The Machine Starts
Stories, Machines, and a Wandering Story about an Old Machine
Preamble: Please enjoy this classic short story from 1909. Its inclusion here is an afterthought but the themes are the same. The themes have always been the same. Forster’s Machine is the deaf, dumb and blind end of the so-called Singularity, a factory-modeled, mechanical Frankenwomb for each of us to rest in peace.
In Praise of Uncertainty
Let there be lightness and darkness, that they may converse in twilight. Let all things under the everchanging lightness be in motion, that ye not grow rigid and desiccated. Let there be uncertainty, that the brightness blind ye not.
How many shades of grey are in a cloudy day? How many more come and go as the winds swirl and the earth moves in all dimensions around its light source? Multiply this quantity once for each creature endowed with sight. Mix in the all the colours and multiply again. How many more shades are possible but unrealized? Multiply again.
Infinity expands when we ask the right questions. Infinity points to something we can’t reason or even imagine our way to. Infinity doesn’t exist numerically, and even as a word its meaning can’t be grasped, only implied. Infinity is the elegant equation before solving for X. Infinity is analog. It’s the uncollapsed wave, the unbounded spectrum, the unnumbered shades of grey.
Could a theoretical quantum computer, say with many more states than simple binary, keep up with the flowing greyness of clouds? Simply, no. For one thing the computer renders representations of clouds, not actual clouds. Even with predictive processing far beyond today, the computer creates at best a lower resolution reflection. An actual cloudy day is hundreds of tons of water suspended over your head, and rest assured no quantum computer will ever construct that. Digitization is digitization of something analog, not the thing itself. It is innumerable quantum beats behind, forever. Call it the analog uncertainty principle.
My musings are not crowd-pleasers, which is unfortunate anytime but even more so in an attention/ surveillance economy requiring market capture as a precondition for existing. My experiences do correspond with the times though. My story, perhaps yours too, is a paradox of lightness and darkness, not grey but rather the poles held in tension. Innumerable greys in potential. Schrodinger’s grey cat. Call it superpositional grey.
What even is greyness besides a quality of lightness?
In Praise of Grey Stories
Interesting times require sitting with the darkness. Wallowing is not advisable, however nor is wallowing in the toxic positivity of consumer logic, where uplifting stories of relatable characters ennobled by their personal journeys are always in demand. Nothing wrong with that as far as the market goes, but the profit motive demands giving people what they want, which over time blurs the fact that the reality behind the stories is not constrained by market forces and consumer preferences.
Seduced by relatable character, we can overlook that plot is a device for magical thinking, for putting said character into encounters with dark situations. We love that darkness too. I myself wouldn’t read a story without conflict, but recall that most of real life, like walking on the beach, riding a bicycle, reading a book, doesn’t present itself in story form. A story arc is a bent straight line, a treasure map of wish fulfillment: Follow the map to get the gold; slay the dragon to get the girl; perform X, Y, Z to unlock happy ending.
The point is not to denigrate a deeply human timeless tradition. The universe is made of stories it’s been said, which is itself a story, although it might be equally helpful to say that stories are made of the universe, which is yet another story about story. Stated more precisely, stories are made from our map of the universe. A story of a universe being made of stories is only slightly less limiting than dogmatizing that the earth and its favourite self-regarding species is the centre of creation. (I should say I am not trying to score a cheap point off this wonderful poem - I point only to the downside of taking this famous line too literally, which I’m sure we do all the time on many levels.)
The cavalry is not on the way. Technology is not the deus ex machina. The path of the postmodernized hero’s journey, structurally explicit and endlessly reproducible, is not to defeat any real life monsters but to become the monsters’ pampered pet, a predictable revenue stream. Stories instruct but also deceive, sometimes within the same story. Stories have the same effect as words on what which they represent, revealing this while obscuring that.
It’s not that there are no happy endings – that would be a category error arising from narrative bias – it’s that there’s no ending at all. The unfolding unfolds and continues unfolding. Because it is so ingrained in us to render aspects of the universe into story, we impose a structure on it that then reverberatively informs how we think about things. Stories will please us, and are often instructive and necessary, but it’s easy to become unmindful that neither life nor the universe fits that structure.
