The idea that intelligence has to do with problem-solving (and the imagining and planning that comes with it) isn't necessarily wrong, I think. What is wrong to equate 'problems' with '*logical* (i.e. discrete) puzzles'.
We humans are pretty poor at discrete logic, so we have for ages equated being smart with being good at logical reasoning. In reality — as Andy Clark has said — we're better at frisbee than at logic. Navigating a difficult, not yet known situation (both physically and socially) is the forte of our intelligence. We have taken solving logical puzzles as the measure not because we are good at it, but because we are bad at it and thus find it difficult. This is not that weird, as we are bad at it in an absolute sense, but relatively we are the species on this planet that is best at it, and that little bit of skill has made a difference (next to having relatively large brains). It has given us the reliability (and time- and spacelessness) that comes with discreteness. So, being able to do logic is a real bonus for our intelligence.
The arrival of the perfect logic machine (the Turing machine) was seen as the logical step towards superintelligence. The current neural net AIs use a different kind of mechanism, namely (analog) 'weights'. These are supposed to be not discrete (they are 'real' numbers), but as long as we approximate them with (discrete, logical) integers on Turing machines, we are fooling ourselves technically in roughly the same way that LLMs fool us by approximating meaning with token-order-predictions.
Where in humans the logic arises out of analog technology (as it does in digital processors, a transistor is a very analog thing), with digital computers we try to let analog (and even chaotic) behaviour arise out of massive amounts of discrete logic. That is fundamentally a doomed route, however if we accept the enormous inefficiency, we can push that envelope and create some useful tools. But AGI on digital technology, no way.
Note that Google has already partly given up on using 'floats', their latest Gemini uses a data type called 'int8' instead of float32, float16, or bfloat16. This probably enables them to have many more (but far less precise) parameters. In the end, the expressive power of these models is simply the number of bits of all the parameters (not the number of parameters). Many researchers assume that you need only a limited amount of bits, but that assumption is based on regularity of the analog signals, and one can seriously doubt the validity of that assumption in real biological systems.
Nice article, though. Kundera's book was indeed a wonderful read.
Erik, great article and I also enjoy your readers’ comments. I have no technical knowledge of AI, but lots of questions and concerns about--for lack of a better phrase--the human side of the equation. It’s what attracted me to your Substack.
I do retain a grasp of high school statistics, and AI seems to me to just be a super-hyped statistical model, and all models just say what they are told to say. Put me in the skeptical camp.
I’ve learned a lot in the few months I’ve been a subscriber, and look forward to your upcoming essays. My primary concern is that the AI drivers and true believers are so focused on the cool things AI can do that they have lost perspective on its impact on people and society as whole. The memoirs of the Columbia University biochemist, Erwin Chargaff, is one of the best critiques of this failure of science in general I have ever read. Chargaff was also one helluva writer, but his integrity and aloofness cost him dearly in academia. (Didn’t help that he basically accused Watson and Crick of taking credit for his groundbreaking work on the DNA double helix.)
This is fascinating. My understanding of kitsch might be different from yours — I think I'm more influenced by the analyses belonging to a certain tradition of art history and criticism (Greenberg et al.) — so I'm not yet sure I'm on board. Also, it just takes me a while to process. But let me say: this sent my mind in motion, and I sense there's something really interesting here, and I'm looking forward to thinking this through.
Yes I sort of pigeon-holed the term or adapted to my purposes, but it is evocative, and I want to point to issues/problems and shine a light. Tech seems to have become a worldview, and given that it's well, tech, and also intrinsically tied to commerce, it doesn't seem "deep enough." I'd love to hear your thoughts.
No one, and no critical tradition, has the final say on the concept of kitsch. So I didn't mean to suggest the concept you use doesn't merit the term 'kitsch'. I was just registering some complications in the background that I wanted to work through. After thinking it through some more, I can see the aptness of deploying that term.
