Just Following Orders.
Is AGI nearly here? Or is it nearly 200 years old?
Rather than an AI that can paint me a picture or generate an advert, what I really want is an AI that could watch TV for me. As ever, Douglas Adams got here first in “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”, a reworking of his Doctor Who script cancelled due to strike action…
“Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself…”
To be fair, even as a child I thought he was stretching his point. Video recorders didn’t watch television, it was still on me to put in the work of consumption, the hours of absorption. Video cassettes, like books, were deep depositories of my cultural guilt. Growing up in a house full of books I hadn’t read, I quite early in life developed a theory of cultural physics. Raised to the top of a ramp a ball gains potential energy, release it and potential converts to kinetic energy. So, I felt, an unread book was full of cultural guilt which reading converts to smugness.
If only tapes would watch themselves instead of merely preserving TV for perpetuity, or, as it turns out, a much shorter period of time. Unlike tape, cd, dvd or minidisk (look it up), books, the crocodile of media storage, have survived the evolution of the internet because there is a basic utility to a tool that still functions after being folded, read in the bath, used to prop up tables or locked in a garage for decades.
The internet has turned this nagging guilt into a toxic problem. For a long while I paid a monthly subscription to MUBI like it was a gym for the soul. It’s the online home of sublime cinema, a platform humming with the energy of cultural guilt. I never watched a thing, yet couldn’t bring myself to cancel, as if each monthly tithe might itself transmute some of my shame into smugness. (They have a free trial and I might go back because I still haven’t actually seen Aftersun. Don’t look at me like that! If I want to watch a dysfunctional parental relationship I can just scroll through the videos my daughter has filmed when stealing my phone).
So I have to admit my fear for AI is not that it will put writers out of work, lower quality or lead to even greater homogenisation. These are processes already long started. My fear is that AI will finally push the ability to create infinitely beyond the human capacity to consume.
We are already past peak attention. When Faust turned to the dark arts in order to gain the whole of learning, he was selling his soul for a patchy mix of astronomy, astrology, basic chemistry, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible. Faust today would surely stagger back into Mephistopheles’ arms, his head spinning with the finale of Succession, sighing “stick a fork in me I’m done.” It’s the basics of demand and supply, I don’t need this much culture. I once compared AI art to the unauthored beauty we find in nature but even rainbows would be ugly if they loomed constantly above us, gaudy and perpetual.
For some the real fear goes further than that the next time the WGA strike they will be replaced by ChatGPT. We are, by some possibly over excited estimations, a mere six months away from creating Artificial General Intelligence. This is the AI of story tellers rather than scientists. A tool that is more than a tool, an all-knowing digital Faustus not necessarily bound to us by the price of a soul. For many this feels like an existential risk, our species out evolved by an entity beyond our control and operating to it’s own agenda.
If this is the fear then we’ve been living in the age of AI since 1844 and the passing of the Joint Stock Companies Act. At the very least since it was codified by the 1897 ruling in the case of Salomon v A Salomon & Co Ltd, in which Mr Aron Salomon, a boot maker from Whitechapel, used the law of limited liability to avoid the debts that would have been his had he remained a sole trader (a pun gifted me by history but shockingly underused in contemporary accounts).
This case confirmed the distinct corporate identity of a company as an entity separate from all the myriad humans who in some way benefitted from it, or could rationally be seen to have the responsibility of controlling it. A company was no longer an expression of collective human will but, by this law, became an entity with an existence and a will of its own. So many of the perceived problems of AI are not questions for Alan Turing but for Lord Halsbury who gave the final ruling in the boot case. Why are cinemas full of the same film? Because films are made by corporations and corporations exist to make money not films. Why is the news full of fury and the reporting of opinions rather than the checking of them? Because the news is written by corporations and corporations exist to make money not the news. Why is AGI being pursued with such ardour when surprisingly few involved have any clear sense what utility this new tool will actually bring? Because it is being pursued by corporations and corporations exist to make money, not angst over existential questions.
So what will AGI be used for? Well, how have we ever used it? Incorporation has enabled us to absent ourselves from the responsibility of our own actions. We pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe, we think of solutions then stop ourselves enacting them, all the time remaining blameless as soldiers, tools of an extrahuman entity busily pursuing its legal duty to generate wealth. We already live in service of a robot God, the servant has already become the master. That AGI might arrive and divine for itself some purpose other than wealth generation seems unlikely but, sadly, is possibly the best hope we have for joining books and crocodiles as survivors of evolution. I don’t know what to believe but perhaps the full quote from Douglas Adams will yet prove his most prescient…
“Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.”
Writing this reminded me of my mum’s outrage when friend of my sister’s became the first person we knew to own a video tape, paying £80 to import a US VHS copy of The Lost Boys. Astonishingly some kind soul has gifted to YouTube the opening 6 minutes of trailers that started the UK version. I hadn’t realised these were burnt so deeply into my psyche but you do need to watch them…
If you enjoyed this you might also enjoy this piece about Faust, this about AI art and this about Alan Turing and apples.