In Praise of Brief Asides #1: Why I say these things
My model of the universe began forming in 1966, a brief 21 years after the second war to end all wars. To go into why I feel so negative about Techno-Optimism, a stew of black magical thinking and domination-at-scale wish fulfillment, it will be necessary to say a few words about my experience, otherwise I’m just being abstract. However for perspective I’ll acknowledge my blessings first. Nature has been kind in granting me a healthy body and an open, searching mind. I am lucky and advantaged in many ways and humbly grateful for it every day. All my darkness, challenges, and strange circumstances come from external sources, the Techno-Accelerationist times we live in. That’s my starting point and the legend in my map.
I’ll keep the personal bits brief and decontexturalized to avoid endless digressions. Everybody’s got problems, I only mention mine because they’re as much about our time as about me. A list of absurdities (the map’s legend) may suffice to easily place my story in the modern age:
No settled place to be from. No roots. No persistent social network or peer group.
Electronic screen as best friend, lover, mentor, boss and fashion advisor.
Myths, stories, cultural memory touchstones swapped out for journalism, movies and entertainment content, all designed to tunnel-view attention and pipeline dominant culture social signals and product placements. Packaged as Progress.
STEM-stunted, graph-goes-up view of a dead, decontextualized world of resources to be exploited at ever-accelerating rates, as if neither math nor physics nor life was real.
Jobs that require, or simply are, sitting in a chair, narrowly focused on uploading and downloading information from a computer. (See #’s 2, 3 & 4)
These features of my map are universal today, arguably, affecting your environment and people you know even if you personally are healthy of mind as well as body. The first is extreme in my case, but more people, and beyond that the entire earth aside from our pets, are affected by various forms of domicide than ever before. This graph goes up too.
In Praise of the Age of Smart Machines (Just kidding there’s no such thing)
The information space, both inside and outside what used to be called ‘The’ media, is highly corruptible because we are by default trusting, loyal and cooperative. Isn’t that astonishing to hear it like that? PR and propaganda and the mis-dis-mal-information of ‘the information age’ work work so well precisely because the baseline human condition is NOT to have your own social hierarchy out to roboticize you and reduce you to your creature comforts.
There are several hundred or so distinguishable cognitive biases, depending how you count them. It’s widely accepted that we are susceptible to all kinds of heuristics, prejudices, category errors and faulty judgments, and so on. But the complementary aspect of those flaws is rarely discussed: that we are susceptible and naïve toward predatory schemes by strangers precisely because we evolved to be trusting, loyal and cooperative in communal groups.
If I weren’t opposed to the sneaky, secret data extraction scheme of the Large Language Models (LLM’s), I’d input the following prompt. Computer: number and name all potential shades of grey. If it comes back with an unqualified list it’s hallucinating; it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. If it goes on calculating that’s better but the adjacent possible greys expand with every iteration. I’d ask it to number and name all the types of questions it can’t answer. I’d run these questions multiple times on multiple LLM’a and see what different answers come back. The only correct answer would be for the data processor to say it can’t answer and it can’t even process the question, and so it ought not to be in charge of anything let alone the future.
I always remember one professor’s first words from the first lesson in the first week of electrical engineering: “The most important thing you need to know about computers is that they’re dumb. They’re really, really dumb. Dumb as a toaster. They can only do what you explicitly tell them to do.” Nothing’s changed in the decades since, Moore’s Law notwithstanding.
During my time since 1966 much of daily existence has become increasingly narrow-focused on what is quantifiable and digitizable, which as many have argued makes us increasingly blind to all that’s not. How would an AI go about quantifying and naming all those fleeting greys mentioned above? More generally, how would the scientific method provide explanatory power, or even frame a hypotheses about, ways in which our stories shape us? The universe shrugs at our attempts to dumb it down. We only dumb ourselves down. Some, from the yesterday’s Techno-Optimists to today’s Techno-Optimists, seem grimly determined that’s our superpower.
We evolved in relationship with trustworthy ingroups, where selfish, outsized egos and sociopathic tendencies can be checked as a matter of routine by social pressures. In a smallish community the idea that one person can be “superior” is absurd, since each individual is an expression of the community itself. Trust, almost by definition, requires vulnerability. So we can be blindsided if an opaque ruling outgroup (or detached ingroup, like, say, an overstaffed intelligence wing) exploits our evolved presumption of trustworthiness while remaining unreachable by said social pressures.
The idea that one’s own society is deliberately, mechanically and scientifically undermining one’s capacity to be an agentic living being sounds absurd on the face of it. How long could such a self-annihilating society last? Instead, our opaque ruling order manufactures superiority by hoarding growth opportunities and grinding away at dumbing the rest of us down. It seeks its liberation in getting its greedy hands on a magic robot switch somewhere at the bottom of our brainstem. But black magic is a bitch and the boomerang always comes back.
And yet, while one has to work to imagine a community that would kneecap itself, it sounds like common sense if that opaque ruling group tells itself a story about being a superior order from the ruled. Is that why there’s a hundred different ways the future looks like a robotic boot-on-the-face and very few that don’t?
In Praise of Progress, or, “I’m from the State-Corporate Tech Sector and I’m Here to Help”
When did this chasm between ruler and ruled develop? It might be a defining feature of civilization, when social groups become too large for personalized relationships. It may have been a gradual development, an evolving awareness that hierarchical organizations will typically outcompete their rival outgroups who enjoy greater individual freedom. Whatever one can speculate, the written record is questionable and only goes back a vanishingly short time. Alienation of ruler from ruled could be a measure of the extent to which an invasive outgroup or detached ingroup rules over an otherized, instrumentalized, abstracted mass.
Aligning with the theme that words and stories conceal as much as reveal, the term ‘race to the bottom of the brainstem’ elides much about the process. As adults we can read it and think of operations aimed at our own developed brainstems. But really it’s about taking unformed children and attaching robotic facehuggers to their brainstems as they grow. It’s a horror show nightmare when you look at it baldly like that, almost too painful to apprehend directly. Somewhere in our hearts we know something anti-life, anti-sacral and anti-human is progressing just outside our peripheral vision. Stalin and you-know-who were Humanist-Reductivist Techno-Optimists too, for many of the same reasons.
This is Progress? No wonder we’re awash in so-called mis-dis-mal-information. We swim in lies every day the modern world touches us, every day since we’re born under the artificial lights of climate-controlled, colourless, rectilinear rooms. Is it conducive to a healthy relationship with shared reality if advertizers are clamouring to colonize your child’s brainstem beginning the day they learn you’re pregnant? Is it strange to consider that hundreds of surveillance advertizers routinely discover pregnancy and move to exploit it long before you even tell your closest family? Whoever first suggested our relationship with Big Technology is an abusive one with a dark triad sociopath was right on the money.
Did you know there used to be regulations in America limiting advertizing to children under twelve? Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill in 1988 that aimed to extend those protections, presenting the story that, “This bill simply cannot be reconciled with the freedom of expression secured by our Constitution.” (Per NYT: “The House of Representatives passed the measure, 328 to 78, on June 8, and the Senate gave its approval Oct. 19 by unrecorded voice vote that could have been blocked if only one Senator had opposed it.” Apparently it was overwhelmingly reconcilable with freedom.) America has been grooming its children’s brainstems ever since. Why had there been such a law in the first place? It’s like we’ve forgotten something so thoroughly it’s hard to remember anything was lost. Mis-dis-mal-information is all around us all our lives. It’s like Big Intelligence wants to fight half a forest fire while letting the other half burn, gaslighting themselves into contortions about how one is an existential threat but the other is a Torch of Freedom.
In Praise of Egotist-Objectivism and its Baby Robot, Humanist-Reductivism
History is written down by the victors, but these words too obscure more than they reveal. Most of history remains unwritten, as it’s always been. Dominant culture narrative is a bright light that binds as it blinds.
Retaining sight, as it were, involves a paradox. Until the bright light of modern consciousness created a story that all of reality can be quantified and explicitly verbalized, it was considered important to teach humbleness in the presence of a darkness we can’t see, only create space for. "The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." (Niels Bohr) Holding both sides of a paradox invites the grey.
This is the ancient beating heart of spirituality and belief – that there is something in the universe beyond our capacity to represent it. What that is we can’t know other than that there is a darkness we can only acknowledge as such. It’s enough to know we know nothing. If you think you know, you don’t know. If you know you don’t know you still don’t know, but there’ll be that space to sit with the unknowing.
But in a politico-economic age dominated by people who profess belief in Egotist-Objectivism, ascendant in the aforementioned 1980’s, humbleness is death. Ego death. The Humanist-Reductivist Egotist-Objectivist aspect of all our minds doesn’t know what death is because it doesn’t know what life is. A felt connection to all living things requires a healthy humility while the ego requires a deleterious separation to persist. Lightness and darkness blur in this realm – the so-called “bright light of consciousness” is really quite dark, while embracing the vastness of all that’s dark is really quite enlightening. It’s a paradox, but there it is.
The steadily growing separation between ruler and ruled rolls forward across centuries to now, leading more and more into separateness from all that is. The distance creates a negative space for implicit and explicit judgments that categorize who and what is superior and inferior. This judgment sets up a positive feedback loop of separation. (The detachment of superior from inferior hardens the judgment, which then increases the separation, which then further hardens the judgment… and so on.) This unwritten aspect of Managerial Techno-Scientism continues to progress. It fractally recreates the basic structure of the divide between ruler and ruled, still in dynamic unfolding since the rise of city-states. I’ll call it the Revelation of Rome.
The revelation was that a small group of soldiers, disciplined to function as a machine, can defeat a much larger cohort of skilled but unorganized fighters. While this would hardly be a revelation to Greeks and older city-states accustomed to fighting in formation, it’s worth remembering how this came as a world-smashing revelation to the pre-Roman cultures to the north and west. From this moment all Progress is a march of becoming ever more machine-like. Though conceiving of workers (formerly, people) as replaceable parts in ‘dark Satanic mills’ is often thought of as a consequence of industrialization, I am saying that the seeds of The Mechanical Universe were germinating long before.
Acknowledging machine thinking to accomplish goals that could not be achieved otherwise is not a value judgment. The social machine brought aqueducts, beautiful buildings and indoor plumbing, as well as knowledge of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and the existence of billions of galaxies. I bring this forward as just one of those things, expansive of techne, that comes as both blessing and curse, lightness and darkness, and difficulty knowing how much of each.
In Praise of the Great Chain of Machine
The Great Chain of Being, the eternal map of the medieval mind, is a machine model too; hierarchical, static and consisting of parts in their appointed places. Unlike the ephemeral map of the modern mind there is space for divinity and nature and the greater-than-human, though on some level of abstraction an engineering god created a machine to keep people in their place. Even leaving aside the symbol of chains for slavery and captivity, there is a linear, vertical aspect of conceiving the universe as a chain, as opposed to say a net, web, quilt or other non-hierarchical image. The Great Chain of Being was a story and a map, and like all stories it obscured more than it revealed and like all maps it left out most of reality.
By the time industrialization took hold, machine thinking had already colonized our minds, but until then there was still a mind-expansive tension from holding two different worldviews together, as with the aforementioned paradox. With industrialization the dominant culture itself becomes a machine, and all that was held implicitly, the divine, the natural, the greater than human, vanishes in the glare of the bright light of consciousness. To the managerial mindset, from here on everything either resembles a machine or else doesn’t exist. It is then a short hop to thinking either something can be quantified, verbalized and digitized or else it doesn’t exist. The modern map is a static thing, like all maps, so it never registered the frictionless glide into thinking either we are a cog in the “Great Chain of Machine” or else we don’t exist.
In Praise of Brief Asides #2: Why I say these things
This may be getting abstract, so for context I’ll say a little bit about my experience on the wrong end of Humanist-Reductivism. I feel strongly about our dominant culture of Reductive-Materialism because I know intimately this feeling of nonexistence, of being separated from communal life. It is a deeply uncomfortable, void-adjacent otherness which forms many of my earliest memories and created a downward spiral I’m still climbing out of.
I know the double-edged nature of stories because I experienced an extreme edge case. Having brought pain, embarrassment and shame to even the few family members I do have, stories were told to explain my hateful, self-loathing, schizo-psychotic tendencies, addictions and juvenile delinquencies. Every story was wrong, lacking all context and designed to soothe the tellers, but they stuck to me like feathers on tar just the same. I never saw a true reflection of myself. It was all I could do to reject those stories, to remove myself from the water, and trust to a belief that somewhere inside there was a higher self that no one else could see or hear. Hence my distrust of stories.
Knowing only an anemic sense of self, social belonging and shared memory beyond entertainments, advertizements and transactional relationships, I finally accepted by my mid-twenties that being alone with a searing, hypertensive toothache of the soul was my lot in life so I may as well deal with that instead of wishing it were otherwise. That was a story too, both limiting and expanding, but from there I found more meaning in life than utility as a machine cog and more multitudes than the economy will ever know. That thou art more than. A story that could have unfolded into self-termination a hundred different times landed instead in a state of grateful and persistent beatitude.
I have come to understand that for this to be so I have to speak what I feel is true, even if no one wants to hear it. For the longest time I intended to take all I ever learned to the grave. Even if I found the words, no one was going to listen to me anyway so why bang my head on that wall? Saying what I really think creates discomfort because it reveals my estrangement from consensus reality. Said consensus may be false, as many have said about “the world” since recorded time, but even a manufactured taboo commands the primordial fear of social banishment. I write these things to bridge the separation between myself and everyone else. Not doing so brings even more discomfort, I learned the hard way.
In Praise of Artificial Intelligence, Wisdom and Empathy
Now you know why I feel so strongly about the alienating nature of proposed life under Managerial Technocracy, which no one ever accuses of producing healthy humans and environments. The passion projects of TESCREAList’s [Transhumanists, Extropianists, Singularitarianists, Cosmists, Rationalists, Effective Altruists, and Longtermists] and the Big VC’s rolling out the commoditized, atomized, unhuman future are dangerous, delusional and damnably dumb. Their gigawatt engineering/business brains are so narrowly intellectualized they think the shiny objects in their “bright light of consciousness” are all there is. (However, while TESCREAL is a comprehensive and accurate descriptor, it will never catch on as it is clunky and confusing and the word “REAL” doesn’t belong anywhere near these anti-life concepts. Hereafter I follow convention and use the term Transhumanist even though I mean all the above and more including Accelerationists.)
Computers can never be intelligent, let alone conscious, because they only crunch numbers. That’s it. That’s all they do. They do it much better than we can, as is fitting for a tool, but at the end of the day they only crunch ones and zeros. They no more understand what the results of their calculations mean than your toaster understands what it’s doing to your bread. The hypothetical transhuman, cognitively “enhanced” with large scale data processing capability, is diminished as a living being unless humility, wisdom and empathy are installed in the firmware. Alas, the higher faculties don’t work that way. They take time and experience and understanding, not to mention countless mistakes and unpleasant feelings and experiences. One seeks a lifetime for wisdom, knowing in the end that no one ever gets it. As for empathy, Transhumanists can program the words but not the music.
Artificial Wisdom and Artificial Empathy? Artificial means fake in everyday usage. While many are rightly concerned about how dangerous AI will be in ways we can hardly imagine, I’m also concerned about how dumb the future looks, bright with dumb copies of dumb copies of dumb copies of explicit, propositional things. A reflection of its creator’s values, AI will destroy you in chess but be as useful as a flashlight for seeking out the good, the true and the beautiful, or humility, wisdom and empathy.
In Praise of Binary Processing
It’s a common parenting tactic to guide a child’s desires by presenting two choices and letting the child decide between them. It’s less common to understand this largely defines the modern adult world too. Even the scientific method, lauded in high schools and ivory towers alike, is dressed-up binary thinking: hypothesis vs. null hypothesis. We can’t blame large scale data processing (AI) for producing cognitive reductivism, only for accelerating down the path that was cut long ago.
