Why do Ai’s zealots take the road most travelled, usually by teenagers? Because they only think at surface level? Surely there must be more to it.
“History remembers who acted” is a line of adolescent attack I’ve seen being used by Ai proponents, that is to say grown adults – predominantly men – to convince other people to buy their preferred tech and to use it for anything and everything.
It’s wrong.
Expanding the stupidity of the line reveals it to mean that if you don’t jump aboard the Ai juggernaut right now you’ll be a no-mark. You’ll be swept into a common grave, anonymised, forgotten by history. You’ll be damned to a nebulous eternity; no glory for you.
It’s a form of goading behaviour akin to those childhood games of dare you probably saw straight through as at best stupid and harmful at worst by the time you got to 11 years-old.
It’s a form of ‘fortune favours the brave’ thinking that teenage lads believe fits them as well as it fits Captain America. It privileges action over thought; a strategy that even the most martially inclined of newly minted Lieutenant Generals will tell you is a fast track to destruction.
Why might this be seen as so tediously, so sweepingly trite? Why, in fact, is it? Let me start with a basic story that even an artificially intelligent shill has a chance to grasp.
Great Aunt Agatha’s fragile things
A pair of 11 year-old twins are wrestling in the dining room of their great aunt Agatha’s house even though they’ve been told not to. They’ve been told not to because of the many wonderfully precious and delicate items balanced precariously on thin, fragile glass stands around the room.
Crash! Bang! Wallop! Yes, you – the adult reading this – guessed it. The tumbling and brawling, action-taking mindless limbs of the twin wrestlers send a priceless 18th Century vase, a gift from Agatha’s one true love, the Count of Somewhere in Germany, to the floor where its shards now lie, mournfully, beyond even the most skilful mistress of Kintsugi to reconstitute. A love token demolished. A life’s story demeaned by violence. Sad, right? Right.
Both twins stand up immediately and distance themselves from the fallout as at that very moment Great Aunt Agatha enters the room and sees her love memory as destroyed as her brave Count during the battle of that thing that most people have forgotten.
“Who did this thing!?”, she cries.
“He did!” chorus both twins pointing at each other.
Now, of course, they’re both correct. However, to be more correct they could have said, “We did”, but where would that have got one of them.
Not that it really matters because Great Aunt Agatha has a favourite twin. She already knows who she’s going to punish, and punish them she does.
Now, you – the adult reading this – have probably already worked out what that little parable means. Just for the Ai fundamentalist who might accidentally have fallen into this too-human territory, I’ll spell it out.
History isn’t sentient
Like an LLM, history is not sentient. It is not a monolithic truth. It is mediated over and over again. This is the reason most sensible people spell it with a lower-case ‘h’ unless it’s the first word in a crosshead or a sentence.
Therefore histories do not remember. It’s like saying that Great Aunt Agatha’s best goblets case remembers the first goblet ever placed in it. Histories don’t remember. Animals do. People do.
What’s worse for the machine-men is that memory (therefore the act of remembering) is malleable. Just check out the theory of Weapon Focused Memory, ideal for the action-man in your life.
But let me be fair and reasonable, and test the assertion that history really does remember those who acted.
Some questions:
Who took the lead or even took part in the slave revolt aboard the New Hampshire ship ‘Adventure’ in 1764? They acted.
What were the names of all the dissident writers who became zeks in the Soviet Gulags? They acted too.
How about the names of the 30 or so unnamed soldiers in 1st Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry who carried out the My Lai massacre during the USA’s asymmetric wars in Vietnam, Loas and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? They acted.
What about the people who took part in the Stonewall uprising who didn’t make the papers. They acted.
And so on and so on and so on.
Why do you think historians still visit archives if HISTORY is settled? Why do people make oral history collections from multiple witnesses to the same event?
Why do you think Australia’s Black Armband “history wars” happened and are still happening?
On and on and on…
It’s not a difficult idea to get your head around unless, that is, you’ve opted to hand your critical thinking over to an alogrithm and a techbros. Or you’ve the mental capacity of a 10 year-old in a room full of someone else’s precious things.
