As the world around us increases in technological
complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a
single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through
computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.
In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James
Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and
reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.
New Dark Age by James Bridle review – technology and the end
of the future
The consequences of the technological revolution may be even
more frightening than we thought
Will Self
Sat 30 Jun 2018 07.30 BST
I suspect your enjoyment – or otherwise – of James Bridle’s
New Dark Age will depend very much on whether you’re a glass half-empty, or a
glass
exactly-filled-to-the-halfway-mark-by-microprocessor-controlled-automatic-pumping-systems
sort of a person. I like to think that while I may have misgivings about much
of what the current technological revolution is visiting on us, I yet manage to
resist that dread ascription “luddite”. It’s one Bridle also wishes to avoid;
but such is the pessimism about the machines that informs his argument, that
his calls for a new “partnership” between them and us seem like special
pleading. As futile, in fact, as a weaver believing that by smashing a Jacquard
loom he’ll stop the industrial revolution in its tracks.
If we’re in ignorance
of what our robots are doing, how can we know if we’re being harmed?
At the core of our thinking about new technology there lies,
Bridle suggests, a dangerous fallacy: we both model our own minds on our
understanding of computers, and believe they can solve all our problems – if,
that is, we supply them with enough data, and make them fast enough to deliver
real-time analyses. To the Panglossian prospect of Moore’s Law, which forecasts
that computers’ processing power will double every two years, Bridle offers up
the counterexmple of Gates’s Law, which suggests these gains are negated by the
accumulation in software of redundant coding. But our miscalculations
concerning the value of big data are only part of the computational fallacy;
Bridle also believes it’s implicated in our simple-minded acceptance of
technology as a value-neutral tool, one to be freely employed for our own
betterment. He argues that in failing to adequately understand these emergent
technologies, we are in fact opening ourselves up to a new dark age. He takes
this resonant phrase from HP Lovecraft’s minatory short story, “The Call of
Cthulhu”, rather than the dark ages of historical record, although the latter
may turn out to be a better point of reference for our current era. Lovecraft’s
new dark age is, paradoxically, a function of enlightenment – it’s the
searchlight science shines into the heart of human darkness that brings on a
crazed barbarism. Bridle’s solution is to propose “real systemic literacy”,
alongside a willingness to be imprecise – cloudy, even – when it comes to our
thinking about the cloud.
I’m not against this; indeed, I often think that in a world
crazed by its sense of certainty, the best way to stay calm is to allow
yourself the luxury of doubt. But while I can see it as making good stoical
sense for the individual, I’m not sure it’s sufficiently rousing to prepare
humanity, en masse, to cope with what’s coming down the steely, preprogrammed
track. Bridle offers us techno pessimists plenty of examples to worry about.
Some – such as death by slavish adherence to GPS navigation systems, and the
woeful effects of the computational fallacy – I was already familiar with; but
others did give me novel heebie-jeebies.
I hadn’t bitten down on the fact that the very heat
generated by the internet itself is a strong factor in global warming, which
pretty much nixes any view that a more wired world will be a more sustainable
one. Nor was I aware of the increase in a phenomenon known as “clear-air
turbulence” (although really, it speaks for itself), which may well ground a
lot of commercial aviation by the middle of this century. And while I may have
known at an intuitive level that the Syrian conflict had an environmental
dimension to it, Bridle is the first person I’ve read who authoritatively
labels it as a resource war, provoked by drought. Meanwhile, those hot and
powerful secret government computers are being used to speciously survey us (he
makes a convincing case for the complete uselessness of CCTV systems), while
with their spare processing capacity they try to crack the prime-factoring
encryption system that’s vital for online privacy and commerce.
That the US National Security Agency has already cracked
some of the more commonly used prime number factors was, again, news to me. And
I don’t think of the fake variety: for Bridle isn’t just a purveyor of the
armchair jeremiad, who sits there blowing filter bubbles – he does fieldwork as
well on our hideous and looming fate. I particularly enjoyed his inquiry into
the weird and wobbly realm of British airspace and the link between drone
programmes and so-called “plausible deniability” – the invisibility cloak for
so much of our rulers’ dabbling in the dark arts. But perhaps the strangest and
most unsettling aspect of the coming new dark age is the emergence of machine
intelligence.
I suspect many
readers will find Bridle’s perceptive and thought-provoking book terrifying
rather than enjoyable
Here Bridle makes an excellent and possibly original point:
we’re accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either “go
rogue” and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution –
what we didn’t reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds.
And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network
Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in
all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional “semantic space”? I’d wondered
why it was that Google Translate had massively improved – moving from being a
reliable provider of nonsensical silliness, to, well, an effective and
instantaneous way of translating. The problem is, we have a general idea how
the program is doing it – but it can’t tell us exactly; and, as Bridle
observes, this is tantamount to transgressing the first of Isaac Asimov’s
famous Three Laws of Robotics – for if we’re in ignorance of what our robots
are doing, how can we know if we’re being harmed?
Intelligent computer systems are already menacing us with
weird products devised algorithmically and offered for sale on Amazon, as well
as bizarre and abusive “kids’” videos, which are mysteriously generated in the
bowels of the web, and uploaded by bots to YouTube. Bridle borrows Timothy
Morton’s modish conception of the “hyperobject” as a way of discussing our
inability to apprehend the totality of the risks embodied in such vast
phenomena as machine intelligence and global warming – but I’m not sure that
acknowledging the ungraspable nature of anything really helps us to grasp it.
Bridle looks to so-called “centaur chess” as a way forward
for our wetware: computers may now effortlessly beat the grandest of masters at
the game, but one of the defeated, Garry Kasparov, has developed a fight-back
method, in which humans partnered with computers can indeed regain the podium.
On this basis, Bridle argues, it’s possible to conceive of a new kind of
“guardianship” of our frazzled planet and its poisoned wells, one in which we
all work together. This seems Pollyanna-ish as much as Panglossian to me – I’m
more struck by Nicholas Carr’s observation, in his takedown of the coming era
of self-driving cars, The Glass Cage, that our inability to grasp the emergent
techno realm may be a function of our having devised tools that do away with
our need to use tools.
Most of us already float free from the world of making,
doing, extracting and refining – and observe it indolently and imperfectly
through the scumbled lens of the cloud. We carry on ditching single-use
plastic, and ordering stuff from Amazon, and giving our personal information
away promiscuously, not, I’d argue, because global warming and AI are too big
to grasp, but because we understand only too well that real change could only
be effected by a great mass of individuals. And that, as Bridle acknowledges,
is an impossibility, given the new technologies atomise rather than fuse our
social formations.
Still, no doubt once the microprocessors malfunction and the
pumping system splutters to a halt, we’ll hopefully pick up pretty much where
we left off before the Enlightenment – or possibly the Renaissance. One thing
about the old dark ages was that they only seemed dark in retrospect, once the
dread weight of state power had been reimposed. I bet there were plenty of
people besides the Goths (and the Visigoths for that matter), for whom the fall
of the Roman empire was a cause for celebration. I realise this isn’t a popular
view. And I expect many readers will find Bridle’s perceptive and
thought-provoking book terrifying rather than enjoyable – but then as I implied
at the outset, I’m very much of the glass half- empty type.
New Dark Age by James Bridle (Verso, £16.99). To order a
copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK
p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
Air pollution rots our brains. Is that why we don’t do
anything about it?
James Bridle
Human cognitive ability is being damaged not just by CO2 and
lead, but the way social media feeds us information, making us shockingly
ill-equipped to clean up the air we breathe
Mon 24 Sep 2018 06.00 BST Last modified on Mon 24 Sep 2018
13.55 BST
In Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy, Idiocracy, the participants in
an ill-fated cryogenics experiment awake 500 years in the future to discover
that due to dysgenic mutation, anti-intellectualism and corporate capitalism
the intelligence of the population has fallen to dangerous levels. The
president is sponsored by fast-food chain Carl’s Jr., and crops are failing
because the fields are irrigated with energy drinks. The film was abandoned by
its studio and largely ignored at the box office, but its subsequent cult
status might be in danger once again, this time from the overbearing reality of
present events.
Researchers from Beijing University and Yale School of
Health published research last month showing that people who live in major
cities – which is, today, most of us – are not only suffering from increases in
respiratory illnesses and other chronic conditions due to air pollution, but
are losing our cognitive functions. The study showed that high pollution levels
lead to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the
impact on some participants equivalent to losing several years of education.
Other studies have shown that high air pollution is linked to premature birth,
low birth weight, mental illness in children and dementia in the elderly.