For machines that only crunch binary numbers there’s only one way to render the world, which is to reduce inputs and outputs to a very large number of discrete, explicit binary states. That’s useful for computation though it would be delusional to think the universe actually conforms to this simplistic rendering. But that’s how the bright light of consciousness sees it. Don’t believe me? Red pill or blue pill? Conservative or Liberal? Tweedledee or Tweedledum? Vote or don’t vote. Like button or don’t. Friend, follow, subscribe or don’t. Perhaps more to the point: Click to Agree to the surveillance technology terms and conditions.
As with app agreements requiring you to pretend that you “…have read and understood the terms…,” there’s often no meaningful choice. It’s a sham within a ruse, wrapped in an agenda. The implied terms, the velvet glove that covers the fist, is that you should get used to ‘submitting’ to ‘agreements’ you can’t fathom. It’s the modern ‘social contract’ – click to agree to some open-ended, evolving, AI-surveilled Franken-state that even the engineers and lawyers can’t fathom.
The Transhumanist vision is of a universe seeded with and dominated by “happy” mechanical brains, with or without fleshly bodies as their chariots. Yes, they seriously argue this, in scholarly books affiliated with prestigious universities. (I won’t link to a book I’ll never read. I’ve heard interviews and read enough to feel solid on the main points of Longtermism, the L in TESCREAL.) Counterpoint to the main thrust that we can affect and better future “people’s” lives: We best do that by making the best possible present at all times, not with ideal propositions from faulty presumptions about what the future even is, let alone what’s best for it. That’s how it was done in the dark past, before the machine mind germinated, before the future became so longterm and far out in space it can only be an abstract proposition and a technical problem to be programmed.
Leaving aside how depressingly dumb this vision is to anyone who feels they are more than a set of propositions; this is a self-owning horror show. If humans go extinct (or obsolete) it won’t be the graphs going up all at once (climate, AI, eco-collapse, nuclear, mass extinction, dead oceans, resource depletion, toxin buildup, bio-weapons, mass alienation and despair, etc, etc.) It will be because our Techno-Optimists and Big VC Futurists, following a storyline laid down long before anyone alive today, finally became so detached from the dark universe, proportional with attachment to their bright egos, they became certain of the dumbest things, and acted on them.
In Praise of Unknowing
The cooperative-competitive drive toward becoming ever more machine-like is a story as ancient as recorded time (which is to say really quite recent.) The questions to ask are analog: How much surrender is good and how much freedom is good? How much agreeableness is optimal and how much friction is optimal? When does the human desire to belong and work together become an instrumentalized yoke of Technocracy? The answers contain multitudes.
It’s easy to default to machine thinking unless guided to be more expansive, for example through love, nature, art, music, poetry, holistic contemplation and all the squishy qualities that make life worth living (and for which STEMB [Science, Tech, Engineering, Math, Business] has no time for. ) This leads us to where we seem to be heading, the meta-politics of Transhumanism. And hiding out of sight behind that shiny brand of Transhumanist Techno-Optimism, like a dark triad stealth monster, lurks a velvet-clad, boot-in-your-face, AI-enabled Humanist-Reductivism.
Nineteenth century factory owners saw profit in optimizing and mechanizing their workforce. To a certain way of thinking, call it Rationalist-Objectivist-Humanist-Reductivist, this is logical and obviously good. But to another way of being, call it human, warm-blooded and alive, it’s just as obviously delusional and psychopathic. Sometime during the long cultural drift toward abstract machine thinking, smart people lost the art of pondering open-ended questions and paradoxical answers. What is truth? What is good? Why something instead of nothing? What is life for? Who are we?
I don’t know and neither do you. Isn’t that amazing? Uncertainty, humility and respect toward all we can’t know is a more expansive augmented reality than Technology will ever produce, even if large scale data processing (AI) turns out to be the most useful tool ever made. The mystery behind life defies naming, just as it defies calculation. We’re two billion years ahead of tech in this realm. Your computer will never be amazed about anything. But humans will be, every single day if we want, for as long as we’re alive and in tune with the heartbeat of the soul of this universe.
Let there be mystery, wonder, unknowing…a modest light unto the darkness.