Book REVIEW THe Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher. Not a bad place to start once some scores are settled.

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AI and a Future of Duckrabbit Auction Speed English Conversations

by John Kendall Hawkins

Looks like AI is my daddy.

- On the toilet wall of the Pedro Martinez family home

In The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, the word reality occurs 127 times. This would be quite significant in any book but especially so for one that is only 158 pages long (e-book). Reality. Jesus, here we go again. Just when I thought I shook the habit, I'm all Jesse Pinkman on the crystal blue persuasion and breaking bad again.

Totally coincidentally, I've been pursuing a doctorate in philosophy with the Question in mind about the future of human consciousness in the Age of AI. I've been on this path, I now see, since I studied phenomenology and the philosophy of science at RPI many years ago. Thomas Kuhn and the structure of scientific revolutions. Paradigm shifts. The Print Center was the old on-campus church, stained glass stations of the cross still there; a machine encased in glass, where the altar was, inside. All I remember now, as I rekindle my fires, is that I drew the conclusion that there was no reality; that we basically just made up things as we went.

And as I read and research in consciousness studies now, I bring no comforting presumptions about humanity, vis-a-vis the deep 'faux' learning of futuristic machines or artificial intelligence. I know I missed something in my first go through with the ancients, and this time I'm gonna keep my mouf shut and learn something enduring this time. I'm a student not yet an expert on anything. A phenomenologist, not yet a phenomenon.

I keep this in mind as I read The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (2021). I've been putting off reading and reviewing it, despite the appeal of its subject matter, because I detest two of its authors. Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt. Ugh. In fact, I was just reading a piece about Kissinger in Nation, "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal""Still at Large at 100," where author Greg Grandin celebrates his evil and its uncanny endurance. I excoriated Kissinger in a review of his memoir, "Self-inflation: the Ultimate Little Blue Pill of Power," a few years back. And who can forget how They almost let Henry preside over the 9/11 Commission until shrill protests from the Left chased him off.

And Eric Schmidt, former CEO of "Don't do evil," Google (2001-2011), in the shock and awe years of The Empire Strikes Back. He helped pave the way for Julian Assange's execution, working with the State department under Hillary Clinton, back when she took no sh*t from the likes of Gaddafi and wore glasses and looked like one of the Hanson brothers from the film Slapshot, starring Paul Newman. Schmidt more recently pissed me off with his massive tome, The New Digital Age (originally titled Empire of the Mind), which celebrated a new electronic bourgeoisie and promised middle class buffer zone types that everyone would have their own robot one day soon and that noisy spoiled brats could be sent packing for a couple of hours, by means of a holograph machine, to Mumbai's slums to experience how 'the other half' lives. This last image has me thinking of the parents in The Illustrated Man, who rush to rescue their children 'in danger' in a 'holographic Serengeti' scene, and who discover their kids have set them up, and the rescuers get eaten by lions, while the kids laugh.

The book's third author, Daniel Huttenlocher, is an academic and the inaugural dean at the Schwarzman College of Computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That strikes me as cool. But then I read he was also a farmer director at Amazon, which seems not so cool, because their logo looks like a Mighty Whitey schlong, and the tax-free Jeff Bezos strikes me as an a**hole who works wth the intelligence community in ways that make me feel queasy inside. But, for the sake of the important subject matter, I got over my hissy fit and proceeded through the short book with three authors without further ado.

The Age of AI contains seven chapters that succinctly address where we are at with AI, how we got here, where we are heading, and analyses of the implications for our collective humanity and, indeed, species identity. Like many recent scientific, philosophical and technological observers have averred, the authors here regard the changes we are going through as "epochal" and very likely irreversible. There is real concern growing right now for our future relationship with the applications of AI and the intentional introduction and acceleration of their use in our lives, especially generative AI, such as Google has very recently announced that it will pursue. It should be duly noted that the concerns expressed about AI here and elsewhere do not include a deep consideration of Noam Chomsky's three primary crises he says we face: Climate Change, Nuclear War, and the end of Democracy -- each of which he sees as potential civilization destroyers. Nor does it address the further coming revolution brought on by quantum computing.

In the Preface, the authors tell us what AI is and what it is not, and this is important to keep in mind:

AI is not an industry, let alone a single product. In strategic parlance, it is not a "domain." It is an enabler of many industries and facets of human life: scientific research, education, manufacturing,logistics, transportation, defense, law enforcement, politics, advertising, art, culture, and more. The characteristics of AI "" including its capacities to learn, evolve, and surprise "" will disrupt and transform them all.

But AI isn't necessarily compatible with long-established contentions of humanity, including the myriad facets of multi-cultures and ontological representations of self qua others: "[H]uman attributes AI does not possess [include]: friendship, empathy, curiosity, doubt, worry." It looks like the closest to these attributes we can expect are those of the homoerotic and psychopathic obsession HAL had in 2001: A Space Odyssey for Dave.

In Chapter One, "Where We Are," the authors provide three excellent examples of the power and glory of AI. First, they tell of the shocking ability of AI AlphaZero in beating the then world's best chess program, Stockfish (created by Google), in 2017. While Stockfish had been filled with all the moves and strategies of all previous chess champions combined, the authors tell us, "By contrast, AlphaZero had no preprogrammed moves, combinations, or strategies derived from human play." This meant that it was learning on its own. And that learning was a mystery to observers, because AlphaZero thought differently than either humans or companion chess computers. In fact we're told:

The tactics AlphaZero deployed were unorthodox "" indeed, original. It sacrificed pieces human players considered vital, including its queen"AlphaZero did not have a strategy in a human sense (though its style has prompted further human study of the game). Instead, it had a logic of its own, informed by its ability to recognize patterns of moves across vast sets of possibilities human minds cannot fully digest or employ.

They add, for dramatic effect, that "After observing and analyzing its play, Garry Kasparov, grand master and world champion, declared: 'Chess has been shaken to its roots by AlphaZero.'" It didn't help that AlphaZero had self-learned to get to this level in only four hours. Could we be heading for an AI version of ??berNarcissism where humans are reduced to mere Echohood, and love goes unrequited?

The second example from the book discusses the totally relevant role that AIs play in the so-called new biology era we're in. They cite the 2020 discovery at MIT of a novel antibiotic that was capable of killing a bacteria which had been previously resistant to all known treatment. Like the chessmaster, AlphaZero, it just thought about the problem differently. The authors sum up the achievement:

Standard research and development efforts for a new drug take years of expensive, painstaking work as researchers begin with thousands of possible molecules and, through trial and error and educated guessing, whittle them down to a handful of viable candidates. Either researchers make educated guesses among thousands of molecules or experts tinker with known molecules, hoping to get lucky by introducing tweaks into an existing drug's molecular structure.

Presumably, it was just such revolutionary technology that led to the deluge of Covid-19 vaccines in 2020, less than a year after the pandemic had hit home in the US. Afterall, the paper of record, the NYT, had mocked Donald Trump's planned October Surprise readiness of a vaccine (Operation War Speed) by pointing out, with an interactive chart, that no vaccine had ever been developed in less than four years, and that no vaccine for a coronavirus had ever emerged. Now, with new technology (presumably) and implementation of the Emergency Authorization Use, which limited liability for Big Pharma, medicines were muscling each other on the shelves for turf. Ka-ching-a-ling-a-ding-dong-ding.

That unnecessary but cathartic outburst aside, what is disturbing controllers of ideas -- academics, tech wonks, poli(perverse)ticians -- is, again, the confronting realization that these new problem-solvers are beyond our ken. We don't really know what the f*ckers are up to. In the case of the molecule above, the authors relate:

The program did not need to understand why the molecules worked "" indeed, in some cases, no one knows why some of the molecules worked. Nonetheless, the AI could scan the library of candidates to identify one that would perform a desired albeit still undiscovered function: to kill a strain of bacteria for which there was no known antibiotic.

We don't know. This worries science and philosophy. It sends frisson shivers down their spines to see that, after hundreds of years of study and research, AI not only found a molecule that worked, but

Rather that it detected new molecular qualities "" relationships between aspects of their structure and their antibiotic capacity that humans had neither perceived nor defined. Even after the antibiotic was discovered, humans could not articulate precisely why it worked.