According to the critical-historical tradition I've found most illuminating — and to start with the end of the story — the cultural products later termed kitsch emerged as a(n) (over-)correction or (over-)response to conceptually and theoretically glutted art that was inaccessible (for various reasons but above all for material ones) to the general public. These artifacts are formulaic and mechanically reproducible. Instead of providing emotional significance, they symbolize emotional significance. Instead of demanding to be experienced, they demand only to be acknowledged as being a cultural artifact. Instead of inviting critical reflection, they reinforce pre-existing tastes and sensibilities.
In these respects, I think, the AI Triumphalism and AI Doomerism narratives are indeed kitsch. Such a narrative is an oversimplified story meant to be reproduced and uncritically consumed by those whose pre-existing views it flatters.
It was insightful of you to bring the concept of kitsch to bear on this topic. Excellent. And thanks, as always.
So cheers to simplification - here is one 😊 Post Cold War capitalism gradually converged into a state in which majority of population own nothing or very little, with a specially talented few having access to premium properties and lifestyle funded by assets held offshore and owned by legal structures set up offshore, while not paying taxes. All this while majority of population (who can’t escape the taxes) is being told that once the AGI is “born” (which is soon - when? very soon)- we all reach “nirvana” (1 layer distilled nutshell of the narrative). I can’t help but see striking similarities with soviet communism - Deja vu 🤯. Das Kapital also had stages via which the society was supposed to reach the final blissful stage - the communism. It seems I can’t escape it in my relatively 😉short life span. (Though I look young, I am not that young!) 😊
Dear Erik, Merry Xmas and Happy New Year! I love reading your articles, the book, posts and I am looking forward to your new book. Those who can, must 😊 Thank you.
Merry Christmas, Erik! Thank you for your great writing and pushing forward a much-needed cultural battle. I’m going to restack this fabulous post today and am looking forward to reading the extended essay. I want to connect and run a guest post/interview in my publication. There are several questions I’d like to ask you.
Hi Erik! Happy New Year! I'd love to connect for arranging the guest post. And thank you so much for your availability, as well as for the recent recommendation of my Sub! Please drop me an email at alberto.chierici@nyu.edu.
Great post, Erik. I have been struggling lately with balancing technology's pervasion of everything and real human connection, especially as the former is lionized as a savior for solving all our ills. I feel like I am swimming against an unstoppable current when I gently challenge the idea that technology is THE answer.
I have been reading a lot of history and philosophy lately, and I came across the below quotes from Heidegger and his pupil Hans Jonas. Per usual, we are not the first generation to struggle with this, but what have we learned?
Jonas writes in “Toward a Philosophy of Technolgy,” “[T]he despotic dynamics of the technological movement as such, sweeping its captive movers along its breathless momentum, poses its own questions to man’s axiological conception of himself.”
Heidegger called this current state in an interview with Der Spiegel published in 1976:
“Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]—the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.”
A question I cannot solve: Can we manage (control?) how a despotic force (technology) is changing our fundamental values and our understanding of ourselves?
Hello Eric, I’m a subscriber after coming across your very intriguing work. I believe we have much in common in our worldviews though I’m sure in some ways we may depart. I have been involved in a fifty year effort toward very intentional community that, it turns out, is only ninety minutes away from you. Around 1200 of like minded folks have determine to make human interaction the center of our lives. Someday perhaps we can meet at our number-one rated cafe in central Texas, Cafe Homestead. I wanted to drop a comment to thank you for cutting across the grain. And I agree with your latest post, though I would include going back of Comte to St. Simon and even the philosophes, especially Condorcet and Rousseau. But I’m looking forward to what you have to say about dear old Auguste, whose modesty was breathtaking. I’m a co-author of an extensive study of the social sciences and psychology that have attempted to reduce humanity to specimens subject to the scientific method. And Comte is indeed a central figure. I’m no scholar or disinterested observer but fully invested in fleshing out what I believe is the very purpose of humanity. If you’re ever going up Hwy. 6 to Dallas and pass through Waco, I would love to meet you. We are about fives miles north of Waco. My phone number is 254-717-2163. If it ever works out, give me a call and the burger will be on me. Meanwhile keep up the excellent work.
Hello Erik, late to the party here and still trying to get a better sense of your perspectives overall but enjoying it, thank you! You might have covered this in 2024 posts that I haven’t gotten yet, but on the question of humanism I have found Iain McGilchrist’s work very inspiring and the conversations that eg Perspectiva has facilitated with him highly insightful and relevant to the topic. A previous comment also mentions Hans Jonas whose work I’ve also recognised as wonderfully meaningful!
"In every field of inquiry, it is true that all things should be made as simple as possible – but no simpler. (And for every problem that is muddled by over-complexity, a dozen are muddled by over-simplifying)."
Totality to me is when majority understand and agree that something is systemically and structurally wrong with the society and economy, but don’t know what or can’t do anything about it with the civic tools available to us.
I don’t mean to defend soviet propaganda, quite the opposite. I would like to highlight that there is a lot of “embedded/institutionalised” propaganda in current society/economy - that majority understand is wrong and instinctively oppose but can’t or don’t know what to do about. And I think it has been here even during the Cold War. I would say that the propaganda now is more subtle and more sophisticated 🫣 perhaps ? It is not Kunderas unbearable lightness of being post occupation times ... when a neurosurgeon was forced to clean windows ... now, he wouldn’t even stand a chance to become a neurosurgeon.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful - but having lived in post Cold War London for the past 20 years ... there is a lot of propaganda here, too, at least, I think so. E.g. People seem to be ok and accepting that there is a dual education system (private and tax funded)... they take pride in being able to afford it and at the same time complain about the fees, the ones who can’t, are put through the mills of drudgery of British schooling system. I find it opaque, a sign just like in soviet times, of a quiet disapproval, mixed with an inability to do anything about it. Anyone with common sense, would agree that if we pay taxes, and education is a public good, it should be funded from taxes and also to ensure that teachers are not treated like customers of rich parents. That to me - is opaque and quite frankly, irrational.
I think people who never lived through soviet times will never understand it. It wasn’t a monolithic period of time. I only lived the last 9 years of it... but through my parents and grandparents, friends and family, I heard and saw in pictures the life as it was unfolding ... Soviet times for Czechoslovakia presented themselves after the 2nd world war and it was the mess of late 40s, the torture of the 50s, the exuberance of the youths of the 60s culminating in the Prague spring aug 1968, and occupation, then the normalisation of the 70s, and the majority of the 80s I can remember is a general fatigue of people who were always secretly speculating “when is it going to fall?”...I would imagine only very few people truly believed the soviet propaganda/ideology even though you had to sign papers to that effect and if you didn’t ... then that had consequences on your professional, family life Etc. propaganda whether forced onto you via declarations, or subliminal manipulation ... is unhealthy. Our societies are polarised these days up to violent clashes ... back in the 80s Czechoslovakian society was unified against “soviet” propaganda which culminated in a velvet revolution ... if you have time during the holidays ... there is a tough movie to watch “All my good countrymen” I think it captures the transition from pre-war democratic capitalist Czechoslovakia to a soviet satellite state after lines were drawn across Europe post 2nd world war - https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0063791/
My Russian acquaintances I only met in London (I never met a Russian person before while growing up in Czechoslovakia) say that we were lucky in Czechoslovakia, we had it good ... I think it is important to understand that there were different implementations of soviet/das Kapital ideology/business model in various parts over various periods since the October Revolution 1917 depending on various soviet leaders (very few were actually “Russian”).
The idea that intelligence has to do with problem-solving (and the imagining and planning that comes with it) isn't necessarily wrong, I think. What is wrong to equate 'problems' with '*logical* (i.e. discrete) puzzles'.
We humans are pretty poor at discrete logic, so we have for ages equated being smart with being good at logical reasoning. In reality — as Andy Clark has said — we're better at frisbee than at logic. Navigating a difficult, not yet known situation (both physically and socially) is the forte of our intelligence. We have taken solving logical puzzles as the measure not because we are good at it, but because we are bad at it and thus find it difficult. This is not that weird, as we are bad at it in an absolute sense, but relatively we are the species on this planet that is best at it, and that little bit of skill has made a difference (next to having relatively large brains). It has given us the reliability (and time- and spacelessness) that comes with discreteness. So, being able to do logic is a real bonus for our intelligence.
The arrival of the perfect logic machine (the Turing machine) was seen as the logical step towards superintelligence. The current neural net AIs use a different kind of mechanism, namely (analog) 'weights'. These are supposed to be not discrete (they are 'real' numbers), but as long as we approximate them with (discrete, logical) integers on Turing machines, we are fooling ourselves technically in roughly the same way that LLMs fool us by approximating meaning with token-order-predictions.
Where in humans the logic arises out of analog technology (as it does in digital processors, a transistor is a very analog thing), with digital computers we try to let analog (and even chaotic) behaviour arise out of massive amounts of discrete logic. That is fundamentally a doomed route, however if we accept the enormous inefficiency, we can push that envelope and create some useful tools. But AGI on digital technology, no way.
Note that Google has already partly given up on using 'floats', their latest Gemini uses a data type called 'int8' instead of float32, float16, or bfloat16. This probably enables them to have many more (but far less precise) parameters. In the end, the expressive power of these models is simply the number of bits of all the parameters (not the number of parameters). Many researchers assume that you need only a limited amount of bits, but that assumption is based on regularity of the analog signals, and one can seriously doubt the validity of that assumption in real biological systems.
Nice article, though. Kundera's book was indeed a wonderful read.
Erik, great article and I also enjoy your readers’ comments. I have no technical knowledge of AI, but lots of questions and concerns about--for lack of a better phrase--the human side of the equation. It’s what attracted me to your Substack.
I do retain a grasp of high school statistics, and AI seems to me to just be a super-hyped statistical model, and all models just say what they are told to say. Put me in the skeptical camp.
I’ve learned a lot in the few months I’ve been a subscriber, and look forward to your upcoming essays. My primary concern is that the AI drivers and true believers are so focused on the cool things AI can do that they have lost perspective on its impact on people and society as whole. The memoirs of the Columbia University biochemist, Erwin Chargaff, is one of the best critiques of this failure of science in general I have ever read. Chargaff was also one helluva writer, but his integrity and aloofness cost him dearly in academia. (Didn’t help that he basically accused Watson and Crick of taking credit for his groundbreaking work on the DNA double helix.)
I wish you peace and goodwill in the coming year.
This is fascinating. My understanding of kitsch might be different from yours — I think I'm more influenced by the analyses belonging to a certain tradition of art history and criticism (Greenberg et al.) — so I'm not yet sure I'm on board. Also, it just takes me a while to process. But let me say: this sent my mind in motion, and I sense there's something really interesting here, and I'm looking forward to thinking this through.
Hey Eric,
Yes I sort of pigeon-holed the term or adapted to my purposes, but it is evocative, and I want to point to issues/problems and shine a light. Tech seems to have become a worldview, and given that it's well, tech, and also intrinsically tied to commerce, it doesn't seem "deep enough." I'd love to hear your thoughts.
No one, and no critical tradition, has the final say on the concept of kitsch. So I didn't mean to suggest the concept you use doesn't merit the term 'kitsch'. I was just registering some complications in the background that I wanted to work through. After thinking it through some more, I can see the aptness of deploying that term.
According to the critical-historical tradition I've found most illuminating — and to start with the end of the story — the cultural products later termed kitsch emerged as a(n) (over-)correction or (over-)response to conceptually and theoretically glutted art that was inaccessible (for various reasons but above all for material ones) to the general public. These artifacts are formulaic and mechanically reproducible. Instead of providing emotional significance, they symbolize emotional significance. Instead of demanding to be experienced, they demand only to be acknowledged as being a cultural artifact. Instead of inviting critical reflection, they reinforce pre-existing tastes and sensibilities.
In these respects, I think, the AI Triumphalism and AI Doomerism narratives are indeed kitsch. Such a narrative is an oversimplified story meant to be reproduced and uncritically consumed by those whose pre-existing views it flatters.
It was insightful of you to bring the concept of kitsch to bear on this topic. Excellent. And thanks, as always.
So cheers to simplification - here is one 😊 Post Cold War capitalism gradually converged into a state in which majority of population own nothing or very little, with a specially talented few having access to premium properties and lifestyle funded by assets held offshore and owned by legal structures set up offshore, while not paying taxes. All this while majority of population (who can’t escape the taxes) is being told that once the AGI is “born” (which is soon - when? very soon)- we all reach “nirvana” (1 layer distilled nutshell of the narrative). I can’t help but see striking similarities with soviet communism - Deja vu 🤯. Das Kapital also had stages via which the society was supposed to reach the final blissful stage - the communism. It seems I can’t escape it in my relatively 😉short life span. (Though I look young, I am not that young!) 😊
Hi Jana,
Super insightful. The "top 1%" problem has been noted by economists over and over. The link to soviet communism is.... interesting.
Dear Erik, Merry Xmas and Happy New Year! I love reading your articles, the book, posts and I am looking forward to your new book. Those who can, must 😊 Thank you.
You're a great voice here Jana, thanks! Happy Holidays to you too!
Merry Christmas, Erik! Thank you for your great writing and pushing forward a much-needed cultural battle. I’m going to restack this fabulous post today and am looking forward to reading the extended essay. I want to connect and run a guest post/interview in my publication. There are several questions I’d like to ask you.
Hi Alberto,
Merry Christmas to you too! Thanks for the restack! Sure let me know about a guest post. The goal here is to spread the word...
Best,
Erik
Hi Erik! Happy New Year! I'd love to connect for arranging the guest post. And thank you so much for your availability, as well as for the recent recommendation of my Sub! Please drop me an email at alberto.chierici@nyu.edu.
Speak soon,
-a
Great post, Erik. I have been struggling lately with balancing technology's pervasion of everything and real human connection, especially as the former is lionized as a savior for solving all our ills. I feel like I am swimming against an unstoppable current when I gently challenge the idea that technology is THE answer.
I have been reading a lot of history and philosophy lately, and I came across the below quotes from Heidegger and his pupil Hans Jonas. Per usual, we are not the first generation to struggle with this, but what have we learned?
Jonas writes in “Toward a Philosophy of Technolgy,” “[T]he despotic dynamics of the technological movement as such, sweeping its captive movers along its breathless momentum, poses its own questions to man’s axiological conception of himself.”
Heidegger called this current state in an interview with Der Spiegel published in 1976:
“Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]—the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.”
A question I cannot solve: Can we manage (control?) how a despotic force (technology) is changing our fundamental values and our understanding of ourselves?
Have a great holiday.
Hello Eric, I’m a subscriber after coming across your very intriguing work. I believe we have much in common in our worldviews though I’m sure in some ways we may depart. I have been involved in a fifty year effort toward very intentional community that, it turns out, is only ninety minutes away from you. Around 1200 of like minded folks have determine to make human interaction the center of our lives. Someday perhaps we can meet at our number-one rated cafe in central Texas, Cafe Homestead. I wanted to drop a comment to thank you for cutting across the grain. And I agree with your latest post, though I would include going back of Comte to St. Simon and even the philosophes, especially Condorcet and Rousseau. But I’m looking forward to what you have to say about dear old Auguste, whose modesty was breathtaking. I’m a co-author of an extensive study of the social sciences and psychology that have attempted to reduce humanity to specimens subject to the scientific method. And Comte is indeed a central figure. I’m no scholar or disinterested observer but fully invested in fleshing out what I believe is the very purpose of humanity. If you’re ever going up Hwy. 6 to Dallas and pass through Waco, I would love to meet you. We are about fives miles north of Waco. My phone number is 254-717-2163. If it ever works out, give me a call and the burger will be on me. Meanwhile keep up the excellent work.
Hi Howard,
Intriguing. Waco is not far, as you point out, and I may just take you up on that! Merry Christmas!
Hello Erik, late to the party here and still trying to get a better sense of your perspectives overall but enjoying it, thank you! You might have covered this in 2024 posts that I haven’t gotten yet, but on the question of humanism I have found Iain McGilchrist’s work very inspiring and the conversations that eg Perspectiva has facilitated with him highly insightful and relevant to the topic. A previous comment also mentions Hans Jonas whose work I’ve also recognised as wonderfully meaningful!
"In every field of inquiry, it is true that all things should be made as simple as possible – but no simpler. (And for every problem that is muddled by over-complexity, a dozen are muddled by over-simplifying)."
— Sydney Harris, Chicago Daily News, Jan. 2, 1964
Excellent. I may be the most boring person you meet all year, but I guarantee the quesadilla burger will be the best.
Totality to me is when majority understand and agree that something is systemically and structurally wrong with the society and economy, but don’t know what or can’t do anything about it with the civic tools available to us.
Ay, there's the rub. I agree with this too.
I don’t mean to defend soviet propaganda, quite the opposite. I would like to highlight that there is a lot of “embedded/institutionalised” propaganda in current society/economy - that majority understand is wrong and instinctively oppose but can’t or don’t know what to do about. And I think it has been here even during the Cold War. I would say that the propaganda now is more subtle and more sophisticated 🫣 perhaps ? It is not Kunderas unbearable lightness of being post occupation times ... when a neurosurgeon was forced to clean windows ... now, he wouldn’t even stand a chance to become a neurosurgeon.
A sophisticated form of corruption and unearned privilege, corrupting the selection of the fittest.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful - but having lived in post Cold War London for the past 20 years ... there is a lot of propaganda here, too, at least, I think so. E.g. People seem to be ok and accepting that there is a dual education system (private and tax funded)... they take pride in being able to afford it and at the same time complain about the fees, the ones who can’t, are put through the mills of drudgery of British schooling system. I find it opaque, a sign just like in soviet times, of a quiet disapproval, mixed with an inability to do anything about it. Anyone with common sense, would agree that if we pay taxes, and education is a public good, it should be funded from taxes and also to ensure that teachers are not treated like customers of rich parents. That to me - is opaque and quite frankly, irrational.
I think people who never lived through soviet times will never understand it. It wasn’t a monolithic period of time. I only lived the last 9 years of it... but through my parents and grandparents, friends and family, I heard and saw in pictures the life as it was unfolding ... Soviet times for Czechoslovakia presented themselves after the 2nd world war and it was the mess of late 40s, the torture of the 50s, the exuberance of the youths of the 60s culminating in the Prague spring aug 1968, and occupation, then the normalisation of the 70s, and the majority of the 80s I can remember is a general fatigue of people who were always secretly speculating “when is it going to fall?”...I would imagine only very few people truly believed the soviet propaganda/ideology even though you had to sign papers to that effect and if you didn’t ... then that had consequences on your professional, family life Etc. propaganda whether forced onto you via declarations, or subliminal manipulation ... is unhealthy. Our societies are polarised these days up to violent clashes ... back in the 80s Czechoslovakian society was unified against “soviet” propaganda which culminated in a velvet revolution ... if you have time during the holidays ... there is a tough movie to watch “All my good countrymen” I think it captures the transition from pre-war democratic capitalist Czechoslovakia to a soviet satellite state after lines were drawn across Europe post 2nd world war - https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0063791/
My Russian acquaintances I only met in London (I never met a Russian person before while growing up in Czechoslovakia) say that we were lucky in Czechoslovakia, we had it good ... I think it is important to understand that there were different implementations of soviet/das Kapital ideology/business model in various parts over various periods since the October Revolution 1917 depending on various soviet leaders (very few were actually “Russian”).
I didn't know you were in Czechoslovakia, I was just a tourist passing through. How interesting. I'll check out the movie when I get a chance!