Responses to the horrendous attacks on Israelis, as well the pandemic challenges, serve as society-wide mental health checks. But how are we to grasp the context while interpreting the test results?
AI is arriving rapidly and, according to many, it packs sufficient potency to meaningfully upgrade humanity’s decision making. But will such technological marvels help us, individually and collectively, to adhere to the early 17th century counsel: “Above all else to thine own self be true”? Or, if we need technology to understand ourselves and our fellow human beings, does that spotlight our having lost the plot?
The more partisan news outlets and their audiences become, the greater the potential benefits from having algorithms seek “objective truths.” As trading algorithms are “backtested” using historical capital market prices to determine their effectiveness, AI programmes to guide public policy making can be assessed by how well they would have outperformed humans at processing publicly available information.
Success at framing
While getting the facts right is hard enough, success at framing emotionally charged multidimensional challenges often remains far more elusive. Consider how elected representatives and public health officials in nearly all jurisdictions stumbled badly responding to the Coronavirus.
Should they have been much quicker at recognising the need to balance tradeoffs between saving elderly lives versus child development? Or should economic or other health considerations have been paramount? Whereas a broad consensus has still not converged around a clear set of answers, AI tools will soon look back and identify when the accumulated public data was sufficient to confidently gauge priorities and tradeoffs.
Machine learning is more amenable to being programmed to prioritise objectivity than pack animals, such as humans, whose politics provoke partisanship. For many millennia this was less of a problem as clans and bands and, more recently, large diverse societies prioritised survival. Then, last century, child mortality and women surviving childbirth improved dramatically in most parts of the world. As pharmacology flourished and famines faded, life expectancy surged.
Deterrence value
The first half of the 20th century produced mind numbing military casualties whereas such carnage plummeted in the second half. The decline was due in no small part to the deterrence value of mutually assured destruction from a nuclear holocaust causing great powers to shun direct confrontations with each other.
Then the Soviet Empire collapsed and affluent societies chose to disregard the last vestiges of harsh survival pressures. Instead, more people began dying from too much food than too little. Now, pharmacologists offer effective weight loss drugs with seemingly acceptable side effects.
Such brief background sketches can’t adequately depict how unsettled our footing is as we fumble about trying to grasp the Israel-Hamas conflict. Such framing is further exacerbated by Hamas’ leaders successfully promoting martyrdom to the point of volunteering innocent Palestinian families as human shields - along with those kidnapped.
All the while, commentators routinely fail to acknowledge how central deterrence is to self-defence. Surely algorithms could be designed to flag such peril-provoking omissions.
Mutually assured destruction has served as a core deterrent to direct conflict among nuclear powers since the 1960s. This is an extreme example but there is nothing new about how deterrence is central to self-defence and achieving peace. Yet it is perhaps easier, and certainly more sensational, to judge Israel's response to Hamas’ 7 October attacks as vengeance.
Children and the elderly need to know that capable adults will defend them and this affects how humans are programmed. Our seeking nutrition is triggered by feeling hungry. To deter aggressions, the emotion we draw upon for courageous reprisals is vengeance.
While there are times to feast, the urge to overeat must frequently be resisted. Vengeance must also be calibrated, but not to the point of ignoring its power to deter. Whereas preventing overeating can save many lives, developing pills to tamp vengeance would invariably numb our commitment to loved ones.
Judging “others”
Many of today’s most influential knowledge arbiters coerce public opinions through shaping issues while inculcating audiences to judge “others”. Given the chance, they would require all ages to be vengeance vaccinated. We must fully appreciate, independent of algorithms, why this would have to be vehemently resisted.
Before peaceful survival to old age recently became a common presumption in affluent nations, societies saw satisfying vengeance and hunger within a largely amoral context. It was deceit, inspired by pursuit of power, wealth or lust, which their individual and group politics sought to dissuade. Those lacking real power might dabble at parables or plays or, using today’s lexicon, they might develop grand narratives.
Do we need to become more “true to thine own self” by being hoisted on our own techno-powered petards? Have we lost the plot to the point that we are manipulated as characters in a play, set within a wider play?
Do we appreciate how effectively prominent media and university elites condition us to see the world not by seeking understanding or pursuing solutions but rather through judging “others”. Their castings emphasise identity politics while their narratives invariably emphasise the strong oppressing the disadvantaged.
Today’s global cold war is about authoritarian regimes aggressively challenging democracies and the rules-based international order. Hamas’ savagery extended this to testing societies’ willingness to deceive themselves. We are left hoping that AI and related technologies can soon counter such distortions.
An ill-fated imaginary prince once mused, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” A journalist documenting Hamas-inspired fatalism recently quoted a Palestinian, “If I die, I die.”
While algorithms are destined to expose today’s unique forms of treachery, our reliance on poets and playwrights to explore meaning will remain timeless as peace follows from understanding others, not judging them. From there, love and passion for life can wither martyrdom.
@shawnhagedorn
