Tip-Off #131 - Simply True
"A single neuron in the brain's 86 billion is an incredibly complex machine." - Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain (now Google DeepMind).
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Rubik's Cube, the 3D combination puzzle, is a global symbol of intellectual challenge and creativity. Recently, researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) developed a system named DeepCubeA, which can solve the puzzle in an average of 1.2 seconds using about 20 moves.
The headlines declare that AIs' solving complicated problems provides valuable insight into human reasoning. However, these systems draw on massive amounts of data beyond control, often feigning profundity by being verbosely simplistic.
What Winston Churchill said about Russia is true of today's troubles: "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Centuries-old insecurity lies at the heart of Russia's relationship with Western dominance. Vladimir Putin isn't merely a Rubik's Cube or a trick in the deck. Like the rest of the world, he embodies his history's ambivalence and is more than just an issue to solve.
Complexity is less problematic than the tendency to turn trouble into a crisis. This guarantees its significance and prompts immediate attention. A crisis demands swift action to prevent severe repercussions. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or tragic accidents strike and require decisive measures. Support is readily available. If the crisis is close to home, neighbors become more neighborly, like helping one another dig out their cars after a massive snow blizzard.
Not every snowstorm is a blizzard. Most trouble is not a crisis, at least not immediately. That can be unnerving. "A crisis I can handle; it's everyday life that gets me down." The most challenging issues are commonplace, such as a troubled marriage, recovering from a severe illness, or living with chronic pain. ("I'd rather die.")
Alarmism confuses urgency with importance. It leads to a desire for obvious, instant solutions, like finding the right medication instead of getting more exercise — or, on a global scale, insisting that "We need to act now to avert climate disaster" without bearing in mind that "we" is not just us and other high-income countries. 70% of emissions growth these days is driven by billions of poor people in the developing world striving for the security and comfort of middle-class life. Escaping poverty turns out to be highly carbon-intensive, far more so than wealth.
Whether or not the sky is falling, sometimes we need to believe it is. After weeks of relentless rain, I heard one woman exclaim, "I'm so used to being miserable, I couldn't handle a nice day." Misery is a comforting default, sparing us the effort of seeking something better. Many of us are close to "crisis fatigue" without even considering the next election, a good excuse to do nothing. Bill Gates once joked, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
AI's biggest problem is ours — not complexity but the allure of simplicity. "Solutionism" is the ideology of the moment.
Artificial intelligence can mimic, but not replicate, our own intelligence. It is busy solving problems and pretending to be rational. Love and heartbreak, anger and forgiveness, and other deep feelings are often at odds with rationality. Life is "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," way too complicated for AI and never simply true.
The danger is not that machines are becoming more and more human and will one day replace us. The greater threat is that machines will become less and less human, eventually surpassing us.
Often, we find ourselves alone, overwhelmed, and unsure of what to do. But the future isn't about new solutions or another answer. It belongs to love beyond measure: tougher than the toughest problem, the real trick in the deck.
Notes and reading
"A single neuron in the brain..."—Andrew Ng, Wired (February 2, 2015). This is a good article on the parallels and divergences between biological and artificial intelligence. Ng is an excellent answer to techno-utopians and doom-mongering.
AI and a Rubik's Cub - Engadget: technology news (July 17, 2019); Fast Company (January 19, 2021).
Atlas of AI - Kate Crawford (2021). A material and political perspective on what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power. - Crawford co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU.
Climate change - “Developing countries are the new emissions hotspots…” - The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). - Also, Persuasion (Substack - June 12, 2024).
“In Defense of Machines” - “The struggle against dehumanizing machinery and technology is not unique to the modern period, even if it feels sometimes like we are laboring under uniquely horrible circumstances.” C.W. Howell (June 11, 2024). - Howell is Clinical Assistant Professor at Washington State University, also the Director of Academic Programs for the C.S. Lewis Foundation.
On Complexity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) - Edgar Morin (2008). Morin, now 103, “the Founder of Transdisciplinarity,” is a French philosopher and sociologist recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought.” - “The paradigm of complexity depends on the fusion of Western and Eastern thinking.”