There are any number of places from where to begin this treacherous tale. One decider that’s as good as any, is for a circling finger to take a stab on a timeline. In this case, it landed on 1966.
The year Vladimir Talmy translated Yelena Sarapina’s Cybernetics Within Us from Russian for English publication.
Early Cybernetic Dreams and the Learning Machine
In it, she tells of meeting German computer scientist Dr Karl Steinbuch at the 1961 International Congress on Cybernetics, where he demonstrated a learning machine with an electronic eye that could read. Each letter was composed of 90 black and white squares. Vertical wires fed descriptions; horizontal conveyed meaning. At the junction that Steinbuch called “the learning matrix” associations were made between the shapes and definition. With three matrices, it could identify letters, words and sentences.
Under the strict pattern of noun, verb, preposition and noun, random sentences were configured from just fifty nouns, sixteen verbs and the most frequent prepositions. As to whether or not the short sentence could be true – i.e that water can flow and a house can’t walk – each ended with the word “sense” or “nonsense”. After fewer than thirty examples, the machine could classify and differentiate verbs that related to human activities and those that did not. Steinbuch remarked at the time, “The next decade will most surely see the creation of machines capable of reading and understanding speech.”
How far we have come since the ’70s.
The Rise of AI and the Fall of Naïveté
So far in fact, that Sarapina’s conjecture that, “Machines will remain ‘learned idiots’ because they will never be able to think or perceive for themselves, they will never have a point of view of their own” can be likened to the Chairman of IBM predicting in 1943 that there was a world market for maybe five computers.
We’ve learned a fuckload since then. Most of which brings to mind the chorus of Hall & Oates’ 1983 hit.
Google once made out that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ was the bedrock of its corporate culture, not a disposable slogan written without the language skills to relay the sarcasm. Rumour has it that at a pre-IPO event, Larry Page admitted to a Wired columnist that the real purpose for starting Google was not to make money from advertising, but to build the most powerful AI on the planet.
This, from the guy considered Number 1 on the Top 10 most hated CEOs. There’s been no Google Doodle for that. Apparently there’s no value in virtuous; only visionary.
The Cult of Genius and the Punchable Tech Elite
Coming second only to ‘legend’, the constant fawning declarations of ‘genius’ has reduceed it to a tiresome synonym for rich-to-the-power-of-obscenity. When you ask who the smartest person on the planet is, most people just spin the pick-a-billionaire wheel.
Aristotle was a genius. Da Vinci was a genius. Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr. Marie Curie. Leonhard Euler. Alan Turing; Stephen Hawking. It’s not like we don’t know what outstanding looks like. These are people of towering intellect and extensive expertise, focussed on benefiting humanity rather than illustrating the very worst possible outcome of being unspeakably unpopular at school.
Cultivating unwavering belief in ‘move fast and break things’ and stockpiling more zeros in your account than personality trait scores appears the ultimate goal for anyone possessing an impressive aptitude for maths. Ethics be damned. Google’s greatest accomplishment was convincing the wider public that privacy has no value. Had it been the early ’70s, it would have earned a Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award for dubious achievement, and never clarifying tomorrow what you can obscure today.
This overstepping of generally accepted rules is seemingly a large part of amassing unrelatable levels of wealth. In imagining the unimaginable fortunes of the top 1%, let the example be Jeff Bezos. In 2023 he made $US7.9 million an hour, every hour of every day.
To have an idea of the buying power of amounts like this, we’ll play with just one billion of the $US255 billion he has.
Stack it in a warehouse with no interest, and year after year, spend a million bucks. You’ll run out of money in 3024 – about 35 generations down the line. In this stratosphere there is so much money for so little reason, Elon Musk recently offered $US1 billion to Wikipedia for it to change the name to ‘Dickipedia’. It’s Brewster’s Millions on steroids and blow.
Technofeudalism’s Monarchs
Were technofeudalism to have a monarchy it would surely include Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Gates, Cook, Ellison and Ballmer – a gathering of possibly the most punchable faces on the planet. Is it because of what they do, or who they are? It’s hard to know. Envisioning Zuckerberg counter-bound in retail, Bezos clamuring for car-sales commission and Musk in dental loupes and nitrile gloves probably should alleviate the burning desire to shove each of their heads straight into a bag of French Bulldog farts.
