Margaret Mead, technocracy, and the origins of AI's ideological divide
resobscura.substack.com
resobscura.substack.com
Weiner was an outspoken socialist and was persecuted for it, to such an extent that Cybernetics got needled to death and AI became “simply a matter of computing.”
Hopefully we all see now how wrong that was
Carving off computer science as a separate realm with less interdisciplinary input was definitely a fork in the road for the history of science.
By the way, if anyone is interested, you can find the list of cybernetics conference attendees here: https://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeop...
And if anyone is really interested, here's my book, which is coming out in January: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/benjamin-breen/trip...
It is interesting how cognitive science sees AI as a sub-discipline, where AI sees cognitive science as its sub-discipline.
McCarthy was not too enamoured with the bombastic nature of Wiener's persona and research, and may have birthed the field of AI, in part, to carve out his own field of study, and move away from an existing and defined field. As a result, control theory and reinforcement learning have a big overlap, yet use different words, approaches, and concepts.
Especially for the time
What I learned in Cybernetics was really: how prefix-free codes work (unsurprising given that Huffman was the instructor), how karnaugh maps work, and something about sphere packing being easy in 8 dimensions. Oh, and that Huffman was an arrogant jerk but also an excellent teacher.
Transdisciplinary fields are usually more delicate; they're often the momentary confluences of scientifically-inclined humanists and prominent scientific fields of their time. Before cybernetics there was various ambitious/systematic philosophy/evolution crossovers like Herbert Spencer.
From what I've researched and worked with individuals on the edge of the field, the contemporary debates seems to be going for "Second-order cybernetics"
Possible resources of interest are "IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics" (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?reload=true&...), as well as the work of Hugh Dubberly (Apple II, DNS) from Dubberly Design Office.
The conflicting models were the origin of the cold war (capitalism vs communism) and today between china and the west.
Its heyday had certainly been back in the '70s, as in the '80s the focus shifted to some other stuff thanks to energy inputs getting too expensive and us becoming bankrupt because of that (someone should write a history of the alternative energy sources tried by the communist government back then, some of which are now getting tested by the West, too), but for sure people weren't getting sent to prison because of it.
Here's [1] a list of Cybernetics-related books published before 1989 that I can find at an old-books store here in Bucharest, and that search reminded me that one of the main proponents of Cybernetics around these parts was Manea Manescu [2], a guy which had been prime-minister of communist Romania in the '70s (just before that he had been in charge of the State Planning Committee) and who stood by Ceausescu's side until the very end (that list of books I linked to includes a book with his name on it).
[1] https://www.targulcartii.ro/cauta/cibernetica?filter_name=ci...
That's literally what the whole thing is about - you model a problem as a bunch of cybernetics/control theory equations (with or without helper diagrams of boxes and arrows), do some computing on it, and implement the result in the physical world. In many cases, the computational model is partially included in the result itself - the physical control system includes a computer (whether it's an analog or digital one) that keeps the physical system stable by means of computation, i.e. "simply a matter of computing".
(In general, I feel many people didn't get the memo: "computing" isn't something "techbros" do; computing is a fundamental part of how we understand the world works - up there with energy conservation, thermodynamics, etc.)
I'm from Bucharest myself, and I live just a couple of blocks away from an institution called the Faculty of Cybernetics, meaning the computer-focused faculty of the local school/university of economics.
If I'm not mistaken, and I hope that I'm not, it had been set up sometime in the early '70s when many of the technocracy higher-ups in here were really into Cybernetics and into Wiener's works (some of which had been translated before Ceausescu fell, so when the communists were still in power). Most, if not all, of those technocrats were not engineers and also not "classical" computer-science people, afaik the majority of them were economists.
But, as a I said, when the '90s came the "classical" computer-science paradigm (and especially the engineering-focused part) took off for good, so that all that "side-quest" about Cybernetics was left in the past (apart from the some entities still being attached to it only by name).
The same can be said about the concept of linear programming as applied to economics and to economic forecasting, that is a quite cool concept that had been almost completely forgotten starting with the '90s but which now is having a small resurgence (I've "re-discovered" it myself by first reading about it in Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis and then by going through a Soviet dictionary of economics published sometime in the '70s).
