In AI We Trust

Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms

Helga Nowotny

• Verlag: Polity
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509548828
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI – and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us.

At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care.

As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.

1
Life in the Digital Time Machine

Between the mud and the sky: the birth of the digital Anthropocene

Beginnings are always difficult to pin down, especially when several strands come together. Human-induced global warming has convinced us that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The designation remains unofficial as long as the required evidence for a ‘Golden Spike’ has not been approved by the official gatekeeper of geological time, the International Union of the Geological Sciences. The origins and scientific definition of the Anthropocene may still be unclear, but it is a juncture characterized by the entanglement of human activities on the human timescale with other temporalities. These include evolutionary timescales with different rates of species going extinct and new forms of life emerging, some of them created by us. We find ourselves confronted with the complexity of ecological timescales and ultimately with cosmic timescales subject to the laws of a still expanding universe. The Anthropocene thus contains a multitude of temporalities that reveal traces of the past, while pointing towards a future that harbours a vast space of possibilities. As I will argue, these temporalities also include digital time.

The Anthropocene leads us to reconsider our existence in a present that many find profoundly disconcerting. But its fuzzy origins reveal more than the ruins of a past that haunts us, and offer more than a constant reminder of the over-exploitation of natural resources that has led to dire warnings about future environmental collapse. The beginnings take us back to the radioactive traces left in the rocks at US nuclear test sites. First carried out overground in the 1940s, with massive radioactive fall-out, the tests were later moved underground. Now they offer evidence for the ‘Golden Spike’, the stratigraphic traces required to mark a new geological epoch. These developments led to the twin birth of nuclear power and the power that computation would assume in the digital age. They were enacted by the initial explosion of the atomic bomb and the proliferation of nuclear weapons that followed. The digital part proliferated as well. It has become ubiquitous and is now associated with with Artificial Intelligence, a term coined by Norbert Wiener in the mid-1950s.

George Dyson grew up on the premises of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), in Princeton, New Jersey, and has retraced what he calls the birth of the digital universe in the form of an origin story: ‘There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky’ (Dyson 2012: ix). Origin stories are not easily translatable into precisely dated historical contexts. Should we identify the birth of the digital age with the brilliant insights of a young mathematician who in 1936 published his paper ‘On Computational Numbers’, introducing the formal hypothetical devices that would become known as Turing machines? Already in the seventeenth century Leibniz was firmly convinced that everything was calculable based on the dual principle of 0 and 1, and built a machine running on this principle in 1685. Others, like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century, were to follow. But it was in the mid-1940s at the IAS that a small group of physicists, mathematicians, biologists and engineers designed, built and programmed an electronic digital computer. Alan Turing’s originality had provided the mathematical-logical spark that established the decisive link between code, now called software, and the arduous work of building physical machines, the hardware, that would run at electronic speed (Dyson 2012). It was this combination that led to the birth of the digital universe and, with it, of digital time.

But there is more to the origin story. The moment the digital universe and, implicitly, digital time were created eclipses the presence of human beings. Between the mud and the sky, humans occupy a middle ground. Humans built and deployed the atomic bomb. The scientific research and engineering efforts at the IAS in the 1940s were intimately connected with this historical moment of immense significance. The development of the bomb in Los Alamos was part of the wartime effort against Nazi Germany and its allies. It turned out to be instrumental for the advancement of electronic digital computers. Fission reactions had to be simulated accurately, which required computational aids to replace the work done manually by human ‘computers’. When the first computational problem was run in 1945 on the newly designed and built Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, ENIAC, it was for the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Half a century later, the late Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen’s suggestion of naming the onset of a new geological epoch ‘the Anthropocene’ became widely adopted. Long-term observations, measurements and modelling show the lasting impact that humans exert on the earth system, including its atmosphere and climate. The concept of the Anthropocene registers the dire state of the planet and represents a call for urgent action. On the middle ground between mud and sky, humans struggle to make their precarious living torn between the two. Having over-exploited the natural environment we now feel threatened by the consequences, which come with increasing frequency in the form of floods and droughts, melting arctic ice and the massive loss of biodiversity. Undeterred, we continue to reach out to the skies. Emboldened by the technologies at our disposal, we venture into outer space, exploring potential escape routes for the time when life on planet earth will become unliveable, all the while struggling to cope with the challenges we face right now.

Since 1947 the members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an association founded after the war by physicists involved in building the bomb, have released an annual report that is represented in the form of the Doomsday Clock, as a metaphor for how close humanity has moved towards a global catastrophe as a result of unchecked scientific and technological advances. Every year, the finger on the clock moves dangerously closer to midnight. It is no longer only the possibility of humanity annihilating itself that keeps the finger moving. Climate change and the collapse of vital parts of the earth system are now at the forefront of the impending catastrophe, while the global population continues to rise. For the first time ever, the metaphorical clock’s time has fallen below the two-minute limit. Since 27 January 2021, the day of the last official announcement, it stands at 100 seconds before midnight.

