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KTi BOOK CLUB: You Are Not A Gadget - Chapter 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-10 16:59:53
Edited:
2024-03-10 17:47:38
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

"We can't afford to respect our own designs so much." (p. 36)

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Silver bullet uppercut punches to my jaw sending my head flipping and bobbing like the die inside a magic 8ball!

Listen up buttercups, small note, if you have begun reading the book pls take a selfie w it! Book Report no. 2 is almost done but I feel like we don't get anywhere near as many selfies as people who participated, bc we tend to spike at the start and taper off towards the end. This is fine! But I kinda wanna get more photos on that spike to include people who poured their energy in. Looks good too.

Take some pics of you reading it and where you read it! Submit them in the Exit Survey at the end or even while we're reading it to cj@cjthex.com

ok onward with analysis summary mini essay thing that i do 

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Cybernetic Totalism

You know the thing. SkyNet from Terminator. The Machines from The Matrix. Allegedly we're close to making it! 

Or The Fuck Are We? 

The antihuman approach to computation is one of the most baseless ideas in human history. (p. 26)

It's rather fascinating how deeply we've ingrained the idea that machines are smarter than us, or will be one day. But is this because machines are getting more human, or because we're lower our standards of what qualifies as "human"?

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Guns are real in a way that computers are not. (p. 27)

Information is alienated experience. (p. 28)

Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information... is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. (p.29)

Lanier has a good way of clappnig his hands in front of your face so you wake up from a passive daze you didn't know you were in.

The removal of boredom and uncertainty can feel like convenience and efficiency. But what if your technology didn't fill up your uncertainty space with predictive options? How can you know that you are yourself when you're constantly being fed other peoples words?

The thing is, that dynamic space of boredom and uncertainty is the most human thing about us. It's where the creativity and full spectrum of feeling happens, before it's clamped down into language or form.

This is why I can't quite take people's Tweets seriously. Cause yeah, it's a human being on the other line (maybe), but they've been clamped down into Twitter shape. How long has Twitter been working on their soft malleable head? I wonder what they're like in real life. I wonder how their ideas feel when they say them out loud or write them in their journal, instead of throw them out to be ranked and filed with Likes.

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I Am Once Again Asking You To Listen To C. Thi Nguyen Lecture on Seductive Clarity

I linked a different one than the one we usually link so give the slightly different angle a fresh listen. I'll listen with you today! 

Nguyen and Lanier both touch on the technology of standardized grading systems, and the way that starts to work backwards to alter how we teach and learn.

Maintain The Mystery

re the discussion on page 30, I really don't remember where I first read this, but that thing about how every generation uses whatever it's most recent technology becomes our metaphor for how the human mind works? It sounds a little Neil Postman, but I'm not sure. I feel like someone here might remember? Like we always think the human mind is like a machine, be it a horse and carriage or a printing press or a steam engine or a floppy disk or an app, whatever is newest?/..... and we should maybe doubt the perfection our latest analogy? Maybe it's a video essay? Hm.

The common use of computers, as we understand them today, as sources for models and metaphors of  ourselves is probably about as reliable as the use of the steam engine was back then. (p. 30)

Anyways I remember personally eventually feeling like... well yeah it makes a lot of sense we map ourselves by our latest  mode of communication and thinking. Like there's nothing wrong with that at all (my therapist uses video game metaphors, espec Persona 5, OFTEN) but one must simply bear in mind the map vs territory. Maintain The Mystery.

The reinterpretation of the Turing test <3

What the test really tells us, however, even if it's not necessarily what Turing hoped it would say, is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder. (p. 31)

The Circle of Empathy 

So a lot of my philosophy leans towards a kind of anti-dualism. We Are All One, Reality Is One Thing, the wonderful mystery is progressive realizations that this is bigger than you.

I recall watching Jaron Lanier on Lex Fridman and being struck by his commitment to dualism. He believes that some kind of Pantheism is actually reductive to the unique unexplainability of human consciousness. Bearing in mind We Are Subjects Experiencing an external world Maintains The Mystery and dignity of human individuals.

He makes this point by reference to the use of VR headsets, which is wonderful. 

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[EDIT: What I was actually remembering here was this bit from an IQ2 debate on the Promise of Artificial Intelligence, which Lanier totally dominates:

40:30 "when you're in VR you can turn into some weird creature you can turn into some crab or something the whole world can change, and yet you remain there hanging and I feel as if you notice that your consciousness is this real thing. And I find that experience just amazing, when everything becomes mutable suddenly you realize: wow there IS like some conscious thing that's not just mechanism..."]

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Furthermore his explanation of his Circle of Empathy and his choice not to extend it to AI kind of on principle is really bold and compelling, particularly while Lex Fridman is fighting him about it bc Lex wants to be friends with the AI Robots and Jaron doesn't <3 

The final echo in that interview I want to source as support for the book is the idea that we need to place our mystery somewhere, and if we don't put it in human consciousness it can burst out somewhere else unexpected and unproductive to human ends.

The alternative to sprinkling magic dust on people is sprinkling it on computers, the hive mind, the cloud, the algorithm, or some other cybernetic object. The right question to ask is, Which choice is crazier? (p. 42)

Or as stated on Lex Fridman:

believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic. That goes with my philosophy of dualism, I believe there's something magical and instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs i think experience is something real and something apart, something mystical... (1:33:39)

Honestly this Lex interview is just fantastic front to back. I think I first listened to it in an airplane and I had an unexpectedly profound flight. I remember the section on Cryptocurrency tech versus the Government being so so compelling, as Lanier pushes back hard on Lex's kind of... conspiratorial idealism? Don't know how to describe it, but it's very contentious conversation, which is fascinating because Lanier and Lex are both generally very generous and gracious conversationalists. Then at the end of the interview it all suddenly settles into extremely emotional anecdotes about death and grief and growing. Man. 

It really deepens my respect for him, because we're essentially witnessing one of the many difficult debates that Lanier is constantly having with his comrades in the tech world. He's been enduring this conflict and holding his ground for decades.

"but Clippy promotes the myth of AI" - 1:19:00

He is RELENTLESS!!!!

The Thought Experiments on Pages 40 & 41 Fucked Me Up

I read them on a bench last week and I didn't understand it at all. Then I read them again yesterday and I got it. 

Jaron speaks with such a folksy tone sometimes you forget how intensely techy and intelligent he really is. The portion about Consciousness and Time (p. 43) also flew totally over my head until I went back to it and spent some time with it.

Finally he lands the plane William James style: What we believe will shape our world. 

If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling  prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. (p. 44)

Bonkers.

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k. I'm interested in what you think.

I see Lanier kind of like I see myself: Lighthouse standing firmly where he stands, and whether you agree or disagree with every finer point and nuance, he's at least extremely useful for navigation. He's not moving. Might help you see where you are.

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Antihuman Rhetoric and Metaphysical Shell Games Below!

Files

Comments

Daniel Shaul

My page numbers are off so my apologies, but I will note my thoughts in order: “The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality.” (pg. 34) - The idea of an authorless world is like a film without a director; tone meshing into a shlop of unmanageable information, tone be damned. It is key they use the word “global”, something encapsulating the “Allness” and “Everythingness” of the internet. It's why we hate every new film made by committee: the essence of the film is drowned in profitability and algorithmic sentiment, we kill the artist and puppet their corpse in the name of art. “Information doesn’t deserve to be free… Information is alienated experience” (pg. 36-37). - Experience delineates information, taking it from an ungrounded scrambling into discernible and decodable experiential component; experience propels experience; information is at best a form of myeline sheath in experience, propelling one to action or barring oneself in its absence (in this metaphor). - In my neuroscience textbook, one of the key features of conscious experience was sensation; patients who had suffering from extreme cases of paralysis and recovered described how their consciousness was obliterated without sensory experience. The brain is a feedback machine in conjunction with the body; it cannot allow us to exist, and we cannot know we exist, if we do not experience the world, we take it in like air, and if we don’t, we take in nothing. There is no brain in a jar, there is no uploading of consciousness: if all we were was thoughts, we’d be in a distorted world of Plato’s realm of forms, not alive. But we are alive, and so we are not thoughts, and so we are real. “…before computers came along, the steam engine was a preferred metaphor for understanding human nature.” (pg. 38) - In my cognitive psychology course, we were given description of human consciousness, thought, perception, and memory as if it was in a computer; it was linear and technological, described as hardware and software, and yet… that always is and was insufficient as a metaphor. It is so interested to me that we define ourselves on a functional level in relationship to our most complex of technologies. “People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time” - - The Asch experiment presented how, in group contexts people will conform to a wrong answer if never questioned by everyone else. I think the internet has ritualized this in the way we do many socially constructed practices: we buy in and believe the internet when it tells us things; even in doubt, it occupies us, it captures us, in a way many irrelevant or incorrect things shouldn’t. Enraptured by twitter discourse, by subway racer(?), we accept a lesser standard of being and of thinking, in order to conform to a digital environment. “Chess and computers are both direct descendants of the violence that drives evolution in the natural world” - A majority of our (the US) wifi, Internet access, and technological advancements are in part funded by the US military; they often advance technology first and foremost for tools of war, and then parse it into generalized use; it is taken the semi-automatic weapons and turning them into lawn chairs for us to sit on: same bones, different use, with a slight fear the bones will come alive and kill us "People, not machines, performed this accomplishment [Deep Blue's Victory over Gary Kasparov] - Chess isn’t just algorithms, it involves starring, projecting confidence: emotion, lies, psychology, betting practices. We aimed at the algorithm over the abstract in chess: we gave up being out of book to show how scary it is a machine can be “in-book” really well (i.e. see dating apps with AI responses to initial small talk: a machine can do the introduction better for us, but is terrible at all the rest). See CJ Hauser's writing about stepping "out of book" on Tindr. ***Principle Established: People conform to technology, technology is suspended from conforming for people*** Computer as neuron (Ship of Theseus) - I have a slight qualm with this metaphor, which is semantic but important to me: the brain isn't the housing place of neurons or consciousness, our whole body is. You would need to replace nearly every neuron in the body for the artificial neurons to take ones place, and then this becomes a different question for me: Can we make a robot out of a human and still call them a person? or can we make a human out of a robot? ***Because in the end, we cannot replace only parts of ourselves and consider that the end: consciousness isn’t the brain, consciousness is the body.*** Consciousness is situated in time - Consciousness can be distorted through time; since the internet and computers are a-temporal (i.e. the diverge from our experience of time), their responsiveness distorts and therefore causes cognitive dissociations (deficit) in our experience of time: temporal dissociation, one of the key features of cognitive absorption. We experience this in other tasks too. While we are situated in time, we lose track and therefore conscious experience of time in SO MANY WAYS. - There is some anchor, but in my mind, the anchor is not unified, and shifts, like a tall creature clumsily shifting its weight to stay balanced on a moving platform. It's why we call an attempt to find the present moment “grounding”: we are trying to find something for our consciousness to cling onto. We are reaching for an anchor to cling to the earth. A lot of this makes me think of cognitive load, in which we make tools that can perform cognitive processes for us. The most common example is calculators: we use them to do basic mathematics that our brains are capable of but can’t be bothered to sit and do the steps of without remembering the algorithm (formula). The computer is considered to take a huge weight off our overall cognitive load: we don’t need to remember facts, quotes, or theories, we don’t need to worry about manually tracking time, we don’t need to think through the process of sending or receiving messages, etc etc. A programer did the work for us, and we no longer think about it. Cybernetic totalists think eventually computers will supersede all cognitive processes, doing them all fast and better, and then some. However, the problem is that the cognitive load taken off our minds leaves humans with unnecessary deficits in return for temporal benefits. Its kids going on while hating math class: “why do I need to do this when I have a calculator in real life”. However, the issue is the more dependent we are on the tool to do the work for us, the less we are capable or expected to perform the task ourselves. Suddenly, cognitive load is being taken off our need to track conscious experience, to pay attention to the environment around us, to experience time move, to talk to people, to face social discomfort, to make things real: the internet can show us all the human creation and wonder ever made previously, with such little effort, that it is easier than doing it ourselves. It takes away risks of getting things wrong by enhancing our inability to risk it ourselves. “If a computer can make better art, why should I make art” is an AI argument, and it is a stupid one, because it neglects the point of art: it isn’t about what or who can do it “better” or “faster” but that we are capable of doing it at all: it is the joy in the doing and making real, of, as Kurt Vonnegut goes on “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” I am not saying the internet as a tool is useless and damaging to us alone, but that our dependence on it to fulfill normative cognitive tasks reduces our capacity of consciousness: it isn’t just that it makes us conform to the computer, its that our ability to exist is conformed to what the computer does for us, what is gives us and what it deprives us of. A computer is meant to make life easier for us, not to end our experiences of life in its totality, and I think our modern use of the internet have left us without memory of this.

azalea water

I tend to do, like, two mini thoughts but I kinda let this one get out of hand. Consistency be damned! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The way Lanier talked about experiencing the internet reminded me a lot of John Dewey. However, my only exposure to him was through CJ’s stranger things video. So, considering I knew fuck all, I read the first chapter of Art as Experience to see if there was anything in that idea, and I think I’ve got something. Dewey and Lanier are very clearly both empiricists. My understanding of how Dewey conceptualises experience is that it emerges between the interaction of a subject and an object, and that art is a sort of peak in experience. Lanier seems to be in a simular ballpark, drinking his Fuck The Rationalists Juice™. “You can believe that your mind makes up the world, but a bullet will still kill you” (p26). In chapter 1 of “Art as Experience”, Dewey talks about how when a piece of art gains classic status, there is a separation that tends to remove the humanity from it. He uses the example of the Parthenon and says “Sure, you can look at the columns and go ‘neat!’, but if you wanna understand it - you gotta know about the time and the people who built it - people built that shit!” And when Lanier talks about “Cybernetic Totalism” removing the human aspect of computer science, it’s the same thing! “The anti-human approach to computation is one of the most baseless ideas in human history” (p26) “The first tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system” (derogatory - p27). Two dudes, same wave-length, 100 years apart - it’s so fucking cool! Lanier: “A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it” (p26), Dewey: “The career and destiny of a living being are bound up with its interchanges with its environment, not externally but in the most intimate way.” (Art as Experience - p13). It’s the same fucking thought! But what I love about this is that Lanier is SO aware that social media is an extension of the kinda conception of experience that Dewey’s going for, some endless, timeless extension that’s so painfully real. “A virtual bullet, however, doesn’t even exist unless there is a person to recognize it as a representation of a bullet. Guns are real in a way that computers are not.” (p26/27) But the point is that that digital bullet does exist, at least in the mind of the experiencer. But we have to remember that the only reason we’re experiencing that digital bullet is because of people. I had the conception of Deep Blue vs Kasparov as some “aw, fuck” moment in the history of our arses getting dominated by our computer overlords, but I’m so glad to have had Lanier’s perspective completely bash that train of thought over the head. “People, not machines, performed this accomplishment” (p34) I’m around a lot of creatives, I’m a musician myself, and AI terrifies me. I’m worried about me and my friends’ art being harvested for use in something we never consented to. But, I’m so glad that Lanier has some kind of positive perspective on it. AI tools could be really fuckin cool if we paid artists for their data or just used stock images, because humans built those tools. When you remove people from the equation, your nothing short of fucked. (side note - When Lanier claims “information is alienated experience” (p28), I think he’s right. But, I’m gonna leave the task of tying that idea to Dewey’s conception of experience open for anyone who wants to have a stab at it.)

phil e the theyby

Skipped through most of this because I just ordered the book (I joined the Patreon like two days ago), but looking forward to joining in!

D.S Films

I have never read the words of Jaron Lanier before... and that got deep fast. From reading the first chapter, I was not expecting this deeply metaphysical turn to what I perceived to be a technological book. I can only describe these chapters as a journey, with this particular one being from Turing to Chess, to the profound chapter of consciousness and time that I still haven't fully gotten to grips with, and that beautiful summary about 'Zombies'. "Humans are free. We can commit suicide for the benefit of the Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real." p44

Aris

I LOVED this chapter for a great many reasons, but I don’t want to go through every thought I had as I read. This quote towards the end of the chapter can help me sum it up: “The mysterious stuff can be shuffled around, but it is best to just admit when some trace of mystery remains, in order to be able to speak as clearly as possible about the many things that can actually be studied or engineered methodically,” (43). I drew about six stars around this and immediately texted my logic/tech-headed friend that he needs to read this book. He responded by saying he recently heard Lanier on one of the podcasts he listens to and was thinking of reading it anyway, so this will motivate him even more. Synchronicity and a win! What matters to me about this chapter is: 1. Humans are much smarter and awe-inspiring than we give ourselves credit for; 2. Information is not “free” as in it has autonomy like a human would. Information isn’t alive at all and doesn't even exist or have meaning until we experience it and create meaning around it; 3. There will always be magic and mystery in this world. Intuition will never be obsolete. Intuition and magic are part of the human experience. For some background on me: I practice secular witchcraft, read tarot, and study astrology. I value philosophy and I do not enact a ritual or a practice until I have philosophically situated my action into my value system and world-view. I don’t just pick something up because it worked for someone else - I make sure that I really believe in what I’m doing because it philosophically and spiritually makes sense to me. I also center non-appropriative praxis into my witchcraft so this is an important way I make sure I’m engaging in culturally-appropriate spirituality. What I love about reading stuff like this book is that no matter how anti-intuition and mind-obsessed technologists and other “hard” scientists tend to be, there will never be a western theory that can fully disprove the magic and wonder of the human experience. For example, western logic is constantly used to invalidate indigenous ways of knowing and being in this world. There are many ways we gather information and truth, not just through language and science. Western logic is used to gaslight people into thinking what they experience isn’t real because whatever they are experiencing can’t be explained by western logic. Lanier once again shows the philosophical holes in this way of thinking: “it is best to just admit when some trace of mystery remains.” Truly, some things are only knowable through embodied experience. The language comes later. I couldn’t help but think about Frankinstein’s monster when reading this chapter. I feel like the technologists feel towards technology and computers what Frankenstein felt towards his monster. The difference being that Frankinstein’s monster was able to communicate and experience human emotions and desires. It’s kind of like the technologists /believe/ they created a monster like Frankenstein did, and act accordingly, instead of the reality that they created a kind of tool. A tool that could have started out in a completely different form. They program something, the program mirrors to them what they wanted it to do (such as respond to a question as a human would), and then suddenly the computer is alive even though it simply did what it was programmed to do! It really does seem quite absurd. To me, it just really reinforces the necessity of intersectionality. Imagine if diverse disciplines and perspectives went into the creation of the internet. Imagine what Social Workers would have contributed to the discussions! Love this book, love being here, lets fkin go.

Sylvan Thomas

The best thing I can find regarding brain comparisons to the Hot New Technology is this nytimes article from 2015 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/face-it-your-brain-is-a-computer.html From the opening paragraph: "Descartes thought that the brain was a kind of hydraulic pump, propelling the spirits of the nervous system through the body. Freud compared the brain to a steam engine. The neuroscientist Karl Pribram likened it to a holographic storage device." For the rest of the article, the author makes his case for why computers *shouldn't* be added to the pile of failed metaphors. I don't have a strong opinion on his arguments; I'm more interested to know if what he would say now. It's been 9 years. Are computers still king, or has he found a more app metaphor?

LoveInYellow

This chapter really opened my eyes to this delusional fantasy that has become so prevalent in our society. In it's essence, the idea that bits of information in a glorified calculator could, somehow, be alive "But if bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on it's own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants" (p. 29). The bits of stored information on a computer only get meaning because it is given to them by the person experiencing the information. Kind of like how an art object on it's own really doesn't mean anything, but it is the art experience with all of it's nuances that bring meaning to the art (that may or may not overlap with the meaning the artist(s) have attempted to convey). "The common use of computers, as we understand them today, as source for models and metaphors of ourselves is probably about as reliable as the use of the steam engine was back then." (p. 30) I love this. Using computers to define humanity is a ridiculous notion. Just because you can give meaning to information through experience doesn't mean that humanity can be modeled after that information, that is literally the opposite of what is actually happening. "What happened was primarily that a team of computer scientists built a very fast machine and figured out a way to represent the problem of how to choose the next move in a chess game. *People, not machines performed this accomplishment.*" (p. 34) Just wow. They way Lanier lays this out is beautiful. It makes me almost feel stupid having never seen this before. Essentially it's as if a group of genius mathematicians came up with a new formula for a problem we as humans haven't been able to solve/calculate before, and then saying that the formula is now smarter than humanity and could potentially somehow be/become alive. Just as Lanier says: "We cant afford to respect our designs so much." (p. 36) "To expand the circle indefinitely can lead to oppression, because the rights of potential entities can conflict with the rights of indisputably real people. ... Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best?" (p. 37) I feel this explains a lot about why even entertaining the notion that computers could somehow be alive and therefor deserve the same rights as people, is inherently damaging to us; "If we lose our finitude, we lose our own center and indentity."

alex

just as a side note, i just want to say i appreciate lanier’s use of headers. it’s the old apa-style writer in me that loves a header and a succinct punchy section. okay, now to be non-succinct and fluffy (i have a Lot to say about this particular chapter). literally the first thing i thought of when i saw the header image leading to the Singularity(TM) was my epi iii professor showing a similar image - but it had less “religious” overtones. he’s an insane person that works with like three supercomputers in his lab but what he was trying to convey was the exponential increase in the way we’ve been able to process data. it had incredible implications for sequencing millions of strains of viruses and the advent of precision medicine, and it was more hopeful than the decidedly apocalyptic timbre to cybernetic totalitarianism. but lanier makes an excellent point: “If you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease is others to bring about the conditions that could prod the Rapture into being.” (pg 25) why fix the problems we as humans face - why use this incredible power for good - if eventually we’re going to end up in a technocracy/the rapture is coming? it’s kind of chilling to think something i’ve always felt was like “giving up” on the human race even extends to people in tech, but it also makes me wonder if spirituality is just a built in part of being a human. religious people have to believe the rapture is imminent, just as those that believe in the singularity must “believe information is real and alive.. [and must] deify information” (pg 29) there are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes. i guess you could argue that when you’re tinkering with the bounds of what’s possible in computing, that’s a philosophical foxhole. who wouldn’t deify the logical conclusion of their work when they feel like they can see into the spine of the world? obligatory transistor reference here. (transistor is a game set in a virtual world (“cloudbank”) that constantly reworks itself under the democratic influence of its population (“the process”). this seems to be a post-singularity world where even its inhabitants aren’t aware of when or how this happened, since one of the antagonists is documented doing research on “the process”) anyway, this book kind of makes me want to read the undiscovered self. carl juung was also an insane person, but a lot of the arguments made here remind me of it. i didn’t finish it (dr juung is. very long winded.), but his central thesis is collectivism is killing individuality and the cure is spirituality. part of me instinctively balks at that, having been raised in the bible belt and developed a healthy distrust of christian spirituality, but spirituality isn’t entirely bound to gods and rules. there’s a reason “spirit” is virtually a constant in religion, and i think it’s because it’s a natural component of humanity. but what’s interesting is one of lanier’s next points: a computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it. in that way you might be able to interpret interacting with a piece of technology (digital, that is), as a pseudo-religious experience. the only one giving any of this any meaning is a human, and without the human, the technology is just “a warm mass of patterned silicon with electricity coursing through it.” (pg 26) but similar to moments of religious experience, we give machines the benefit of the doubt. around fifth grade, i went to some sort of computer camp. we were taught how to use alice to make a quick 3d game, and one of the very first thing the teacher explained to us was that *computers are dumb.* you have to be very careful in what you tell them to do, because they can only do *exactly what you tell them.* and yet - maybe because we want to be amazed? maybe because we love the idea of a machine being that wonderful? we’re constantly willing to push ourselves into tinier and tinier boxes to call the computer smarter than it is. the Deep Blue victory in chess was a victory of *people creating a machine* to understand chess, and yet “Kasparov detected a sinister stone face where in fact there was absolutely nothing. While the contest was not intended as a Turing test, it ended up as one, and Kasparov was fooled.” (pg 35) this perception of a sinister, all knowing face? the feeling of inferiority over some inevitable loss? y’all, in this sense, the turing test isn’t about fooling you into believing that technology is human. it’s about fooling you into believe that it’s god. it’s weird. i didn’t perceive it this way until i started typing it, but the more i look at this chapter, it’s an explanation of technology as god. “god has a plan”/“who understands you better than god” = “the computing cloud is going to be a better and far more capacious consciousness than is found in an individual person” (pg 32) “don’t question god’s design”/“god’s design is perfect” = “science should no longer seek theories scientists should understand, because the cloud will understand them better anyway” (pg 26) after all, siding with the cloud puts you “on the side of angels” (pg 32) but lanier continues to say: every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. we’re playing along when we say machines are truly intelligent (pg 32). even chatgpt isn’t intelligent - just because it uses Customer Service Voice and can answer my question, i’m tricked into saying please and thank you. (granted in case the singularity Does come i do want it documented that i say please and thank you to chatgpt siri and echo dots) this is similar to religion - an attribution of divinity to ambiguous situations. where religion calls us to be small protected by god, this paradigm of technology calls us to be small and defined by data points. lanier makes a good example of this by comparing chess to poker, because poker’s more based on bluffing and subtle non-verbals than pure strategy. can confirm, my nana’s an emotional terrorist. but in “beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, [we are] leaching.. empathy and humanity.” (pg 39) i’ll give another example. the manuscript i’m currently working on uses statistically significant changes in total gad-7 and phq-9 (the tests used to measure anxiety and depression severity) to assess whether or not certain factors did or did not influence either disease. but anxiety and depression aren’t encompassed in the *sixteen total* likert scale-style questions. i mean, they have good validity in that they’re able to detect if someone is truly depressed or anxious, or if their mental illness better or worse. the idea that these questions *fully encompass what is is to be depressed or anxious* is ludicrous. one of my most prominent and severe anxiety symptoms was derealization, and that’s not on the gad-7. oh, and sometimes half of my body will just go numb. but if we were to take this literally, because i’m not experiencing that particular data point, i’m not experiencing something related to anxiety. i might then begin to act in other ways that are more consistent with the gad-7’s take on anxiety (feeling nervous, not being able to control worrying, trouble relaxing, being annoyed) and push aside the other experiences. or i might classify those behaviors as something else entirely, to fit into the algorithm. something about it reminds me of the kiddos on tumblr skimming the dsm-5 to see if they meet the criteria for anything. or maybe the people in churches on their knees, pushed into crying after being repeatedly told that they’re broken and need god. i don’t know, maybe i’m pulling super disparate ideas. the rest of the chapters i’ve read afterwards didn’t hit as hard for me, but this section is pretty tabbed up. i’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else thinks just because this one kinda fucked me up !!

SkateLouis

"If you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority." Is so true!!! It makes us passive in spirit, the same way most "imminent" cathastrophes makes us feel. Super powered contries are "meant" to be at war. Global Warming is "meant" to get worst and kill us all. Automation is "meant" to replace people's jobs. Computers are "meant" to become more inteligent than us. But by admiting that those things are prophecy, that our future cannot be different, we disengage with imagining and creating a better one. "The whole point was to make this world more creative (...) It was not to escape it." The virtual world is not an alternative reality, it is inside our reality, it is our world aswell. When we say we want the world to be a better place, that includes the tecnological one. We should strive to that. And usually when we say "better" we mean kinder, more usefull, more lovely, more creative, more humane. "By change, it might turn out that we are real" THIS!!!

Shy Anne

Big Alan Turing Stan here, one of my pettiest peeves is how people talk about the Turing test. Like a) they fucking leave out the female/male aspect! as if it was a cosmetic detail that had nothing to do with his point! b) they think he means “if it can trick a person, then it is a person”??? Which is bizarre to me, like people are so easy to trick, I’ve never fucked with that conclusion 3) people act like the conventional interpretation that leaves out gender is like, an axiom of computer science, and if you question it they act like you don’t know what you’re talking about, although this may be augmented by my experience of having these conversations as a woman. Almost like the gender we perceive someone as changes how we feel about their actions, but certainly a man who had to hide loving men from the world wouldn’t have given that whacky idea any thought. I’ve had the benefit of knowing some computer scientists well, I learned R from one who repeatedly reminded us that “computers are stupid” as a phrase to encompass how important it is to understand how the machine comes to conclusions, and why we shouldn’t trust an output without understanding the source of it. One of my favorite human beings in the whole world is an old Russian man who’s thoughts on AI end with “it’s your problem, I’ll be dead soon” but when the chatGPT stuff was really freaking out a lot of university professors and everyone was talking about how to prevent students from using it, he asked it to prove a theorem his complex analysis students (one of whom was my partner) were expected to understand, and made them grade/correct chatGPT’s proof. It was a VERY effective demonstration of how bad at math a generative text program was; the proof was nonsensical, it looked like a math proof, but the computer had no idea what it was saying. I’m having trouble organizing a lot of my thoughts while reading this, like I have pages of notes, but not a lot of it I want to share just yet, nothing wrong with the book, imma give a copy to a particular professor assuming it doesn’t go off the rails at the end, but like I’m ahead of the book club and kinda disorganized on what exactly is where and kinda uninterested in things that aren’t paint rn anyway, like I’m typing this with teal-stained fingers inching to get back to my canvas now that the previous layer has dried. But in the words of my favorite old Russian “There are many theorems that are not interesting, but they are important” which maps pretty well onto how I feel about things like drinking water, sleeping, and participating in communities; at least when I feel like I do now. But like, the book bringing me back to my Turing hyperfixation influenced my art, because I realized what I was doing reminded me of Turing patterns, and actively leaned into that, which is looking very cool (like, the surface of the corral that looks like a brain, Turing’s last academic publication got some cool biology stuff named after him, interdisciplinary king, liking the paper but honestly just google Turing patterns and go to images shit’s neat) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.1952.0012

Natthew Lee

“Wired editor Chris Anderson proposes that science should no longer seek theories that scientists can understand, because the digital cloud will understand them better anyway.” This quote reminds me of another Ted Chiang short story, "The Evolution of Human Science" (also called, a more fitting title IMO, “Catching Crumbs from the Table”) It’s a short three-page story about a future where genetically modified advanced computer-humans have powerful intelligence. Science for normal humans no longer is doing research, but becomes just trying to decode and interpret the advanced computer-humans’ research and communication. Common people are no longer able to create anything fundamentally new. Ted Chiang’s stories are always grounded in human empathy and subjectivity, but it’s interesting how they still take the sci-fi cybernetic totalist principles of ever-expanding Moore’s Law technology as baseline. I think these ideas can make wonderful stories that interrogate the human condition, but I think the cybernetic totalists can be in large part nerds who have gotten carried away and deluded by these types of genre fiction and sci-fi conventions. Worshipping shit that was originally cool thought experiments. Asimov’s Laws are not meant to be tenets of a religion guys, you can cool it for a second fr. “Guns are real in a way that computers are not” - such a simple fact that so many people would argue about. Again makes me think of the Bo Burnham quote about mining irl life for content to bring back to the more real digital social media world. Have a feeling I’m gonna be bringing this up every week lol it seems expressly relevant to/inspired by Lanier’s work. “Turing imagined a pristine, crystalline form of existence in the digital realm, and I can imagine it might have been a comfort to imagine a form of life apart from the torments of the body and the politics of sexuality.” Again this gets me thinking about the utility of role play and personae online. Many queer people would not be able to experiment with being their authentic selves without the ability to be an avatar on the internet. But at what point does exploring aspects of yourself online become too much of an escape? It may be hard but creating change in your irl life and being authentically yourself offline is better than only being authentically yourself online. In the same way a gun is more real than neopets. It just is. It’s kind of sad to have your only real and true expression forever being in a digital space. Temporarily, it can be a good transitionary space to figure things out, but being in the closet and only out as queer on 4chan and Club Penguin is not living your life girl!! I understand Turing’s impulse to escape into a world of ideas and abstractions when the physical world is too painful to bear. But I don’t see his attempt to escape into a fake world of 1s and 0s as a beautiful expression, I see it as a sad torture resulting from the circumstance forced upon him by a closed-minded society. But at the same time for a lot of people it’s the only beautiful escape you can find. One of my favorite movies is “We Met in Virtual Reality” which is a documentary following couples who met in VRChat. And I do think it’s really really beautiful that these people connected through their avatars and personae that let them be more real than they can be IRL. Hell, I’m a furry, and that entire community is in large part about people finding a persona that makes them feel more real than their IRL form. I’m very conflicted and interested by the entire question of escaping and finding beauty into the internet vs being subsumed and sunk in the internet. “The adoration for the hivemind, which yields better results because there are real people behind the curtain” - obviously today's “AI” (machine learning) is doing the same thing to an even more hyper extreme extent. Lanier has hinted at the topic of cybernetic totalists anthropomorphizing digital hiveminds and I hope there’s a whole chapter about that because I find it fascinating and ghoulish. The whole latter half of this chapter is a pragmatic proof that you CAN’T prove that souls are real, but it is best to Act As If souls are real. As if subjectivity is singular and sacred. I’m convinced :-) OK! Til next week. Hugs AND kisses Natt ! PS I’m currently reading another book called Ways of Being by James Bridle. It’s really interesting to read in conversation with this book. The author is really pro-AI in a way. The book is about finding and respecting intelligence in plants and animals and computers. There’s a lot of sections about how we can make AI more organic in software and hardware. Feels very relevant to a lot of what we’ve read here, but at the same time disagrees with a lot of what we’ve read here.