As far as the 'ideological divide' at OpenAI, the fact that they're all silent about the military contracting arm of their partner Microsoft as well as potential applications of LLMs to the military arena should be proof enough that their 'do-gooder' PR operation is nothing more than a branding and marketing game.
I suppose you could argue that military dominance of the planet in the name of do-gooder agendas is just what we need, but that's always been little more than a justification for robbery of others, ever since the dawn of recorded history.
Everyone might be able to work out which snippets of media were true and which were not in a few days, but if it happens during a crisis point the loss of time and momentum could be catastrophic.
They say the want to output a shortlist to aid human decision-making, but of course they might decide to skip that step.
I imagine the Pentagon would pay billions for an LLM that could shave a couple of seconds off that target-acquisition time.
It is employed to resolve the cognitive dissonance that highly talented people struggle with, when they realize they could do anything they set their minds to (including making the world a better place), but still want to work as a quant or optimize for ad clicks, because this pays well.
Like Goedel stated "most religions are bad, but religion is not", most people vocally identifying with EA are bad, but EA is not. To judge EA by the character flaws of prominent people like SBF, is like judging Christianity for Jim Jones's massacre. EA is, in essence, about effectively allocating charity. Noble and good-hearted.
Surely, grifters and frauds would abuse EA to virtue signal or trick venture capitalists into thinking their investment also builds wells in Africa. That should reflect badly on them. Elizabeth Holmes got so far, in part, because venture capitalists were attracted to her due to her being a young female. Merely Goodhart's Law in progress, not young female entrepreneurs being bad or without merit.
I don't see it. They're pretty much opposite approaches.
Christianity is deontological and focused on God. Christianity says that's what is important is following the rules, and the rules exist to make God happy, and that outcomes are irrelevant.
EA is an utilitarian frame work, and focused on the real world. Utilitarianism says what is important is obtaining utility, and that outcomes are the ultimate measure of goodness.
The main difference is that from an utilitarian standpoint, Christian charity only ever works by accident. From its point of view what's important is that you do it. The how and why, and what happens as a result is unimportant. So giving huge amounts of money to a megachurch for the pastor's Ferrari while the poor starve is perfectly fine, because you're not doing it for the poor people, you're doing it for God, and you did what was asked of you.
My intent was to disagree and say that no, EA isn't come sort of of rebranding of a Christian concept for people who dislike religion, but a fundamentally different thing altogether, with different mechanics and motivations.
For that matter, atheists in general don't believe Christianity has any claim on charity, marriage or even Christmas.
I think the morality of Christianity is the old-testament part and the charity/universal love is the New Testament part and thus more the focus of Christianity (obviously this depends on your particular sects interpretations of the scriptures).
Without a consistent formal system of inference, every moral proposition and its negation are consequences of the religion, so it is now capable of providing moral justification of any behavior. There is a powerful evolutionary incentive for religions to provide simple "justifications" for behaving selfishly, while disguising the inconsistency of the systems they put forth.
Effective altruism is particularly guilty, i think.
Wait, I thought Altman got canned because he was starting businesses behind the board’s back making conflicts of interest.
Wikipedia ‘The term technocracy is derived from the Greek words τέχνη, tekhne meaning skill and κράτος, kratos meaning power, as in governance, or rule. William Henry Smyth, a California engineer, is usually credited with inventing the word technocracy in 1919 to describe "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers", although the word had been used before on several occasions.’
Yes, this is how voices work.
> Whatever people were thinking 90 years ago, it had already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut in the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today.
Are you making this argument simply based on the passage of time? I can think of a lot of ideas whose longevity makes 90 years seem a sneeze.
> While both may share a mindset, linking Mead to today's techno-bros is a bit of a stretch.
If they share a mindset, would that not be an obvious link? Additionally, this article is drawing a connection not just between Mead and techno-optimists (not the same as tech-bros), but between Mead and both techno-optimism and existential risk. That's sort of what the article's preamble describes as the interesting thing.
Plato was famous, but only one of the many voices in very long debate. Whatever people were thinking 2000+ years ago, it had already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut in the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today. While both may share a mindset, linking Plato to today's techno-bros is a bit of a stretch.
The allegory of the cave still has resonance today. Abstract ideas are timeless. That's the point of abstraction.
Historians who study the origins of idea traces them back and make connections to thoughts and ideas of the past. Often, the inheritors of those ideas knows nothing of how they get them and think themselves clever for coming up with them all by themselves.
Remove Margaret Mead from the timeline and the AI camps today would probably be the exact same. Those are basically the two options with anything in life that's both useful and dangerous: optimism or pessimism, hope or fear.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/world-war-i-battlefie...
The debut would seem to be at least 1968, with HAL9000's starring role in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(If you watch it now, you will see that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick made a film that is right on-target today. Even the most prominent feature of their 1968 fictional AI is its polite, conversational, very human output and input - and some very bad analysis.)
> „The OpenAI tussle is between the faction who think Skynet will kill them if they build it, and the faction who think Roko's Basilisk(‚s Monster)will torture them if they don't build it hard enough.“
Shes famously attributed with saying: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
But it’s never been able to be sourced and it can’t be found in any of her writings. Her family however continues to claim it as something she said.
Anyone here that can shed more light on if she said this or not?
https://dicastri.club/2020/07/16/the-legacy-of-adriano-olive...
Robotics disrupting the workforce and devaluing labor are another category continuing the process of mechanization and automation that started with small electrical motors and the electrification of factories.
Artificial intelligence is in a third category because it threatens the disruption and impending devaluation of broad categories of intellectual work.
We flourish in a middle ground between collapse and stability, and a cheap source of intelligence threatens to shift the ground one way or the other.
Citation needed? If that were true I would expect a long history of alternating societal growth and collapse. That doesn’t seem to be generally true?
The decline of Rome does seem to be mostly about civil wars :
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
(Immigration pressures do play a role in the subsequent fall.)
I'm also not aware of climate being behind the civil wars (though that doesn't seem impossible), any sources ?
It's not wrong to say that it was a civil war. Alaric, the king of the Visigoths, was also a roman legion commander. So I guess you could say that as it was a Roman commander that sacked Rome, it was therefore a civil war? But the actual soldiers of the army that took Rome, plundered it, and as a result ended the western empire was an ethnic army composed of people who didn't really see themselves as roman... so "it's complicated" is probably best.
But as far as this thread is concerned, the Visigoths would never have been pushed out of their territory and the refugee crisis wouldn't have existed if the Huns hadn't been expanding their empire into Eastern Europe. It wasn't a cycle of Rome getting fat and lazy and asleep at the wheel--it was, like the late Bronze Age, a series of famines in Central Asia that kicked off a bunch of wars, that created a refugee crisis, which the existing political system was ill-equipped to handle.
I was talking about the Crisis of the Third Century, when you can see the debasement of currency getting really bad. The timeline seems to be something like
plague + climate change + weak institutions => civil wars => civil wars + plague + famine + barbarian invasions => almost miraculous stop to the collapse
Alaric and the Huns were a couple of centuries later, though it does seem like Sarmathians played a similar role at that point ? But Roman legions were still far off from recruiting non-citizens at that point, and even when barbarians invaded, they did not stay for long ?
My confusion probably came from that debasement - that was a big drop, but the debasement had started significantly earlier !
So if we look at indicators like denarius silver content, lead pollution, shipwrecks... they all seem to point to the beginning of the decline around 125 AD, so about 125 years before that big penultimate crisis ? I will have to look at what then some other day though...
That would be three centuries prior.
The 3rd century crisis, two centuries prior to the (2nd) sack of Rome (1rst one was 8 centuries before that), already looks like a stopped, and partially recovered from, systemic collapse to me.
(Also even collapse isn't instant - Rome got sacked 3 times in a span of 62 years !)
I'm not progne, so I would rather say that the cycles are about growth and decline, with "collapse" being notable because things can decline much faster than they can grow (again, consider gestation - birth - early years vs death, especially accidental death). (And yes, business cycles are also like this, on a shorter timescale.)
As for guessing were WE are at, consider how the combination of growth then of decline also results in a semistable brief peak : we seem to have had it in the 90s. Unless of course you also consider the (ex-)URSS, which had a first collapse at that point, at which point the peak was probably more something between 1945-1970-1991. But then previously we were exclusively talked about the Western Roman Empire, while the Eastern Roman Empire survived for another millennium !! (Including recapturing Rome, which then was sieged/sacked two more times.) I guess you might want to look into that for counter-examples ?