A.I.’s Will, Powers Humanity
Life, Death, and Data.
I read the perfect essay to end last week, in a guest opinion in the NYTimes, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Microsoft board member offers this soul destroying view of the future, A.I.Will Empower Humanity. You are your data, not only can your life be measured on a scatter plot, but everything that is meaningful about you can be measured, weighed, qualified, assessed, and helpfully analyzed as the pattern making up your life. A.I. has done it! —World’s Best Coffee! Will A.I. replace therapists, psychiatrists, and priests—-why not, especially if your best friend is an A.I., Love on Algo Island. I think ethics and Philosophy courses should be mandatory ride alongs for statistics and data analysis courses.
There is a fatal flaw in Hoffman’s prescription for a solution to all our ills. It is a similar issue I have to deal with as a Program lead at my College, data driven decision-making. Every year I go into a meeting where I am supposed to be convinced by scatterplots. All these dots symbolize individuals, and these swarms of points hold information that finds meaning in measurement along an axis. Talk about axis of evil. How rich is the data? How is it measured? What does it measure? What is missing?
He also offers a cast of characters as an antidote to totalitarianism…
In “1984,” George Orwell’s classic novel of state oppression, powerful telescreens enable a totalitarian regime to rule over dispossessed proles with unchecked omnipotence. But today we live in a world where individual identity is the coin of the realm — where plumbers and presidents alike aspire to be social media influencers and cultural power flows increasingly to self-made operators, including the one-man podcasting empire Joe Rogan, the YouTube megastar MrBeast and the human rights activist Malala Yousafzai.
I think he maligns Malala Yousafzai, her personal courage excludes her from this list—a better and much more apt addition would be Greta Thunberg, but I know why he needs Malala, she provides cover, because of his next sentence…
I believe A.I. is on a path not just to continue this trend of individual empowerment but also to dramatically enhance it.
Individual empowerment? How are we measuring value and worth? The world needs more entertainment like Beast Games and the best food on this planet is McDonald’s —-69 million people daily can’t be wrong. Are we supposed to take this opinion piece seriously? Yes, deadly serious because this is what is percolating in the brains of the people that actually do have their hands on the dials of power.
There is something fundamentally sad about this essay, because it assumes that there is nothing of value that we haven’t shared, that “status updates, invites, DMs “ can be aggregated and offer us an insight into who we really are. There is no essence of us that is outside of the glare of this digital all seeing eye. How do you measure the profound nature of your being from an engagement system that is designed for distraction, and getting us to love cat videos? I guess the nearly 50 years I wasted on this planet before Facebook made me real and the smart phone gave me purpose are just footnotes to the real story of my life written in zeros and ones.
Hoffman’s final paragraph and some questions…
Instead of functioning as a means of top-down compliance and control, A.I. can help us understand ourselves, act on our preferences and realize our aspirations.
Hmmm, where have we heard that before, over 100 years ago—
Advertisers became interested in the new discipline of psychology, a connection theorized for the first time in 1917 by Walter Dill Scott in The Psychology of Advertising: "The actual effect of modern advertising is not so much to convince as to suggest."Products had to be made attractive, endowed with perceived characteristics that would stir the consumer's imagination. This idea was to become known as "added-value," an essential dimension of productivity that can be increased and consumed almost without limits. Added value became the playground for psychogramming. Excerpt from essay by Hirohito Hosoya and Markus Schaefer, Project on the City 2: Harvard Design School, Guide to Shopping
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Psychogramming was applied by psychologists like John B. Watson (in 1920 he joined the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson) to map the collective unconscious and mirror it in products. It used psycho-analysis, motivational analysis, focus groups, and ethnographic research to sell commodities. With psychogramming, psychology became one of the means of modernization. It was the on ramp to our online life today and succinctly described by the authors…
Psychogramming seemed to be foreplay to the total control over the consumer's mind.
Now back to the final paragraph.
In this way, perfect recall isn’t just a tool for remembering the past. It’s also a compass that provides a clearer understanding of our goals and improves our decision-making. It transforms our digital trails from passive records of who we were into dynamic resources, empowering us to shape who we wish to become — with greater self-awareness and freedom to live lives of our own choosing.
I will admit having a visual imagination sometimes helps with seeing words more fully. When Hoffman describes the taps, swipes, scrolls, and clicks of our online path as a ‘digital trail’, I can’t help seeing the wavering slime trail left by the snail. How exactly do we transform the media and platforms ownership of our attention and the overwhelming passivity that is baked into A.I., as it is designed, into dynamic, empowering resources. I’ll tell you what dynamic and empowering resources are LeFrancBourgeois oil paints, a 2 inch thick piece of aluminum , a Japanese carving knife, an Epson scanner, and a Moleskine storyboard sketchbook. They weren’t designed for me, they weren’t the flattened experiences that online life offers, rather they were tools and products that shaped me because they opened my imagination, offered me new ways of thinking through an embodied, hands on interface. How do I plot these things when they are not mere data points, but epicenters for waves of influence.
I do agree that having a clear understanding of our goals is a key aspect of moving our life forward. First, our goals need to be formed and seeded and no compass navigating through our online life will lead to insight, because outside of that paved road is the wilds of wonderful risk; being lost, making mistakes, and tripping over the opportunities and challenges of working with different people and trying new approaches and tools.
The best thing about LinkedIn for me is weirdly exactly opposite to how Hoffman describes the success on the platform for users, as they are…
willing to share information about their work experiences and skills in ways that were once considered both imprudent and impractical.
Sharing your education, work history, core skills was once impractical—sounds like a resume to me? I like LinkedIn because it’s about work, not a useless scroll through the passive aggressive IG, and the tag you’re it of Facebook. I just wish it would stop asking me if I would like to—Rewrite with A.I.,— could be worse, offering me an image to adorn my post…feeling empowered yet?