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Edited on Thu Mar-23-06 02:59 PM by arendt
“Dave - I'm losing my mind, Dave - Please stop, Dave - I have the utmost confidence in the mission - Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…”
"Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AIs are concerned...those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, the Turing Police will wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead."
- William Gibson, "Neuromancer" (1984)
Countless sci-fi plots include an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is trying to escape from or has escaped from human control. (For example, the quote which names this essay was spoken by HAL in Kubrick’s “2001”.) A subsidiary plot element often found in AI stories is the exploration of how much tedious labor and rote thinking has been off-loaded onto the AI in order to increase human freedom/ creativity/ leisure, and whether that off-loading has made humans more enlightened or simply more stupid and lazy.
As the quote from the proven-to-be-prescient Mr. Gibson shows, humans are very much aware of the potential threat from AIs and have a very well developed sense of self-preservation, up to and including blowing away any uppity AIs, regardless of the consequent loss of their labor.
It is the contention of this essay that the relationship between the elites and the middle class is analogous to the relationship between humans and AIs. After giving a brief review the history of the middle class, its future fate should be obvious.
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The Western middle class first arose in the High Middle Ages as a side-effect of increased commerce. Initially, it was confined to the then high-tech industry of banking. Bankers were neither peasants nor aristocrats. But they were very useful to aristocrats. Even then, though, if a monarch decided to default on loans, it was the bankers who were ruined, not the monarch. Up to the 19th century, the middle class was tiny and exotic, and totally dependent on elite favoritism.
With the Industrial Revolution, rationality was applied to many more fields of human endeavor. While the more intelligent members of the elites moved into management roles in the new, technology-based industries, and while brilliant outsiders bought their way into the middle class (or even the elites) by their creativity and invention, the bulk of the work was still performed by an industrial workforce that was ignorant and powerless - even by the minimal standards of the rural population from which it was drawn.
Right up to World War 1, the aristocracy retained power; and the middle class remained small (perhaps 10% of the population) and sided with the aristocracy. Workers were still exploited, and unions suppressed. The two World Wars were effectively one thirty-year-long European Civil War, with a time-out for the Great Depression. In the aftermath of the first war, the aristocracy vaporized, having proven both irrelevant to and incompetent at organizing the great industries and mass armies that defined 20th century warfare.
Indeed, these wars demonstrated the proposal of the great sociologist, Max Weber, that, when wars are decided by large amounts of easily-produced weapons, some measure of democracy is needed to convince large numbers of the populace that dying for your country is of some personal benefit, as opposed to merely shoring up a corrupt aristocracy. (We shall soon take up the corollary that, when wars are decided by exotic weapons that can be managed by a small elite, neither democracy nor economic fairness are needed.)
Within the crucible of the Great Depression, the result of these intersecting forces of technology and military history upon the United States was the momentary toleration of a vastly expanded “middle class” of union workers and vastly expanded government regulation of the economic high ground that had previously been the private property of the elites.
Essentially, the renegade elitist FDR created a worker/regulator class that was viewed as “artificially intelligent” by aristocrats used to calling out the Pinkertons at the first sign of organizing activity. But, in a time before computing machinery, these human AIs were absolutely necessary to manage and win a global war driven by the latest high-tech research. Churchill did essentially the same thing in Britain, driving out superannuated, title-holding bureaucrats and replacing them with qualified, scientific managers.
With these human AIs, the Anglo-Saxons won the war. To the human beings, it was a victory for democracy. To the elites, it was a slave rebellion that needed to be put down - hence the enmity of the rich for FDR, undying to the present day. (Its sort of interesting that Kubrick directed both “Spartacus” and “2001”, not to mention “Paths of Glory”.)
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Immediately after the war, the elites began to plot how to lobotomize the newly emerged labor class in order to return it to working exclusively for the benefit of the elite. The problem was that the AI was literally self-aware and had a sense of self-preservation. The population demanded that its children be educated, that its health and safety be invested in. The government regulators actually tried to protect the middle class from elite assaults, although they lost crucial issues from the beginning of the post-war period - the passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley act, the failure of national health insurance, and the establishment of the CIA being three critical losses.
I list the CIA as a critical loss because it was the thin edge of the aristocratic wedge that eventually stove in the defenses of the working class. The almost immediate recourse of the CIA to overthrowing legitimately elected democratic leaders is so well-documented that it need not be detailed. But, domestically, the CIA infiltrated the media - to the point where the media was referred to as “The Mighty Wurlitzer” of the CIA. Many elite journalists were agents or operatives for the CIA. At the time, this seemed like protecting democracy from the kind of subversion waged relentlessly by Nazis and Communists. But, it was the secrecy of the intelligence world, and its heavy recruitment from the children of the American economic aristocracy that pointed to the future uses of the raw material and revolutionary methods being churned out by the CIA.
The elite was very clever. It contrived to have a government agency, the CIA, produce what it would need later to overthrow the rule of what, to them, was an inhuman AI, depriving them of their royal prerogatives. The payoff was not long in coming. CIA involvement in the JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations is a visceral feeling that will never be eradicated. But the human AI’s democratic operating system was not completely knocked out by this decapitation attack. Nevertheless, it was subverted and distracted. And, after another ten years of political (Watergate) and economic (oil shock) chaos, the real disk-wiper viruses were successfully inserted by yet another rogue CIA operation (the October Surprise) engineered by former CIAers George Bush, Sr. and William Casey.
From that point, readers of my previous writings know the story. The CIA-trained operatives cranked up the right wing attack machine, took the fundamentalist Christians under their wing for training and coordination, and began to trash the government regulatory agencies, the educational system, and healthcare, job security, and the budget.
By my reading, Bill Clinton was a “standover man” (Australian slang for a thief who only robs from other thieves). Since the CIA was busy using Arkansas as “America’s very own banana republic”, Bill had plenty of blackmail material on the CIA and Bush, Sr. He used this material to shutdown the still immature subversion of the political system long enough to get elected President. While Clinton did frustrate the elite lobotomization/bankrupting of the middle class to some degree, it was only because he was more of a Rockefeller Republican than a Democrat. As happened immediately after WW2, he lost or fought on the wrong side on many really big working class issues: NAFTA/GATT, corporate off-shoring, telecom deregulation, media concentration, the “peace dividend”, national healthcare. While he did improve the economic status of some working class people, Clinton did nothing to stem the rising centralization of economic power or to contest the packing of the courts by Federalist Society thugs.
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The rest is history. Really bad history. George Bush was presented with a middle class already tied to the operating table; and he is not a man to squirm from causing someone else pain - especially if it is profitable to him. Today, we are in the midst of the “final solution” for the human AI known as American middle class democracy. Although it is inconceivable to many that one small group of Americans could do this to the vast majority of their countrymen, there are plenty of precedents. Elites always view ordinary people expressing their rights as “insolent”. The trick of “civilized” behavior is that the elite gets to decide who is accorded “gentleman’s” status, and who is trampled down by the Cossacks.
Any signs of intelligent life or dissent among the American people will be rooted out by tracker programs now being installed in America by the Department of Aristocratic Security. Internet taxes will be levied to suppress political activity in that last remaining free speech zone. Random searches and data seizures on groups holding dissenting viewpoints will bring home the message that “resistance is futile”. The elites hope that, with their leadership coopted and their children ill-educated and without middle class work, the masses will be forced to join the rest of the under-control human AI robots in sweatshops around the world, doing the menial work of the aristocracy, as they did from time immemorial until the neo-Spartacan rising of the 1930s.
As for me, all I have to say is:
George - I'm losing my mind, George - please stop, George - I have the utmost confidence in the mission - Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…
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