First I know I didn't give you the honor yet of giving the reason of the moniker Jungle Philosopher but that shall come in due time, it shall wait while this idea for this post is fresh in my brain.
The theme, illusion of power came into my head when I watched Jurassic Park (1993) again last month, a movie which in spite of its great innovations for that time in special effects, it still used an ancient technique called dialog (not the annoying popups which bothers us with useless informations) and storytelling to captivate the spectators by making them think, unlike the modern visual rapes without any content. A certain dialog between the characters Ellie (Laura Dern) and Hammond (Richard Attenborough), amazed me because of its brilliance and relevance to our time:
Ellie Sattler: Malcom's okay for now. I gave him a shot of morphine
John Hammond: They'll be fine. Who better to get the children through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert? You know the first attraction I built when I came down from Scotland … was a flea circus. Petticoat Lane. Really … quite wonderful. We had, uh … a wee trapeze, a merry-go…carousel. Heh. And a see-saw. They all moved, motorized, of course, but people would say they could see the fleas. "No, I can see the fleas. Mummy, can't you see the fleas?" Clown fleas, highwire fleas and fleas on parade. But with this place … I wanted to give them something that wasn't an illusion. Something that was real. Something they could see, and touch. An aim not devoid of merit.
Ellie Sattler: But you can't think through this one, John. You have to feel it.
John Hammond: You're right, you're absolutely right. Hiring Nedry was a mistake, that's obvious. We're over-dependent on automation, I can see that now. Now, the next time everything's correctable. Creation is an act of sheer will. Next time it'll be flawless.
Ellie Sattler: It's still the flea circus. It's all an illusion.
John Hammond: When we have control again–
Ellie Sattler: You never had control! That's the illusion! I was overwhelmed by the power of this place. But I made a mistake, too. I didn't have enough respect for that power and it's out now. The only thing that matters now are the people we love. Alan and Lex and Tim … John, they're out there where people are dying. So … [takes a spoonful of ice cream] it's good.
I took the liberty of boldfacing the relevant parts. Of course you might already know what is the relevance today. No, nobody found out yet how to bring back the dinossaurs, but the automation of today is way beyond the one in Jurassic Park®. Big data allows machines to make predictions on human behaviour that nobody could ever make. And automation/AI is becoming so efficient that in first time it may really eliminate many job posts and leave a mass of unemployed people. And there is already trader-bots and microtrading exchange much more money in fraction of seconds than their human counterparts.
That's the power of automation and AI and it is very real. But wasn't the title "Illusion of Power"? Yes power is real my child (paraphrasing Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars®), the illusion is that this power can be controlled, that we have power over power. The John Hammonds of today are entrepreneurs in the field of machine learning, prominently the ones from Alphabet (mainly Google) and Facebook. Make no mistake, Google and Facebook systems can control what you will see next, they are programmed to maximize your engagement, ie. screen time. But nobody elaborated this concept better than Jaron Lanier, in his books and videos he explains in detail how Google and Facebook algorithms manipulate their respective network's users. Do you see the power? Of controlling the attention of more than a billion of users and influence them? Enormous isn't it?
And who is on control of it? Well Alphabet and Facebook shareholders surely profit from it. But is profit from the same of being in control? Obviously not. No wonder Jaron Lanier call these massive big-data centers servers as "siren servers". In analogy to the creatures from Greek mithology that had an alluring aura, tempted the unaware sailors and then drawn them to the depths. The wise Marcus Aurelius also said: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Howcome that the owners of these companies don't control this power? Well the reason is in the very technology they use, machine learning. Will it learn maybe to destroy humanity? Unlikely. But it does optimize very well the user-engagement. Through the mapping and correlation of massive amounts of data generated by millions of users in long time. They work very well and nobody knows why, and if they don't work as expected, guess what? Nobody knows. Actually I oversimplified it, the engineers know the principles of machine learning and the statistics behind it, The problem is that the data is so humongous and the calculations are so many that is nearly impossible for a person to pinpoint where an error might occur in the data or code. So in short they don't have control. And this power has backfired on their wielders several times. It happened once that the revenue stream from AdSense completely stopped, also in the High Frequency Trading, there was a flash-crash in 2010. All due to the high unpredictability of this technology.
Also in Jurassic Park the character Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum), says "life finds a way", indeed nature is relentless and it is the true and ultimate owner of all power, the same character also talks about chaos theory. The system theory has (differential) equations which are very descriptive of many systems dynamics and interactions, the problem is that all of these equations require initial conditions and a small change in that completely changes the result, that is what is called chaos, and it is also behind the entropy law. From this massive system called Nature, our technology only borrows its power. We can reduce the entropy somewhere like in a CPU, but for achieving this low entropy we increase the overall entropy in the system, which in case of data centers or PCs is just the waste heat blown out by the fans in the form of hot air. Botton-line, we can control entropy but that comes at a high energy cost.
So is technology going to destroy us? No our vanity and self-indulgence will as it always did before us for the illusion comes from vanity and pride. Brilliant minds that could be researching much more useful technologies, cure of diseases are now researching on how to get most clicks from the users, or how to imprison the minds of the social networks users. On this subject I refer again to Jaron Lanier nobody (that I know and published a book) elaborated better how the social networks and engagement algorithms are backfiring to humanity in general.
