Is AI already telling us what to do?
And other thoughts while reading of our past, present and future.
I’ve been reading three books—about the past, present, and future. Two of the three are not yet public, and the third has yet to receive the attention it deserves. They could hardly be more different, but I will propose, by the end of this post, that they share certain themes.
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America is by Heather Cox Richardson—a Boston College historian and a star of Substack, where her “Letters from an American” has something north of one million subscribers. The book is on shelves and websites in September.
Her analysis of history is designed to illuminate the present. She does not presume that our current phase of American history began in 2016. She reaches back to the 1930’s, for example, when a group of wealthy reactionaries began organizing to push back the New Deal. In her telling they have been pushing back ever since; and this is just one of her ongoing themes.
Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race is by Michele Norris-Johnson, a former NPR host, now a Washington Post columnist and creator of the Race Card Project. The project invites Americans to tell their stories about race in six-word stories. She first created it as a Morning Edition series, and I still remember some excruciating submissions from the public, such as “Black babies cost less to adopt.” Norris would sift through thousands of such submissions, choose a few, and call their authors to explain what they meant.
One essential skill of listening is to hear what’s not said—or rather, what may be implied or assumed in the words that people do say. A good listener will hear what’s missing, ask follow-up questions, and draw out a story.
Due out January 16, Our Hidden Conversations comes from an acutely perceptive writer, the right person to listen to a mere six words and sense how much more is there. Anytime I open the book my eye falls on something poignant, such as: “Yellow: Neither White nor Black enough.” A Japanese immigrant talks of moving to a diverse country where many people think of race as a matter of Black and white. Like Cox-Richardson’s, Michele Norris Johnson’s book illuminates the connections between our present and our past.
The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workspace by Ifeoma Ajunwa is a different approach to a very popular subject. Artificial intelligence has captured the world’s imagination and concern—ever since tech firms released “large language models” that can scrape the internet for information and respond with (sometimes) coherent, seemingly human writing or speech.
The news of consumer-facing products like ChatGPT have raised all sorts of future-tense questions: What will AI be capable of? How will it change our lives?
Ajunwa contends that for many of us, AI is already part of our lives. A moment’s thought will tell us that this is true. When your email or text app suggests the next word you might want to write, that is a simple form of AI: it has analyzed many prior emails and is guessing the most probable word that may follow what you have just written.
The Quantified Worker reveals a far more ominous reality. Employers, with an assist from AI, have been collecting enormous amounts of data about workers. He begins with an anecdote of an employee who agrees to have her sleep patterns and health statistics monitored for insurance purposes. She wears a lapel pin that allows the employer to track her movement around the office. A “mechanical manager” tracks her activity and monitors whatever she may do on her computer screen.
On the surface, such efforts promote efficiency, health and safety; but Ajunwa argues that on a deeper level they are about asserting control of other human beings. Not only that: the machines may be biased, producing differing outcomes for people of different races or backgrounds. He gives the example of job applicants with criminal records, who never get a chance to persuade HR managers that they can be reliable employees. They are interviewed first by filling out a form, on which they must disclose a criminal record, which is sifted by computer and dooms them.
In an NPR interview last week, we heard from Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs for Meta, which released an open-source large language model and invited companies to develop products with it. Clegg maintained that an open-source model was ultimately safe, and that Meta’s Llama 2 model wasn’t the kind that could pose an existential threat. The real concern might come with “supersized, super-intelligent AI models in the future, which develop a kind of identity and autonomy of their own. Crucially, if they develop the ability to replicate themselves, then you really are, in a sense, crossing a Rubicon.”
But if we do not yet face that scenario, we face another. Ajunwa’s book is not about computers setting up shop and taking over the world in a kind of Matrix scenario. It raises questions about what human beings are doing to other human beings using the power of AI right now.
Maybe it is apparent by now how these three books share an overriding concern. As different as they are, all three dwell on aspects of democracy: how we govern ourselves, who is included, and who is not. On a deeper level they wrestle with who we are—where we have been, where we stand, and how we keep control of our own affairs.
None of the books provides easy answers. The answers are complicated and up to us. But they give me a lot of information to think about this summer.
Thanks for reading, and welcome to new subscribers! Differ We Must is a companion to my book of the same name, due October 3. It tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him. If it succeeds, which other people will judge, this book, too, will get people thinking about the connections between the past, present and future.
Netflix: “Unknown-Killer Robots”. Delving into AI in a way that made me want to curl up in bed, deep under the covers.
"Covid19" was the first global AI run operation for Big Pharma. Everyone frightened out of their wits got into the medical experimentation .
Many are seeing we dont have a democracy...how could we when we have a central banking economic monopoly=follow the money. "I dont care who runs the nation state as a puppet as I control the dosh"