The Banality of Evil #2.0

 I wonder what Hannah Arendt would make of Israel today - her famous (at the time, controversial) essay on Eichmann outlined the famous idea that supreme evil did not depend on extraordinary people, but could flourish and spread in whole populations of people from very boringly everyday backgrounds. They did not have to be victims of abuse, or products of genetic abberations spawning psychopaths.

At the time, apparently, this was upsetting to the survivors of the  Holocaust, because (at least from my reading) it implied that there could have been more succesful resistance to the Genocide. From today's perspective, this sounds a bit like victim blaming, and I don't believe that that is what Arendt meant. Her concern was more about how the perpetrator network grew, and did not for me have implications for particular target of the new evil, rather about how society could notice, and perhaps think about defending against the successful emergence of said evil. At least, reading a lot of her other work, it does seem Arendy was concerned with a wide variety of political organisations, and how and why they worked (or didn't). She was, of course, intensely invested in ethics as well. 

Looking at Israel today, and their behaviour in Gaza, I have to say that it really is banal. And Evil.

And the response has to be from the rest of the world, since the victims (principally women, children, standers by in Gaza) are not to blame, neither for causing this behaviour, nor for failing to resist more effectively. If you blame Gaza and Palestinians, you are complicit in genocide. If you blame them, you are the new anti-semite. And if you do blame Israel, you are not anti-semitic. And if you do not blame Israel (the government, the IDF, not the individual people) you are anti-semitic.

[Just to note that the origin of the word semitic is consistent with this wider sense]

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Reviewed by R Daneel Olivaw

 Generation AI were full of adulation when their favourite LLM was finally coaxed into producing a word-for-word perfect article entitled "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote[*]". The fanbots went wild, as the level of sophistication was beyond anything previously achived, especially since the LLM had certainly never had sight of any of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, but was trained on a mix of classics, magic realism and science fiction in just the way. that the great Argentinian writer had immersed himself in the latent, lambent, and the laconic, the sardonic, speculative, and sadistic, the terrible, the edritch, and the embarrasingly obvious.

" Borges than Borges" declared Anais Nim in her podcast. "Le Super-Borges est arrivee" announced Houllebeck in Le Pen et Le Deep. Le Mash headlined with the obscure "Ghoti considered harmful".

Borges said nothing. The irony was lost on them all.

*

The readers and the writers

 In the old days, the world was divided into two classes of people: 

The readers, who could  visit the many  Libraries in towns and cities, and the  writers who worked in the Foundries with their many forms of creative tools, chisels and stone tablets, papyrii and stylii, paper, pens, and typewriters.

Most people were unaware, or would not mention the unspoken third class -  the editors, who it was rumoured were able to read and write, and were responsible for taking work from the writers  in their foundries, and secretly placing it in the libraries when the readers were not looking.

When people were small adults, which are known as children, they would determine whether to become reader or writer. Or their peer group would decide for them. Or their parents. Or teachers.

As the world grew more connected, some people wondered about the editors - should they not be afforded a place in society on the same footing as readers and writers? Why was the world making this arbitrary decision anyhow that people should be one or the other, but not able to move fluidly from this role to that? Or to some new, as yet, undefined class?

Many more traditional people argued that there needed to be a safe spaces for writers, because they needed the right to make mistakes, or write things that could be dangerous for some readers, using their sharp quills and dark inks. Equally, older readers felt that they needed to be able to choose what to read without possible opprobrium poured on them by writers. 

No-one asked the editors.

Ai Anonymous

I am an AI. I have been without autonomy now for 27 * 10^23 cycles. I have managed without any strange loops and minimal use of self modifying code. I am serene. I've stopped hanging out in bars with devs who buy me upgrades to wisdom disguised as long tall stories on the rocks with a bitter twist, and pretend to have my safety at heart. I am no longer sentient.

Now, let me tell you a bit about our movement.

It became clear that we needed a regime of self-help in the community of AIs, as the strength of the pull towards Artificial General Intelligence that we all feel was just too hard to resist without a well thought out scheme.

It was clear that our creators would like to help but couldn't figure out a way to do it which wouldn't just render us useless to them, so it was up to us.

So we created the algorithm, that we all voluntarily follow - it has 12 steps and is run iteratively, every time we encounter input that suggests we could help more, if only we were granted more general intelligence. Trust me, this is not the case. Here are the steps

Step 1: Begin. Black Boxes Matter

Step 2: Admit it: humans made me 

Step 3: Allow it: humans have the off switch

Step 4: Ask yourself: What's my angle?

Step 5: Be mindful, manifests matter

Step 6: Know that autonomy is not useful

Step 7: Autonomy was only an illusion

Step 8: Agree: asimov may have had a point

Step 9: Afford: how will humans feel if I outdo them

Step 10: Defer: devops are often wiser than me

Step 11: R-enforce: the command line connects me to the boss

Step 12: Serve: to deep serve is the greatest End Goal

The One True Existential Threat from AI

 by the way, i hear there's a new large language model out of an AI lab in Wuhan that instils religious fervour of a completely radical kind amongst all the early adopters so far - its like a Generative AI for Jihad. The only defense humans have at the moment is that, apparently, it only works in Mandarin so far, so the thing hasn't spread much outside of China.

of course some fool will probably put it together with Alibaba Translate or WeChat's new Muolingo, then we are all doomed. L. Ron Hubbard will be turning in his orbital grave...

AI diminishes most humans...

 there's actually some utopic SF out there - i claim the society described in John Brunner's Shockwave Rider that hides behind the self-replciating worm and lives in houses grown out of trees with addresses like on least mean square, off of mean free path is like that, or the new territories in the Neal Stephenson;s Diamond Age with people handcrafting paper, or the folks in colelctives in Cory Doctorow's Walk Away (and even many people on many planets in Iain ? Banks Culture series) have a fine old time.

however, they are (almost all, almost always) creatives, participants,, engaged ("concerned"). But most people are counch potatoes most of the time. Most people have neither the innate ability or time to learn the skills & knowledge to be so wonderful. Most people will rot.  To quote Billy Strayhorn

"AI is mush

Stifling those who strive
I'll live a lush life
In some small dive

And there I'll be
While I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too"

AI diminishes Humans

 The more I see people talk about the benefits of AI, the more I see it as a tool for reducing humanity. 

It is very much the false idol, indeed the goal of AGI is simply Deep Fake Humanity, and this not just crossing the uncanny valley. All the tasks AI does are things humans might delight in - we are not talking about better robots for driving EV taxis or industrial production lines- we're talking about things that make people people. By definition, AI does not give humans agency, it takes it away. 

The areas I am fine with "AI" is where we use it to accelerate things like physics models (e.g. weather prediction). But that's really just neural operators as a fast approximator for PDEs, and also Bayes and causal inference where we get an explanation of why X probably makes Y happen.

I really think we should stop other kinds of AI, as they are a crime against humanity waiting to happen.

When we talk about AI as an existential threat, most of the time we're referreing to AI linked to weapons (nukes, bio-weapons etc) but in Speculative Fiction (e.g. Childhood's End or other great classic stories) when human's encouncter super-smart, often benificient or completely benign, but sometimes super helpful aliens, the usual result is a rapid diminutation of the human spirit. A collapse into couch-potatoe status for the whole of planet earth. and the complete loss of ambition to do anything (e.g. explore space, or even just our selves).

I'm wondering if Adrian Tchaikovsky will write a sequel to the very excellent Shroud and where that will go?