Random Acts of Intelligence

We are all worms.

I’m reading a book by Winston Churchill and it is reminding me how much we Yanks don’t really mind what Europe is all about. In some way we have convinced ourselves that there is nothing in Europe’s past that could possibly resemble our own future. I’m beginning to think that’s dangerous and wrong. I was provoked by the following passage. Who the hell was John Morely? A Victorian of his era.

Englishmen felt sure that they had reached satisfactory solutions upon the material problems of life. Their political principles had stood every test. All that was required was to apply them more fully. Liberty of the Press and of the person, freedom of trade, extension of the franchise, the perfecting of representative Government and of the Parliamentary system, the sweeping away of privileges and abuses—all to be peacefully and constitutionally accomplished—were the tasks before them. Statesmen, writers, philosophers, scientists, poets, all moved forward in hope and buoyancy, in sure confidence that much was well, and that all would be better. {96} The tasks were inspiring and the risks were small. In a land,
‘Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent,’
there was an appointed place for the active Radical reformer. He need not fear the repression of autocratic power, nor the violence of revolutionary success. The world it seemed had escaped from barbarism, superstition, aristocratic tyrannies and dynastic wars. There were plenty of topics to quarrel about, but none that need affect the life or foundations of the State. A varied but select society, observing in outward forms a strict, conventional morality, advanced its own culture, and was anxious to spread its amenities ever more widely through the nation. A sense of safety, a pride in the rapidly-opening avenues of progress, a confidence that boundless blessings would reward political wisdom and civic virtue, was the accepted basis upon which the eminent Victorians lived and moved. Can we wonder? Every forward step was followed by swiftly-reaped advantages: the wider the franchise, the more solid the State; the fewer the taxes, the more abundant the revenue: the freer the entry of goods into the island, the more numerous and richer were the markets gained abroad. To live soberly then, to walk demurely in the sunshine of fortune, to shun external adventures, to avoid entangling commitments, to enforce frugality upon Governments, to liberate the native genius of the country, to let wealth fructify in the pockets of the people, to open a career broadly and freely to the talents of every class, these were the paths so clearly marked, so smooth, so easy of access, and it was wise and pleasant to tread them.

Churchill, Winston S.. Great Contemporaries (Winston S. Churchill Essays and Other Works) (p. 96). (Function). Kindle Edition.

All of our vibes are essentially that Victorian. Because we all believe that sooner or later, Artificial Intelligence is going to be on our side. But we forget who we humans are. We’re the ones who effed it up in the first place.

Community-Americans
We have enough people to have enough people for any mindful or mindless constituency accelerated by the kind of computer mediated intimacy that makes us believe what’s on our minds is significant - whether or not we do anything. Porn is like that. Group chat on Signal about bombing Houthis is like that. Itch.io fan fiction is like that. Bluesky is like that. Everything is like that online because we have delegitimized ‘nation’ and legitimized ‘community’. As if we all lived next door to Westboro Baptist Church or Elon Musk. Don’t just stand there, do something.

Option A: I don’t have to do something because my community knows better.
Option B: Your static complacency is the problem. I’m gonna fix it. Hold my beer.

You name the problem, Americans don’t like the spectrum. They like the exemplars. We want champions of the Special Olympics. Informed, by whatever means necessary there is always a Call to Action. That’s the bottom line. Whatever exists out there that we haven’t grasped, mastered and bent to our will is considered worthless. Americans don’t want to exist somewhere among the 50 shades of purple. We love our binaries. Even the non-binaries hate the normies.

We are weird and wrong, but absolutely not so in a predictable fashion. Predicting is what we always get wrong despite our Kantian best categorical imperatives. I’m old enough to remember how we have hopped skipped and jumped from Kettering’s GM to NASA’s rockets to Volcker’s Fed to Chiat’s ads, to Pixar’s films. There’s always something that proves America knows best. Depending on who you ask, we’re back to rockets again. We just get itchy about how many queens we can keep on the chessboard at once. We expect our statesmen, writers, philosophers, scientists, poets, all to move forward in hope and buoyancy. We call that Western Civilization and somewhere in that formulation is the key to the future. But not for our nation, but for the World Community. We Are the World, remember? We are the ones who make a brighter day so let’s start giving.

Bigger Than Woke
If you ask me, I’d say that it is the failure of nationalism, it’s the choking sound attended by the phrase ‘one nation, under God, indivisible’. There’s the rub. Nobody is so worried about liberty and justice for all. We all still want that, but we’re too focused on skipping forward to those ends without any concert about the means. We refuse to believe that great minds don’t all think alike. Your community must think differently than my community. Sooner or later we accept that there can only be one path to liberty and justice for all, because of that community over there still has grievances it means our community hasn’t fulfilled its obligations. And so we still go around in our rose colored glasses asking what kind of American are you?

Community disputes

What’s key to remember here is that Artificial Intelligence, is nothing like Kettering’s GM. It’s more like Colt’s revolver or Wilkinson’s sword. It’s going to get out everywhere, and for a while its ineptness will make us skeptical. On the other hand its ubiquity will give us confidence. The same kind of confidence that has destroyed the traveling salesman. That by the way was the confidence in the radio and subsequently the television pitchman. I grew up learning about Kettering’s GM from Cal Worthington and his dog Spot. Your mileage may vary. Ultimately AI’s capabilities will want us to ‘keep it out of the wrong hands’. All of our hands are the wrong hands because we think it’s going to give us superpowers.

That’s the wrong way to think about something ubiquitous. Consider the vote. All of us having it and using it judiciously without our lives being sucked into the vortex of a eternal partisanship - that’s the power. In short, it will just be used like any other power. It will be in the hands of rivals, adversaries and enemies and it will make us search desperately for … communities. Alliances, tribes, anarcho-syndicalist communes that take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. Isn’t that what we’ve always had? What can you do executive officer 47?

Consider the internet. It is now ubiquitous and monetized in ways we never could predict either before or after the dotcom bust. Is it an information superhighway? Yes to be sure. How much of that information did we actually need? Enough to question our old confidences. How much intelligence will artificial intelligence give all of us? Enough to make us feel like we’re smarter than we actually are, as we have intelligent conversations with some entity cooked up to subvert our access to literature and relevant facts, let alone wisdom. I miss Cal Worthington. He was no billionaire, but he did own a lot full of new cars and he invited me to go see for myself.

We used to understand cars and people.

I think the most prophetic aphorism I’ve ever heard is that ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’. Liberty, freedom, power, fame, pleasure, prestige, it’s all here if you can fumble your way into it. We’re not living under the absolute monarchy of Queen Victoria. We cannot afford to act like Victorians. This world is too chaotic, but we still like to draw straight lines between ourselves.

And yet if we played America like the instrument it is supposed to be, with all ten fingers instead of banging it against the wall as if it were a drumstick, then its decentralization and separation of powers might get us through the most chaotic of times. The other [yes, technical] aphorism that still works is:

Decentralize until it breaks. Centralize until it works.

We’re starting to recognize how this house divided against itself us on the verge of losing some of its ceiling beams. It doesn’t matter that it was the Progressive woke mind virus that manifested. It doesn’t matter that it was Fauci’s Regime of Truth. It doesn’t matter that it was some of us decided to forgot what a woman is. It doesn’t matter that one candidate got bloodied by a bullet. Ignorance, violent crime, corruption, and the very Devil himself are nothing new. It’s just unevenly distributed. It’s not all in the champions corner, nor the challenger’s corner. It’s in the details.

So whatever kind of intelligence gets us off the floor, its not likely to be coordinated until we take it for granted and make it easier for the middle class to benefit, as a nation. How many years after the Model T did the Interstate Highway System come to fruition and give us road trips? How many years after Ben Franklin’s key did we get the lightbulb and finally the Tennessee Valley Authority?

Expect progress to be sporadic and random, like the discovery of Viagra. That’s the way things happen in America. All of our great minds don’t think alike. They still need the freedom to. They’ll eventually coalesce into national unity, but today we are still too decentralized. Either way you cannot expect progress, order and civil unity as if we lived under a Blue Queen or a Red Queen for that matter.

Victorians understood all the rules.

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Beware the Meta
One of the things I have tried to never forget, along with the power of nuclear weapons and the abandoned process of Atoms for Peace is the collapse of leverage in 2008 and the failure of the Savings & Loan industry before that, and the wage and price controls even before that. All this affected our economy more than it should have because too much of our economy was the meta-economy of finance. I remember having been at Xerox during the days when VanKampen Merritt was their most profitable property. They took their eye off the copier ball and got into finance because, why the hell not? So finance became more important than manufacturing and Japan Inc came in and ate Xerox’ lunch. What kind of engineer wants to work at a company that has sold out engineering. Obviously, Apple went all in for computer engineering.

If you watch Formula One racing as well as the Netflix drama about Formula One, you’ll come to understand an even more abbreviated form of fandom. You can simply follow the post-facto manufactured drama of the Netflix producers - and even call yourself informed. Following the meta is an anti-pattern for success, but it generates plenty revenue in the mass market. You could say that’s reasonable because none of us are ever going to be in that ultra-specialized ultra-competitive arena. Yet so long as there is mass market drama, the right kind of scandal could be as lucrative as the destruction of any competitive field would be.

I have come to learn that we are adjusting our expectations of everyone in every position, and we are so accustomed to that meta-game, that we allow it to outweigh the substance of accomplishment. It’s like the insecure mother who cannot stand the tone of her children’s correct explanations. It’s quite enough to generate opportunities for people who otherwise would have no basis to compete on the substance of the game. It enables asymmetrical warfare. That’s why we have to consider how the building codes of bathrooms might be overturned - the spirit of the law is weak.

I say that AI is a meta-game invented by a community in the same way that I think Galbraith saw the financial community.

“The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud.

The wheel of financial progress revolves around a fixed center. It is the old idea that money can be made by not working. The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.”

Churchill’s Quote
We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.
—Winston Churchill to Violet Asquith, 1906

There’s not much a glow worm can illuminate, but he can at least glow even if that power is not his to switch on or off. So when we get grumpy about ‘under God’ we are exhibiting the hubris that our souls are of our own creation. Yet do we truly understand our own luminescence? Other things besides us bear light. Our own torches have burned witches too. Perhaps we should simply let our souls glow, little lights. It may be all we have.