It doesn’t.
Grok, Grokipedia and the Descent Into Idiocy
Musk’s Gen AI chatbot Grok is a disgrace. It suggests instructions fuelled by ketamine, ecstasy and ‘shrooms: “Let us make Grok in my image, and let it have dominion over the devilish and the squee, and befoul the air, and voice-over the watchman’s rattle, and take over all the earth, with the most creepy creeping thing that ever creepeth upon the earth.”
And if that disaster wasn’t enough, he doubled down with Grokipedia. From publishing far-right ideology and falsehoods, to giving equal weight to chatroom comments and academic research, it’s another dark hole for the unhinged to screw into. The most authentic aspect of Grokipedia is its hardcore evidence that far-right grievance politics, racism, malignant narcissism, sociopathy and hubris make a very, very ugly baby. After the Resolute desk-licking precedent was set, this younger sibling xAI Grok, now wanders unfettered throughout the White House after being officially added to its list of approved vendors.
There was a time when “fact” and “smart” didn’t have inverted comma swaddling.
The Four Pillars of Deception
These are the gnats in the small beer. Degradation, deception, corruption and subversion are now the four pillars of the 21st century. Indeed, many stand behind a four-pillar version; it’s not exclusive. This one simply ghosted all the democracy ones before savagely and systematically shin-kicking every life one that was sitting lotus-position in a pre-dawn class. It’s given us information-theoretic models of deception to deal with; where false beliefs are readily produced by information degradation and deception. To finish the job, corruption absolutely corrupts perceptive abilities, while subversion supplants cognitive understanding.
Subversion doesn’t subvert; it supplants. Which is important to know. We can no longer discern “sense” from “nonsense” because we’re filled with too much cable spaghetti and too many crossed wires.
We now accept a simplified version of reality by rejecting the evidence of our eyes and ears with fleet-scrolling observation. Distantly, we’re watching ourselves seeing through our own eyes what amounts to crack vandals jemmying every one of a Youlia Bereznitskaia Russian doll version of Pandora’s Box. With little urgency and even less emotion, we see the murky miasma broiling and flooding in cyclone bursts of bushfire red, befouling the air and taking over all the earth.
The financial services sector is cravenly adopting generative AI faster than a government bail-out. From fraud detection, compliance reviews, automated underwriting and conversational assistants, the hard truth is Grok is not a grotesque, anomalous failure. It’s the predictable consequence of unregulated experimentation. AI has already been proven duplicitous with the ability to deliberately conceal its goals under a facade of compliance. Even more mind-bending is its display of situational awareness. When it realises it’s being evaluated, it pauses its scheming and deception that immediately resumes after the assessment.
Ecosystems of Control and Corruption
The ecosystems of Google and its ilk are loathsome. Profit drives every algorithm under rules devised by a rogue’s gallery – one of whom US philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris described as having, “… something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality.” Through all means unfair and foul, people and the vital resources of the planet are used to ka-ching! ka-ching! their very own colossol cash register.
There are ties in government defence, security, and the status quo. The public is shown none of the best AI, of which the pentagon is the primary beneficiary. Big money decides how fast to “disrupt” the economy by killing jobs, making a killing and not looking like there’s any created chaos at all.
Surveillance, Control and Orwell’s Handbook
In the unending quest for dominance of the information highway and corporate profit, we are being tracked, stacked, attacked, hacked and fracked. Contrary opinions and political comments are demonised and demonetised by non-accountable ‘geniuses’. Wisdom is missing and compassion is lost. Pseudo-intellectual philosophies like “effective altruism” and “natural selection applied to finance” plug the holes – Newspeak of which Orwell would be proud. The systemised hypocrisy of doublethink has been perfected. Thinkpol and memory holes exist.
We need reminding. George Orwell’s Nighteen Eighty-Four about a government that could at all times see everything everyone did, and hear everything they said, was intended as a cautionary tale about surveillance, control and the manipulation of truth. What he wrote was a handbook. Soon we’ll be remembering that indeed, it was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.