Artificial Intelligence: the Future of Our Religion-Capitalism Paradigm, New Gods...and the Eminent ? of Humanity

A recent article streamed from the DailyGalaxy web site, "An AI God Will Emerge, Replacing Our Concept of the Divine", 102417) painted a future where Artificial Intelligence (in device or mega-cloud format) may escape from human control after passing some cybernetic threshold of uber-smartness compared to humans. This threshold is, as of yet, undeterminable but felt by a significant number of vocal scientists to be both inevitable and fast creeping up on us.

Pericles21 posits that it will be impossible to sustain human control over future Artificial Intelligence because of our mercantile-dominated Western culture that is dominated by the Capitalist Equation where nearly every item or service is price-tagged and Western (nay, Global) economies are driven to maximize profit. A break in this post is inserted to review this phenomenon:

CAPITALISM EQUATION: Maximum Profit = Revenue - MINIMUM COSTS (where the desired cost goal is ZERO)

ZERO Costs is the 21st century mantra that governs most if not all human activity in this era of global capitalism.

ZERO COSTS is the cause of global wealth inequality and is killing working humanity by its consequences: elimination of raw material costs by resource robbery in non-developed nations, outsourcing of manufacturing to lowest wage areas, the elimination or at least emasculation of unions, and increasing productivity through automation which serves to reduce labor cost(human participation in manufacturing) to a goal of ZERO!

Capitalism's goal of ZERO LABOR COST will essentially be achieved as automation becomes widespread and eventually human labor becomes fully redundant with Artificial Intelligence taking over from all labor activities.

The ascendency of this simple Capitalism Equation (destruction of Labor's negotiating powers by eleiminating unions and automation) has been a steady trend since industrialization was introduce in the 19th century, with certain halts such as the period after the Great Depression, principally the Roosevelt programs that promoted a balance of power between labor and capital. But there was also a second attempt to restore that power balance through an appeal to reason and observation that unfettered capital development was ruining our water and air quality that quite naturally deteriorated the health of workers and the general population...thus negatively affecting worker productivity. A strong voice among economists bringing attention to this need for Capitalism to support policies that acknowledged Capitalism's shared accountability in preserving clean water and air through appropriate manufacturing practices and government guidelines (regulations) was what Pericles21 calls the 'Samuelson School' of the 1980s (Samuelson, MIT). Unfortunately, after a brief popularity the Capitalism world re-established its former myopia regarding the public weal and went full out to complete the destruction of American unions and further its CAPITALISM EQUATION goal of ZERO COSTS.

This brings this discussion back to Artificial Intelligence...which will, unless managed in some way, complete the process of making human labor and humans in general, redundant!

The process of making the working human labor, and humans themselves, redundant will be unstoppable as long as Western culture is, unquestioned, shaped and ruled by the profit-driven, unbreakable partnership between Western religion's gods and modern, unfettered global capitalism, aka Neo-liberalism - all of these will allow unthinking acceleration of technologies that serve purely to promote the Capitalist Equation (ZERO LABOR COST). If not a declared partnership, the relationship between economic-corporate-society and religion has become mutually supportive, mutually protecting and mutually preserving. The first two traits of the 'Partnership' might be seen as positive or at least non-destructive, but the third trait is negative because it traps humanity into a whirlpool of its own making, greed of profit and what profit will 'buy'.

Yes, it appears human 'civilization' has beecome simply defined as 'Buy' (how much available to buy, what to buy and what next can (must?) be bought to satisfy basic urges that are not 'needs'. Humanity's real 'needs (those of the world's needy, i.e., food, clean water, clothing, housing, health care, education ...are now ignored because the needy have no money to Buy right now...and the corporate frame is short term, quarterly at best. The corporatist frame can't wait a decade for an educated and more productive, and more consuming, citizenry to appear after a social makeover!.

Given this dynamic and the increased profitability of Ai replacing inefficient human labor, the uber-Ai threshold is inevitable, approaching rapidly, and can't be stopped without some major social-economic adjustment...which is not likely.

