Electric monk

The JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. Go Premium An electric monk, yesterday. Technology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

“The electric monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.”

—The late, greatly lamented Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

So here is the thing I don’t understand: where are our electric monks?

Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. Scrappy little Wikipedia, crowd-sourced and free-for-all vanquished forever the grand, longevous Encyclopædia Britannica. Reddit vanquished the masters of the universe. Yet, we insects, still crawling on the planet’s face — we seem on the end of a perpetual hiding from new-economy conglomerates with their artificially intelligent engines exploiting our innate horror of boredom; filling our heads with a clangorous noise that pleases us by obscuring the abysmal silence that otherwise would predominate.

In this way we are aggregated, parsed, tracked, anticipated and nudged around like cups on some giant Ouija board, and all this just to monetise: to extract value from the magical well of human weakness into which it jams its stent, thereby consigning us by degrees to stale, mute, digital oblivion.

Okay, okay; enough already of the nihilistic dystopian moaning — the JC is a glass-half-full sort of fellow; this isn’t really his style.

Here’s the question: why does this sorry state of affairs persist?

Regular readers will know the JC is no subscriber to the dismal futurism of Ray Kurzweil or Daniel Susskind. Unless by occupation you mindlessly follow predefined rules — and if you do, will you miss it? — there will always be plenty to keep you busy.

For, even if your operating theory is that our fleshy cerebella are no match for the overwhelming power of a neural network, there is still a limit. Our friends at LinkedIn hint at it, with their underwhelming AI-assisted “predictive comment” functionality. Not because it is so hopeless — I mean, happy work-iversary!? M’lud, I rest my case — but because the fact that it can even exist points us at a route out of the Matrix.

How so?

Like so: if by mapping, tracking and anticipating all human frailty, artificial intelligence can predict with greater confidence than can even we what our next moves will be — and this does seem to be the present state of play — then the machines can emulate human frailty. They can impersonate it. One cannot tell the two apart. We cannot, and a machine cannot.

If a machine can perfectly impersonate us, it can fake us. The point must soon arrive, therefore, when we can deploy AI to doom-scroll on our behalf. And that ought to be devastating. Think GameStop, only with the Redditors tooled up with the same tech the hedgies have. While the machines joust furiously at each other we can escape through the side entrance and go back to what we were doing.

As Douglas Adams remarked of the video-recorder which watches television for us that we don’t have time to watch ourselves such an “electric monk” would be a labour-saving device.

Call this new implementation our “avatar”. An electric monk, even. But it is a virtual electric monk.

Real electric monks, like electric sheep, would be costly: they would take up space, drain energy and require servicing. Virtual electric monks would not.

Now if I can have one avatar emulating my human browsing habits — I can have one thousand. Each of us can. And if the technology works then the forthcoming apocalyptic battle will not be between us and The Man, but between our technology and The Man’s, and since, Q.E.D., The Man’s technology has no way of telling us from our avatars, we have the advantage. Especially since our avatars don’t have to emulate our behaviour at all. We can obstreperously configure them to emulate something else.

So, if we each deploy a thousand avatars to randomly browse, like and share content at random, constrained only by the requirement that an avatar’s browsing habits should emulate as nearly as possible the behaviour of some human, even if not necessarily its host’s, then all that wondrous aggregated data that the FANGS have on us isn’t on us. It is worthless, meaningless, hypothetical.

Systems theory, folks: the same way algorithms can extract profound insight from data they can inject ineffable absurdity into it.

Commerce is a profoundly human endeavour. To want; to need — to demand — is to be “intelligent” in a way that a machine cannot be. A “demand curve” is a second-order derivative of a uniquely mortal motivation. A clever algorithm can extract it from us — or for that matter create it in us — by manipulating our most secret communiqués. But only if they really are ours. The massed algorithmic armies feast upon a fey proxy. Just as they can hack our motivations, so can we hack theirs. An army of anonymous Redditors showed this quite nicely.

It has only become one-sided through a conjuring trick; a sleight-of-hand foisted upon us, wherein a few corporations have harnessed the network effect to generate apparent monopolies. They have the technology, they have the scale; we are but ants.

But enough ants can do a lot of damage. The beast awakens from its “dogmatic slumber”: the fight is only one-sided when the vendors have a scale to deploy tools that the ants cannot. But we now know — we have known for some years, in fact, but had forgotten — that we ants, if only we can co-ordinate, have a scale that a vendor can only dream of.

See also

• Douglas Adams
• Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated