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Newsletter cribnotes

Robot Nirvana

Why the emergence of artificial intelligence that can write its own Nirvana tunes tells us something opposite to what we think it does.

In 1992 the remaining members of Pink Floyd, minus perma-curmudgeon-but-creative-force Roger Waters, assembled to record a new album, which would be later released as The Division Bell. Beautifully recorded and redolent of the bands signature crystalline guitar solos, swampy organs and moody synth pads, the album went straight to number 1 in the UK and the US, selling something like 10,000,000 worldwide. But critical reactions were mixed; one wittily dubbing it “Wish You Were An Animal On The Dark Side Of The Wall”. Despite the phenomenal sales, posterity has favoured Roger Waters’s judgment that the Division Bell was “Just rubbish ... nonsense from beginning to end.”

Now keep in mind that this was a a real album, created by actual members of Pink Floyd. A new album in 1994 could have taken one of the following forms:

• An actual, new Pink Floyd Album, where Roger Waters returned to join the, wrote most of the material and bossed, grumped and control-freaked the remaining members of the band as, allegedly, he did in the 1970s;
• The Pink Floyd album that was released, The Division Bell, with Waters replaced by a session musician, and David Gilmour’s partner writing all the lyrics;
• An album created by a band of musically gifted Pink Floyd fans — people who are passionate about Pink Floyd, deeply understand it, and have considered views of its thematic and musical output, and intended to create what they would expect a Pink Floyd Album to sound like;
• A Pink Floyd Album made by AI, deploying machine learning, neural networks to analyse the band’s recorded output.

The importance of authenticity. Why is it not the same when it isn't David gilmour playing that guitar solo?

The importance of effort. We should not underestimate how we we value the effort required to produce intellectual property. Many years ago go robotics engineers designed a contraction that could play the flight of the bumblebee on classical guitar. Undoubtedly the machine was extremely complex, the programming highly ingenious and it executed the police flawlessly at tempo, undoubtedly more perfectly then the finest classical guitarist could. But would you pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch a robot playing classical guitar? Once the technical problem has been solved and can be inexpensively replicated the value of the performance tends to 0. Even though we can can program robots to flawlessly play, at no cost, we will still pay good money to watch a human virtuoso doing the same thing less well than the machine.

The segues into a conversation about the meaning of value. The same way that meaning does not exist in the words on a page, value does not exist in in the technical performance of a skill, but lies somewhere between the performer and and it's audience. Similarly, science is not simply demarcation of the correct answers to questions, but is demarcation of the correct questions requiring answers. This is a dynamic. It is complex in the technical sense, the ground rules are approximate and shift without warning based on the attitudes of the conversants.

Leaving aside all the overpowering psychological reasons not to value an AI version of Pink Floyd, there is the bluntly practical one. They can only ever be a flawless moment it can recombine existing elements into a new you form. But it cannot create genuinely new you output because it is not the artist. Whatever the machine comes up with it will not be what nirvana's next album was going to be. Of course, we cannot know that, but consider an AI algorithm directed at The Beatles first four albums. Is there any chance it could have devised music resembling that on revolver or rubber soul let alone tough White album or sergeant pepper's? An AI analysing Pablo honey and The bends will not produce amnesiac or kid A.

Allegory, fairy stories and the hubris of taking things literally

We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take Arthur C. Clarke at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons?

Critical Theory, post-modernism, and the death of objective truth

They say every successful conspiracy theory contains a grain of truth. They have to be be something for even credulous people to glom onto.

Critical Theory’s grain of truth, ironically, is that there is no truth. This is its debt to postmodernism, and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept.

The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical Theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical Theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones.

The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Helen Pluckrose, Douglas Murray and recently Matthew Syed) is that something things — physical sciences are a favourite example — just are true. No amount of identifying with an alternative Theory of gravity will stop you from hitting the ground if you throw yourself out of a window.

On the other hand [XXX] made the interesting assertion recently that so completely has critical Theory escape its postmodern origins, that it has become captured by, of all people the high modernists. These people are uber rationalists and inhabit a world which seeks to solve all all problems by top-down computation. Theory has escaped its usual can finds in the liberal arts faculties of universities and is now inhabiting the the management and human resource departments of corporations, and who are using there rationalist framework to to advance what is a a fairly radical political agenda. Critical theory is not an alternative narrative by which we can puncture the arrogant assumptions of the capitalist class: it has displaced the capitalist assumptions altogether.

That's not altogether a bad thing — although the practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another.

The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not false (that would be a paradox right?) So much as incoherent. It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language.

And languages are intrinsically ambiguous. This is the tragedy and the triumph of the human condition.

The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way: you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright.

If you accept the proposition that truth is a function of of a sentence and therefore the language of that sentence comma for there to be a transcendent truth the language in which it was uttered would necessarily need to be complete, comprehensive, and it's self true. The nearest linguistic structures that we have to to complete languages are those of mathematics and perhaps science. Yet we know that mathematics is a necessarily incomplete language something Colin from that we know that any natural language is necessarily incomplete semicolon and in the case of science we know with certainty that science is not what a complete and comprehensive statement of the laws of the physical universe. We haven't solved the universe yet. There are large fundamental unknowns; dark matter; dark energy; the incommensurability of quantum mechanics and and special relativity. Even if the concept of transcendent truth were coherence we have nothing like enough information to access it. In the same way that the fielder does not have enough physical information to calculate the trajectory of a cricket ball, and therefore pragmatically approximates it, so we do not have anything like enough information to confidently predict the scientific performance of the universe and therefore we pragmatically approximate it.

Pragmatic approximations comma being provisional, contingent, and subject to revision at any time I'm are are more tolerant, plural and liberal than concrete scientific calculations.

The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know comma to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective.