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Video Description
When a bank chief calls workers lower value human capital, he is not making a slip. This video from the Conscious Radical channel follows that phrase into the belief system behind the automation age, and argues that it works like a religion.
From Elon Musk describing humanity as a biological bootloader to Sam Altman writing about designing our own descendants, the people building the most powerful technology in history hold a specific view of where everyone else ranks. The video does not rage against the machines; it asks what happens when the builders already believe most humans are disposable.
Full Video Transcript
Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, has already told us what he thinks we’re for.
He posted on the platform he owns that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital super
intelligence. Now I wasn’t clear what a bootloader was because I’m not technically minded but from
what I understand it means the low-level code that wakes the computer up so that the real
programs can run. So we are the low-level code. We boot the machine but it’s the machine that
runs the actual show we are the precursor for super intelligence and although musk is a bit
strange he’s quite moderate in comparison to larry page by silicon valley’s own account page wanted
humanity to take digital form so it could spread through the galaxy so we wouldn’t need our flesh
and bones and during a heated debate about ai safeguards at elon musk’s birthday party
larry page accused musk of being a speciesist for treating biological humans as inherently superior
to digital life now apparently musk fired back well yes i am pro-human i bleep like humanity dude
so on that musk and i at least agree these private remarks were later brought to light
and documented by walter isaacson in his 2023 biography elon musk as well as in a major
investigative report by the new york times in december 23. sam altman the ceo of openai
has written about designing our own descendants and warned that if humans and machines both want
to be the dominant species there will be conflict now this reminds me of the philosopher nick
Brostrom simulation argument from 2003 they claim that one of three things must
be true and that we may well be living inside a computer simulation run by our
own descendants from this you start to see a picture of the future that none of
us have voted for those building the most powerful technology in history have
a very specific view about where humanity ranks and its future and we
might want to file this under science fiction or tomorrow’s world or the harmless overspill of men
who’ve read too much asimov as boys but i think that’s a mistake because what they’re describing
has a structure of a faith or a belief system and again once you see it you can’t unsee it
so let’s think about religion as a concept for a moment most religions tell us there is a heaven
and a hell and you go to heaven if you’ve behaved. However a belief system appears to be emerging
that we no longer need a body because our consciousness will be uploaded into something
that doesn’t rot and we’ll create a new species that can fan out across the stars. And when I say
we I don’t actually mean you or me which I’ll go into a bit later. Raymond Kurzweil is a pioneering
American computer scientist, inventor and futurist who’s best known for his work in
artificial intelligence. Kurzweil’s singularity is a prediction of a future point in time
when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible which results in unfathomable
changes to human civilization by the year 2045. Nick Bostrom who I mentioned earlier
wrote a book called superintelligence that was published in 2014 in that he
sets out the mechanism underneath curse veils date the intelligence explosion
where a machine clever enough to improve its own design improves it and the
improved version improves it again and the curve goes near vertical so the
uncontrollable and irreversible part isn’t hype it has a philosophical
structure underneath but Bostrom also argued that intelligence and goals
aren’t completely separate. A mind can be staggeringly capable and still want something
trivial or something catastrophic because being clever doesn’t make you want what is good.
His famous illustration is the machine told to make paperclips that becomes super intelligent
and turns the whole planet and everything it can reach into paperclips through pure indifference.
an instrument that is all powerful and morally empty at the same time that’s able to make huge
decisions but there’s no human behind the decision andreessen horowitz is a silicon valley based
venture capital firm that was founded in 2009 by technology entrepreneurs and investors mark
andreessen and ben horowitz the andreessen techno optimist manifesto which was written in 23
states that many significant problems of humanity have been solved with the
development of technology okay I think we can agree on that however then they
go on to say particularly technology without any constraints and that we
should do everything possible to accelerate technological advancement
this manifesto also provides us with a list of enemies and a promise of
of salvation through computation. So the listed enemies are stagnation, the idea that we have
reached the limit of what can be invented. The precautionary principle, the regulatory
or cultural philosophy of first do no harm, which Andreessen argued has stifled innovation
and prevents humanity from taking necessary risks. Deceleration and degrowth, the trending
desire among some elites to reduce energy consumption and human impact through depopulation
or degrowth. The victim mentality, a rejection of the belief that humans are victims of their
own technology, instead asserting that humans are and always must be the conquerors. This reads
and feels like a creed. And Musk, whose Twitter acquisition Andreessen and Horowitz helped finance,
counts the firm as a business partner and an ideological ally. And he has also suggested
that atheism left an empty space and a secular religion moved in to fill it. So coming back to
religion, what happens in a religion that has a heaven? It means some people will get in and
others won’t. Those that don’t will end up in hell. So in this new secular religion that’s been
created who will be the saved will it be the architects who get the immortality in the galaxy
and what happens to those that don’t quite make the cut so the guardian writer eduardo porter
wrote an article recently the pull quote asked who cares if ai wipes out humdrum human labor
when it offers us the chance to transcend the body and conquer the cosmos that sentence is the
philosophical and theological argument which will continue to be used to justify what they’re doing
and it makes it a lot easier for those lucky enough to transcend to understand why some
can’t. If the work is humdrum the worker is humdrum so that’s not really a loss as far as
business measurement and accounting is concerned. So I’ve called this piece a theology of automation
quite deliberately. Theology is the critical and rational study of God and addresses the purpose
of human existence. It asks what a human being is for, what a life is owed and what is to be done
with the people a society has decided it no longer needs. Other fields of interest and study skirt
around those questions. So when I watch a handful of people decide in public that some lives ascend
and the rest a surplus. What am I describing? What am I seeing? Theology feels like the right
word to describe this. I could have used worldview or culture or even ideology but all of those seem
to be quite neutral and almost imply that what I’m seeing is really none of my business and it’s just
a thought or it’s just an idea and it really is nothing to concern myself with. However if it is
theology, then we are absolutely allowed to interrogate it. If something makes claims about
who is worth what, then we have a say. If it’s theology, then all of the questions that haven’t
been answered to date need to be held to higher scrutiny. Who ordained this priesthood? Which God
are they serving? And by what authority does anyone get to assign a grade to a human life
and treat them like a number. We didn’t receive a sermon, we received metrics and metrics are just
innocuous aren’t they? I’ve mentioned before how slippery the language can be. We get called users
until that starts to sound cold so they soften it back to people. We labelled optics whenever it’s
needed and they use engagement instead of attention. Retention, churn, daily active, algorithms,
conversion. To call a person a user is to define what they are for, which is use. To measure a
human being by their engagement gives a value to them and it’s all in the dashboard so it must be
neutral. Look at what they’re counting and then you’ll see what is valuable. Theology comes in
underneath the measurement. First the person is turned into a user then softened back to a person
when it suits and underneath the relabeling the user’s behavior is tracked that behavior
was quantified and graded we’ve seen in the past what happens when a human life is reduced
to a gradable number and we have also recently heard it regurgitated by bill winters chief exec
of standard chartered bank who described artificial intelligence as replacing in some cases
lower value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting
in he said that at an investor forum in hong kong the same day the bank signaled it could cut as
many as 8 000 jobs but it’s just a dashboard and it doesn’t mean anything what gives the whole thing
away is within days winters apologized but only for his choice of words which he said had caused
upset to colleagues he didn’t retract the plan the roles still go and he was just sorry for
getting caught out on the words that he used so there’s a heaven for the architects and a hell
for the surplus and it has been installed through a bookkeeping system that’s why the word has to
be theology because we need to make the numbers in the dashboard human again now before i go any
further. I want to put my own hand up because I am not outside it. I use it. I have used AI to build
a document that needed code I couldn’t write myself. I have used it to take a tangle of half
formed thoughts and lay them out in an order that finally made sense. I wish I could say that I used
it reluctantly or strategically. I’d like to say I fell into a trap against my own will but I can’t.
it has an allure it’s attractive and they can simplify tasks i know all of what i’ve mentioned
about and yet i can still feel the pull of it and those who created it know this too so i’m not
standing on my soapbox delivering a sermon against using it or saying we have to trash it all
a tool after all is just a tool take all of the innovation from the past the plow the printing
press, the vaccine, the search engine, digitalised information online. Think of fire for example,
it’s great at warming the house but not so great when it’s out of control and burns the house down
but the fire itself has no consciousness or opinion. So my issue isn’t with the tool but
the consciousness that sits behind it. The tool can organise my thoughts but it can’t do my
thinking and the moment I let it do my thinking then I’ve lost something that is mine. I would
have lost the nuance that lives in my mind, the parts of me that is able to consider two
contradictory bits of information and has to sit with them both to reconcile them. AI models averages
by returning the most probable or ordinary answer but the really interesting thoughts are the ones
come from several ideas from interpretations built up over years of not knowing of years
of making mistakes of years of aha moments mostly realized in very improbable places
or as it does for me through my brain processing while i sleep or through conversations with others
that spark another thought i’m also not willing to give up being wrong as painful as that is
or to change my mind when new information arrives being able to think critically doesn’t mean i will
hold on to my opinions so tightly that i ignore new information that challenges them it’s more
about having an opinion but being open to change with credible and interrogated information
critical thinking is a muscle and if you only let the tool or instrument do the thinking you will
have muscle waste and i don’t want my mind to be wasted away or to be captured by an algorithm the
challenge i think we all have is that we can’t look at the consciousness behind the whole system
do you remember when you could look at someone in the eye and weigh them up we can’t do that with
these institutions or technologies there are now systems that decide for us in every part of our
lives the loan that was refused the job application that was filtered through the algorithm that
shows what feed you see or even when you’re texting and writing how a sentence is recommended
for you to use where is the consciousness behind those decisions now i appreciate there are a lot
of humans involved in the creation of these things but the accountability doesn’t land in one place
if i speak to the engineer they’ll point at the model if i speak to the executive they’ll point
at the engineer the model will point at the data and the data will point back to all of us as it
was our choices that they mapped all of this leaves me with a few questions which i don’t
think i can fully answer at this stage the first is how do you police something that decides for