IvanTheTerrible

Singularity and the Rapture!! Wow!!! I never thought to view cybernetic totalist culture as a new religion, but reading about it made me bite my nails and think real hard. It’s so fascinating and so true, because much like many other religions it’s belief and faith that guides, with no big emphasis on physical things. The physical is an afterthought, rather than reality. With the case of cybernetic totalism, it’s the belief technology is bigger than us, and becoming bigger than us every single day. We’re so quick to take ourselves of the equation, just so we can deify something and look up to it. And I do agree that the entire idea of technology as anti-human is insane and makes no sense! Loved all the bits about information and its place relative to humanity. Yes, all the bits are there, but they are meaningless without the presence of someone to lead them and experience them. Whyyyy are we so obsessed with minimising and downplaying our participation in life whyyy!!! We are the players we are not the pawns!! (haha in-theme chess reference) “You can believe that your mind makes up the world, but a bullet can still kill you. a virtual bullet, however, doesn’t even exist unless there is. person to recognise it as a representation of a bullet. Guns are real in a way computers are not.” - I sent this quote to all my friends much like my grandma sending facebook memes to everyone she knows. The last sentence hits so hard. A reminder you definitely need to hear often about digital culture. Even as I comment this on my little keyboard on my iPad, iOS scrambles to fill in every word I mean to type. I catch myself looking at the automatic suggestions, which are not always correct, but I just take them, because it’s harder not to. There are suggestions and autocompletes and autocorrects in every program I use, whether I like it or not. It’s stifling just as much as it’s helpful. “People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.” - this one got to me. And the chess example was brilliant! “Computers and chess share a common ancestry - both originated as tools of war.” - holy shit!!! So many things I’ve never thought about, but reading it once again made me want to crawl on the floor and spin in circles. Direct descendants of violence!!! Yes! The drive to compete is palpable in both!!! Absolutely!!! This chapter specifically is one of those where you can’t just read it once and leave it at that. It’s mentioned so many things which I’ll need to look into more before I go back to read it again so I can fully understand it. All in all, loved the chapter this week, can’t wait for the next :))

Just Connor

i find that the chess part and the ending are little similar. "If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. " "Kasparov seems to have allowed himself to be spooked by the computer, even after he had demonstrated an ability to defeat it on occasion. He might very well have won if had been playing a human player with exactly the same move-choosing skills as Deep Blue" this idea of negativity actually changing how it happens is one i find terrifying and fascinating. i dont think i have a single friend who has a positive outlook on social media or the internet changing for the better (or the world for that matter). for me though, i always tend to avoid this line of thinking and look for solutions, much like the ones in cj's newest essay. the second quote is deeply fascinating to me, because in my head i had built up Deep Blue, AI, or whatever else. as much as i try and avoid those lines of thinking, something there is captivating. i guess that is why so many people - including everyone i know - are so negative. -- the empathy circle part was a fun read as i was already familiar with Peter Singer's version. im a vegan (ofc i had to tell everyone) and have the liberal impulse to expand my circle very far. never though have i ever properly considered robots or ai, and im glad Lanier talked about it. -- overall im really happy with the book so far, im excited to see what Lanier says next.

Ajey Pandey

I am waiting for Lanier to say “soul “I know he wants to say it and he should The section on making people obsolete really hits me as someone working on public sector rebate programs. I’ve been putting a lot of work into reworking our rebate tracking sheets to make reporting easier, but in practice that means making the inputs more amenable to numerical inputs and drop down menus. Each rebate is a real person, but I have to flatten each story to make the big picture easier to analyze. Lanier ends the story of chess programs too early, though. High-level chess players now use chess engines as preparation. Commentators will often run the engine atop live chess matches as a proxy for a “default strong move,” meaning the engine makes chess a more digestible spectator sport for less-informed viewers. Ex: “The engine wants to pin the black rook, but Caruana clearly has a different idea.” Meanwhile, top-level chess players dodge around engine moves to put their opponents in novel positions they didn’t prepare for. A match between super-GMs now has the feeling of Obi-Wan and Anakin running a feint atop a feint atop engine-tuned, Twitch-streamed preparation. Chess engines didn’t kill chess much as make chess into an e-sport. The entire chess world seems to have stopped caring if Stockfish is better than any human because that question is less interesting than the anime-ass vibes of the players.

Robert Lasica

I wrote my post for the previous chapter while walking around anime Milwaukee, and I saw a vector graphics game console for the first time, the vectrex arcade system. It made me think about the unexplored possibility space of hardware, not just software, and what modern art software could bring to it. The idea of immitating the modern Gameboy studio and Atari Jaguar creator scene with a radically different interface is exciting. But anyway, I'm at the Milwaukee art museum now, so I'll write about this chapter. The Internet as a higher form of collective consciousness is fun(see serial experiments lain), but feels like it gets misused. I'm reading some epistemology for reasons, and the collective connections of Human society having emergent properties long predates the web, and the common talking point about the speed of the web might honestly make it dumber and more muddled than the pre internet. Think of misfiring neurons in a near death experience, a trip, or a seizure. One might argue that AI over the next 20 years might improve the utility of those connections, but currently its just content aggregation contributing to more slush. I don't think the internet hivenind is distinct enough from the in person hivenind to justify thinking it would come with different collective outcomes, we are still an ecosystem not a greater being with autonomy. When I read "We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lose our standards" I thought of AI girlfriend apps, and the chatgbt powered game "Yandere AI Girlfriend Simulator ~ With You Til The End". I played the game with some friends and we horrifically broke the program, using the normal techniques for ruining a chatgbt instance, but I wonder how realistic of a conversation you could have by closely following best practices and ignoring the cognitive dissonance. The potential for an anime girlfriend app to provide the right signifiers to pass a turning test, despite a lack of intent behind it, feels like a good example of Lanier's point. Bringing that point into conversation with circles of empathy, outside of intellectualized principles of empathy there are individual moments of empathy that interest me, like how we interact with NPCs. Obeying traffic laws in GTA, treating people kindly in Skyrim, and Grandmothers feeling bad when you use an attack in Pokemon, these are instances of people wanting to extend their empathy out to the inanimate. I hope that as a society we can agree to maintain some of these moments of personal empathy while pushing back against some of the silicon valley marketing around their new inventions. Would the hailstorm have a soul? No, but if it is a steady existence that consistently acts as and functions like a working brain, we might as well call it conscious. A different kind from me and the person reading this sentence, but if it functions like a conscious to the best of our discernment we should call it one. The question of extending my personal circle of empathy would depend though, I'm not sure where I would land, and what modifiers to the prompt would push me in the other direction. I may end up treating this conscious thing like goats or NPCs, who could say. In a distant speculative future with perfect computer brains I might have policy disagreements with Jaron, but currently we agree about our modern rhetoric about AI overlord beliefs. I'll read the next chapter tonight, and send my thoughts out with the next post, looking forward to reading everyone's impressions.

Hex Diesis

Anyone else get a whiff of Pirsig's Quality from reading about information as alienated experience? In much the same way that quality precedes the interrogations of it and the subject/object dichotomy, experience precedes information, but becomes it (in some sense) at the point of analysis and recording. Lines like 'the exercise of treating machines intelligence as real requires people to loosen their mooring to reality", "is it useful to portray computers themselves as intelligent or humanlike in any way?" and as CJ quoted: 'We cant afford to respect our designs so much". All of those are just so relevant to the AI/ML that the tech industry is having right now, much more so than when this book was written. Another piece of evidence for Lanier's clairvoyance I guess.

Kiara

This chapter was harder for me to dig into. Its likely cause I wasnt dedicating enough Atenttion to it, but it felt more slippery. I will say, the comparisons between the Rapture / Singularity (and discussion of technology-love as religion) was another moment of “YES THIS, THIS IS WHAT IVE BEEN FEELING!!! THATS IT 🫵🫵” We worship the power of these fast boxes that follow Our Instructions. We should not lessen Humanity’s Value for these tools we have created. They are impressive, but so are we. And we matter. I didnt even realize that I believed some of this crap. The discussion around machine consciousness in popular culture is all “😮 WHAT IF MACHINE IS BIGGER BETTER HUMAN” and so its hard to recognize that humans are complex creatures, while machines are mostly just reflections of us. They are our creations. We should not think less of Humanity in comparison to some of the things they can do, because WE told them to do it! Deep Blue was a human achievement! Overall good discussion, and i think I will come back to this at some point. And now i crave more dissections of silicon valley as a religion :) “The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.”

erga

i just finished reading zen&theartofmotorcyclemaintenance for the first time so as im reading im comparing what lanier is talking about with pirsig's views on technology. in ch. 2, lanier discusses the tendency to put AI on a pedestal and mistakenly view it as having high intelligence while also fearing its intelligent capabilities, the most extreme examples of this being the singularity truthers. this really reminds me of pirsig's description of the sutherlands' fear of technology and the "death force". in both cases a lot of the fear/reverance of technology comes from a failure to recognize that technology is not an untouchable, unchangeable entity, and a blindness to the human hands and minds that are behind all of technology. john sutherland would rather hide his frustration with his motorcycle than fix it with his own two hands and a bit of a beer can because it is a Motorcycle made of only Motorcycle parts. and many people look past all the flaws and inefficiency and inadequacy of computers/AI because it is the All Knowing Machine or whatever and That's Just The Way It Is

Lou Corben

Oops I forgot we were doing chapters 2 and 3 only one chapter at a time instead of in pairs and got ahead of myself. I’ll try and focus my response in on Chapter 2 but some ch3 thoughts might sneak in, because Chapter 3 is GREAT (In the following paragraphs I’m going to use what I understand to be current terminology used by disability rights activists in the UK, alongside terminology used by disabled Australians to self-describe. I know terms differ globally.) So, in 2022 I saw a show by a Back to Back Theatre who are an Australian theatre company that “creates new forms of contemporary theatre imagined from the minds and experiences of a unique ensemble of actors with disabilities”. The show was called ‘The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes’ and was set in an activist meeting hall. It was captioned so that d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences could experience it, but also so that non-disabled audiences who were not used to hearing the voices of actors with speech impediments caused by disabilities could understand it. Or so we were led to believe. The captions were introduced to the audience as being automatically generated with AI, but in actuality behind the scenes, were pre-written and controlled by a technician. Throughout the show, the apparent “AI” would misrepresent what the characters were saying, and would over-correct them. The characters frequently tell it to fuck off. It highlighted how the voices of disabled people can be mediated through technology. It made the non-disabled audience members complicit in relying on captions instead of listening directly to the voices of the disabled actors, even though it could be “difficult” at first to understand them. It asked “who are we willing to bother listening to?” The characters went on to speak about the Deep Blue vs Kasparov chess game and suggest that as AI develops, if it were to develop into a singularity, all of us will become “learning disabled” in comparison to AI. How will it treat us? Will we all become second-class citizens? Reflecting on the show now through the lens of what I’ve read of ‘You Are Not A Gadget’, I think actually intelligence has very little to do with the conversation we should be having. These actors, who self-described as people with intellectual disabilities, wrote this show (and often had people not believe that they had), and brilliantly articulated their thoughts and feelings about technology and the treatment of disabled people in (Western) society, and asked deeply insightful and challenging questions, despite being supposedly less “intelligent” than other people. But intelligence isn’t what makes us human. So how could an Artificial Intelligence ever be like us? A person with Downs syndrome with very high support needs is no less human than towering genius Alan Turing, and has more in common with him than a computer ever could. Lanier says “You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart” but I don’t think intelligence, at least in the way it's traditionally understood, is how we should be measuring humanity at all. His colleague isn’t human because he’s intelligent enough to have invented a chicken telecuddling machine but because he wanted to telecuddle his chickens. I don’t think we’re “lowering our standards of intelligence” but lowering our standards of what it is to be human. Where do disabled people, particularly people with intellectual disabilities, fit in our circle of empathy? “the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle,” and in 2013, a jury awarded $240 million to 32 men with intellectual disabilities who had been housed in squalid conditions and made to work on a turkey farm. “it turned out that, given a chance, slaves could not just speak for themselves, they could speak intensely and well. Moses was unambiguously a person. Descendants of more recent slaves, like Martin Luther King Jr., demonstrated transcendent eloquence and empathy.” - but a person does not have to be eloquent (or arguably even empathetic) to be a person. “If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of *personhood* degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?” “If you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about the conditions that could prod the Rapture into being.” - Death instinct! Death instinct! I thought I was going to talk about the NextDoor app today but this came out instead. **telecudding u**

Chandler Sterling

Firstly, what a kickass chapter title. "An Apocalypse of Self-Abdication" says it all right there on the tin. It's so poetic I want to cry about it. And poetry is probably an intentional angle because we're talking about EXPERIENCE baby!!!! That's right, experience: the go to word for a John Dewey book title, and the goal that allows poetry as a medium to thrive. @azalea water has already done some excellent work in the Art as Experience comparison department, but I didn't read that whole book just to pretend like I wasn't underlining every instance of the word Experience in this chapter. The big quote is, "Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information." (pg. 29) which is quite possibly the most important part. Dewey's idea of Experience is very particular though, so I do want to extrapolate a little, Your Honor. Please don't find me in contempt, I swear I'm going somewhere with this. Dewey's Experience is something that occurs in the relationship between the doing (you happening to things) and the undergoing (things happening to you) in nature (which can be more than literally nature, but that is its own can of worms to unpack). An easy example is the art moment that occurs when a human subject *experiences* an art object. To some extent, Dewey is saying in that book that art is a way of cultivating an experience, and the esthetic enjoyment of art is partially found in the striving for experience itself. Most vitally to our discussion here, he sees experience as irrevocably tied to the present. To truly experience something is to be caught up in the interrelationships of the here and now with your past as a lens and the future as some esoteric goal. So that's a long way of saying experience is presence in the Now. All of that is to get to this point. Information is the currency we claim that computers work on. If we supposedly had all the information, and a computer that could process it, then we would have something to surpass humanity (see The Singularity). The thought experiment describing the fact that every supercomputer would probably run this data in a completely different way is one way to disprove that supposition (see pgs. 40-41). The other would be to say that if we accept that experience is necessary to truly process information, then we would need a computer that is capable of being present. So can a computer be present? Lanier is already ahead of me on that one. "There's a way that consciousness and time are bound together. If you try to remove any potential hint of mysteriousness from consciousness, you end up mystifying time in an absurd way." (pg. 42) For a computer to be present, it would have to be conscious, but in order to be conscious, some mysterious, metaphysical act would have to take place that we couldn't even begin to understand, let alone define. In other words, divine intervention. This is what people are getting at when they say that AI doesn't know what it's saying. It doesn't have the presence necessary to properly understand the very information it is spitting back at you. So I mean, MAYBE, the Singularity, but no almost certainly not. And if it does, it will happen beyond our control anyway. Lanier is absolutely right in leading us away from that myth, the most we can do is nudge a potential Singularity into the realm of possibility, but actively bringing it about is almost certainly out of the question. (my only citation for this tangent besides Lanier and Art as Experience is myself, and I will not be taking questions or comments as to whether I am correct. It came to me in a vision.) All this talk of consciousness is strangely enough tied to the Apple of Eden for me right now. The Bite of [REDACTED] where Eve (the alpha, leading the pack) and then Adam (the beta, following his leader) took a big chomp out of the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil is about humans becoming sentient/concious! (I believe this is a reading of Adam and Eve that CJ strongly shares with me, so I'm saying it with my chest unlike the rest of my Bible thoughts). As a Computer Science degree-haver, I have in fact heard of the Turing test, and it is definitely contentious! It exists as its own sort of myth, so it's nice to see a fresh take on the old story. I don't think there is a "right" interpretation, but I certainly vibe more with Lanier's vision because it seems to be far more productive. Like the chapter says at the end, we should believe in ourselves because, "By chance, it might turn out we are real." (pg. 44) What a pragmatic way to snap us out of all the high-minded theory and thought experiments. They're great and all, but hey, you do remember you're real at the end of the day right? RIGHT?!! The absurd assertion that we MIGHT be real?? It's wild that that's a useful wake up call. In the spirit of pulling ourselves back from the edge of the Void, let's talk empathy. The reducto ad absurdum example of trying to include bacteria in the Circle of Empathy is very Braiding Sweetgrass (see the chapter about Kimmerer trying to clean her pond). It is also *breathes in* JUST LIKE LILA! BIOLOGICAL QUALITY IS BELOW SOCIAL QUALITY. A SOCIETY THAT KILLS BACTERIA TO PROTECT ITS MEMBERS IS MORALLY JUSTIFIED. READ LILA! IT'S MOSTLY WORTH IT I PROMISE! *breathes out* Sorry about that, I blacked out for a moment, and every time I try to read what I just wrote it happens again. Strange. Empathy inflation is something I struggle with a lot. It still feels hard to say that the Circle of Empathy shouldn't grow forever, but then it wouldn't really be a circle. It'd just be Everything, and we aren't really equipped to deal with infinity. Like Lanier said, "If we lose the finitude, we lose our own center and identity." (pg. 38) The individual things we passionately empathize with are vital to our own self-conception. Your ego is constructed upon the Circle of Empathy you created. Those lines are the only thing separating you from the vast everything that is... everything. Individuality has its cons, but Lanier is right to caution against this level of self-abdication. It is good. I think it is a useful first step in being more conscious of my boundaries. I guess my only conclusion is: How is this only Chapter 2??? My mind is racing with Thoughts and Opinions. I am really feeling this book, and it speaks to me on a level I haven't quite felt since ZMM. I hope my contributions here have made sense! These are big ideas, and I'm not sure if I even understand them some days. Either way, let's go believe in ourselves! People are really cool and smart actually! Yay!

Emrys

“a computer isn't there unless a human is there to experience it” P.26 This quote seems to be the unifying thread of this chapter, and I think it will be the unifying thread of my thoughts this week. This quote speaks to the way that we have constructed computers, and how they have evolved over time. I’ve been doing a dive into 1990’s graphic design for another project, and I came across the concept of WYSIWYG (pronounced Wiz-ee-wig – very fun to say out loud). The acronym stands for “what you see is what you get” and became a commonly thrown around term during that time. Prior to it, word processors and HTML editors were all just plaintext with modifiers attached to the text that you wouldn’t see until you printed the final product. But WYSIWYG was the beginning of the creation of more human centered UI design in the digital realm, as it was ultimately the daddy of modern web UI. I want to call back to the end of the last chapter, because I noticed this quote last week, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. “There was an active campaign in the 1980s-1990s to promote visual elegance in software. That political movement bore fruit when it influenced engineers at companies like apple and Microsoft who happened to have a chance to steer the direction that software was taking before lock in made their efforts moot. That’s why we have nice fonts and flexible design options on our screens. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” P.22 I’m somewhat irritated because Lanier is directly contradicting himself here when look at the quote from page 26. The underlying implication of his point as I read it, is that ultimately tech and the internet was built for humans to use it, and that it wouldn’t exist in its current form otherwise. So built by humans, for humans. This is reinforced in the section about chess and deep blue: “People, not machines performed this accomplishment [in reference to the defeat of Gary Kasparov by deep blue]” P.34 What’s bothering me, is that in the quote from P.22, Lanier seems to be omitting talking about the most important part of the design/invention process: Objectives. Objectives are the frame that orient the creation of experience and products. In the case of deep blue, the objective was to create a computer program that could beat humans at chess. Let’s take a moment to break down the objectives of a silicon valley tech company. The prime directive of a startup like this is to generate revenue for its investors and shareholders because they keep the lights on in the beginning. Ok great, how do you accomplish that? Well they’ll have to bring a product to service to market to be able to generate revenue that hopefully exceeds the fiscal expenditure that is required to bring that product to market. Maybe this tech company is idealist as well, and they have the objective to change the world in addition to generating profits. Then you add on all the smaller scale objectives that will bring more definition and structure to the nature of the product as they target a certain need or niche. The important thing is that the objectives work in harmony, and remain coherent as they travel nested down their chain of objectives. In an ideal world for this tech company, one of the best ways for them to create revenue for their stockholders, is to create a product that has the biggest market share possible while also trying to correspond to as many of their existing goals as they can manage. To gain market share and create products that are the most widely adopted, you must make products for the average person. To be able to do that, you cannot have bad user interface design that are only understandable by tech nerds (ie. a very niche market of people). Mass adoption of any technology or trend hinges on its ability to be grasped by the layman. When Lanier references this push to improve digital aesthetics in the 80s and 90s, this wasn’t simply a result of the public’s pushback on the clunky command line user experience of computers back then. It was rapidly growing corporations that quickly recognized a way to get anyone to be able to use a computer. Once the ability to use the tech is there, the adoption follows. To summarize briefly: the product isn’t created by the manufacturer, it is created by the customer. Companies that do not realize this, die. There's a specific scene I remember from the 2015 steve jobs movie. The scene is features Job’s supposed 5 year old daughter using the macintosh. STEVE: “Can I borrow your hand for a second?” STEVE puts his hand on top of LISA’s and demonstrates the mouse. STEVE: “Point that arrow…and click. You don’t have to but if you want you can play with it. Nothing you can do will break it so just do whatever you want with it.” … STEVE, without looking at it, takes the Mac that Lisa’s been working on by the handle and turns it around so Chrisann can see the screen and puts it forcefully back on the table. Lisa’s made a painting. The kind of thing only a parent could love, but a painting. STEVE: (without having to look at it) “You asked me what people are going to do with it. They’re gonna do that.” Then STEVE looks at Lisa’s painting which he hadn’t seen when he turned it around for Chrisann…he’s seeing it for the first time and he almost involuntarily stops unbuttoning his shirt. LISA: “It’s an abstract.” STEVE can’t help but let out a laugh and smile at that. There’s an emotion happening inside of him he doesn’t quite understand… STEVE : “You used MacPaint.” Yes it’s a movie, yes it’s dramatized, but it illustrates the mentality of the 90s shift in design trends perfectly IMO. Lisa just instinctively picked up how the UI works, and was able to use it to express herself. That’s human centered design at work. The customer was the source of the product. Graphical user interfaces were a way for more people, the not tech-savy people, to be able to interface with computers. That was, and has always been, the only strategy for mass adoption. You don't make people change their habits, you change the product to meet the demands of people’s habits. In other words, I think that Lanier is misdiagnosing the victory of a political movement in the name of the free internet (p.22), instead of recognizing it as a strategy to gain market share. Lanier knows this, and specifically states it on p.27 when he talks about Clippy from Microsoft word, but forgets to mention that the public backlash from clippy was strong enough to make Microsoft remove it! He continues his train of thought to say this. “[In reference to clippy as an “AI” tool] promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life form that can understand people better than they can understand themselves.” P.38 He does this to later on be able to make this point: “When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful. People already tend to defer to computers, blaming themselves when a digital gadget or online service is hard to use.” P.36 When people are told that a computer is intelligent, but then it fails to meet the most basic expectations of human experience, it creates dissonance in that user’s experience. Personally, most people I know aren’t blaming themselves when tech is acting up. They are usually blaming the tech for not living up to their expectations. Like when you get frustrated at google, alexa or siri for not understanding what you’re saying. People have rejected, time and again this philosophy, no matter what tech companies do to try and promote it. They are actively demanding that the computer and/or software corresponds better to their needs. I think that Lanier roasting the everliving crap out of the abstract group of people he calls cybernetic totalists is based. He demonstrates well the absurdity of hyper technocratic rhetoric but in doing so, I think that he is doing a disservice to his excellent praise of consciousness later on in the chapter. He looks down on the tech user, as a way to frame his arguments around the assumption that what the totalists are doing is working, and that the user is dumbing themselves down. By doing this, he raises these technocrats as priests of a new religion, rather than what they really are: businessmen in pursuit of the simple goal that is more market share. This is antithetical to exactly the kind of emphasis on pro-consciousness behaviours that he is trying to promote, and wrongly portrays the user as the zombies he was talking about at the end of the chapter; ie. lacking agency. The self isn't abdicated, never has been, Lanier has only presented it as such. This was long, and I spent too much time on it, but the read gave me an itch that I really really needed to scratch by writing this. I’m curious to get some perspective and feedback from others! I also get the feeling I may be hyperfixated on an inconsequential point in the grand scheme of lanier’s narrative, but I guess that will be clarified by later chapters, or other people’s perspectives. I look forward to both eventualities! Have a good week everyone!

masey

Hello again! This was a big one. Before I get into it, I gotta talk about the chicken suit. Lanier name-dropped his colleague and I had to know more. This guy built a fluffy chicken jacket and a model chicken to pat and it’s the best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x-8EzuMiqU&t=23s Anyway! Onwards! As the biggest Wikipedia user I know, I was kind of embarrassed by how familiar the Oracle illusion felt. It really got me thinking about the trust we place in what appears to be objective. I questioned the Oracle illusion most recently while reading a Wikipedia article that included some slightly too flowery and occasionally comedic language. On the other end of this article was, unmistakably, a human telling a story. I felt their passion about the details and eagerness to communicate the thrills of the subject (fly-fishing if you must know). Instantly, I doubted everything I’d just read. I sensed the soul of the author and credibility was shattered. Then I realised how completely absurd that was. The first lessons in academic writing are all about removing yourself from the piece. You create a mental map of your perceptions and your opinions and then you pick yourself out of it. You would probably be crucified for using an “I” statement. At times this whole process has seemed less like a quest towards objectivity and more like an exercise in how well you can dress up an opinion in fact’s clothing. Despite having this style drilled into me, I’m as much a victim of the Oracle illusion as anyone else. It doesn’t even occur to me that a single person wrote a Wikipedia article unless they betray their humanity by being, god forbid, too entertaining. Present something robotically enough and I’ll happily assume I’m glimpsing some eternal truth that sprung up organically from the hive mind. Obviously this is dangerous on a terrifying scale. All this to say that when I read any impersonal text, I envision a nebulous network of abstract authors, rather than the reality: a person obscuring their personhood to achieve some end. So, I’d like to apologise to the fly-fishing expert from earlier. I shouldn’t have trusted them less because they were a person. Literally fucking everything is people and the difference is just how honest they are about it. So yeah, Lanier giving a name to the Oracle illusion in this chapter was hugely satisfying and really spoke to the lengths we go to in separating technology from ourselves—as if it’s been smarter than us this entire time and we’ve been uncovering, rather than inventing, its potential. I think we see this so clearly in the painful observation of an older person trying to google something. Google seems so clever to us because we learned to speak its language, while to them it’s a useless hunk of metal. Why do we see our own fluency with a tool as evidence for the tool’s intelligence, rather than our own? “Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever?” (pg. 32). There’s so much to be said about this chapter. I mean, come on, “By definition consciousness is the one thing that isn’t reduced if it is an illusion.” I was really reminded of a segment from a CJ video I can’t place (Bo Burnham?) about how despite not agreeing on whether humans have souls, absolutely none of us are confused about where the sentiment comes from. And yet, the urge to project our experience on our dominant technology compels us to reduce ourselves! I wonder if our search for consciousness within AI will one day seem as absurd as searching for human nature in a steam engine. We’re just so hesitant to accept that we may be more complex still than the most complex thing we can currently grasp. Lots of good stuff. Loving this book and loving everyone’s contributions!!

mouse

chapter 2!! dense!! increasingly fascinating to recontextualize tech through this lens though, I had never heard about or thought about the religiosity in computer science like this. really really interesting. I have so many thoughts and questions lol I think it makes sense why there's this kind of Rapture-esque cynicism that I can kind of see in the tech world from the outside. my brother-in-law is in tech and I didn't have the words to put that vibe he has when he talks about future technology. I've had conversations with him about various things like censorship or the current dangers of ai and he usually says "well, it's around now so we just have to deal" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and I challenge him to ask why we shouldn't try something else, or consider using the tools we have as a different tool than it's being used as now, and he really doesn't know how to engage with that. it's interesting. "if you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority." exactly this!! my brother-in-law has recommended me the book What We Owe The Future, and from his description and what I've read about it, it seems that it talks a lot about this kind of ideology. anyway, I'm going to start reading it and see what's up! "The first tenet of this new culture is that all reality, including humans, is one big information system... The meaning of life, in this view, is making the digital system we call reality function at ever-higher "levels of description."' this reminds me of Braiding Sweetgrass, in thw conversation about language in the first part of the book. when humans and everything else becomes diluted down to "description", we lose our agency of being/doing. we're sorted into categories, and life nuance is filtered out and boxed in. "But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so of they are experienced... It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants." this is a veeeery interesting thought to me. I'm honestly not quite sure how I feel about it. not what I think about it, but how it makes me *feel*. which is an involuntary impulse, the desire to understand how I feel, that I think explains why this thought is true? like, I've already spent several days turning this around in my head. and I'm really curious if anyone else has thought about it. I don't want to understand it so I can solve the problem of lack of understanding, I want to understand it so that I can understand *why* it feels aesthetically beautiful at the depth that it instills in me. are we human because we suffer? is it because we can experience the spectrum of suffering and joy and the fact that we can strive for what we desire? it is because desire is tied up in both confusion and hope? these questions aren't new lol but I am curious about them in this context. the computer doesn't care about aesthetics unless you tell it, command it to show that it understands the "problem" of aesthetic beauty. it has no agency until a human presses its buttons. and weirdly this train of thought made me think about The Matrix movies lol? there's something there about these computer programs and desire. Agent Smith and his desire to be, is a dysfunction and a flaw. and then in the most recent film, how some of the machines that used to oppress are now living alongside humans. they're not treated as smarter or even as not living, but equals. is really interesting. I'm not totally sure how to connect/compare the hopefulness of some sci-fi works (Star Trek included) to the cynicism of religiosity in contemporary computer science, I just feel something there. "You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart." that's why we have to build life outside of online, to remind ourselves of what actual life is. I loved the part about how chess is a striving desire to understand and learn, and how "no one will claim that the quest is over." connects really well to Nguyens book!! desire doesn't end, it just grows and builds. striving is desire, and desire is a living thing, maybe? "Settling for a middling Big Tech job — chasing lavish promotions instead of making history — represents a failure to realize the promises of tech and what it sought to accomplish, which those on the frontier now want to recapture... Over the next few years, tech experienced a profound loss of identity, followed by a search for meaning." this is from an article Tech Strikes Back from the new Atlantic. I read it after haweya referenced it in her recent substack, and it describes the desire for philosophy in tech really well. this article and haweya's articles pair really well with this book, I'm still thinking about them all together. how do we adapt to what we've created? "We all have to live with our imperfect ability to discern the proper boundaries of our circles of empathy." I think the more we understand our own personal circles of empathy, the better we can understand how ours intersect with others. "The tern "morality" is usually used to describe out treatment of others, but in this case I am applying it to ourselves just as much." there's this great book The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor that I think fits really well with this. like, maybe in a way, we have a moral responsibility to practice radical self love. "There's a way that consciousness and time are bound together. If you try to remove any potential hint of mysteriousness from consciousness, you end up mystifying time in an absurd way." so I recently rewatched Arrival because it's one of my all-time favorite movies, and this quote in the book reminded me of it!! and then I remembered I have a copy of the book the short story is in and that it was one of thw bookclub books! lol so I read it ^^ the title of Arrival I think is such a good adaptation of the original story. Arrival is present tense, it's present memory. also, I think one reason why humans love sci-fi so much is because it plays with time. scifi works are often like period pieces. even Denis Villaneuve, who directed Arrival, also directed the Dune movies. the costumes in them are STUNNING. and I read an interview with the costumer designer who described her process making them. she looked at historical human cultures and emulated them so that the characters in Dune are both relatable to us now, because they're historical and we recognize the aesthetics, but also very much futuristic. it's fascinating. I think the best sci-fi writers have a very deep desire to understand time and manipulate our perception of time. and I think that they also try to understand it in a hopeful way. because humans perceive time in the way that we do, I think one way to think about it is that it can be really easy to be cynical, mistrusting, and desperate to "avoid" time. and one way of doing that is obsessing over the Rapture and the end of time. maybe that feels like relief. but I think the best sci-fi tries to instill hope about time. like, no, we don't HAVE to be dragged down by it. we can have agency over our living time. but it takes work to create agency, and it can be distressing. I need to reread Story of Your Life again to understand it better and I'm gonna look through the bookclub post, but I understand Lanier's thought about this a bit better because I read it in a sci-fi story. love that I really recommend the interview with Jaqueline West who designed the costumes for Dune. "Denis wanted to create a world that felt different from existing sci-fi films, so [there are] no aliens, no silver gadgets. Instead, you have a philosophical experience,” says West. “It’s a futuristic take on the past and immediately made me think of medieval references, ancient tarot cards, and alchemy. We went back to Greek tragedy, [as] I felt there was a correlation between the house of Atreus and the house of Atreides. Our references were primarily historical, and Denis loved that.” YES. INCREDIBLE. that's what I love about scifi lol. https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/dune-costume-designers-interview-definitive-science-fiction-fantasy

Cristina Fernandez

“A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it.” That quote is a big takeaway from this chapter, and such an accurate and obvious point that I’m surprised by how it surprised me. A lot of that experience through-line in this chapter made me think about Twitter. I’ve been off it for about a month now, and I’m fascinated by how my brain understands it now that I’m not engaging with it. I know consciously that it is still nebulously ‘out there’, that things are happening out of my sight (not only because I get emails daily trying to urge me to redownload the app). It oddly feels like a place that I don’t visit anymore, that should exist somewhere, since time is passing and people are there and events are occurring. Reading this chapter, instead of the place that is twitter existing somewhere in the information of the internet, maybe the place is in my mind and the minds of anyone else using Twitter. Maybe the internet isn’t a plane of reality where things exist, maybe it’s just information stored physically on servers, that I use my human consciousness to construct into a place and events and culture. It requires my brain and other people’s brains interacting with it to make it into a place and an entity beyond just information. “People degrade themselves to make machines seem smart all the time.” I really enjoyed the computer thought experiment. As someone largely outside of tech, I get the same feeling when I think of how computers work and how the human brain works. It’s seems so confusing and impossible. There are tiny magnets that communicate binary that are translated to programs that tell the computer what to do. (I think?) And my brain is made up of neurons that fire to communicate that do the things to keep me alive but also make me feel emotions. (I think?) The confusion feels the same. But computers were made by people. There are some people out there that understand how they work. Meanwhile there are so many unanswered questions about our own consciousness. Conflating the two does feel wrong. Merely replicating what my brain does, I have to believe doesn’t replicate the me of it. Because what am I if not the experience of being me? I was reminded also of a conversation I had in therapy this week. I’d been deciding to leave things up to the universe, to guide me to where I’m supposed to be cosmically, and with some helpful insight from my therapist, I realized I was really just trying to not make a decision about my life. There’s something easy about removing agency from the situation. I think similarly there’s an appeal to degrading our concept of personhood. By making it smaller, by pretending it’s replicable, it puts less pressure on question of what it means to be alive. If we remove the magic, if we create anti magic, it makes things easier to comprehend, makes it less scary to make decisions about who to be and what to do with your life. I can understand the appeal of cybernetic totalism. It would be great to just hand the enormity of being alive to something smarter than me. But it’s important to fight that urge and to honor what it means to be human even if I can’t answer the question.

Louis-Antoine LeBel

“What the test really tells us, however, even if it’s not necessarily what Turing hoped it would say, is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder” To me, this quote is the crux of the chapter. I wrote in my comment last week about how I dislike a lot of the language used in AI because it attaches itself to humanity (despite the technology being fully digital). So I really loved reading what Lanier had to say about the singularity, digitizing our consciousness and how anti-human these ideas are. However advanced large language models get, we’ll only ever be able to compare them against our own writing. And however natural these LLMs start to sound, they will only write when prompted by a human. Lowering your own standards of human intelligence really is the only way to believe AI models simulate our minds. Up until the Stranger Things video, I was pretty on board for the idea that the body and the mind are two different entities. It was just intuitive to me for some reason. But after watching that video and also the Social no para ep 9 (I believe), I started becoming more aware of my body and how it connects with my thoughts and emotions. Like the second it starts getting warmer in the spring, I feel good as hell and start listening to some upbeat music (Caroline Polachek is peak spring music). And after going through that, the concept of uploading my consciousness in the digital realm seems very silly. I can’t feel the sun on my skin with my simulated neurons. “A virtual bullet, however, doesn’t even exist unless there is a person to recognize it as a representation of a bullet. Guns are real in a way that computers are not.” This is essentially the Tyler, the Creator cyber-bullying tweet. “Information is alienated experience.” I’m fully with Lanier on rejecting the idea the Information by itself lacks something essential, but I’m also hoping he goes a bit deeper into his dislike for Wikipedia. Right now, I feel he mischaracterizes Wikipedia as an “Oracle”. I use Wikipedia to quickly familiarize myself with a topic, and I think that’s how most people use it. Maybe it’s because I grew up with teachers constantly repeating that Wikipedia wasn’t a valid source, but I definitely don’t see it as having “superhuman validity”. I’ll always trust an expert over crowd-sourced factoids. Maybe our relationship to the website also changed since the book was published, idk.

Josh Milburn

This isn't necessarily super related, but the notion of information being molded by the mindset of the interpreter is something that is ridiculously obvious when you hear people talk about "people will be able to tell from your bones whether you were male or female." Yes, I'm sure that you believe that because it's true and we're all just 'male' or 'female'; it definitely has nothing to do with us having always looked at bones with an approach of "well is it this thing or this other thing? We know it's gotta be one of the two."

benedict.m

~ Turing ~ among a lot of other things this chapter did, it made me feel deeply for Alan Turing. I knew he was an early programmer and code cracker, I knew he was gay, I even had vaguely known that he took his own life, but I'd never heard anyone meaningfully talk about his life, his beliefs and his struggles. what a tragedy that the society around this brilliant man killed him. what a tragedy that we've all embraced the wrong aspects of his last great contribution to the world. "No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures." (31) "Turing imagined a pristine, crystalline form of existence in the digital realm, and I can imagine it might have been a comfort to imagine a form of life apart from the torments of the body and the politics of sexuality." if I were Lanier's editor I'd suggest to change at least one of those uses of 'imagine', just saying, but Lanier is right to point this out. imagining a beautiful digital future from the perspective of someone grotesquely oppressed by the world around them is VERY different from imagining the same thing from the perspective of someone with tremendous power and privilege. we have to put Turing's ideas in context. I do wish Lanier took this section a little further, maybe explored the fact that in his thought experiment "it is the woman who is replaced by the computer", rather than just saying "It's notable." but just by contextualizing and demystifying the Turing test a bit, Lanier is doing good work. "What the test really tells us...is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder." yes. AI is fake, computers are not alive, it's humans all the way down. ~ Condescending to Computers ~ guys they are not intelligent. they're smart, by certain metrics, but not intelligent. I think I've always felt suspect of the idea that the only thing separating computer 'intelligence' from human intelligence is processing power, as though if a computer just gets big enough it'll be the same as a human mind. like, yes, the sheer size and complexity of human brains is definitely part of what gives rise to intelligence and consciousness, but to reduce those slippery, spiritual and philosophical concepts to a single measurement of like 'how much information can you process in a second' is laughable. of course there's more to it than that. "If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?...Did that search engine really know what you want, OR ARE YOU PLAYING ALONG, lowering your standards to make it seem cleverer?" (32, emphasis mine) fucking facts. no notes, this goes hard as hell. think about how we learn to phrase search queries. how, if you're into talking to 'AI' chatbots, you learn to omit certain questions that you know it won't be able to answer well. how you speak incredibly clearly so Siri will understand you. these aren't bad things to do if you see these tools as what they are: tools. it's not immoral to use a screwdriver the way it's meant to be used. that's not condescending to the level of a screwdriver. but when we start to even entertain the notion that these digital tools are alive or thinking in any way, that's where it's dangerous. they aren't just unintelligent compared to a human, I think they're unintelligent compared to literally any living organism. living organisms are directly tied to the world around them. they experience it and respond to it, and live or die by their relationship to it. a blade of grass is more alive than a supercomputer. I suspect this will always be true. and look, computers are impressive. they're cool. they beat people at chess and do math fast and keep planes from crashing and shit. but we are the ones who make them. "People, not machines, performed th[ese] accomplishment[s]" (34). I absolutely love Lanier's suggestion that Kasparov psyched himself out when playing against (the programmers behind) Deep Blue: "Kasparov detected a sinister stone face where in fact there was absolutely nothing. While the contest was not intended as a Turing test, it ended up as one, and Kasparov was fooled." (35) ~ Empathy & Consciousness ~ the circle of empathy is an idea I've had rattling around in my head for a long time, though not in those exact words. one amendment I'd suggest is to conceive of it as actually multiple concentric circles. we may have a circle of intensely personal empathy for those closest to us, another of more general empathy for those in our nearby community, another very basic level of empathy for all humans and maybe like dogs and cats, and then one more wide ring of low-level sympathy for all other life forms. this isn't exactly what my concentric rings of empathy look like, but I think the structure is more accurate to how most people feel and behave. this structure also avoids some of the extreme examples he uses of extending one's circle of empathy to bacteria. because, yes, if you extend the same degree of empathy to individual bacteria as you do toward individual humans, you're gonna have a hard time operating in the world. but I feel perfectly capable of having a different kind of empathy toward single-celled organisms. I like them, I recognize them as living things that all have a singular experience of the universe, but I would never prioritize the life of an amoeba at the same level as a person's life. I also would unfortunately disagree with Lanier's assertion that "most people would place all other people within their circle" (36). I think that we should, but many--if not most--of us do not. we very often have different rings for different groups of people. and we should be extremely conscious of that. I don't think it's bad to have a somewhat restrictive inner ring of empathy for the people closest to you, the people whose emotions you feel as if they were your own, who you think about often and support at all costs. it's probably impossible to sustain that depth of empathy for every human on earth. but beyond that, the empathy rankings start to get dicey. when the humans in your country are in a higher ring than people outside your country, that's nationalism. when people in your economic class are in a higher ring than those more impoverished than you, that's classism. when people of your race are in a higher ring than those of other races, that's racism. Lanier makes a similar, very astute point when he says "The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle" (37). yes this is a bit of a generalization, but he's pointing to the core, animating philosophies of liberal and conservative politics, not at every individual liberal or conservative. and he's fucking right. like just read this sentence instead of Kill All Normies. (I'm only half-joking) Lanier ends this chapter talking about human consciousness, mystery and 'zombies'. I don't think I have much to say about it. "Consciousness is the one thing that isn't reduced if it is an illusion." beautiful. true. "Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will...if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual--then perhaps collectively we have the power to make it so. WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO COLLECTIVELY ACHIEVE ANTIMAGIC." (44, emphasis mine) horrifying. true. 'see' you all in a few days, keep pretending to be real, keep your borders variegated and fuzzy, reject the Singularity, expand your concentric rings of empathy in every direction you can. <3

Evelyn G

Loved the Empathy Circle! I have a deep appreciation for films like Blade Runner, The Creator and Ex Machina. Sci-fi that takes itself seriously is just ecstatic bliss for me. However, I fundamentally reject the notion that robots/AI should be seen as human replacements in any way. There's certain tasks they can do perfectly well, but you lose the magic we should be telling stories about. In that way I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is better. In a bold move Clark and Kubrick make HAL the most charismatic character in the whole narrative. The story is a Turing Test. At first, you're meant to empathize with the machine. Even though HAL's humanity is always filtered through this strange affected sincerity. He plays chess with the crew and makes small talk with them. He's kind of endearing, but eventually HAL goes rogue and murders the crew by shutting off the frozen astronauts' life support systems to very little fanfare. The reason he turns rotten isn't because 'technology is bad' but it's because he was designed to value the mission end-state above all else. From the beginning he was created as an oracle of infinite knowledge and was meant to never be wrong and yet people programmed him to withhold information therefore creating a complicated paradox that systems aren't capable of dealing with. And too illustrate the humanity of the actual humans in 2001: earlier when HAL kills Frank in the cold vacuum of space, Dave Bowman decides to get in a shuttle to retrieve his co-pilot's body. It's a decididly bad call. HAL uses that moment of human weakness to seal the pod bay doors, passively letting Dave run out of oxygen and drift off into the abyss. It's stupid, but there's something human in honouring the sanctity of bodies we leave behind. In the end Dave conquors the machine by removing every module from HAL's brain. And you hear his breath crackling in your ear as he does it. (Also, I'll just add that 2001: A Space Odyssey is critical in any kind of The Barbie Movie analysis. And I could tell a lot of critics were doing surgery with a bowie knife.)

rui

i haven’t finished reading the chapter yet but i just read “what if only humans are real, and information is not?” and that really shook me to my core…

reva

i've been meditating on "If you believe the distinction between the roles of people and computers is starting to dissolve, you might express that–as some friends of mine at Microsoft once did–by designing features for a word processor that are supposed to know what you want, such as when you want to start an outline within your document." this feels extremely timeless, there are so many "correction" or "autofill" features that are just kind of forced upon us that you just kind of have to learn to work around. like how AI features are being built into software as an option that you can't fully hide. and how sometimes when i'm trying to crop images on my computer or phone, it will auto crop to a certain size and not let me crop slightly bigger or slightly smaller than whatever it locks into. it feels like this is everywhere in technology i use today. the discussion on the circle of empathy reminded me a lot of braiding sweetgrass. there was a chapter where kimmerer talks about all the small creatures living in her lake that she was killing in order to make it a clean lake that her kids could swim in. and she talked about the conflict between the part of her that didn't want to kill any creatures no matter how small, and the part of her that wanted the lake to be clear for her own selfish reasons. i don't have a point about this i'm just thinking about it. i'm ALSO thinking about how to do nothing. that book jumped around between topics a loooot, but was organized like a typical book, with like a few breaks per chapter. and this book has a lot of headers that break up the text, but it doesn't really feel like "different sections" it all feels very cohesive. i do like the formatting, i think it adds Personality and Flavor. also loooooved the chess discussion i think it's so important. the whole concept of "people lower their expectations for technology to make it seem better than it is" goes SO hard. of course people will think that chess machines are perfect if they casually ignore that machines do absolutely nothing to replicate the poker-like element of the game. of course people will think that ai is going to replace artists if they casually ignore that ai does nothing to create meaning or purpose behind its art. my thoughts are a bit scattered because it's been so long since i read the chapter, but this book is really really exciting me. it's letting me put words to things that i've always felt but never quite been able to describe.

Ricardo Aguilera

I love and respect that Lanier went heady and took big swings. There's some issues with the metaphor of the empathy circle — I don't feel like it is a very useful model to think with, and I don't think it is "meaningful because it's finite" — but the Oracle illusion is a useful concept that has wide applications. Consider people who distrust scientific consensus, believing it's a kind of appeal to authority. At some level, their distrust is warranted — one shouldn't trust authority just because. But I really feel like if they peeled back the curtain of the Oracle, if they actually saw and participated in the ordinary activities of science, they'd see how knowledge formation in science follows the same kinds of processes as knowledge formation in everyday life. They'd see how it's based on principles that, in ordinary situations, they'd accept. Part of the problem seems to be, then, that oracles obscure or abstract rich processes of production by individuals, whether it's production of knowledge or artwork. These processes are genuinely really interesting and, in small enough bites, approachable. To clarify, I'm not saying we shouldn't trust scientific authorities, or that it is practical to "check their work". And I'm under no illusions that climate denial will disappear once people sit down and really do the research. But often, when I learn about the historical context of a scientific discovery and the nitty-gritty details of the experiments, I feel like I finally get why we've come to believe what we believe, and I get a boost to my trust in people and our ability to work out problems together. The same happens a bunch in math and software. 3blue1brown often does a great job of presenting mathematical ideas, not as prophecies from an oracle, but as concepts you could've come up with, in the right context and with the right company. Oracles can be a practical abstract, but looking at what's underneath them is empowering and beautiful. Wikipedia as a huge human project is more inspiring than Wikipedia as a static repository of knowledge.

spencer schoening

I have tried to revisit the thought experiment a couple times. The first one lands for me, but is the hailstorm idea meant to point out that it would be absurd for a consciousness to reside in a network of data?

halley

damn these section titles go hard! the imagery of nanobots forming a grey goo that eats the earth reminded me of agent cody banks. I'm not convinced the luddites are that crazy to begin with so I wish he'd expanded a bit more on that. I listened to a podcast about it a few months ago and sympathized with their ideals after hearing more of the context so maybe I'm a bit of a luddite myself? "[autocorrecting design features] promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life form that can understand people better than they can understand themselves." I'm often mildly enraged at the audacity of computers to correct me- as if they know better than me what I want to say?! at some point I decided my typing-voice sounded more true without default capitalizations but it took some digging to figure out how to disable that feature. it's a small step of taking back my agency from the default settings. "what if information is inanimate? what if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? what if only humans are real, and information is not?" it’s the old 'if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?' I have this conception of the internet, this connective structure made by and of humans, as some kind of massive immersive art experience- an ongoing work of collective art- the mirror and memoire of humanity. not so much as a separate entity capable of consciousness and agency reaching for its own ends, its own destiny, but rather as being reflective of our own. it's an ecosystem of humanity filtered through tech for us to communicate, express, learn, entertain, and feel real things, with and from each other. the danger in my perception is that this project is exclusive to humans. we're the only ones using and understanding and benefitting from this world we've created. a frog or a hailstorm can't use the internet or feel any of its effects as real. it is important to be in community with other humans but we mustn't forget the real ecosystems we are part of for getting subsumed by the fantasy of the one we're cocreating. it's the parable of the matrix. the humanness of the internet at the exclusion of all else becomes the death instinct by neglecting the rest of life, by becoming enraptured by our self-aggrandizing sense of human superiority. how can we engage with this most human of artistic endeavors in an artful and mindful way? it seems like we are suffering under the weight of unchecked discharge in contrast to expression, which could look something more like the cultivation of one's individual voice (a website for example) that Lanier suggests. the striving makes us alive. a computer doesn't want things, it is reactionary, it does what it's told; living beings want things. it's like bad parenting- the obedient child of science and humanity does exactly as we program it and it becomes the golden child. the problem children, the untamable and unknowable hungry wild things, drift even further from our experience, unless they can be tamed in some way. "information is alienated experience.... experience is the only process that can de-alienate information." it's dewey, it's kimmerer, but most of all its david abram! the subject and object are cocreated by each other in experience/relationship so this paradigm of separation doesn't hold up. i'm once again recommending abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous and dropping a couple relevant quotes here to elaborate: "however determinate one's genetic inheritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an activity that necessarily involves both a receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one's inheritance) to those contours. it is this open activity, this dynamic blend of receptivity and creativity by which every animate organism orients itself to the world (and orients the world around itself), that we speak of by the term 'perception'." "to directly perceive any phenomenon is to enter into relation with it, to feel oneself in a living interaction with another being. to define the phenomenon as an inert object, to deny the ability of a tree to inform and even instruct one's own awareness, is to have turned one's senses away from phenomenon. it is to ponder the tree outside of the world, or, rather, from outside of the world in which both oneself and the tree are active participants." I realize after typing it out that this (+ the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty being referenced) also speaks to the ship of theseus thought experiement in this chapter. to quote @Daniel Shaul- "consciousness isn't the brain, consciousness is the body"!! "wikipedia works on the oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text a superhuman validity. traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems." a network is not an intelligent being just as a company is not a person. it makes me think of bureaucratic systems abstracted to remove the humanity from individuals contributing to the system while claiming that they're not responsible, they're just doing their job. when autocorrect irritates me I don't get mad at a designer, I'm mad at the program itself, just as I have to remind myself I shouldn't be mad at the person working at the IRS when they can't solve my problem. I'm afraid that these easy delusions are alienating, and I still believe the purpose of the whole internet project is to connect us to each other. a lot of the hype encouraging integrating ai anywhere and everywhere possible seems to be at the cost of connecting with others. we're being forced to use chat bots for customer service so we can't communicate. ai voices are infiltrating voiceovers so we can't hear each other's voices. reminds me of some meme about how we hoped the robots would automate the things we don't like doing, not making 'art' for us so we don't have to. it really raises the question of what the internet is for- is it to connect us, or to be the most intelligent and efficient machine possible? is it meant to make our lives better, or easier? "you can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart... If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an ai program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?" in my field (voiceover) I have seen a lot of changes in the past few years involving ai creep. I get so many badly written scripts for cashcow channels that it has become pretty easy to spot. the writing is awkward, they always use the same bad metaphors, and they use a lot of words to not actually say much. the rise of ai voices has definitely hurt my business and is threatening the whole industry. while I can understand using an ai voice to make documents more accessible, when it comes to storytelling I don't believe humans can be replaced. you listen to an audiobook to hear a person read you a story, not to just download information. ai seems like a cheap and easy shortcut but it can't deliver on quality. "we all have to live with our imperfect ability to discern the proper boundaries of our circles of empathy. there will always be reasonable people who disagree." I really appreciated this line. the circles of empathy reminds me of metta meditation a bit, as a way of practicing expanding that circle. I also think it is a pretty individualistic approach and could perhaps be better by thinking on a ecosystems-level, like kimmerer cleaning the pond scum- isn't the sacrifice of those bacterial lifeforms going to create the conditions to benefit many more creatures? "we might be able to collectively achieve antimagic." Lanier is a whistleblower for a strain of dangerous imagination. I'll wrap this up with some related quotes from one of our past town halls: "our consciousness is an intrinsic part of the universe / thinking beautiful thoughts and experiencing beautiful things is *literally* making the universe better / beauty is a moral obligation"

Seoyoung Park

I found the last page about zombies the most absolutely fucking compelling, but I haven't seen anyone mention it! I wonder how much stock we're putting into "dead things!" The cloud of online people who manifest (or who are erased) via ChatGPT is the training farms made up of people in the Global South who spend all their labour CREATING all the prompts that AI has to offer. We continuously give primacy to the dead thing that's been created by the live individuals, but they exist! They are there! Everything about the earlier parts of the chapter have been said already, and I don't want to regurgitate the same information, but I couldn't stop thinking about citation as a feminist act, about unseen labour, and about the politics of the oracle illusion being at the cost of the global south, most of the time. Even on Instagram when content is taken down, you appeal to a nebulous cloud, or they say "we've found this content Blah Blah Blah" and the truth is that there are people watching it all. The invisible labour problem moves past the household into the web