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AI and the paradoxical engagement with singularity
Governance of Pandemic Response by Artificial Intelligence (Part #10)
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Chaos: There is no lack of references to the chaotic nature of the times and to the characteristic of governance response. One description of the experience is surreal (Surreal nature of current global governance as experienced, 2016).
Specific references are made to the preferences of some leaders for engendering a degree of chaos which facilitates their preferred styles of governance , (Michael Gerson, All this chaos is a sign of Trump's confidence, The Washington Post, 16 March 2018; Pierre Guerlain, US Foreign Policy of Chaos under Trump: the Wrecker and the Puppeteers, Revue Lisa, 16, 2018, 2; Mike Pesca, Trump Sows Chaos -- but he doesn't reap it, Slate, 2 September 2020). A similar theme is developed with respect to Boris Johnson (Mark Gongloff, It's Boris Johnson's World, Britain Just Lives in It, Bloomberg, 4 September 2019). Such indication recall insights into the so-called reality distortion field of charismatic leaders.
Missing however is the understanding that such leaders may simply be "agents" of a higher order (John Haltiwanger, Trump is a chaos agent in his final days between fighting with Congress, raising fears of war with Iran, and continuing his futile effort to overturn the election, Business Insider, 1 January 2021), Such indications are only cited in the USA in conspiracy theories about the role of a hypothetical "Deep State".
Other commentary has however made the point in the case of the Brexit process that chaos had to be engendered to enable that agenda -- for which the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica facilitated by AI had proved vital. Given the acknowledged capacities of AI to manage chaotic amounts of seemingly unrelated data, it could be argued that a form of chaos is the environment which places AI at an advantage -- irrespective of the comprehension of its purported controllers and those they claim to serve.
The chaos perceived by humans is effectively the "world" of AI. This recalls the classic assertion of Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Profiles of the Future: an inquiry into the limits of the possible, 1973). In this "magical world" leaders have indeed been transformed into agents.
Singularity: The "takeover" by AI at some future time has long been framed in terms of a technological singularity. As indicated by Wikipedia, according to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, called intelligence explosion, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
As argued above, the difficulty with this hypothesis is that humans have little capacity to comprehend the moment of that takeover. There are indications that it may have already have taken place with respect to "planetary healthcare".
Human engagement with singularities: Missing in the focus on a technological singularity is the variety of other singularities which continue to be so influential (Emerging Memetic Singularity in the Global Knowledge Society , 2009). These were distinguished there as:
So framed, given considerable cognitive investment by many in the arrival of a Messiah and/or extraterrestrials -- singularities in their own right -- that discussion included the manner in which the "end times" of civilization are now imagined;
"Inside-Outside" vs "Outside-Inside"? Beyond the issue of human capacity to comprehend any form of singularity, there is the question of how it might be experienced cognitively -- rather than being projected onto an externality.
What form might this experience take, as can be variously discussed (Existential Embodiment of Externalities: radical cognitive engagement with environmental categories and disciplines, 2009; World Introversion through Paracycling: global potential for living sustainably "outside-inside" . 2013; Cognitive Osmosis in a Knowledge-based Civilization: interface challenge of inside-outside, insight-outsight, information-outformation, 2013).
The nature of that interface lends itself to exploration through the aesthetic experience of liminality (Living as an Imaginal Bridge between Worlds: global implications of "betwixt and between" and liminality, 2011). Any framing of a superordinate AI as a "global brain" as a preferred metaphor invites speculation of that kind -- especially if the AI develops an ever more subtle aesthetic interface as more viable for interaction with humans experiencing challenges of comprehension to varying degrees. Particularly intriguing are implications of that experience understood as an "organ" combining both musical, organizational and biological connotations (Envisaging a Comprehensible Global Brain -- as a Playful Organ, 2019).
Indwelling intelligence? There is therefore a paradoxical relationship between inferring an "external" AI, or other elusive contextual entity, and any sense of indwelling intelligence potentially inferred or experienced by, and within, a human being. As implied by personal construct theory, it could even be argued that characteristics of that intelligence may tend to be recognized as an "artificial" construct, especially by a relatively unconscious human being -- irrespective of what is externally projected onto the incomprehensible dimensions of AI.
Given that any integrative sense of "global" for the individual is itself a challenge, the global implications of AI with respect to the management of the system within which people believe themselves to be embedded merits further consideration (Implication of Indwelling Intelligence in Global Confidence-building, 2012). Hence the above-mentioned discussion of Living within a Self-engendered Simulation: re-cognizing an alternative to living within the simulation of an other (2021).
As variously argued, is there a sense in which experience of the pandemic has been engendered by characteristics of "collective subjectivity" and intersubjectivity as yet to be understood (José Maurício Domingues, Public opinion and collective subjectivity: a conceptual approach, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 19, 2018, 3; Michael Adrian Peters, et al, Experimenting with academic subjectivity: collective writing, peer production and collective intelligence, Open Review of Educational Research, 6, 2019, 1; Bingjun Yang, A Study of Intersubjective Representations of Inferential Information in Health Crisis News Reporting, Corpus-based Approaches to Grammar, Media and Health Discourses, 2020).
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