Today, digital technologies are rapidly transforming our economies and societies. They are officially hailed by the European Union, among others, as the engine for a programmatic ‘digital transition’. They have also led to a considerable expansion of the military arsenal to which a growing number of geopolitical players have access. The middle ground between mud and the sky continues to be contested over spheres of geopolitical influence, be it claims for uninhabited islands in the Pacific, for jungle patches occupied by insurgents who refuse to recognize a central government, or over access to resources in outer space. Even if the nuclear threat has lost the imminence it had during the Cold War, it has not vanished. It has merely receded into the background due to proliferation and dispersal. Meanwhile, humanity appears to be moving towards digitally advanced autonomous weapons systems, with drones already flying over enemy territory equipped with instrumentation that enables them to hit self-selected targets with precision.

From around the 1950s, the space between mud and sky, the middle ground inhabited by us, underwent a remarkable convergence of two large-scale developments that had not previously been seen as connected. Changes in human activities started to correlate strongly with changes observed in the earth system. With the enormous surge in economic growth – closely linked to the rise of GDP, population growth and primary energy use – many associated human activities began to show a strong correlation with the key indicators of changes being observed in the earth system, including greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, ocean acidification and a host of other indicators that are now displayed and continuously updated on a planetary dashboard. The phenomenon is known as the Great Acceleration. What began some seven decades ago shows no signs of slowing down (Steffen et al. 2015; McNeill and Engelke 2015).

This co-occurrence of environmental transformation and innovative human activity appears not to be confined to the Great Acceleration. Much further back in time similar patterns have been observed, although on a much smaller scale. Historical records based on data that stretches back thousands of years, patchy and deficient as they are, show striking correlations between periods of major climatic change and bursts of innovative human activities. One hypothesis is that a high variability of climate selected for humans who had the capacity to adapt, either by speciation, migration or developing new tools (Slezak 2015).

In 1955, John von Neumann, the mathematician and engineer at the forefront of building the first operable computer in Princeton, wrote a brief essay with the startling title: ‘Can We Survive Technology?’ He referred to the most radical advanced technologies of his day, the atomic bomb and nuclear energy, and argued that with them the acceleration of technological change met its natural limit – the size of the earth. During the industrial age technological progress had been extended geographically, but with the advances in nuclear technology the propensity to evolve towards ever larger-scale operations and to extend spatially was halted. As most timescales are fixed by human reaction times, habits and other factors, technological acceleration, von Neumann argued, was no longer possible due to the heightened risk of mutual nuclear destruction on the part of the two superpowers. This induced the instability that worried him most and which, so he argued, had ended the further spatial expansion of technology (von Neumann 1955).

With the benefit of hindsight, it is a remarkable irony that one of the pioneers of computerization and digitalization did not foresee the enormous impact the new digital technologies would have through the widespread and decentralized diffusion of computers; that a technology he had helped to create would overcome the innate temporal limitations of humans, and that digital technologies in the form of satellite communication would expand the scope and scale of monitoring and surveillance of the finite earth. The transformation of the world by digital technologies has led to a compression of time, while the spatial reach within such compressed timescales has expanded. However, von Neumann’s diagnosis that the ultimate limit for technology is the finiteness of the earth still stands, at least for now (Fleurbaey et al. 2018).

While the official timekeepers continue to deliberate over whether the geological traces in rocks or lake sediments resulting from human activities are sufficient to recognize the Anthropocene, the enormous challenges that come with the sustainability crisis have been summarized by the United Nations in seventeen ‘sustainable development goals’ (SDGs). The time pressure to ward off further deterioration, and possible collapse, is enormous. The intricate interconnections between the digital transition and the green transition are still not sufficiently recognized, but novel solutions may emerge by adopting more systemic, holistic and integrative approaches to bring them together (Renn 2020). This will require taking into account evolutionary perspectives and their timescales as well. The manifold interactions of the earth system with our activities are crucial for life on the planet – the only environmental niche the human species has for a population that will soon reach 8 billion inhabitants.

