In my city, thousands of data scientists and machine learning experts are building a layer of automation onto our economic and military systems. Of course, each individual data scientist has no access to the big picture and how this work fits into it. He merely builds the tools he is told to build and holds the faith that his work will bring about a better tomorrow.
Automation sounds so wonderful – take humans out of the loop so that they can be free to do less tedious work. They can write novels, perform in plays, dance, and sing. This is the dream, but not always the reality of automation.
There is, of course, mechanical automation which frees up our hands, but that isn’t what I’m thinking of when I worry about today’s automation efforts. I’m thinking of the tools we develop to free us from tedious mental tasks – like finding our way home with GoogleMaps, understanding statistics, or deciding how many more shoes of a certain type to manufacture.
The first system to feel the wrath of this form of automation was the publishing industry as journalists, writers, and editors were no longer paid for their work. Journalists were replaced with people like me who write for fun and editors were replaced by bot infected ranking systems based on clicks and likes. The clickbait and fake news pouring out of this system has had effects on people’s minds that haven’t yet reached their zenith. I wrote a lengthy piece on this last year and I think it is still worth reading : https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/the-fake-economies-of-the-internet/
The more immediate effect when automation (or a pandemic) sets people free from their repetitive mental responsibilities is that they tend to go into a sort of hibernation mode, consuming all available entertainment, and then complaining that nothing entertains them anymore. Some then become paranoid when they try to understand more about the world. Without a family leader, or with a family leader who has slipped into a state of hibernation, uncared for children may head out into the streets to cause trouble. Meanwhile, the children who have been absorbed by the system work frantically to increase the automation which simultaneously frees and enslaves them.
I know that reducing people’s workload is good, but this effort can go too far – as in the mouse utopia experiments conducted in the 1970s in which, despite ample food, water, and shelter, mothers failed to adequately care for their young and those rejected children became violent and destroyed their environment.
Mice and people who have not felt supported by their parents need the opportunity to go out and explore new territories because when they get trapped in the place which reared them, they lose the ability to become a newer, better person (or mouse). When they feel trapped in the black sheep role forced upon them by their parents or community, they are enslaved by their family or community’s definition of their identity. Similarly, when people allow themselves to be defined by a centrally managed community on the internet, they may find no place to escape to and create a newer, healthier identity. They are enslaved by their shadow-selves on the internet.
We do not, of course, live in a world of infinite resources and while people do often have the opportunity to start a new life, far from their dysfunctional homes, when there are limited resources, the management of the economy will inevitably produce winners and losers. In a communist system, these discrepancies are minimized, but at a cost.
In a communist, command economy, whenever demand increases, the system must shift production to meet the demand, but as we have seen during the coronavirus crisis, globally outsourced medicine production leads to shortages when production does not anticipate demand increases. In a less monopolistic, more market-based economy, there would always be profiteers standing in the wings with supplies of medicine that they hope to sell when opportunity strikes. In a command economy, this doesn’t happen.
Since this virus will destroy small businesses, leaving only the largest and strongest companies standing, this opens the door to monopolies which must construct command economic structures, but as in the case of communism, these command economies can only serve everyone’s needs if they have sufficiently efficient information, analysis, control, and automation of their supply and demand chains. These new, automated corporate control systems developed by data scientists and machine learning experts are like corporate communism that citizens unknowingly buy into and can’t get rid of once they are dependent on it. The only difference from soviet communism is that, unlike a political system, you can’t just remove the leaders, hold elections, and privatize the companies. Monopolies supported by a government that is democratic in name only will only die if the people all agree to stop using them – good luck with that!
The Soviets tried and failed to produce an efficient, command economy but as inefficiencies accumulated, production never seemed to meet demand and communal spaces got neglected because no one felt a sense of ownership. In the destructive wake of the coronavirus, if our new, globalized systems of economic automation produce monopolistic, command economies, will common spaces like the sky and the ocean not fall into disrepair in a similar fashion as perfect order and control rule the day?
Perfect order and control go against human nature because we find beauty in systems that have a degree of incomprehensible chaos, pulling away from geometric unity. If the world is perfectly ordered and predictable, with everyone marching to the same rhythm, it becomes, ugly and boring. Instinctive rejection of this ugliness has the potential break people free from their internet or gaming hypnosis in a potentially disruptive fashion. Or, it could break their hypnosis in a beautiful fashion, like flowers turning away from an electric light and reaching towards the sun.
How can we maintain free will within such an automated system in which the electric light of our smartphones directs our focus from dawn until dusk? Are we all destined to be crushed beneath automation’s wheels, and driven underground with nary a human cog to be found? If your bank account is hacked, will you be able to find a human to help you after the banking system automates itself? If your social media profile is hacked, making you look like a monster, will you have any recourse in an automated online world?
Perhaps we will perseverate and distract ourselves from this ennui with silly riddles, like that of free will. Here is my solution to the riddle:
A: “Quantum mechanics is consistent with classical determinism, but we can never know the initial conditions and this makes all of our predictions a bit uncertain.”
B: “If we can’t remember the initial conditions, but we can still act on them, then we can still have free will. Not being able to remember a decision doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.”
A: “True, but doesn’t that imply some sort of time travel?”
B: “No, you just aren’t aware of the decision while it is occurring. You can only identify it in retrospect.”
A: “But when you make a decision, you don’t know what sort of effect it will have and an uninformed choice isn’t much of a choice, is it?”
B: “All choices are relatively uninformed when we can’t know the initial conditions with absolute precision.”
A: “Surely we must know something about the initial conditions, otherwise we wouldn’t feel like we have free will.”
B: “There might be a part of us that knows something about the initial conditions, but we are not conscious of it. That is where the feeling comes from.”
A: “So, our conscious mind makes a decision without knowing the initial conditions, but our unconscious mind knows the initial conditions? This seems rather mystical.”
B: “We clearly can’t have free-will within a single point in space and time, but in a more distributed system, it seems possible because the knowledge of initial conditions might be stored outside of the system that makes the decision, however, the storage device might have emotional control over the decision-making center.”
A: “Then the decision isn’t really being made by the decision-making center, it is made by the storage device that exerts emotional control.”
B: “Well, the emotional control can’t physically act on anything, it is just a feeling. The feelings exist in emotional space and the actions exist in physical space. Mixing the two spaces makes us confused about free will.”
A: “So free will is the result of the exchange of potential and kinetic energy – emotional and physical energy.”
B: “Exactly. The potential energy contains information about initial conditions and the kinetic energy makes a decision without knowing that information.”
A: “Are we going around in circles here?”
B: “Definitely. A circle moving through space which looks like a spiral from certain vantages. It is a recursive system. Larger forms of consciousness control smaller forms of consciousness and so on, down to the tiniest particle. Cogito ergo sum. It circulates, therefore it is.”
A: “But a particle might have a local memory which causes it to decide to die or to resist a more powerful force and that is why it has free will?”
B: “Right. To be or not to be, that is the question. All of the other decisions we can make are somewhat illusory, but they are necessary illusions without which the world would not function in the way it does.”
A: “But even a decision to resist is illusory because outside pressure or a memory might be the cause of the resistance.”
B: “Sometimes people choose not to move away from a source of pressure and that is a real, genuine choice. Sometimes our choices are forced upon us.”
A: “Why do I feel uneasy about this?”
B: “It is the uncertainty principle. It does that to us.”
……..
I wrote a lengthier piece on the mind-body problem here:
https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/mind-over-matter/
The image in the header is from artwork in Grenada representing victims of the slave trade.
Kirsten Hacker 