoon when I was an irritable, reactive mess and I could not figure out why. What I should have done was paused and breathed and journaled. What I did was look up whether or not Nathan Lane has won an EGOT (he hasn’t). If the Twitter or Instagram apps had survived a purge from my phone last year, I probably would have been sucked into their gravity. Needless to say, unthinkingly diving into Wikipedia only exacerbated my anxiety.
I’m guessing this happens to you as well. O’Gieblyn calls it “repetition automatism: the tendency to unconsciously seek out the pains of the past, like a machine stuck in a feedback loop.”
*
In 2020, Dean Kissick, who wrote a fantastic column at Spike I will miss a lot, wrote a “Letter of Recommendation” for the Pomodoro technique. For the uninitiated: it’s a writing aid that breaks up the process into intervals. By committing to chunks of uninterrupted time to write, I find I can focus a little better. The app I use to time my writing stints is called “Flow,” presumably for the concept popularized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
While in this “flow” state, or really, just when I’m vibing in my process, I feel I have a rare access to myself. (It’s not a coincidence that I’m writing this on an airplane, on my notes app, Wi-Fi mercifully unconnected.) Moments that I might convene with myself are nearly always hijacked by those dizzying heights. As I stand in line at the coffeeshop or await the arrival of a friend or laze about on a Saturday, I’m on, yup, Wikipedia, looking up Woody Harrelson to see if he counts as a nepo baby.
I’m not saying anything new here (this is well-trod ground thanks to Jenny Odell and Cal Newport and many others). But it brings me to O’Gieblyn’s conclusion: that “we are increasingly abdicating our role as the authors of technological progress and becoming, instead, its passive subjects.”
Her point here is that the Silicon Valley mandate to “move fast and break things,” the logic of a VC fueled market to get to scale as quickly as possible, has become the unthinking reflex of programmers and entrepreneurs. Fair enough. What I am curious about is how I have abdicated my role as the author of my own life (a phrasing that bears similarity to the opening line of a formative book of my childhood), and have become the passive subject to forces I don’t know, let alone control. One of those forces is my unconscious, a sensitive little boy convinced his feelings are too much for the world. Another is the convenience served by technology in the form of product, playlist, and “people you may know” recommendations. As GPT reveals, there may not be as much distance between these forces as it appears.
Advances in machine learning have afforded artificial intelligence the semblance of humanity. But this is only one part of the story of technological development. These same advances also act upon us, giving us the (fitter, happier, more productive) trappings of machinery. In the popular imagination, the dangers of AI lie in its potential to radicalize robot overlords. The more likely scenario, I think is, is underappreciated: not machines rising up to conquer us, but us settling down to them.
Burn After Reading
Zack Beauchamp interviewing MLK scholar Brandon Terry in Vox:
Part of the task of our intellectuals, and part of the task of our activists, is to recover [King’s] questions. So instead of saying, “We know what a protest looks like, because we’ve seen it on Black History Month footage,” we need to say, “They were protesting in a way meant to disarm fear. What are the fears of our moment, and how might we disarm them?”
When we talk about voter suppression, King thought the vote was a matter of dignity. Are our protests about voter suppression appropriately conveying that this is a matter of dignity, not of partisan politics?
So recovering the questions is really, really important.