The Consolation of #AI

I studied philosophy in university. I had already put in my 10,000 hours of software development, starting as a child, developed games in my tweens, and decided to use my time in the square debating other perspectives. By studying philosophy you will ultimately study history, literature, psychology, logic, ethics, art, language, sociology, and many other topics. It may surprise you, but the reason I am able to invent, design, innovate, architect and lead the production of world-class software is that I studied philosophy.

"The Consolation of Philosophy", by the Roman philosopher Boethius, was the first book I was assigned to read. In it, Boethius "reflects on how evil can exist in a world governed by God, and how happiness is still attainable amidst fickle fortune". The Consolation is prison literature -- Boethius wrote it while imprisoned, waiting to be tried for treason, a year spent waiting until he is, alas, finally executed. It's a rare thing to face death, and these testaments are typically poignant, a genre to explore. You might want to read Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail", Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis", or Antonio Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks". There are also those who wrote of their prison experiences in fictional form, like Ken Saro-Wiwa with "Sozaboy", Brendan Behan's powerful "Borstal Boy", Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".

In The Consolation Boethius speaks to a vision, Lady Philosophy, and writes:

If I have thoroughly learned the causes and the manner of your sickness, your former good fortune has so affected you that you are being consumed by longing for it. The change of one of her this alone has overturned your peace of mind through your own imagination. I understand the varied disguises of that unnatural state. I know how Fortune is ever most friendly and alluring to those whom she strives to deceive, until she overwhelms them with grief beyond bearing, by deserting them when least expected.

About Lady Philosophy Laura D'Olimpio writes:

Lady Philosophy tells us that we seek happiness through wealth (because we think it will lead to self-sufficiency), we seek happiness through public office (because we think it will lead to respect), we seek happiness through kingship (because we think it will lead to power), we seek happiness through celebrity (because we think it will lead to renown) and we seek happiness through pleasure (because we think it will lead to joy). Yet fortune is fickle and the only things that cannot be taken away from us is our understanding, or wisdom and our heart.

The Consolation was written in AD 523 (still think your social theories are novel?). I would offer that its wisdom is even more important today as we bask in the twilight between the sunrise of #ai and the sunset of conceit, trying to understand ourselves in relation to this new Other, our child, our patron.

What is understanding, wisdom, our heart? And how will #ai dab at the human stain?

To dream the impossible dream

Miguel de Cervantes wrote the epic "Don Quixote" while enslaved by Barbary pirates. The protagonist of the book is famously oblivious to the reality of the world, "tilting at windmills" and inhabiting a personal world of magnificent notions. We are similarly divorced from reality in our conversations about #AI.

The greatest oration I've ever heard regarding the plight of African-Americans in America was given by James Baldwin at The Oxford Union in 1965, debating William F. Buckley Jr. on the proposition "Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro". This speech by Baldwin is required listening if you hope to understand our history. I'll leave it to the reader to listen to it, right now.

The words in this speech cut like blades, and you should walk away with a much better understanding on the topic. The specific idea I'd like to draw attention to here is Baldwin's extraordinary analysis of how the matter under question is meaningless if one does not appreciate that the players in this story have not merely different perspectives, but different realities. The matter under question, in other words, simply does not exist in the dominant ideology, and any consolation requires a new view of reality, one that at heart simply requires honesty about the past, and how these histories are inextricably interwoven.

Jeanne de Salzmann, in her book "The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff" writes about how we might open our minds to new perspectives:

[The mind must] remain motionless in the stop between two thoughts until it becomes more sensitive and perceptive, more alive than what is seen, what is under its look

I hold with Slavoj ?i?ek, when he suggests, in the context of anti-capitalism movements, that now is not is not the time to act, but to think. It's the time to pause. It time to "clear the table" and construct something completely different. I think this is what we should be doing w/r/t #AI. Now is not the time for a few to fabricate incomplete regulations in isolation, for the many of a future world we cannot see, or to make pronouncements about how we should live by seeking a convenient perpetuation of nostalgia. It is the time to consider how we got here and where we want to go, before we take the next step.

This is water

David Foster Wallace begins his commencement speech at Kenyon college, "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life", with a story about two fish:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

Wallace challenges these young scholars to keep their minds open, to have the humility to be open to other perspectives. To be less certain of our certainties. He asks us to be to be less eager to make assumptions, in particular about the mundane realities of life, where Wallace feels real progress in empathy must be made. That maybe we don't have a complete perspective, that we are unaware of the water we bathe in, and so cannot justify our certainty. We are not the center of the universe. We can be mad at a reckless driver, or:

[consider] that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

With #AI we must now seek to see water. Who are we, where do we live, what is important? And why do we automatically shut out so many alternative perspectives?

Boethius writes Nunc fluens facit tempus, nunc stans facit aeternitatem: The now that passes makes time, the now that remains makes eternity.

In Wallace's book Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza, a drug addict, describes his process for abiding through withdrawal:

But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

We should move slowly, and be intentional moment to moment, as we progress into an #AI future. I believe we need to, finally, fully enter the present and understand ourselves in it, to withdraw from uninformed speculation about the future (it will come soon enough, as Einstein opined), if we are to successfully weave #AI through our lives.

In major #AI news Amazon is abandoning their once-celebrated "Just Walk Out" technology. Billions of dollars later, not even Amazon could get the #AI right. We hear breathless pronouncements about how software engineers are about to be eliminated, but this is truly an unpronounceable statement. We cannot trust fortune, but can be present in common as the next decade unfolds. We need to find our shared voice before speaking, and that is the hard work to do. We should listen to Wallace, and Lady Philosophy, and be less eager to conclude chapters that haven't been written yet (and will likely be rewritten as soon as they are) with recycled notions of what life, freedom, and #AI mean. Breathe in the water, you won't drown.