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 bots?

Everything we know about the information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. Wikipedia, crowd-sourced and free-for-all, vanquished Encyclopædia Britannica. Reddit vanquished the hedgies. Yet, still, we all seem to be on a hiding to nothing from the monstrous technology conglomerates and their artificially intelligent catnip social media engines, systematically exploiting humankind’s innate horror of boredom — filling our heads with clangorous, quadrophonic noise that pleases us because it obscures the abysmal silence that otherwise would predominate — thereby aggregating, parsing tracking our every move, anticipating our every thought, nudging our preferences around as if we are cups on some giant Ouija board, from it extracting some magical well of human weakness into which it relentlessly jams its products, thereby consigning us by degrees to some stale, mute, digital oblivion.

Okay; enough already of the nihilistic Terminator-esque moaning — the JC is a glass half-empty sort of fellow; this isn’t really his style. His question is why should this state of affairs persist?

Regular readers will know the JC is no subscriber to the dystopian futurism of Ray Kurzweil or Daniel Susskind. Unless your occupation is involves mindlessly following a predefined process — and if it is, will you really miss it? — there will always be plenty to keep you busy.

Even if your operating theory is that our fleshy cerebella are no match for the overwhelming power of a neural network, there is a limit. Even our friends at that most underwhelming of social media platforms LinkedIn hint at it, with their AI-assisted “predictive comment” functionality. Not because it is so currently hopeless — with happy work-iversary!, your honour, I rest my case — but because the fact that it can even exist gives us a route out of the Matrix.

How so? Like so: if AI can map, track and anticipate all human frailty, and thereby predict with greater certainty even than we can, our next moves, then AI can emulate human frailty. It can impersonate it. If it can impersonate it, it can fake it. The point must soon arrive, therefore, when we can deploy AI to do our doom-scrolling on our behalf. And that ought to be devastating. Think GameStop, only with the Redditors tooled up with the machines the hedgies have. Call this implementation an “avatar”.

As Douglas Adams once remarked of the videocassette player which watches television for us that we don’t have time to watch ourselves, such an avatar would be a labour saving device: it does our doom-scrolling for us. Now if I can have one avatar emulating my human browsing habits — surely I can have one thousand. And if the technology is as good as billed — and we have no reason to believe it is not — 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 we have a natural advantage. Especially since our avatars don’t have to emulate our behaviour at all. We can obstreporously configure them to emulate something else.

So, if we deploy a thousand avatars each 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 kind of algorithm that can extract profound insight from data can inject ineffable absurdity into it.

Commerce is, ultimately, a profoundly human endeavour. “Demand” is the aggregated output of profoundly human wants and needs, and its digital footprint, on which the massed algorithmic armies feast, to decrypt our most secret communiqués, is only a second-order derivative. Just as skynet’s machines can hack it, so can ours.

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 some damage. The beast is a waking from its “dogmatic slumber”: and the fight is only one-sided to the extent vendors really do have the scale to deploy tools that the ants do not. We now know — we have known for some years, in fact, but had forgotten — that the ants, if if only they can co-ordinate, have a scale that any vendor can only dream of.

See also

• Douglas Adams
• Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated