Suffer the fools.
In America, we are now in the final days of the harvest.
We are reaping what we have sown.
Our fate will be determined by the least informed among us: the “swing” voter.
It’s a stress test of our technologies of self-governance.
Elections are a claim on the future.
As always, one party wishes to “take us back”.
It is not by chance that this party has the support of many prominent technologists whose fortunes are largely speculative—i.e., claims on the future.
Their wealth, and thus their power, is predicated increasingly on claims that they can create intelligence.
Intelligence without humans.
We should evaluate this claim.
Because we cannot fully know ourselves,
Because our inner minds (our dreams, our impulses) operate in darkness,
much like our fate,
it’s tempting to think that we can build an instrument to look into ourselves
and thus produce a window into a new world.
Or see the future, and the past, perfectly.
What would such an instrument look like?
Would it be a mirror or a window?
Windows are necessarily views to an outside: a place where we don’t matter.
Indeed, a place where we don’t exist.
Mirrors have an entirely different obligation.
They are to reflect back to us, perfectly, with little to no imperfections. Warts and all.
But who would build a mirror that focuses on our flaws?
Few makers (or markets) have such confidence!1
More often we make mirrors that flatter us.
You might say: Surely that can’t be!
The free market would never allow such confidence games to go on for very long.
Hahahahah. Hahahhaah. Hah.
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.
It’s very possible to build a machine that lies to us.
An instrument that tells us exactly what we want to hear. Such a device does not know – cannot know – what we need to hear.
After all, we build machines to service ourselves. To lighten our labors.
Even, if not especially, our emotional labor.
(Not the things we cannot do by ourselves but rather the things we don’t want to do for ourselves.)
There are precedents for such machines throughout history.
Let’s call them regimes, arrangements, cosmologies.
And here I must pause to correct a constant and crippling prejudice:
We moderns are likely less “smart” than our ancient ancestors. They survived in worlds of great privation. We are spoon fed.
We like to forget that humans have been writing software for thousands of years: we’ve been programming one another. No small feat.
Why is it then that so much of human history (the relatively little we know) is a period of stasis?
Because they were undemocratic.
Because we were ruled by actual fools.2
The actual fool believes that other people are fools, that depending on other people is friction.
The contemporary version of this fool proclaims they will solve the problem of “people”.
By their arrangements, we will taste only the fruits of other people’s labor, and never be pressed by their bodies, their smells, their needs.
Thus isolated, we become fully realized as idiots.
From idios "personal, private," properly "particular to oneself."
Entombed in a castle, now virtual.
Interestingly…
No one is born alone.
And yet we can all die alone.
To seek our own isolation is to attempt to master our own death.
In essense, to kill that which makes us human: our interdependence.
The joyous fact that not one of us is ever fully whole.
People who need people are the luckiest people of all.
There is another way forward. There always has been.
To build with uncertainty.
Because we know we cannot ever fully know ourselves, we do not build machines that claim to know us, perfectly.3
We build machines that can help us teach ourselves.
We build machines that make interesting mistakes.
For if there’s one fact we know for certain about ourselves it’s that we evolved from other organisms through chance mutations: mistakes that proved advantageous.
This is how we build a wisdom machine.4
A well made window can both reflect us and show us an exterior world.
It’s just a matter of lighting.
Some might say, that’s what the enlightenment was all about: creating windows of reflexivity instead of just tools for self-reflection, or portals to unknown worlds.
To build such instruments we must acknowledge that the darkness we need to illuminate first is our own shadow.
Concluding statement.
The friction that constrains us is a lack of coordination, a lack of collaboration, a lack of communication.
We know that open standards are the bedrock of wealth creation.
How to produce open standards? Consensus.
How to produce consensus?
Radical democracy.
And, yet…
Postscript
Consider the code base (sorry!) called Ulysses, written some 110 years ago.
It’s a book that, in part, satirizes the young artist, Stephen Dedalus, who does not yet know himself, by contrasting him with Leopold Bloom, who is in the midst of knowing himself.
The whole thing is, of course, a contraption. The book reminds you of its mechanisms.
It’s a good reminder that we should just as often look back to understand where we could be going.5
Footnotes
Philosophers would make a humbling machine. That’s supposed to be their whole bag. ↩
In English, the fool is a trickster. Hence, an “actual fool” is someone who takes themselves very seriously and, in doing so, is not to be taken seriously. ↩
Whether or not such a machine can exist is an open question. Because of our limits, we can’t answer it conclusively; we can only guess or hope. But not prove it. We would not be able to understand the proof. ↩
Intelligence is “cheap.” Wisdom is riches. Note that wise “men” are often paupers. FWIW. ↩
Can you imagine what the great encounter would have been like had they had fast learning translation machines? Maybe we can call the future we want: The Age of Re-encountering. ↩