We’re only just beginning to understand how the air we
breathe affects not just our physical environment, but our mental capacity as
well. And the air we breathe is changing in the long term, as well as the
short. Rising carbon dioxide levels – the main driver of climate change –
aren’t just a hazard to the earth and other living creatures, they’re also
affecting our thinking. At higher levels, CO2 clouds the mind: it makes us
slower and less likely to develop new ideas, it degrades our ability to take in
new information, change our minds, or formulate complex thoughts.
Global atmospheric CO2 levels passed 400 parts per million
in 2016, and despite global agreements to keep runaway climate change under
control, little action has been taken. The very worst-case scenario – AKA
business as usual, which is the track we’re on – predicts atmospheric CO2
concentration of 1,000ppm by 2100. At 1,000ppm, human cognitive ability drops
by 21%.
This isn’t merely a problem for the future – as if that
would make it better. As we come to understand more about the effects of CO2,
we have been measuring more of it, and finding that as it increases outside, it
increases inside, too. Outdoor CO2 already reaches 500ppm regularly in
industrial cities; indoors, in poorly ventilated homes or school workplaces, it
can regularly exceed 1,000ppm. A study of bedrooms in Denmark found that
overnight concentrations of CO2 exceeded 2,000ppm, with measurable effects on
student’s performance the following day.
Schools in California and Texas, when measured in 2012,
regularly exceeded 2,000ppm in the daytime. And the kind of “green” insulation
used to improve the heat retention of buildings – a climate change mitigation
process – also raises the levels of CO2 trapped inside.
Even if we meet the most stringent targets set at the Paris
agreements in 2015, 2100 will bring atmospheric CO2 levels of 660ppm – with
around a 15% decrease in average brainpower. It’s possibly one of the most
tragic ironies of the whole sorry business that climate change is making it
harder for us to think, just when we need new and bold ideas to deal with its
effects.
Rather than taking action to mitigate this process, we find
case and case again of companies actively trying to increase emissions.
Volkswagen notoriously spent years creating complex, embedded software to
bypass emissions tests, with the result that cars certified for use in the US
actually emitted nitrogen oxide at 40 times the legal limit. In Europe, where
the same “defeat devices” were found, and where thousands more of the vehicles
were sold, it’s been estimated that 1,200 people will die a decade earlier due
to VW’s emissions – and many more, as we now know, will have cognitive
difficulties.
It’s hard not to see an allegory between Volkswagen’s
manipulation of opaque technologies and the ways in which we are being
manipulated more broadly by the largely unaccountable systems we engage with
every day. Multiple studies have shown that the way in which social media
regulates our information intake for profit leaves us more divided, less
politically aware, and increasingly prejudiced and violent. YouTube recently
suggested I should follow an archive clip of US anchorman Walter Cronkite
warning about climate change all the way back in 1980, with a 30-minute
conspiracy lecture titled How the Global Warming Scare Began. Mental pollution
comes in many forms.
The US Environmental Protection Agency announced recently
that it was reconsidering Obama-era rules governing the emission of mercury
from coal-fired power plants. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include emotional
instability, insomnia, reduced cognitive function and memory loss. It was the
use of mercury to stiffen hat brims that caused an epidemic of dementia among
milliners in the 18th and 19th centuries, the origin of the phrase “mad as a
hatter”. It’s hard to think of a measure better tuned to cancelling the future
than raising the amount of mercury in the environment, or an act more in
keeping with our times than intentionally increasing the recklessness,
forgetfulness and stupidity of the population.
But then those in charge of our affairs currently have their
own chemical load to shed. Since the 1980s, one common pollutant we have
managed to curtail is lead, mostly by excluding it from paint, plumbing and
petrol. As a result there has been a 4.5-point rise in IQ points in those born
after 1985. Those who grew up in Europe and North America between 1965 and 1985
– the cohort who are running things right now – were regularly found to be
carrying 20 micrograms per decilitre levels of lead in their bloodstream, which
can lead to far greater levels of long-term cognitive impairment than those
reported in studies of contemporary air pollution. If you want one simple
explanation for the wildly differing political attitudes between current
generations, and some of the irrational paths we seem hellbent on taking at
present, you could do worse than take lead poisoning into account. Brain
damage, it seems, is the one thing the baby boomers are willing to pass on to
their kids.
• James Bridle is the author of New Dark Age: Technology and
the End of the Future
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário