Shoehorning AI into politics is the worst idea imaginable
Sorry to bring this up, but Tony Blair has said something.
Britain’s former prime minister recently weighed in on artificial intelligence (AI), as he is apparently wont to, saying that you’d better get your running shoes on because the hand of history is chasing you while holding an iron rod.
AI will change everything, it seems.
“I mean everything. There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’,” he wrote.
Or someone, or perhaps some thing, did, but in any case Blair put his name to it, publishing a lengthy essay on his blog.
I am more than happy to have a discussion of thingness with anyone as phenomenology is a truly fascinating area. But the thing is, Blair’s statement is one of the most fascinating things ever committed to print. Not just tendentious, its very form itself is evidence of what might charitably be called motivated reasoning.
Blair’s. Thoughtproof. Truncated. Sentences. Are. A. Clear. Sign. That. Debate. Is. Not. Wanted.
I’ll confine myself to the specific issue of AI here, but, really, what is on display is brazen ideological smuggling where AI is not only inevitable (the future! Gee whizz!) but any downsides are just hard cheese. But the essay, the thing–in-itself is extraordinary, a kind of verbal free jazz, demonstrating Albert Ayler-like levels of skill in relating together hitherto unconnected things.
If only this verbal virtuoso was sui generis, but alas no, we are now routinely treated to the techno-futuristic musings of policymakers who have discovered that if they type some words into a box some more words will appear beneath them. You might even say that such childlike glee is endearing. Up to a point.
The imperative that we must ‘revolutionise’ politics in the face of this, that or the other is not only intellectually shallow but deeply misplaced, and Blair is far from being the only politician who randomly generates such strings of simulated thought. In fact, I only mention him because he’s an absolute hoot.
The more worrying thing is that those in charge of society’s tiller seem to want to jerk it in random directions without understanding how the rudder below actually works. More technology! More transformation! More ‘moreness’!
The inevitable
Change will come. It always does, but thinking about it – really thinking about it, thinking about what is changing, what we want, and, let’s not forget, how these pesky things that sit there stubbornly demonstrating that they are in fact things actually function – is not a roadblock, it is the appropriate response of people who will feel the impact of the change.
Politics seems incoherent today not simply because of bad actors, though they abound, but because of utter failure in a system that was, in the face of a dozy policy of desindustrialisation, kept on life support with cheap credit that is simply no longer available. That’s a thing. And it is a thing that another round of cost-cutting won’t fix.
And here’s another thing: if the negative response to AI we can see in commencement speech booing and the coincidence of both Stave Bannon and Bernie Sanders warning of job wipeouts to come is an overreaction – and it remains to be seen if it is an overreaction – it at least tells us that the public mood is one of concern. And why not? We’ve seen this movie before.
Telling people they are yesterday’s news is not only self-defeating, it is wrong. Wrong as in factually incorrect.
As for politicians, well, God help me, but I’d rather hear from the Pope. There’s a sentence so unlikely an AI couldn’t have written it.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers