Positivism, mechanistic thinking, and right-hemisphere deficits
I offer an alternative to the theories of Team Woke or Team Musk. Entertain for a moment the idea that these Tech Bros are neither evil villains nor saviors. Instead, consider that they may actually believe AI technocracy would be good, but they are unable to understand the full implications of their goals because they suffer from right hemisphere deficits.
While I am thrilled that the Tech Bros are tearing down the old system, I’m worried they will replace inefficient centralized control and bureaucracy with more efficient AI centralized control and bureaucracy. Collapsing the old system of governance is something, not incidentally perhaps, the WEF has promoted as necessary for the 4th Industrial Revolution, the transhuman revolution.
Elon Musk (at the helm of Neuralink, Starlink), Larry Ellison (with Oracle), Peter Thiel and Alex Karp (who founded Palantir) have all expressed enthusiasm for merging biology with technology, figuring out how to live forever, micro-managing society using algorithms and AI surveillance, and other stupid things. They each currently have oversized roles in or adjacent to the US federal government.
Should we be concerned?
Oracle is setting up Stargate, a mega nuclear-powered data center for processing Big Data. Data on us?
Palantir has a contract with U.S. Army, fighting alleged terrorism in tandem with Amazon Web Services (which hosts the CIA’s, the NSA’s data on citizens). They offer Large Language Model (LLM) technology to the US Department of Defense to deploy AI weaponry.
If Palantir were to turn its eye from the people onto the government, that would be a good thing. If the Stargate project were to be used to track all federal spending and make everything transparent to citizens at all times, I would be pleasantly surprised. But I suspect that Palantir and Stargate will be used to try to manage the decisions of warfare and the welfare of the country.
The problem with this is that LLMs are glorified predictive text engines: matching prompts to patterns in a database, they output the type of pattern that usually follows. The system itself is not designed to be factual, only probable: it is stereotyping on steroids.
If you thought human bureaucracy is often idiotic and frustrating, you haven’t felt AI bureaucracy yet.
Hellbound and Down 