ANCIENT GREECE
From the Flying Robot Talon to AI Monsters
Winged Talon robot built by Hephaistos for Zeus who gifted the giant metal robot to his lover, princess Europa — in Crete. Talon protected Europa and Crete by flying over the island 3 times a day. The bull, right, was Zeus, in the form of a bull. He brought Europa to Crete. Courtesy Numismatic Museum, Athens.
Prologue: ancient and modern uses of technology
There’s a tremendous civilization gap between the robots credited to the Greek god of metallurgy Hephaistos and to the robots of the 21st century powered by artificial Intelligence. But the idea remains the same. How to imitate the gods. The Greeks had several gods, supreme beings in power, intelligence, beauty and goodness. Hephaistos was one of those gods.
Hephaistos: copper coin, Malaga, Spain, late 3rd century BCE. Courtesy Numismatic Collection, Alpha Bank, Athens, Greece.
Hephaistos was a perfect metallurgist and engineer. S. A. Paipetis, modern scientist and former mechanical engineering professor at the University of Patras, studied the technologies of Hephaistos in the works of Homer. He concluded there was evidence of advanced technologies in the Homeric epics. He calls them “miraculous conceptions… ideas [which] pre-existed in the thoughts of Mycenean Greeks for almost three millennia before their appearance in the modern world” (The Unknown Technology in Homer, Springer, 2010, p. 118).
The reappearance of those advanced technologies in our times serves a different purpose. The public good dominated ancient Greek science and technology. Now it is mostly private interests and money. No wonder the writing and talk about AI is abstract, illogical, political, economic and self-serving.
Corporate chiefs who fund “data centers,” labyrinths floating in billions of gallons of water, don’t exactly care for diminishing water, much less for the future of America, humanity, civilization and the planet. Their sole purpose is the generation of enough electricity to fuel their AI machines.
AI: Not intelligence but military engineering
These AI machines pretend to imitate human voice and even human calculation. And despite the name, Artificial Intelligence, the AI machines are artificial but not intelligent. Intelligence is almost a divine gift of reason and knowledge wrapped by wisdom, justice and the good and the beautiful. These virtues cannot be grafted onto machines.
However, AI machines have the technical and engineering skills of absorbing enormous amounts of “data” from books, reports, videos, podcasts, television interviews and news. They store and regurgitate those mountains of information for answering questions with human voice-like qualities. They also display their linguistic training by translating texts from foreign languages. Their real purpose, however, is war. Their machine nature glows by using satellite data for guiding warplanes, warships, drones and other weapons to be more destructive and lethal.
Propaganda for political control
Corporate owners of AI technologies are well aware of the military dangers of their creations. They never talk about that. But they take the easy way out, that of making money and gaining political influence from their invisible monsters, which they peddle as a welfare achievement. After all, AI is being employed in iPhones, computers, translation and “assistance” it provides to those ignorant or stupid enough to engage in “conversation” with machines or chatboxes. But the overall impact is consequential, especially on the young. These AI machines, said Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, “are going to subsume us.”
Tech executives want Americans to accept them as their lords behind the throne of the “president / unelected monarch.” Nevertheless, they “know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived,” said Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties. Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities. There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information,” Wieseltier said. “Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.”
True. Dowd and Wieseltier she quotes are denouncing the tech industry for systematic deception and subversion of our democratic civilization, disrupting education from a sophisticated process of learning literature, art, poetry, history, philosophy and science from studying texts and vigorous discussion to a routine mechanical pushing of buttons for easy answers. Such a transition eliminates the complexity, ambiguity, metaphor, satire, satisfaction, pleasure, and beauty of learning. This explains the “warnings” of a few tech executives who even ask the federal government to “regulate” their industry.
Robots, not workers
Yet, at the same time, the industry is doing more with its mechanical invention of man-like robots governed by AI. Companies like Meta already have been firing thousands of workers and replacing them with robots. What if this trend continues? What’s the future of millions of workers? And these workers, in America and other high tech countries, will they stand still while their future disappears in front of their eyes?
The AI owners are politely issuing warnings of this bleak future. Elon Musk, for example, is proposing: “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI / robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.”
Universal High Income is a timely idea. But its supporter, Musk, is a billionaire of billionaires, the antithesis of equity and justice. In the beginning of the second Trump administration, Musk acted like a co-ruler of America. He smashed government agencies supposedly to improve “efficiency,” but in reality, he was crippling government regulation of the industry. Second, he owns an electric car company, but he has been a great supporter of Trump who is saying climate change is a hoax. And third, in his proposal for the government to send monthly checks to workers replaced by robots, he left himself and other billionaires out of a “deal” to help workers. He said nothing about taxing the billionaires to fund their victims. Why not? After all, Musk and his billionaire colleagues make money from the AI monster in the room. They are responsible for the tremendous social upheaval their robots are creating.
With a living monthly stipend to all workers, can we assume no complaints from them? Why should they complain being made into nothing? Staying at home watching television? With all the “free” time in the world.
Epilogue: phasing out AI, nuclear weapons and fossil fuels
It took about 5,000 years for the advanced technologies of ancient Greeks to take the form of robots guided by AI. Only fragments of the written Greek record survived the Christianization of Hellas, barbarian invasions and foreign occupations. Yet the approximate 1 percent that survived triggered the Renaissance among the Arabs in the 8th century and the more lasting in the 15th century Italian states of Florence, Venice, Padua, Rome. From the 15th century till now in the 21st century, we have had the calamitous 20th century world wars, the cold war and the continuing strife and wars. In addition, the Greek-based Western civilization has gradually moved away from the lessons of Greek history and civilization. Instead of expanding the inherited virtues and science from the Greeks, Westerners adopted war for problem solving, hence the immersion into fossil fuels for energy and the development of Democritos’ Atomic Theory into the atomic / nuclear bomb.
AI technologies were inevitable. But, regrettably, like fossil fuels they have not served the interest of the people, much less those vital ecological needs of the planet.
Time has come to understand the AI technologies for what they are. They are assistants to making wars more ferocious, thus bringing humanity to the brink. We need to phase them out together with nuclear weapons and fossil fuels.
No comments:
Post a Comment