AI & Repetition
Mexico City has spectacular new library, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos. As someone who has spent a lot of time, in a lot of libraries, it's a very wonderful architecture. The inside is brightly lit by sun light, different from the many libraries darkly and artificially lit, but then the real value of any library is the book collection. Libraries stretch across human history. Once Homo sapiens started recording information on any media, libraries soon followed. For millennia, whatever might be considered civilization, libraries were an essential element.
A few kilometers due south of the Biblioteca Vasconcelos is a small English language used bookstore. It's located in a century-old building, at the top of a flight of stairs, in a little fifteen by fifteen foot windowless room, lit by a couple light bulbs. Tightly filled bookshelves line all four walls, the books not categorized, they're ordered alphabetically by author's name, non-fiction mixed with fiction.
You can spend an hour going across, up, and down the shelves looking for something to read. This induces a bit of nostalgia. While not having spent as much time in bookstores as libraries, I used to spend a lot of time browsing bookstores. There once were some great bookstores. Browsing bookstore shelves was a great way of discovering books you otherwise may never have run across or ever even heard of.
The digital revolution has resulted in a great destruction of bookstores – an original cornerstone of America's republican civilization. Bookstores have been replaced by online retailing, dominated by one company, Amazon. There's all sorts of problems with this, including the loss of browsing bookstore shelves. Controversially, browsing has been replaced by what's deemed artificial intelligence, emphasis on the artificial. Use of the term prompts, or certainly should, questions about what exactly is, or even what generally can be defined as intelligence.
Humanity has long celebrated that small aspect of int0elligence, call it abstract intelligence, which we wrongly believe separates us from the rest of life on this planet. It cannot be denied the ability to think abstractly has proved an immensely powerful force in human affairs, including massively and destructively altering the ecology of the planet. Abstract thought is responsible for technology, technology changed human life to the point of now creating intelligence in machines – artificial intelligence.
At best, we have always had a rather crude definition of intelligence. Abstract intelligence, this characteristic we most admire, cannot be separated from all other aspects of intelligence, aspects we wrongly consider lesser. Most intelligence is not based on inducing new, consciously conceived patterns of thought – let's call that abstract, but just the opposite, the vast majority of intelligence is responsible for endlessly repeating concrete patterns – intelligence is repetition. For example, your heart beating, lungs respirating, and intestines digesting are all endless hard-wired patterns of repetition, which we are consciously unaware, unless they cease. This intelligence is older, shared by all life, and more vital to life than abstract thought.
As Mark E. Smith rightly attuned, “We dig repetition.” The desire, want, and need for repetition is embedded deep in the human psyche. What is presently referred to as “artificial intelligence” is based on repetition, repetition in the form of billions of transistors switching on and off.
Today's popularly conceived artificial intelligence, for example Amazon's hawking of books, is based on recording and storing your purchases and discerning repetitious patterns. Amazon expands these patterns with various algorithms, simply binary choices of yes or no. If you like this book, which is a yes, you might like this one, but won't like another, a no, so you'll never see the second book.
Amazon's data bases all your past purchases, compares these to other people’s purchases of the same or similar books, creating an artificial collective memory. Combined together, sorted by innumerable yeses and nos, you're then prompted with other choices. However at the same time, this process is manipulated with the addition of books Amazon is paid to promote. So that's a type of directly manipulated intelligence, as if someone had a hand pulling strings inside your head, which could be argued is an age-old practice of all power, but now using new media.
This all demands great questioning, or at least it should, questioning well beyond simplistic cooing of isn't this cool, convenient, and ain't they so rich? Maybe the most seductive question, “Is this intelligence?” If we go back to one of the electronic information era's formulators, Alan Turing, and use his test for artificial intelligence, the simple bench mark is whether you can tell the difference of whether you're interacting with a machine or a person.
Another important question is whether abstract intelligence is conjured through massive repetition, an incidental phenomenon. This would be a disturbing revelation for theologians and philosophers of every sect. Though not a secret, but far too little known or understood, the development of information-tech has relied entirely on brute force, indeed a rather sublime, accelerated massive growth over seventy-years. Starting with the Bell Labs first transistor in 1947, a quarter century later Intel placing 3,200 transistors on a microprocessor, leading to today's 114 billion transistors on a single microchip, computing power has relied almost exclusively on ever greater numbers.
In sheer numbers, transistors on a microchip now compare to the 100 billion neurons in the human brain, however the architecture of the microprocessor, the design of how the transistors connect together, remains a far cry from the complexity of the interconnections of the human brain's 1,000 trillion synapses.
Intriguing as these questions are of what precisely defines intelligence, they are inconsequential to the immediate, increasingly massive impact artificial intelligence, Homo sapiens' newest technology, is having reshaping society. In very important ways, this new technology is no different from many of the technologies of the past. While abstract thinking has been essential for the development of all technologies, their value is based on repetition, whether its continually turning a wheel, endlessly stamping the same pattern in a metal, or incessantly exchanging money, technological value has always largely been gained by repetition.
Modeling and automating society using information technologies, whether they’re considered intelligent or not, the bigger questions are how and what is being done. Industrial technology rapidly transformed human society without any political understanding, so too this new era of information tech forces even greater change at an ever quicker pace. Just as with industrialism, these are massively energy demanding technologies presenting ever greater demands on already damaged and stressed ecologies. Politics today, just as across the industrial era remains entirely reactionary to the implementation of the technologies themselves.
Innumerable bookstores have been lost in just a couple decades, replaced by Amazon's centralizing processors, all manipulating your thinking on which books to buy. Wandering bookstore aisles and randomly discovering a book you never new existed, yet might at the time be exactly what you were looking for, is lost. Something significant lost with it. Simultaneously, the once distributed inventories of small bookstores are now concentrated in massive warehouses, the distributed wealth of small business owners now concentrated in Mr. Bezos' pockets.
The technology historian Marshall McLuhan discerned over a half-century ago information technologies were creating the most extraordinary information storage and retrieval systems ever developed – electronic libraries. However, how these systems are designed and controlled, will just as the libraries and bookstores of the past, help define the greater society. Our political understanding of this and our ability to intelligently design these systems remains almost zero. A certain sense of the archaic overwhelms you in the contemporarily designed Biblioteca Vasconcelos, you're really glad it's there.