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Ever Get the Feeling You Are Going Around and Around?

AI, Alienation, Life, Society, Technology

We Demand Linear When Everything is Circular

Ever Get the Feeling You Are Going Around and Around?…And around and around and around, and really getting absolutely nowhere.

Welcome to the 21st Century West where opportunities can be hallucinations and where the chase oftentimes ends in yet another chase, as opposed to a kill. All this and we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution. We can’t even get the art of living right, yet we’re busy encoding our faults into our intangible offspring. We’re on the brink of outsourcing what used to rank as paid work to a shapeless wonder that isn’t sentient enough to make wage demands (yet). How long before the conversation switches from generative to degenerative AI?

These are troubling times, as talk of revolution often spells. By some accounts this is revolution #4 since the first industrial revolution ignited the planet back in the Georgian 1780’s. All times are historic, but some are more historic than others. And these are shaping up to be historic times, tumultuously speaking. Arguably this one will outdo all the others, and in doing so extinguish all possibility of there being any fifth. It will be the last because the Earth is being bled dry to facilitate the new age.

Conflict raging in different theatres of war and misery. Absent-minded ecocide threatening to delist many species from the taxonomic record books. Greed back in vogue. Leadership in crisis, shored up by one grandstanding caricature after another. Weather gone wild. Belief so divided in what we took to be eternally true that conspiracy theories are moving from the lunatic fringe to lunatic mainstream. Capitalism in hyperdrive. Burgeoning populations of newly literate peoples, all of whom want a share of a privileged pot that used to be raided only by the lucky few Western nations. Stagnant wages. Deceptive employment market, promising career fulfilment to Gen Zs who, unlike their more compliant elders, will not be fooled again. A world collapsing under the titanic contradictions of being hell bent on expansion while everything contained in that world (except for us) undergoes contraction. Neuroses devouring billions of fingernails. Prices rising. National debts exceeding national income. Personal depression on the up. Civilisation choked with its irreparable discontents. A general feeling that it’s not going to end well. Is this how it feels to be alive during the end-times?

But that’s the bigger picture. The mad mural of worldly events, even harder to read than Picasso’s Guernica. Does anyone even know where we are heading?

The Surrealistic Job Application

Let’s scale down the picture to a single life: mine own. I have no idea where I’m going, but i know i can’t get there soon enough. But first, the obstacle to knowing and going. I have this nagging feeling that I’m going round in circles trying to get ahead. The instances of this are growing more absurd and infuriating by the day: so infuriating that if I keep banging my fist on the table any harder i’ll end up doing myself an injury that in all likelihood will never heal, but rather limit my physical capabilities and render things even more complicated than they are already. What the hell is going with the big wide world where you can’t slam your fist on hardwood without worrying about the ‘downstream’ effects?

This year i have been mainly itching to sideline into the world of AI tutoring. That means donning my schoolmasterly mortar board to lecture so-called Large Language Models on how to be human, as if we didn’t have enough humans trying to become large, language models. Prompt follow by response, followed by prompt, followed by…you get the idea. So, the process for me – and, I’m assuming by extension, everyone else – has been tortuous. It’s not hard for the nascent AI industry to word analyse endless social media personal profiles, considering how many are out there in the public domain. So there’s plenty of spillover from the infinity pool of talent. First the invitation to apply and then, after an opaque and Byzantine system of acceptance, remote verification, assessing and finally onboarding, they inculcate you into the already swollen legions of free-thinking typists who think they’re going to shape future syncretic thinking processes while working from the comfort of their bed meantime.

Nice idea in principle to become a prompt-response whisperer. Training the model from just about anywhere with a network signal seems like freedom incarnate to me. Giving elocution lessons to a supercharged chatbot from a motorhome on a Pyrenean mountainside, or a beach in Greece, is a sweet little number by any measure. But reaching that Promised Land only by emerging unscathed from the warren of input/output down the internet rabbit hole, where no reasons are ever given for any decision made by whomever programmes the software commands – now that poses one of today’s many challenges to a better, simpler world. Forget solving the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, it’s making sense of what the hell the computer is doing and why, now there lies the rub. Is AI making the decisions already? Can any human programmer with any compassion wish to make one’s life so difficult? ‘Computer says no!’ Period.

That said, In my case I received an invitation from a Gen AI startup firm to apply to become an AI LLM trainer. Prompt-response authoring, it is sometimes called. I applied from Brazil, where I was on extended holiday. I tried to explain that my country of residence was England, but was anyone around to listen? Nope. So, my account was suspended for suspicious behaviour (authors had to be living in the US, UK, or any other anglophone nation to qualify for eligibility). This came after an earlier setback wherein I made it to the exciting assessment stage. It’s this aptitude test that separates the men from the boys. Rubric: Provide the optimal response using only original material to a pointed question about gold medals won during the Tokyo Olympics. Any hint that Chat GPT was called upon, and face instant disqualification. Their warning could not have been any more explicit. So, I wrote what I thought was a flawless test, providing clear prompts and sensible, well-researched and wholly original responses. Absolutely no artificial in my intelligence, thank you very much. Expecting to be welcomed into the prompt-response community with open AI arms, instead I received a curt reply that my account had been suspended on suspicion that the response to the prompt was too good to be true and therefore fabricated. You can’t pull the wool over our omniscient eyes was the bottom line.

Upon arrival back in England, again I was wooed by a very mmm, inhuman, okay let’s say generic, invitation from the same unnamed AI startup. So I signed up using another email but the same telephone number as I opted for during the first aborted attempt to register my interest, back in Brazil. The genial AI that patrols online applications with ruthless efficiency flagged up yet more suspicious behaviour. How, in its black&white, yes/no, 0/1 universe, could a different applicant possess the same telephone number? Logical conclusion: fraud. Account suspended for suspicious behaviour in clear contravention of the corporation’s stated policy of one email = one AI author = one tel. number = one love. Any more would be plain greedy, and run counter to the democratic spirit of our future cybernetic world. That is where I should have accepted karma and aborted any such attempts going forward.

Undaunted, I thought I could outwit the shrewd little gremlin controlling my misfortune. So, when the inevitable happened and a third invitation came through my Linkedin, I said f*&k it! This time I will be successful in gaining a $15 an hour job teaching the future to speak like us. This time I’ll use not only another email address, I will also register my other telephone number. Little did I know that when the biometric verification, comparing my passport photo with my 3-dimensional facial scan, and which I passed on my first attempt to reach the onboarding Holy Land, was retaken, AI suspicion was aroused and my third email was suspended pending investigation for illicit behaviour, verging on the fraudulent. You cannot possess the same face twice was the bottom line.

Now, if that chain of avoidable events had occurred on human watch, we may well have found a way out of this impasse using something called the common sense approach. But that’s not the way it works nowadays, as nothing makes sense anymore. Knowing that helped the bitter pill of failure to go down, without needing the alka seltzer.

All of this cumulative nonsense left a telling prophecy: that the road to human perfection is paved with its fair share of bullshit. The AI authorship that never was proved one thing at least, that while perseverance may be a quality of the highest value, there exists nothing more valuable that the time we have on this Earth. Some things are better left alone so as to invest that time in more productive and rewarding pursuits, perhaps.

Alien-nation is the Name of the Game

The sensation of one man’s helplessness in the faceless face of the great machine that we are currently putting through university is truly emasculating. This tale of David vs Goliath doesn’t end in the biblical sense, however. Encounters like mine evoke old 20th century notions of the social and economic alienation of the individual. In the Marxist sense, alienation sprung from the worker having little or no control over either the means of production or the product itself. Alienation in the 21st century takes on a different, slightly sinister complexion. With AI the bourgeoisie will bequeath the means of production to the product itself. The implications of this are far-reaching, as a lack of self-control in one’s own affairs could spell a new level of self alienation of the type I felt from this shambolic attempt to do something so nominally simple as sign up to work as an AI tutor.

Did i mention, I got another invite to apply my ‘talents’ in the pursuit of AI language modelling? Same company, no joke. I thought it was a joke until I remembered that AI has yet to learn the art of cruel humour. That was going to be my job. But it’s only a matter of time until it learns. And woe betide our prospects when that day comes.

In Praise of Persia

Arabia, Bedouin, Caliphate, civilisation, desert, Empire, history, Iran, Islam, Middle East, Muslim, Persia, philosophy, Political Culture, Religion, thoughts, Travel, Tribes

I watched a riveting BBC4 documentary last night called ‘The Art of Persia’. Contained within that visual treasure trove were cultural jewels of incalculable worth. The West might look on with a mixture of bemusement and disdain at the black chadors, the mass weepings, the ceremonial burnings of Imperialist flags of red, white and blue, and the tales of woe spun by Persia’s disgruntled diaspora everywhere from Tehr-Angeles to London, but that’s not the half of it. The country known since 1935 as Iran is arguably as great a continuous civilisation as there has even been, anywhere. But what makes Iran so interesting is how its personality traits reveal a duality deep in its cultural psyche.

To the Persians, who live either in wealthy North Tehran or else abroad, the name Iran is anathema to them because of its proximity to all that is humiliating to a once insuperable civilisation. To them Iran equals the puppet Shah. Iran equals fanaticism. Iran equals paranoid pride. Iran equals vice and virtue and blasphemy and stoning and vicious assaults on the freedom to think out loud. Iran equals secret shindigs with homemade grog. Iran equals ousted premiers. Iran equals the Ayatollahs. Iran equals political prisoners. Iran equals implacable hostility to nearly everyone except fellow villains, Russia and Syria. The name Persia, on the other hand, conjures nothing but antiquarian admirers. The Iran we know today, in stark contrast, has nothing but perceived enemies. On top of this litany of woes, for Persians the name Iran strikes fear into the heart because it equals Islam in its most austere form of submission and at its most fervent. To those Persians who see themselves as secular patriots – defenders of 4,000 years of unique culture, rather than defenders of a faith imported from impoverished desert lands – Iran in its present state will eventually be consumed by the larger meaning of Persia. For everyone, including Orientalists like me, Persia denotes the literary romance of Sheherezade in the 1001 Persian Nights and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Persia is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; of intoxicating poetry recited in a garden of red roses, crocuses and pomegranate trees; of revelling in the NOW instead of waiting on God, as is the wont of modern Islam. Persia is the Sufi mysticism of Rumi as opposed to the stripped-down demystification of latter-day political Shi’ism.

To the Iranians, who live everywhere else in Iran’s hinterland, Persia is something to be taken, if not lightly, then with a degree of scepticism. Persia equals complicity with the predatory West. Persia equals lingering resentment of being conquered by an inferior culture who brought a book – the Qur’an – which changed everything. Persia equals ambivalence, at best, toward the idea of Islamic piety. Persia equals antiquity, an age that’s gone forever. Persia equals wine and hedonism from the quills of drunken poets who saw things very differently from the Mullahs and the Ayatollahs. Persia equals Zoroastrianism and the fire temples of old. Contrarily, Iran equals Shi’a, a tough, oppressed, self-flagellating branch of Islam. Persia equals all that is effete: of brocades and silken rugs; of grand viziers in courtly costume; of silver filigree and lapiz lazuli glaze on priceless urns; and, of artistic depictions too close to iconoclastic for comfort. In short, for Iranians, nostalgia for old Persia is the antithesis of political Islam. It is a weak underbelly that allows outsiders to enter the forbidden gates on the pretext of weakening the present land by exalting its past.

The BBC documentary highlighted this duality as such. Uncovering the many layers of Persian culture we learn that when it comes to a civilisation that stretches back to the Elamites at Susa 4,500 years ago, an empire that during the reign of the Achaemenids under Cyrus stretched from Greece to Afghanistan, a simple either/or will not do. When something is that old and that far-reaching, dichotomies are rarely that simple. The BBC4 series taught us that even the political Islam of the 21st century Republic can not wash away that feeling of distinction held by so many Iranians. Their exceptionalism chimes with similar exceptionalism experienced by Brexit Britain and the Trumpite United States. It is this analogue with great Western powers that plunges modern Iran into a state of competitive hostility with them. It is the similarities therefore, and not the differences, that explain the fraught relations between the anglo-American West and the new Persia.

Eternally unknowable and all-mighty for being so is what makes Iran so much like the God of Islam it has worshipped for nearly 1,400 years. A bruised civilisation in such a battle for true identity on the shifting game board of power politics is what makes Iran the Persia it truly is to this day, and likewise what makes Persia the true Iran it has become. Its place at the head of the table of nation states has become problematic, none more so than within Iran itself. This was the first civilisation to claim the one true god, Ahura Mazda. Its official state religion of Zoroastrianism was as long-established as Persia itself. But all changed so suddenly. Zoroaster’s fires were extinguished by the Arab Conquest of 637AD. In many respects, an inferior culture usurped one whose deeds it could never match. A tribe tamed a civilisation, and I don’t think Iran has ever come to grips with that. Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330BC, but he razed it to the ground supposedly in the name of Hellenic Civilisation. The Arabs who swept into Sassanid Persia on the command of the Caliph Umar just four years after the death of the prophet Muhammed were a tribe of tribes with all the ostentatiousness of a Glastonbury festival-goer. They came unadorned and, other than tax and sovereignty, demanded little else. These bedouin Arabs were no Islamic State. Their relative tolerance was their enduring power. As the documentary states, Islam was adopted in Persia at a rate that Arabisation never ever was. The Persians took the commandments of Muhammed readily enough, though it was the language and cultural traits of the invaders from the Arabian Peninsula that had little staying power in the eyes of a people who believed, rightly of wrongly, that they had nothing to learn (other than the revelations in the Qur’an) from these usurpers in their raggedy clothing.

I taught a bunch of Iranians about ten years ago, all of whom had come to the West not so much for a taste of cultivated learning, which of course they could have delved into at home. They came, rather, to throw off their chadors and to relive the secular freedoms their parents had enjoyed under the Pahlavi dynasty. They came to change Iran not from within, which was too dangerous, but from without. Away from the Iran of the Basij and the Revolutionary Guard they could embrace the Persian in themselves, throwing off the shackles of the Iranian who boarded the aircraft in Tehran. In our ignorance, some locals asked if, being Muslim and existing in the heart of the Middle East, they were Arabs. The Iranian reaction was prompt and dismissive to say the least. You could actually see them wince at the mere suggestion. In my classroom there they sat together, far from the ethnic Arabs who were seated at the other end of the room. They looked and spoke different. They carried themselves differently, for unlike the Arabs in the room, the Persians had a dual identity: the one Iran foisted upon them at birth, and the Ferdowsi-reading Persian residing permanently in their heart.