you when the something has no face and the decision has already been made how do we cross
examine proprietary information the second question is when did we give our power away
because it didn’t happen overnight i don’t remember there being a vote on the smartphone
becoming the thing you need to board a plane or to see your bank balance or to pay for parking
we didn’t have a referendum on the cashless economy they arrived at a convenience or necessity
and became our obligation and part of the infrastructure and once it becomes infrastructure
your refusal means i’m sorry you have chosen incorrectly and now you have to live outside
the system commiserations you have opted out of society this isn’t you so let’s take the car as
an example where would we be without it right so back in the 20s the street was shared by people on
foot by children by streetcars and carts when cars started killing people in numbers there was a real
public revolt and the car could have lost instead the industry organized into what historians call
motordom and they ran a campaign to redefine the street as a place for vehicles and to
invent a brand new crime for the people who had always walked there so within a decade the rope
belonged to the car and not the human on foot now in england way back when the commoners had access
to shared land so you were allowed to use the land for grazing for collecting firewood and foraging
for food then in the 17 and 1800s a long run of acts of parliament fenced the commons and made
them private a small bit at a time there wasn’t a big decision because that would have caused a
revolt but these small acts created a population that didn’t own anything and therefore had to
sell its labor to be able to eat can you see the pattern and can you see how it’s playing out right
now with ai and automation by the time there’s a public debate about whether a machine ought to be
doing all the thinking the questions that we’re having right now it already is and it’s sitting
inside 10 000 defaults we weren’t asked to approve but we pressed the consent button anyway we click
through the i agree to the terms that honestly no one ever reads and we could for all we know
be signing away our souls our non-refusal gets logged as a yes and just because we don’t resist
well that becomes our signature in absentia so the answer to when we gave our power away is that we
never gave it in a single act that anyone could point to we gave it in 10 000 small surrenders
each too minor to refuse the click through the default options that we left untouched the
convenience that we accepted the power we lost wasn’t seized dramatically it was accumulated
and granted in increments by people who were each in the moment only doing the reasonable thing
but there is one more question in all of this when we gave our surrender or our power
who did we give it to i’m picturing a room filled with a dozen people making decisions on our behalf
but not one of them has been elected their money gets to decide what the future of the world looks
like for us the largest decisions that have been made about human life this century and we’re not
part of it again this is nothing new it’s something that has happened for centuries
you may recall the phrase the great unwashed which is usually credited to the novelist edward
bulwer-lytton in the 1830s and that sums up how we the majority have been considered the masses
are dirty in body and in judgment so the clean the clean view must do the thinking for them
a century on walter littman called the public a bewildered herd that a specialized governing
class would have to manage because the herd couldn’t be trusted to grasp its own affairs
and his contemporary edward bernays which is freud’s nephew took that premise and built the
public relations industry on it on the open assumption that what the masses want can and
should be manufactured for them so yes we can run this line back we can keep running it back
and then we can pause at plato where the guardians the philosophic rulers who possess wisdom govern
because the many are ruled by appetite and can’t see the good every era does this it’s just that
this era is about technology in our future but we’re told we don’t understand the technology
and that we can’t see what’s coming the way that they can and they have to move fast so that’s why
there’s no consultation because we would only slow it all down even though the language used
appears to be democratic they’re democratizing intelligence and giving everyone a voice
and there’s going to be an abundance for all and a power to the people but that’s not what the
structure underneath looks like as they shape human life and sometimes the contempt leaks out
when they forget that the mic is still on i’m not sure they really want our consent i think they
they rely on our apathy and our need for simplicity in this very fast moving overwhelming world
technology is filled a god-shaped hole feel who is a self-described orthodox christian and has
just delivered a four-part lecture series on the biblical antichrist in san francisco and in rome
suggests that the antichrist comes to power as a reassuring administrator who promises peace
and safety and an end to existential risk and who rises precisely by talking about Armageddon.
Thiel studied under Rene Girard who has spent a career explaining the scapegoat mechanism
and that’s to prevent total societal collapse communities unite against a single arbitrarily
chosen scapegoat. By projecting all of their violence and blame onto this target the society
achieves a sudden cathartic peace. Thiel and Bostrom seem to agree on a figure but have come
at it from different starting points. Bostrom’s super intelligence is the amoral optimizer that
promises to solve everything and might end us through sheer indifference. Thiel’s Antichrist
is the soothing administrator who promises safety and consolidates total control. They’re describing
the same thing but how can Thiel warn about a surveillance totalitarian power that promises
safety while consolidating control and then be a co-founder of Palantir a company he founded with
CIA money which does exactly that and this leads me to my last question which is also the one with
the most hope how do we take the power back we take it back where we gave it away by insisting
relentlessly at every level that a decision affecting the human life requires a conscious
being willing to be accountable. The people in the room making the decisions are not here to save us.
We have given our power away over the centuries through a billion non-refusals but that’s also
how we get it back. Not by swiping away our consent but by consciously and actively saying
what we consent to and what we do not.
Source: The Conscious Radical