To find viable solutions without continuing unsustainable resource exploitation will require some kind of symbiotic relationship between the human-constructed environmental niche in which we live and the life-supporting systems of the Anthropocene. Many living organisms are known to alter their local environment and biologists argue that niche construction is an evolutionary process. The human species, just like octopuses or worms, has also been engaged in niche construction, adapting its behaviour to changes in the ecological conditions and in order to co-exist with other species (Laubichler and Renn 2015). In the epoch of the Anthropocene our niche construction is increasingly pursued with the help of digital technologies. It is nested in the natural environment but equipped with a vast computational infrastructure that enables continued monitoring through the collection of data, ranging from the flows of energy and people in megacities to equipping jellyfish with tiny sensors to measure ocean acidification. Satellites are sent into orbit, special vehicles explore deep ocean floors for mining purposes, and the ground beneath cities is mapped for urban expansion.

As no digital infrastructure can exist without first transforming matter, the extraction of minerals containing the forty or so chemical elements needed for the manufacture of smartphones, sensors and other digital devices, also continues. The amount of energy needed for cloud computing or for the operation of platforms and social networks, not to speak of blockchains, requires the much-discussed transition to sustainable energy to pick up speed. Digital technologies will have to play a central and responsible role if geo-anthropology, the emerging science of human–earth interaction, is to succeed (Rosol et al. 2018). An integrative perspective on the efforts to link the human microsphere with the planetary macrosphere is needed to make the middle ground sustainable.

We have entered a co-evolutionary path with the digital machines we have created. Although humans are the product of biological evolution, we have been able to overtake it by launching a cultural evolution largely based on science and technology. With digital technologies humans can do things that were previously unimaginable, even if we are not yet sure how best to use them or for which ultimate purposes. Yet, in many ways we remain tied to the origins and constraints of our biological evolution, even if we can now identify the genes inherited from the long and twisted lineage of our ancestors that have been retained or lost, and know which functions that were once beneficial for survival and adaptation have become obsolete or turned nefarious.

The heritage of evolution is evident when it comes to the experience of time. The biological arrow of time has been inscribed into us as into all living organisms. It leads from birth to death along the multiple pathways of ageing, even if our species has been uniquely successful in lengthening its lifespan. Technologies and the materials they are made of are also exposed to wear and tear. Things fall apart, erode and decay, and in this sense they age. Their remnants turn up as heaps of plastic, electronic and other waste that pollutes oceans and megacities. Digital code and other immaterial parts of technologies become obsolete even more quickly, overtaken by more recent innovations. But none of these processes are identical to those in living organisms. Life depends on the finely tuned interaction of the many rhythms and cycles that regulate everything from the inner dynamics of cells to the networks they form, from the developmental stages before birth to the amazing synchronization that takes place in the brain and guarantees the unique unity of mind and body.

It is against this backdrop that the impact of digitalization on the concept and experience of time stands out as marking another decisive shift. Social time constitutes a temporal order through which societies coordinate the activities of their members and their relation to themselves and to nature. It is a social construct that has to be constantly renegotiated along with the demands made by other temporalities and temporal orders. The industrial age brought with it clock time and assured the global dominance of the linear concept of time, replacing the cyclical time of preindustrial societies that connected the daily rhythms of human activities with those of Nature and the cosmos (Descola 2019). Industrialization and modernization linked technological acceleration with cultural and social acceleration. The linear time that underlies the modern age introduced a mixture of intense time pressure, exhaustion and the aspiration to a continuously improving future. It nurtured the wish for Eigenzeit, time of one’s own (Nowotny 1989).

Now the linearity of our temporal experience has been broken. The Anthropocene obliges us to relate human timescales with ecological and planetary timescales. Social time has to accommodate the digital time that is built into the technologies that surround us. Thus the seemingly coherent, if individually exhausting, temporal framework that dominated modernity is no longer available in the digital Anthropocene. The configuration of past, present and future as a linear unfolding, the ‘story of history itself’, has crumbled. The future can no longer be perceived in terms of the telos built into it by the belief in progress, since the direct link between past accumulation and an ever-improving future no longer exists. The future has ceased to serve as ‘the Eldorado of our hopes and wishes’ (Jan Assmann). In fact, it can no longer be taken for granted, now that the linearity between yesterday and tomorrow has been broken. The relationship with the future has been upturned by the bewildering complexities of the Anthropocene, exposing the inadequacy of human timescales in relation to the required planning horizons. The entanglement of multiple temporalities pervading the Anthropocene generates a multitude of new, anthropocenic experiences of time in which the ruins and traces of the past undercut linear notions of time, while opening up the possibility of articulating alternative futures (Jorritsma 2020).

The anthropocenic experience of time reveals the different layers of the past, ‘the sediments of time’ (Koselleck 2018), with their continuities and ruptures that lead to the emergence of the new. But our experience of time is also challenged by the pervasive intrusion of digital time. Social scientists have extensively described the changes brought about by digital technologies in everyday life (Elliott 2019). The ...