Pericles21, secondly posits that the uber-Ai threshold for exceeding human 'smartness' is between 5-10 years (probably already here in some defense agency projects). 'We' can do nothing more than hold onto our hats and ride it wherever 'it', not 'we', goes.

The preparative signs of a coming demotion of human importance is already here, most significantly being the gross, global mal-distribution of wealth and income..where the net assets of several billion 'poor' are exceeded by the assets of only a few hundred or less uber-rich.

Humanity is stuck neck deep in our own muck and mire generated by greed, lust, selfishness and the other human frailties we know about and fret about but they are supported or preserved by that sacred partnership between what we believe in - the joining of religion and capitalism.

What is it about us humans and technical progress that seems to entrap us in our own technical cleverness where we injure our health with untested pharmaceuticals, injure our environment (and again, our health) by grossly polluting factories and our failure to conceive of consequences of letting industrial waste be dumped willy-nilly into our water and air as if it no longer is our concern if we can't see it?

Whatever 'It" is about human shortsightedness, we have been unable to learn to slow down and think about what demons technical progress might unchain. And so it seems we are faced with unseen consequences that might accompany uncontrolled development of Artificial Intelligence.

Except, there is a growing movement to try to see what might come upon humanity from super-intelligent artificial constructs.

Under the current 'religion-capitalism' partnership that seems to dominate the Western world, it will be difficult to stop Ai progress as long as economic profits appear linked with Ai. Current Western religions and associated gods are thereby doomed by human greed, selfishness, etc... the human frailties. This good for progress but bad for 'stability', i.e., the status quo. Bottom line -corporate-speak), unfettered capitalism will have to be 'made over', or go.
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An AI God Will Emerge --"Replacing Our Concept of the Divine"
October 24, 2017

'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus' : Mary Shelley's Prescient, 1821 Novel of Humankind's Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Life and the Soul

Note: "Frankenstein, the Monster..." (1821) should be a primer for every modern student and researcher in Artificial Intelligence. The tortured musings of the cobbled-together monster (Ai components) give clues two hundred years later to applying the (Alan) Turing Test for self awareness and developing algorithms for modern artificial intelligence machines.
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This was written in response to a request for comment regarding Mary Shelley, the early 1800's author of Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus, (1818) and Shelley's place in the evolving thinking about the meaning of life and the soul. Although Shelly might not to be significant in a discussion of 19th century tinking on these subjects, this blogger (Pericles21) feels Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' is very important and played a central if not initiating part in framing the thinking about the soul, life and even artificial intelligence from 1818 to the Transhumanism movement of today. Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein' on a dare in 1818 when she was very young and lacking a formal higher education especially technical (although home schooled by very well educated and devoted parents, the Godwin's) who were well known at the time in European intellectual and salon circles. Mary's father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. In addition to Mary Shelley's own varied literary works, she edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley and even is rumored to have assisted in editing the works of the great Romantic poet, Byron. But Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' still ranks as a leader in establishing a new literary frontier in human imagination that explores the most sacred areas of human thought, life and the soul.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was a product of her times, circa 1800. She participated in the thinking and discussions of her times about the nature of life and the soul. Remarkably for such a young person (age 19 at the time she wrote her first work, 'Frankenstein' in 1818) and a woman without formal education much less technical education, she was at the forefront of thinkers of her time (though unknowingly at first) about these topics. In particular, Shelley was caught up in the excitement of new scientific concepts in physiology, i.e., 'animal electricity' ala (Galvani, and discoveries in higher mathematics and science that would lead to the Riemann mathematical lectures in 1854, James Clerk Maxwell's 'Electromagnetic Relationships' in 1865, and eventually to Albert Einstein's Special Relativity Theory (1905), and along the same path of thought and imagination to great works in technical fiction and even art, e.g, the Cubist movement begun around 1905 and exampled by the painters, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Paul Cezanne.

Mary Shelley's intellectual world generated fictional works that expressed the excitement of new science which expanded the boundaries of human ingenuity and imagination. This new territory of the imagination based on scientific discovery led to the 1865 rendering of nascent quantum mechanical tenets of Uncertainy and other quantum principles in the fantasy worlds authored by Oxford mathematics professor (1855-81), Charles Dodgson (nome-de-plume, Lewis Carroll), notably his 'Alice in Wonderland' (1865) and 'Through the Looking Glass' (1871). And also in the works of Jules Verne, aka 'The Father of Science Fiction'- '20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' (1870) and   'Around the World in 80 Days' (1873); in the breakthrough science fiction works of HG Wells (biologist) -  'The Time Machine' (1895), 'The War of the Worlds' (1898) a truly out-of-this-world vision of non-earth (extraterrestrial life forms) and 'The Island of Dr Moreau' (1896) which must be placed as the inheritor of Mary Shelly's earlier 'Frankenstein'of 1818. 

Although Mary Shelley was not a scientist nor formally educated, she was home-schooled by very well educated and sophisticated parents. And her parents' home was an important intellectual scene of the very important 'Salon' phenomenon of 17th and 18th century Europe.  In the scene, Mary was  'taken up' as a teen age girl by the famous poet Percy Shelly and was introduced and immersed into the company of leading figures of 'forward' thinking in Europe, including the mentoring 'attention' from the poet and intellectual, George Gordon Lord Byron.  In this company, on an idyllic Swiss lake vacation, Mary Shelley shyly accepted a 'dare' to write a story about some important or interesting theme of the day.  Venturing forth from in this game, Mary wrote 'Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus' (1818). 'Frankenstein' put into narrative words the questions raised but not clearly stated from the serious scientific thinking of the time about the nature of the soul and life, and following on from there, race and species which in 1839 surfaced through the  biology field work of Charles Darwin, 'The Voyage of the Beagle', and  Darwin's later great breakthrough,'The Origin of the Species' (1859).

Despite Mary Shelley's lack of formal education, especially technical,  Mary's 'Frankenstein'  was at the leading edge of the wave of emotion among Europe's salon intellectuals who pondered the place (and meaning) of humanity in the midst of rapidly advancing 'new science'. A principal focus of those salon debates was, 'what are the biological and/or yet undiscovered principles of life and especially the soul'?

Following from her immersion in the leading salon discussions of her time, Mary Shelly explored what might be the consequences of mankind's 'tampering' with the sacredness of life and soul. In this context, Dr Frankenstein's creation is much more than a 'put-together monster' but a representation of  humanity itself, stumbling along blindly and naively into new realms not completely understood and loaded with potential risks and dangers.

Of great 'prescience' in 'Frankenstein' is how Mary Shelley writes about the monster's musings (and laments) about his physiological incompleteness despite his self-awareness, his worries about who could love him, his search for love and his thoughts about what to do with himself. These are concepts of man-made intelligence that Mary Shelley rendered into words in 1818 but would not be addressed seriously until the 1940's mathematical work of Alan Turing's 'Turing Test', an algorithmic method of determining whether an artificial intelligence is self-aware, i.e., sentient. Interestingly, in the context of this discussion, Alan Turing turned his mathematical prowess into developing a theory for the chemical basis of morphogenesis.

More modern examples of Mary Shelley's legacy of exploring the meaning of life and soul would include Philip K Dick's, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' (1962) (also made into the film hit, 'Blade Runner'  (1982), and  Ursula Le Guinn's ('The Left Hand of Darkness' (1969), Samuel Delaney's 'Babel-17' (1966)  and Walter Moseley's 'Blue Light' (1998) and 'Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World' (2001).

Mary Shelley's inquiring spirit lives on  today. Modern (current, 2015) science is the most recent chapter of her legacy (and of her contemporary fantasy authors, e.g.,Wells, Verne, et al) of  imagination- become-real, e.g., organ transplants, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and the looming 'trans-human singularity' ( Neal Stephenson, Ray Kurzweil, Jody Turner, Vladimir Mayakovsky, et al).