philosophy

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.

Surviving a Wilderness of Weirdness with Philosophy as the Weapon of Choice

ethics, fate, free will, future, greek philosophy, human mind, Life, marcus aurelius, meditations, natural philosophy, natural world, philosophy, Spiritualism, stoicism, thoughts

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The media report much fear and trepidation in the wider world, although judging by the look of contentment on the face of passersby, you’d be hard pressed to think so.

(and I swear even the dogs grin, or is that the outward appearance of having a stick lodged in one’s mouth?)

There’s also the unintended consequence of having a lot of people who find themselves with oodles of time on their hands while Covid-19 does the rounds. So how do they while away the hours until the spectre of death subsides, and we can get back to servicing the toothed machine of human progress? Some trek to Everest Basecamp in the confines of their home by scaling the staircase until the carpet goes bald and they follow suit. Others turn their hand to a spot of home teaching the kids until, realising that the transmission of knowledge through didactic discipline is harder than it looks, they dismiss their tiny class early. Others, like me, write obscure blogs that few dare to read, worse still understand. Still others take up new housebound hobbies with aplomb: such as taking 360˚ virtual trips to the Great Namib Desert courtesy of their much-abused smart phones, or else the wise few keep reciting ‘No wild animals in my delicious hotpot, please’ in Mandarin until the phrase sticks.

With this golden opportunity not to go nuts inside a tiny flat in Basingstoke, how many out there have given over their enquiring mind to the acquisition of a philosophy? Ancients, who weren’t busy warring in a sackcloth and sandals, were rather adept at offering sound advice based on the principle that once a man had found a philosophy to suit his ontological needs, he had succeeded in finding the map that would guide a clear path through this impenetrable life. The bold and the beautiful in the Greco-Roman universe swore by this dictum, going so far as to stitch their new ethos into their imperator tunics while on campaign against troublesome Germanic tribes.

The last of the five ‘good emperors’, Marcus Aurelius, was a man revered for being an enlightened and compassionate allrounder with a mind given over to self-examination in ways inconceivable to other emperors, for whom pleasures of the flesh all too often outweighed the pain of asking what does it all mean and what is my true place in the grand scheme? Given the unenviable task of leading the decades-long charge against tribes terrifying the fragile borderlands of the Roman Empire, the good emperor still managed to fit in a famous philosophical treatise before he died. Known as The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, it was in essence a late second century A.D. reinterpretation of an ethical code dating back to a school of philosophy which had flourished ever since Zeno inscribed it in the minds of 4th century B.C.E. Athenians fed up with Cynicism.

Known as Stoicism, this branch of philosophy sought to strip away the bark of long-established wisdom to reveal the true sap oozing out of life: that is to say something vaguely along the lines of a cosmos working in cycles that start and end in fire. All matter that makes up the physical and, by extension, metaphysical questions that Man struggles to intepret works on a rational and logical basis (or ought to). Hence we humans do best when we are exercising reason over hot-headed emotion; hence we attain more understanding of how things are when explaining that phenomena using language built upon the rational rules of grammar instead of, say, an abstract picture or an incoherent grunt.

Sandwiched between the grand cosmological cycles is something we know as nature. Hence. stoicism is arguably the most influential of natural philosophies in its insistence that you and me are very small and limited in the grand scheme of things. By accepting each our minor yet vital role, the pressure is off and therefore happiness through simplicity becomes viable. Nature has a grand design, and if you let it into your heart you’ll soon realise both you are very insignificant and that, in spite of our own individual position far from centre, the universe nevertheless has your best interests at stake. All things occur for a reason. Fate doesn’t have to explain why it behaves in seemingly random ways. If it did, we’d know there’s nothing random about it. Even if an event seems uniquely cruel or inexplicable, natural forces will use the injustice to take corrective measures later on that symmetrically redress the balance, leading to the ‘Ah!’ epiphany that ‘it all makes sense now’. The interconnectivity of events is so blindingly intricate, not even a genius could spot it (shit! Did I just spot it where better people failed?)

Zeno, the father of stoicism himself, is reputed to have said that fate is an endless chain of causation whereby things are: the reason or formula by which the world goes on. In spite of this complex pattern, nature’s inner workings are, obversely, not mystical and esoteric at all; they are beautiful because true beauty lies in simplicity. That nature is beneficent – an unstoppable force that looks out for each of us if only we’d realise it – is contingent on you, the stoic, playing life as a game involving a basic blueprint of virtues to carry through life’s interactions into every little thing. Seek the four cardinal virtues – 1) justice/fairness/decency 2) wisdom/prudence/deliberation 3) courage/fortitude/endurance, and 4) temperance/self-discipline/modesty – and ye shall find yourself on course for a good death. That’s the idea, as I see it. The moment of death is all that your life ultimately amounts to, so life had better be conducted virtuously if death is to be faced head on, without anguish. There is such an aspiration as a good death, but it must be preluded by a life of self-discipline, fairness, examination, and strength of heart and mind. By the way, a good stoic would urge you not to be virtuous only to for the reward of a least hideous death. Be good, in and of itself, not for what it may give you back. Life is not a financial investment. Do the right thing because that is the natural order of things and to speak the language of life eloquently, we must first understand its grammar and morphology.
For stoics, like Seneca, Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, life exists to be lived, literally like there is no tomorrow. William Faulkener wrote, The past is never dead. It’s not even past. How I do admire that wordplay. That said, Faulkener was no devotee of Seneca the Stoic. To stoics like Seneca, the past is a foreign country. Events that created the mosaic of that life have moved away forever, never to be relived with the veracity of how they were first meted out. Memories are not to be trusted, nor to be dwelt on. And death is not a loss of a whole life but rather just a loss of a moment at the close of that life. The ideal life, according to Seneca, was to be lived in the now, without dwelling on what’s gone, nor the irrelevance of what’s to come. It was to find contentedness in the simple here and now, and to want for nothing. How else to understand what golden threads of alchemy the cosmic fabric is made of other than to look closely at what is all around you NOW?

What the world needs now is love, sweet love, so goes the song. The world also needs Stoicism, meant not as the character-building prototype of the rugged Victorian imperialist (sword in one hand, dove in the other, pen between the toes, and pipe contemplatively in the mouth). Rather, the stoicism that emanated from ancient Athens and Rome was one that understood its demoted place in the natural order. We face a twenty-first century reckoning because we took stoicism to mean putting up with any old shit that life throws at us. Overwhelmingly, that shit was of our own making because we got way, way ahead of ourselves, thinking that two thousand years of Christianity and Islam had transformed each of us into little gods and sinners to be forgiven through atonement and religious devotion. So it was okay to break the ancient covenant with the natural order and go forth and multiply exponentially while scorching the Earth to conquer all before us because it was sanctioned first by the scriptures, and secondly by the arrogance bestowed on us by virtue of having reached a state of civilisation that was deemed far removed from lowly animals (this civilisation, it should be post-scripted, built its sandcastle empire not always on virtue alone).

In an age of uncertainty, rocked by the unvoiced realisation that there are too many of us vying for limited resources in a world wrecked in the search for these valuables, what needs resurrecting from the ashes of a self-deceptive human race is the idea that there are greater forces out there writing the book of life. That we are not gods but men and women who are fallible may seem self-evident, but any visitor from Andromeda would think we had promoted ourselves to that elevated rank. Every one of us might be just a mote of dust in the wind, but life affords us one chance to show our mettle: that if each of us face our remaining days in the pursuit of justice and courage and wisdom and self-restraint we shall once again feel humbled by the enormity of all that surrounds us. While no one gets out here alive, use this present lockdown to fashion your own system of practical ethics. As well as dying with a smile on your face, you might just make a small difference to your own and to the innumerable small lives that together construct the rich tapestry of everything we see and, more importantly, everything we don’t.

Everybody has an answer, but few a philosophy. Everyone wants a life, but not everyone holds the ethical guidebook to embark upon one worth living. Millions likes posting big pictures on Instagram, but how many consider the bigger picture and their own role as but one pixel within it? Why go in search of happiness as if it be a commodity to be acquired when, with the right tools at your disposal, you may reach inside and find it there? Thousands are dying out there (of malaria more than of Covid-19). So why stay at home wondering how you’re going to avoid it when you can stay at home and work out a formula for how to pursue a good life befitting of an equally good death.

Springtime Of Our Lockdown

Britain, climate, conservation, Coronavirus, counter-culture, Covid-19, crisis, death, earth, environment, fate, free will, future, Hinduism, human mind, Liberalism, Life, Lifestyle, meditations, natural world, nature, neglect, pandemic, People, philosophy, Planet Earth, Political Culture, Politics, Reflections, thoughts

While we wither indoors, out there something profound is happening. Nature is back with a bloom. Can anyone remember it being so resplendent? So full of seasonal promise?

I’m asking myself how an annual event can seem to take on another dimension. Yet spring is springing with a wicked spring in its tail. Animals have returned to wander down paths long blocked to them. Goats window shopping in abandoned Welsh seaside towns; boars doing the passeggiata down silent streets in Bergamo; dolphins nosing around now crystal-clear canals in Venice in the absence of gondoliers sticking their bloody oars in everywhere. Hell! Even the tender shoots of first budding look that bit more sharp-suited, greener than usual. The sky, not so anaemic. The signs, far from being ominous to any life form other than us, are encouraging. If this is what the world’s end looks like, I’m signing up to it. The whole thing is beginning to feel like a massive teleological event: a reckoning that pits us against each other, and ourselves. What did Churchill once say? “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Can it be that Humanity pulls off a civilisational coup, foreclosing on the disastrous Age of Kali (see William Dalrymple’s 1998 travelogue for explanation, or else anyone of eight hundred million Hindus) for a gentler, more enlightened epoch? Could the pandemic be the hidden catalyst for it? Probably not, but the thought is a fitting one given the wonder show that nature puts on while we succumb to fear of personal extinction in our homes under the curfew of self-isolation. While a wholesale regeneration of purity in nature at the expense of human resource rape-&-pillage might be a bit much to hope for, certainly the lockdown can generate a paradigm shift in how people work, and in how we spend our few precious days on this Earth.

Yesterday I stopped by a glade of glistening wild garlic by the roadside. Ordinarily, cars would be humming past with such regularity that no one in their right mind would have pulled over on their bicycles to pick a bunch of nature’s own – a little crop of green goodness that went into the making of wild garlic pesto. In the absence of pandemic, would i have so much as done this? No. Am I better for having done so? Categorically, yes.

This reckoning, by which one refers to a near cessation of frenzied (and highly destructive) activity, which has come to characterise the Human Project over the past forty years, enables a beleaguered and frankly overwhelmed world a chance to hit reset. That great ferris wheel of civilisation that turns ever faster, drawing in and spitting out hapless human victims all the time, has ground to a halt for (shall we say) a spot of maintenance. While it lays motionless, finally we get the chance to stop being mesmerised by its whirring circulation, and start taking in the 360 degree view that was perilously neglected all the while.

Now is the springtime of our being (unless you live in the southern hemisphere in which case you’re on for a revolutionary autumn). Those who are in the gutter looking up at stars over cities that are not only shining but coruscating for the first time in the modern age, will they necessarily want a straight return to an orange-sodium sky above their heads, planes roaring overhead? Those realising that the job they are doing from home unexpectedly through lockdown can be done from home post-lockdown, will they desire an immediate return to crammed commuter lines full of sleepy, barely-approachable worker drones? All of us who may take our one hour of daily exercise (which in reality morphs into about four as the conditions are so favourable, and as time has taken on a more elastic property), we who can stroll down lanes untrammelled by the impatient thud of footsteps, do we want necessarily to cash in the quietude for a ride on the capitalist wheel of fortune again?

The spectre of death clears the field. If there were ever a moment to stop and smell the roses, it is now. If there were ever a moment to ask ourselves: what do each of us want from this fleeting life, and what are we prepared to leave behind when the fire goes out? Now is the time. A gift has been offered to us in the form of mass global quarantining. From this renewal nature may stand a fighting chance while for our part we may gain absolution from mass collective sin. Now I don’t quite know what kind of force is behind these weird developments, but whatever orchestrated them is giving Humanity an open window for opportunity to refashion ourselves into a life force that goes with the seasons, instead of one that signifies such damage and ecological destruction that the seasons themselves cease to be what they were. That window will all but certainly blow shut with the first shunt of summer wind against the pane. While we’re all locked down, let’s make room for the other tenants that call Earth their home, too. When the time comes to fling open our doors again, let goodness flow out and everywhere.