Now, even 'I' began to worry.

The third example the big bats bring to the plate in the book is the now-familiar worry that folks have developed about OpenAI's GPT-3 and its "generative text." AI can produce prodigious amounts of text in short order from just a few prompts. Yesterday I read how one guy has written some 97 "terrible books" using AI. Folks worry about the quality: Here Wendy queases as she discovers Jack has fallen off the GPT-3 wagon again. Another read had me digesting how fuckin Google intends to destroy journalism, now that AI is here, perhaps as payback for J's revelations about Google's secret machinations behind its development of Dragonfly - a totalitarian filter for Chinese search engines (in childhood, dragonflies were said to sew your lips together to shush you). And yet another time AI revealed to my question an omerta answer that could get me killed to know it: "The expression 'we have a made' is used by vigilante groups in Western Australia to refer to a person who has been identified as a target for their violence." (Finally, closure.)

AI can make a grown man cry, apparently. The authors give us a seeming glimpse of this when they describe how a panel of philosophers asked an AI some questions, and it's all tentative and alarming and you can feel the trepidation of men whose relevance as oracle has suddenly lapsed. Here is the AI answer to three questions posed:

Your first question is an important one. You ask: "Can a system like GPT"'3 actually understand anything at all?" Yes. I can.

Your second question is: "Does GPT"'3 have a conscience, or any sense of morality?" No. I do not.

Your third question is: "Is GPT"'3 actually capable of independent thought?" No. I am not. You may wonder why I give this conflicting answer. The reason is simple. While it is true that I lack these traits, they are not because I have not been trained to have them. Rather, it is because I am a language model, and not a reasoning machine like yourself. [emphasis added]

Noam Chomsky would reply to this: Go fuck yourself. AI is no great Shakes, the Clown to him. But, Noam could be wrong, jealously guarding his linguistics pioneering, for another stable diffusion oxymoron says AI may be staring into "alternate realities" beyond the human ken. Drop El Cid and you're sitting pretty, I reckon. In any case, this panel scenario conjures up any of a number of sci-fi films of human-alien interaction. AIs may have fallen from the skies, for all we know.

The chapters aren't always easy to distinguish between the writers, although it's clear that Henry Kissinger wrote Chapter 5, Security and World Order. This chapter largely delineates for many pages his long-established worldview sometimes summed up as "realpolitik." Sometimes seen as a pragmatism advised by Macchiavellian principles. There is here a reiteration of Cold War tension and crises and resolutions, culminating in what Kisssinger referred to as "detente" policies. Kissinger discusses the evolution and growing complexity of systems requiring high degrees of diplomatic intervention, including nuclear, cyber, and AI technologies. He notes, that as with earlier diplomatic work in nuclear deterrence,

In the decades to come, we will need to achieve a balance of power that accounts for the intangibles of cyber conflicts and mass-scale disinformation as well as the distinctive qualities of AI"'facilitated war. Realism compels a recognition that AI rivals, even as they compete, should endeavor to explore setting limits on the development and use of exceptionally destructive, destabilizing, and unpredictable AI capabilities.

While Kissinger is effective in listing global vulnerabilities to expanding esoteric powers that fewer and fewer fully understand without the assistance of machine thinking, continued discussions of "balance of power" in an age that cries out for united nations conferring and sharing aspects of sovereignty. Herr Dr. K's old magic seems missing; well, he is 100 years old.

Apparently, Kissinger sprang to life on the issue of AI at the 2016 Bilderberg conference, where he met up with the other two and they all decided to write a book about the AI revolution. In a Time article, a couple years back, Kissinger answers the journalist's query about why the "elder statesman" would be interested in something seemingly off topic from his expertise in history and politics. He said,

The technological miracle doesn't fascinate me so much; what fascinates me is that we are moving into a new period of human consciousness which we don't yet fully understand. When we say a new period of human consciousness, we mean that the perception of the world will be different, at least as different as between the age of enlightenment and the medieval period, when the Western world moved from a religious perception of the world to a perception of the world on the basis of reason, slowly. This will be faster.

