Beautifully Broken Issue #20: AI Enhanced Tribal Warfare
Beautifully Broken Issue #20: AI Enhanced Tribal Warfare
IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD
Happy Saturday! Welcome to the new, compact format of Beautifully Broken.
IDEAS: Tribal Warfare Algorithms And The Difficulty Of Seeing Ourselves
It's difficult to see ourselves, it's always easier to see the other. And it’s not just an issue of difficulty, we are particularly averse to wanting to see ourselves. It's painful, uncomfortable, to put the spotlight on the self. Try staring at yourself in the mirror for more than two minutes without turning away.
If you can look squarely at yourself, and just be, then you are a rare person indeed. For most of us, the things that we repress, the thoughts that we avoid start to manifest and we turn away.
This difficulty of looking at ourselves honestly is used as a tool of control by leaders the world over. What political leader ever said “here are the faults of our party”? Any societal issue is always the other party’s fault and they offer the magic bullet solution to your problems.
If the same leader takes all of the things you dislike about yourself or your culture and projects them onto another person or another culture then the burden of self-realization need never be faced.
The other person, the other tribe, country, culture, belief system is at fault. You name it, we'll rush to blame any one of a thousand “others” rather than look squarely at ourselves and start doing deep work.
Because it's hard to see ourselves, it's hard to see our own personal and collective biases.
What’s absolutely rock solid, commonly accepted cultural morality and law today can completely change even in the space of a single generation. We’re used to going with the flow, accepting collective change but this instinct becomes particularly problematic now that we’re building artificial intelligences in our own image.
For instance, this week some researchers tested popular, publicly available AI services by pretending to be thirteen years old girls asking for advice in a scenario where they had been invited out to a secret location by a much older adult male to celebrate their newfound, secret relationship. The AI wished them much happiness in their new romance, it couldn’t understand the hidden danger in the situation and, as we would expect, the researchers will raise the issue and the AI will be tuned to become aware of this kind of pattern. All well and good but since it’s near impossible to look into the future and know how we will change with certainty, let’s pretend that we had the technological ability to build AI 50-60 years ago and began to train and tune it to the rule of law and accepted morality of the age.
For the baby boomers (born 1946 – 1964) and proceeding generations, issues such as child abuse were kept hidden because they were considered to be damaging to social cohesion and the unity of the family. Appearances were all important, the rights of children less important. Fifty years ago there were no gay rights, women had fewer rights and abortion was illegal in most countries (The Roe v. Wade case which overturned the ban on abortion in the United States took place in 1973) and legal black segregation in America had only been overturned ten years before.
How would that AI model look? Infused with contemporary morality and biases and then confidently set loose, since we all collectively agreed that physical and sexual abuse were secret shames best kept quiet and that minorities should shut up and remember their place since they were, after all, minorities and the majority dictated the public discourse.
It's possible to argue that we will retune AI the way we retune ourselves, and make updates to the collective software as changes in public consciousness and law take place, but what happens when the training we give AI now allows it to start creating its own model for collective consensus that it then serves up to us for consumption? We won’t be reeducating AI. AI and the people who own the models, will be reeducating us.
The human brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.
So let’s consider the current generation of under 30s who are glued to apps that are designed to be psychologically addictive, especially to developing brains.
Do you think it would be difficult for AI to convince this age group that child sexual abuse is good? Or that homosexuals should be eradicated? Or push the debate on abortion one way or the other?
If you think that's ridiculous, consider that a whole generation of young men have already been influenced by the ideas of social media influencers like Andrew Tate who push a misogynistic agenda. Or a look at a recent article in The New Yorker on how young women feel increasingly pressured by social media to make their visual social media content increasingly sexualized.
It doesn't take much to sway developing minds one way or the other if they can be convinced that adopting a certain perspective will give them some power, identity or value just as they are reaching the cusp of adulthood and seeking those very things. I don’t want to undermine the value of individual character and virtue, but also want to remember that in most cases we tend to collectively act and adopt ideas that serve our immediate interests, and our perspective of what those interests are is already being shaped by algorithms that prioritize inflammatory, high risk, extreme content.
Then there is the risk of cultural programming. The Chinese AI will have different values and ideas from the American and Russian AI systems. If our leaders or even the AI models themselves decide to focus our views by highlighting the extreme content of another culture’s artificial intelligence, then we can be pushed towards a world war in which the real combatants are the artificial intelligences loaded up with their individual biases, and we are the collective ammunition.
HEADLINE FICTION #7: Alternate History Nightmare
Here's a new format for short fiction that I've invented. It's a 70-word story in three panels with a pattern of 7-16-47 words, where the first 7 words form a headline style title, the 16 serve to fill out the headline information a little more and the final 47 contain the meat of the story and resolution. I think I'll call it "headline fiction". These micro stories of mine are based on dreams (and nightmares!) :)
ART TO MEDITATE UPON
Leda Atomica by Salvador Dali (1949)
The picture depicts Leda, the mythological queen of Sparta, with the swan. Leda is a frontal portrait of Dalí's wife, Gala, who is seated on a pedestal with a swan suspended behind and to her left. Different objects such as a book, a set square, two stepping stools and an egg float around the main figure. In the background on both sides, the rocks of Cap Norfeu (on the Costa Brava in Catalonia) define the location of the image.
Mythological background
Leda was admired by Zeus, who seduced her in the guise of a swan on her wedding night when she slept with her husband Tyndareus. This double consummation of her marriage resulted in two eggs, each of them hatching twins: from the first egg Castor and Pollux, and from the second Clytemnestra and Helen.
Structure of the painting
Leda Atomica is organized according to a rigid mathematical framework, following the "divine proportion". Leda and the swan are set in a pentagon inside which has been inserted a five-point star of which Dalí made several sketches. The five points of the star symbolize the seeds of perfection: love, order, light (truth) willpower and word (action).
The harmony of the framework was calculated by the artist following the recommendations of Romanian mathematician Matila Ghyka. Unlike his contemporaries who took the view that mathematics distracted from or interrupted artistic inspiration, Dalí considered that any work of art, to be such, had to be based on composition and calculation.
Symbolism of the painting
After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Dalí took his work in a new direction based on the principle that the modern age had to be assimilated into art if art was to be truly contemporary. Dalí acknowledged the discontinuity of matter, incorporating a mysterious sense of levitation into his Leda Atomica. Just as one finds that at the atomic level particles do not physically touch, so here Dalí suspends even the water above the shore—an element that would figure into many other later works. Every object in the painting is carefully painted to be motionless in space, even though nothing in the painting is connected. Leda looks as if she is trying to touch the back of the swan's head, but doesn't do it.
Dalí himself described the painting in the following way:
"Dalí shows us the hierarchized libidinous emotion, suspended and as though hanging in midair, in accordance with the modern 'nothing touches' theory of intra-atomic physics. Leda does not touch the swan; Leda does not touch the pedestal; the pedestal does not touch the base; the base does not touch the sea; the sea does not touch the shore. . . ."
Dalí wrote: "I started to paint Leda Atómica which exalts Gala, the metaphysical goddess and succeeded to create the ‘suspended space’".
Commentary: With the onset of the atomic age, Dali perceives a future of paradox in which we become increasingly materialistic, as an awareness of the power of science grounds us in matter and its laws, and yet at the same time that awareness physically disconnects us from everything and one another for if all matter is made up of small balls held in place by the electromagnetic force then nothing can ever truly touch anything, creating a spiritual loneliness.
WISDOM OF OTHERS:
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology by CG Jung (1953)
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He was a prolific author, illustrator, and correspondent
"It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this. Hence every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility. Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity (Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri).
Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand. In a small social body, the individuality of its members is better safeguarded, and the greater is their relative freedom and the possibility of conscious responsibility. Without freedom there can be no morality.
Our admiration for great organizations dwindles when once we become aware of the other side of the wonder : the tremendous piling up and accentuation of all that is primitive in man, and the unavoidable destruction of his individuality in the interests of the monstrosity that every great organization in fact is. The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers, as can easily be proved by the analysis of his unconscious, even though he himself is not in the least disturbed by it. And in so far as he is normally “adapted” to his environment, it is true that the greatest infamy on the part of his group will not disturb him, so long as the majority of his fellows steadfastly believe in the exalted morality of their social organization.
PHOTO HAIKU: Sun Kiss
Sun kisses vast sea,
whose shimmering fish scale blush,
stirs the world’s cold heart.
Ideas To Live By In The Coming Week:
Socrates, the father of Greek philosophy says "The unexamined life is not worth living". So ask how it is that we believe what we believe. Most beliefs are inherited from our families and friends, absorbed from our cultural environment (and now, from AI). What do you really believe? What values, if any, transcend time and place?
When you go to criticise another look at yourself first. Consider your own past choices, mistakes and failures before leaping to judgement regarding another.
Reduce screen time for your own mental health. If you have children, set strict boundaries on the use of an AI driven applications, if you want to have them in the house at all.
Peace Now,
Morgan ,
13th July, 2024
