The Social Dilemma & Democracy in Chains
We watched the Social Dilemma a couple of nights ago. Very fascinating and intriguing. It illustrates, inter alia, how societies have now all become collections of people addicted to something that grows the economy of consumption, be it social media, video games, watching sports on tv, going on holidays, as well as now conventional addictive substances.
Also, the film illustrates a point of how AI now in fact controls huge swathes of human life whether people are aware of it or not. Also opens up interesting questions of agency and free will – how much are people really choosing or are they just selecting from a narrow range of pre-determined items that the global corporations want us to consume?
In fact, AI could be used to reduce the problem of both small screen addiction, silo-ization, and the level of lying and falsehood propagation that is now rampant. I think, ironically, that AI is the only thing that can attenuate the problem unless one goes for Chinese or Burmese style internet blocking or actual shutdown. If enough people are smart enough they can get round this by using WiFi, though it would be a lot slower and pretty bumpy (perhaps more aggressive Shannon-Weaver algorithms could be applied to increase robustness at the cost of redundancy).
For us personally, I see no plausible way of getting away from google at the moment. It is possible, but their robust systems have been incredibly helpful to us, though I am quite aware that they (and their AI systems) can monitor everything we do. Facebook is a much more insidious and nefarious operation and should be targeted ahead of Google – though all the tech giants should be broken up and far-reaching AI controls introduced. Almost zero chance of this happening I think. Partly because most ordinary people have no idea how AI works, especially deep learning which is exploding, and those that do understand have mostly drunk the Kool-Aid and are desperate to get a job in AI, since these are some of the only paying posts that will exist in the not too far distant future.
A propos the above, it will be interesting to see when AI first starts to wipe out (rather than nibbling at) whole swathes of middle class and upper middle class jobs and the comfortable and dependable income that goes with this sinecure world. Many in the privileged classes will be protected by their share ownership (surely little more than a cross between rent-seeking and gambling), but if one day there is ever a crash (maybe this time is different?), then there may be quite a few surprised cadavers left on the beach as the tide goes out.
Watching the Social Dilemma made me think of Nancy MacLean’s extraordinary book ‘Democracy in Chains’. I would say that if someone were only going to read one book this year, it should be this one. It explains so much about what has happened in the US and how deep the roots of both the (induced) malaise and shocking state of governance are. It is clear that the tentacles of the deliberate and brilliantly planned democracy-strangling operation have also spread to the UK, itself no paragon of virtue in this or practically any other department of governance or society it turns out as one digs deeper into history.
In that regard, Roger Osborne’s book ‘Of the People, by the People – a New History of Democracy’ is really fascinating. Democracy may well be hard-wired into humans and one of the many reasons why there are so many problems in the world, is that democracy can only work in a relatively flat and non-polarised polity. The US and UK are amongst the most unequal and most economically polarised polities in the world. I won’t use the word society, because I don’t think it really exists in the UK and there are decreasing signs of it in the US. What we have are millions of deracinated radical individuals all whipped up into ferocious (and totally unfair) competition for the few places at the top, leaving increasingly vast numbers in the precariat class. COVID-19 and climate have thrown interesting spanners into this operation, like new independent variables being injected into a giant socio-economic experiment. So far, it looks like these elements are further worsening economic polarisation. Despite its libertarian leanings, the very passive though inherently violent UK is, I think a long way from mass social unrest. Not so sure about the US. Interesting times.
The Social Dilemma: https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/
New York Times Review of Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review/democracy-in-chains-nancy-maclean.html