Objective Reality Decay
(on artificial intelligence and fake news)
The concept of artifice assumes a privileged human agent and posits humankind as above and beyond the natural world, yet the cascading crises of the Anthropocene prove we cannot disengage from the Earth without consequence: we have co-evolved with our environment. One consequence of our material culture is a compounding irrelevance of all natural/artificial dichotomies. As intelligent systems emerge from the primordial datascape that is human civilization’s collective product, we must avoid a preemptive othering of post-human superintelligence if we are to assure the sustainability of our collective civilizational project. Once we recognize the coming “AI revolution” as one of degree rather than of kind, see it as an evolution of the systems of communication, commerce, and community we have constructed and cultivated as a civilization, we might better prepare for the impacts we’ll soon experience as individual subjects and communities, and realize our agency in directing those changes.
The free flow of information in our technologically-connected world has led to a breakdown of traditional systems of hierarchy, as long-venerated arbiters of truth have been abandoned in favor of peer-to-peer networks of mutual trust. When technologically-augmented social graphs can act as infrastructure and milieu for the dissemination and evolution of sophisticated propaganda, it should come as no great shock that the very existence of an objective reality can become a subject of debate.
If there is no agreed-upon objective truth, then we all inhabit a gradient field of intersubjective realities, where shared in-group beliefs become self-reinforcing in feedback loops that cause the field to boil with discontinuous nodes of local truth, whose tribal believers reject anything beyond their own radius of intensity. If even the baseline tenets of physics rely on faith, then truths might be fruitfully classified in a Borgesian taxonomy: those that are true; salacious ones; the easily-disproven; catfacts; the ones on this list; gut feelings; those that are actionable; fake news. This sorting of truths is already effected by algorithms: viral truths propagate widely, substantiating vectors that cut through Noosphere ecologies, their Dawkinsian fitness sparking firework flashes with lasting fallout; others gain steady credence through carefully-considered references and recommendations. Who’s to say that the strongly-held belief of any given actor in this collective consciousness is not locally-true, given the topological position of the node in the network?
While technology allows us to connect, and collaborate as never before, our politics seem destined to drive people apart. Yet a functioning, sustainable, civil society depends as much on shared concepts of reality as on shared physical space and trustworthy channels of communication. The conceit of an objective reality remains deeply appealing for those of us invested in scientific proof, technological development, and moral justice. As we human subjects continue to grapple with the implications of artificial intelligence, we should consider if we are already agents of a networked super-human intelligence. If so, this networked trust-chain of intersubjective realities could become the primary front in the war against civilizational collapse and cosmic irrelevance.
4/20/2018
