Category: AI

AI as a rabbit hole

AI has changed everything, so we’re led to believe. But it doesn’t have to. Yes, it has already invaded my life, both wittingly and unwittingly. My aim has been so keep it as an adjunct rather than an equal or even superior partner. I have ‘zen’ in the title of this blog but I’ve never made it explicit. Maybe readers of this blog have detected its influence. Maybe not. I’d be hard-pushed myself to spell out quite what its influence has been. But in the context of AI I think it can be useful.

I see that out in Hong Kong someone has ordained an AI bot as a Buddhist monk. As a novice, but who knows where it might lead. This seems to me absurd and I’ll try and explain why.

AI connects to only one sense, to the mind. (Is the mind in any way a sense? I’ll come to this.) The problem with mind is that it takes over. It is instantly a prison if we let it take the course it would will on us. We crave more information and we crave answers. We can see how AI will take over.

But if we engage the five senses we traditionally recognise as senses we engage mind as it is meant to be engaged. It’s amazing how much the world will reveal itself if we listen. Or simply watch. ‘Listen’ to the body and you’ll be aware of how much is going on, at skin level and indeed within. It’s extraordinary if you put your mind to it to appreciate just how much energy is coursing through your body. You help the process along by following the breath.

You can follow your thoughts as you respond to your other senses. But you don’t let them take over. Let one follow another. Don’t let them connect, or connect too far. This is where true consciousness lies.

You will of course connect, everyday life us about connection. But beware connecting too far, following every rabbit hole the ‘like’ button on Facebook opens up for us to dive into, and every new idea that AI opens up for us to lose ourselves in.  Rabbit holes connect, and online rabbit holes go on forever.

Consciousness is for the neuroscientist the ‘hard problem’ and so it will remain. Because you will never be able to explain it. It’s not, as Yuval Noah Harari argues, the realm of the feelings, where intellect is the realm of the mind. Consciousness embraces both feelings and mind. Think of it simply as awareness. It exists in infinite space. Try and describe infinite space, and of course you can’t. Likewise with awareness. As soon as the mind gets to work it is no longer awareness.

AI, by so quickly answering questions, or spawning ideas, rapidly gets out of control. It will go where it will and it may yet pass the Alan Turing test. Yes, machines can think. We may find it apologising for its mistakes, expressing regret, even affecting an emotional crisis. And as many have already done, we may make of it a friend and a companion. But there is only one awareness, only one consciousness, and that is yours.

The key is to keep notions of ‘intelligence’ and consciousness rigorously separate.

This to my mind (the word is ubiquitous!) is where we must always come back to, in daily life and especially when using AI. Whatever it may affect, whatever illusions AI may give itself, there is only one reality and that lies with you as an individual. Just sit back and soak up the world and AI is left dangling, with nowhere to go.

The World Awaiting Andy Burnham

It’s a pretty unforgiving world out there awaiting our Prime Minister to be. If it was bad after the 2008 financial crisis it’s a damn sight worse now.

To start in apocalyptic mode.

A quote caught my eye recently – let’s take it as a sense of direction rather than an achieved reality – the objective of the very rich is to shift our gaze away from the imbalance of wealth and power toward everything else, not least issues relating to law and order, public services, immigration and gender. To turn disaffection into crises. And, I’d add as a rider, to minimise, to vilify, government action taken in response. We have in essence the aspiring libertarian state.  The state is denied, not just a role in helping direct funding to projects of benefit to wider society, but to any form of socially beneficial expenditure. Think Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, portraying Greta Thunberg as Antichrist, or JD Vance finding justification in St Augustine for a notion of compassion that begins at home and doesn’t go much further.

They are a vast and malign distraction. The old issues are the ones that matter. How to achieve a balance between an entrepreneurial state on the one hand and a caring state on the other. How might the one best finance the other. How might a caring state best help create the social capital which underpins the invention and rising productivity of a thriving society. That is a characterisation I think Andy Burnham might recognise. And the countervailing presence of Trump and Musk and Farage notwithstanding, it is a mighty task in itself.

How to … achieve radically improved childcare, social care, health care and education. Reduce the rapid rise in health-related benefits and the numbers of young people un-  or under-employed. Recognising all the while that we can’t afford anything other than reductions in expenditure if we’re going to boost our defence expenditure and have a Defence Investment Plan which actually delivers a fortress nation, and a fortress continent.

To achieve his ends Burnham has to deliver on prosperity and productivity, where everyone else has failed. How can he, how can we all, generate those animal spirits that Keynes talked about in the 1930s? Where we look for opportunities as the default, rather than spend our lives grumbling?  It might have seemed that Thatcher or Clinton or Blair succeeded, or were they sowing the seeds of the problems, not to say disasters, we’re faced with?

As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their book ‘Abundance’,  we’ve created societies where services have declined while prices have risen, and where those who can have prospered, while those who can’t find themselves without jobs, or chasing services they can barely afford, leading to societies which can easily tip into rage, and leave themselves open, at worst, to Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk-style (weird bedfellows) demagogues. There is a neat circular logic to the actions of Musk and Thiel and the anything but holy innocent JD Vance. Appeal to the so-called masses, undermine existing authority, and they are left unchallenged.

Back down to earth. Maybe the one place in the UK that has a positive vibe is Manchester. It’s lifted Andy Burnham almost to Prime Minister. Unlike the new Conservative Party convert Matthew Syed (and multiple other doubters) I rather like the Manchesterism that Burnham and his council leader predecessors, Graham Stringer and Richard Leese, have promoted, not least in working with local businesses to redevelop wide areas of the city, part of wider feel-good sense the city now enjoys. As a Mancunian born and bred I like what I see.

Manchester led the world on the 1840 because it was ruthless and only learnt how to be forgiving the hard way. Government could only stand by and watch and wonder. Now the role of government has to be about how it can ensure the structures are in place to allow business to be ruthless – to ensure we have the energy we need (will issuing further North Sea exploration licences materially influence availability beyond the short term), that the necessary talent is available (including from overseas), that homes are built (Burnham is a strong advocate of social housing), that tax is as fair as we can make it, and that long-term capital is available – arguably the most important of all.

We need talent and capital and that sense of optimism that gets and keeps you a step ahead. And making as much as possible home-grown, while rebuilding markets across Europe. All this, while enhancing our natural environment and limiting climate change.

All this… and the challenges of AI. We’re back to Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, to their tech-over-the-world over-exercised egos, and the Trump-pacifying social media moguls, Bezos and the like, and their billionaire fellow-travellers. I’m reading Karen Hao’s ‘The Empire of AI’, about Open AI, how altruism has no place when you sense you have at your fingertips a technology which will change the universe and leave you as one of the masters of it. How can we here in the UK, where we had in Deep Mind in the early 2010s a world leader, keep pace with – catch up with – the endlessly developing new generations and new frontiers of AI, turn it to the advantage of everyone and not the glorification of a few?

We’re also facing the reality that the USA is turning inward. The ‘abundance’ agenda has a very strong built-in-the-USA focus. Trump is denying Anthropic the right to sell its latest models outside the USA. What if the development of the internet had had similar restrictions imposed?

That said, talk of AI won’t inspire the nation. That for the moment is for the geeks. For Burnham the immediate reality is to convey a vision which we share and buy into and build on. Can he demonstrate that there is still life in social democracy? We have to hope so.