Politicians have forgotten what it means to be human
A puzzling story broke last week in which an engineer working for Google claimed that one of its AI systems had achieved sentience. The engineer, Blake Lemoine, was put on administrative leave after revealing details of a conversation he’d had with the AI.
There are multiple problems with the report but most stem from the language we use. Just as “administrative leave” is usually shorthand for “about to be given the chop” (a confidentiality agreement had probably been broken) then so too does the term “AI” mean something entirely different to how it’s commonly used. None of the “AI” in your AI-powered cars, TVs, and fridges, is even close to what we mean when we usually think about AI. It is unlikely that any man-made system has achieved even a modicum of sentience or will do so in the conceivable future. That’s not to say they won’t achieve the appearance of sentience but that is something quite different, akin to a magician who achieves the appearance of levitation without leaving the ground. The correct (but slightly dull) term here would be “machine learning” to reflect how a system uses a huge data set of real language to mimic human responses. Given language and cognition are closely related, a large corpus of language is the product of conscious thought, but it is very different to a thinking, feeling machine.
The only truly sentient actor in the story is Blake Lemoine himself who has been largely overlooked in all the hype. Nobody really wants to know more about poor Blake, his motivations, interest, or even the thoughts of somebody who had earned a place inside Google’s labs. All the excitement is focused on a pseudo-human speaking a form of language compiled from a pre-digested corpus of text. Being human just isn’t as interesting and humans are beginning to look increasingly irrelevant in these depersonalised times.
Take, for example, the news that airlines are cancelling flights in the face of a crisis in the industry. It means misery for many travellers, but such is the way of a world economy that now alienates as much as it enables. Yet at the same time, a company called Bakkafrost, the owner of the Scottish Salmon Company, has now bought a Boeing 757 to transport fish across the Atlantic to arrive fresh on the plates of Manhattan diners. So, yes, that’s right. Fish, naturally equipped to cross the Atlantic, will now be provided with their own aircraft. What next? Providing ladders to giraffes, hard hats to tortoises, or jet-powered roller skates to cheetahs? Canadian lobsters are already being flown to China which is probably more than you can say about Canadians.
AI, fish, lobsters… And then there’s the Insult Comic Dog.
Over in the US, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (along with his owner, the comedian, Robert Smigel), has been arrested and, according to some right-wing outlets, been charged with “insurrection” after allegedly trespassing on Capitol Hill. At the same time, Trump the Insult Comic President continues to evade justice. Wednesday’s January 6th hearing witnessed testimony from an election worker, Shaye Moss, whose life has been destroyed by Trump and his followers. She has been accused of being at the centre of election fraud after conspiracy theorists circulated a video from the vote count in which her mother is seen passing Moss something. Rudy Giuliani had claimed it was a USB drive. As Moss described it to the committee, her mother had passed her a “ginger mint”.
In other words, her life and the life of her elderly mother have been destroyed because they shared a sweet tooth. Two ordinary people casually consumed by politics and, no doubt soon to be forgotten as the news cycle turns over. It would all seem so perverse that humans could become so irrelevant, yet here in the UK we now have rail strikes affecting millions. And for what purpose?
It’s the big mystery of the day. Was Emily Thornberry on the money when she claimed on Channel 4 News that the strike follows the “wedge” strategy that Lynton Crosby advocated in Australia? It would be a staggering work of political genius should anybody in the Conservative Party ever wish to take credit for the plan. Perhaps in the future, some biography of Boris Johnson’s administration will tell the true story. For the moment they might deny welcoming strike action, though Tory MPs have not done such a good job of hiding their pleasure at the result, which has left Keir Starmer being pulled apart by both wings of his party. The Tories, meanwhile, get a chance to change the political narrative in time for this week’s byelections. Suddenly Labour, out of power for 12 years, is being held accountable for problems in the country. Purely as strategy, it’s spectacular. World-beating even.
Yet a darker reading of events would consider the misery inflicted on the British public should these strikes be motivated by politics. There was considerable hand-wringing by MPs across social media on Wednesday, claiming how the strike hurt everybody from students, nurses, teachers, army veterans, and even Ukrainian refugees who had escaped war only to run into a one-day rail strike. Certainly, the strikes are either selfish or selfless depending on who you believe. If they are simply about wages at a time of a cost-of-living crisis, then well-paid train drivers will earn little sympathy. If it’s about minimum wage workers asking why companies are paying out huge dividends after considerable government subsidies during the pandemic, then it’s reasonable to ask why state intervention is fine if it helps corporations but not okay if it helps workers. If the strikes are about cost-cutting at Network Rail that could undermine safety measures, then we have another issue entirely.
What is clear, however, is that the strikes are uniformly bad news for Labour which lacks the discipline to avoid the traps being set for it. Yet what would it also say about a government and a Prime Minister who would happily engineer union discontent? Is considerable misery for millions of people worth it to score political points and ensure they stay in office?
Unlikely, you might say. But under this Prime Minister and this fading government, it feels more than possible. It feels entirely likely as rumours persist that the next election will be fought on divisive topics such as gay and trans rights. Over in America where the ramifications of another populist are still being felt, Rudy Giuliani has been quoted as saying “party before country”. He might as well have said “politics before people” because there is something increasingly missing in the culture on both sides of the Atlantic – and that’s what it means to be human.
Politicians need to remember that like Blake Lemoine’s sentient machine, meaning is derived from humans. They forget that fact at their peril and Boris Johnson is playing a high-risk game should the public start to believe that these strikes are manufactured and that he really doesn’t have their interests at heart.