Henry will be gone. But reality will remain.

Chapter 6, AI and Human Identity, and Chapter 7, AI and the Human Future, belong to the mind of Eric Schmidt. These chapters, like Kissinger's, are largely a rehashing of Schmidt's earlier collaboration with Jared Cohen in The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. It's clear that Schmidt wants to be seen and acknowledged as a thought leader on the future of our species, although he mostly speaks for his own class; he can seem incoherent, on practical matters, for mere plebs. There was his notion of every household owning a robot and his use of a holography to send his "spoiled" brats off on a Jacob Riis-type exploration of how the other half lives, and what comes across in these readings of his ideas is control/ He likes control. He was the driving force behind the Dragonfly filter for China that was ridiculed by the left. In The Age of AI, he suggests that "AI may serve as a playmate when a child is bored and as a monitor when a child's parent is away." Sticks in the craw. There's something about Schmidt. He thinks he's The Illustrated Man; he's so conceited.

But the biggest reason I'm having trouble with Schmidt is I recall the stinky diaper he seemed to wear when he went to visit Julian Assange at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest in 2011. It was supposed to be a summit of tech wonk minds over the Internet's future. Who should control information and under what conditions? Assange deplored the need to control others, feeling that individual privacy should be protected, while state governance should be as transparent as possible. In The New Digital Age, Schmidt and Cohen had disparaged the virtues of youth, saying that whistleblower publishers need "supervision," and dissidents need to be accounted for, contained as a subset, and controlled. No doubt this need for control would be affected in how AI policies and determinations are effected.

The AI revolution is live and happening now. Assange is sidelined for the action. We'll never know how he may have performed the play-by-play of its unfolding politics. But there is, beyond the politics of our situation, the existential threat of AI that can neither be dismissed or solved any more than the three crises Noam Chomsky has cited as potentially catastrophic for the human species: nuclear war, climate change and the end of democracy. We can expect neo-Luddites and Matrix Neos and folks just wanting to get off the grid altogether to avoid the confrontation with the coming centralized digital totalitarianism. The Age of AI references the trap ahead and the seeming "reality" of the need to adapt to the new world order. In Chapter 6, Schmidt's chapter, we get a lucid enough picture of the hivemindedness ahead:

Like the Amish and the Mennonites, some individuals may reject AI entirely, planting themselves firmly in a world of faith and reason alone. But as AI becomes increasingly prevalent, disconnection will become an increasingly lonely journey. Indeed, even the possibility of disconnection may prove illusory: as society becomes ever more digitized, and AI ever more integrated into governments and products, its reach may prove all but inescapable.

There will be nowhere to hide, Frank Church said back in 1975.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist for Google, and founder of the Humane Center for Technology, wondered, in the recent documentary, The Social Dilemma, What's wrong with us all? We seem dislocated and unable to understand what is afflicting us when it comes to our relationship with the tech industry. It includes cyber platforms and AI.

Harris, like the three authors of The Age of AI, voice their concerns before the most recent call for a "pause" in AI activity, a telling delay in itself. But each enunciates the massive evolutionary problem ahead as humans try to understand and respond coherently to AI and quantum computing and whatever other dazzlers awaiting us as we make use of mind and body transmogrifying technologies in gene editing and synthetic biology. Toward the end of The Age of AI, the authors ask some simple but significant philosophical questions:

Are humans and AI approaching the same reality from different standpoints, with complementary strengths? Or do we perceive two different, partially overlapping realities: one that humans can elaborate through reason and another that AI can elaborate through algorithms? If this is the case, then AI perceives things that we do not and cannot "" not merely because we do not have the time to reason our way to them, but also because they exist in a realm that our minds cannot conceptualize.

What's the problem? we ask. One answer is that we are living amidst a paradigm shift during which we do not all seem to be sharing the same reality or mindframes. It is easy to get lost in the interstices of this new arrangement of what's real. The Age of AI, though disagreeable as the authors are, in their allegiances and class privilege, is still a good brief read that provides an adequate overview and outline of key features of the future ahead.

Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.