TAMPERING WITH REALITY

Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 15 Mar 2024 03:34

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli; Verso 2023; pp264; £16.99

It feels as though a storm is gathering around Artificial Intelligence (AI), since just about everyone believes that it’s set to change our world but in what direction is a matter of great controversy: will it be a mob of peasants storming Frankenstein’s castle with pitchforks and burning brands, or eager prospectors with mules, spades and pans scurrying to make their fortune in the California hills. 

Matteo Pasquinelli, an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science in Venice, has written an excellent social history of AI in which he treats these technologies as the most recent stage in the historical process of the Division of Labour: “In the industrial age, the supervision of the division of labour used to be the task of the factory’s master” and AI is just another, more powerful technology for measuring, organising, spying-on and controlling workplace and workers, the latest phase in the exploitation of Labour by Capital. Pasquinelli is no techno-utopian.

Pasquinelli’s book covers an ambitious span of historical time, which he found necessary to identify the origins of what he calls ‘algorithmic thinking’ ie. the creation of rules for solving problems via a sequence of discrete steps. His introductory chapter, ‘The Material Tools Of Algorithmic Thinking’, locates the earliest recorded examples of such thinking in the Vedic mythology of India around 800 BCE. Those rituals involved building ‘Fire Altars’ whose design was prescribed by stepwise methods intended to reassemble the fragmented body of the god Prajapati (but they also served to teach a system of geometry useful in building). From that beginning a path winds through the Babylonian creation of counting, and hence accounting, on clay tablets, through the Greek geometers, the Arabic algebraicists and finally to the Europe of Pascal, Leibniz, Newton and Descartes.    

Pasquinelli’s book is organised into four sections, the second of which, ‘The Industrial Age’, contains four chapters beginning with one devoted to Charles Babbage, to whom he attributes the mechanisation of mental labour. In 1822 during the UK’s industrial revolution Babbage designed his Difference Engine, a machine to automate numeric calculation. It would employ then state-of-the-art technologies like metal cogs and steam power to generate tables of logarithms – needed by astronomers and the military – more quickly and cheaply than hand calculation. Babbage only ever produced a single prototype but his efforts in effect inaugurated modern computer science, as well as influencing Karl Marx toward a labour theory of the machine. Babbage saw that all machines imitate and replace some previous division of labour, and that a calculating machine in particular automates the derivation of labour costs. In three following chapters Pasquinelli traces the effect of Babbage’s Principle in Marx’s idea of the ‘general intellect’ and a labour theory of knowledge, at a depth which may prove a slog for all but professional scholars of Marxism. 

A third section, ‘The Information Age’, arrives at what we’d now recognise as Artificial Intelligence where Pasquinelli excels in his choice of crucial technological pivot-points and personalities, as well as in explaining the complex ideas involved. He zips through Alan Turing, the invention of the digital electronic computer during WWII, the rise of cybernetics and interest in ‘self-organising’ systems after the war, and the work of John von Neumann and Donald Hebb aimed at emulating the human nervous system via electronics. An early practical goal was pattern recognition, needed both for reading text and for industrial control, and its pursuit created a split between those who sought to use symbolic mathematics and those who pursued solutions by statistical induction from large amounts of sample data. 

The most intriguing chapter is ‘Hayek and the Epistemology of Connectionism’ which reveals that Friedrich Hayek, co-founder of neoliberal economics, put forward a theory of human cognition which depicted our nervous system as an ‘instrument of classification’ in accordance with the ideas of Hebb’s new ‘connectionist’ school of AI. This is seldom remembered because Hayek didn’t wish for it to be implemented in hardware, believing that it already existed in the operation of markets, as aggregators of knowledge about prices. Here Pasquinelli touches upon the late-1940s debate about ‘socialist calculation’, initiated by Ludwig von Mises who argued that economic planning would prove impossible under a socialist bureaucracy due to lack of commodity prices as units of account. He was opposed by the Marxist economist Oskar Lange who later in the 1960s proposed the use of increasingly powerful computers in socialist planning. 

Pasquinelli follows the split between the ‘symbolic’ and ‘connectionist’ AI schools into a final chapter on Frank Rosenblatt’s 1957 construction of his Perceptron, the first proper artificial neural network of a kind that points toward today’s ‘deep learning’ machines. Using a camera with a 20x20 pixel grid, the Perceptron could recognise simple patterns like alphabetic characters, and the thrust of Pasquinelli’s  argument is completed by its arrival as the route to today’s functioning AI becomes visible: emulated human neurons connected into ever-wider and deeper networks and trained on huge amounts of real world data. That route spanned another 50-year ‘AI winter’ of tepid results, hampered by lack of computer processing power and training data – AI research only started sprinting again in the late 1990s with the advent of LSI (Large Scale Integration) silicon microprocessors and the Internet. 

Google LLC was founded in 1998 and quickly monopolised internet search and advertising, in the process amassing huge quantities of users’ data for free which it deployed in AI research to automate natural language translation. Pasquinelli has of necessity to skim lightly (but accurately) over this period as it would require a whole second volume to describe in detail the way these developments lead to ‘deep learning’ algorithms, pre-trained generative transformers (GPTs) and a sudden blossoming of AI power after 2020 which surprised even its own inventors, and to some extent still does. 

In his concluding chapter ‘The Automation of General Intelligence’ Pasquinelli confronts the politics of AI directly: its monopolistic ownership, and also its extractive nature which ‘scrapes’ (ie. steals) a whole corpus of human culture from the internet for training data, without payment, along with racial and other biases that creep in as a result. His own position appears broadly aligned with the Italian ‘operaismo’ movement of the Hardt and Negri strain and he never deviates from a hostile view of AI as the ultimate tool of control and surveillance over labour: “The first step of technopolitics is not technological but political. It is about emancipating and decolonising, when not abolishing as a whole, the organisation of labour and social relations on which complex technical systems, industrial robots, and social algorithms are based”.

My own inclination is more ‘culturalist’ than Pasquellini’s, forcing me to wonder whether the positive powers of AI couldn’t be tamed and harnessed to help implement schemes of participatory socialism of the sort imagined by Eduard Bernstein, Thomas Piketty and many others. Then I reflect further on the threat that deepfaked images pose to truth, privacy, democracy and even to personal identity, and wonder whether perhaps pitchforks and burning brands might not be such a bad thing after all…

 

DEATH AND/OR TAXES

Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 22 Jul 2022 11:12

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, by Gal Beckerman; Bantam Press Feb 2022, pp352, £9.34

A Brief History Of Equality, by Thomas Piketty; Belknap Press April 2022, pp272, £16.9


When I first sat down to write this review the runners and riders had just been announced for the race within the UK Conservative Party to find a replacement for disgraced PM Boris Johnson. Out of 11 starters, 10 immediately declared their intention to reduce taxes and shrink the size of the British state, despite advice from the whole economic profession that doing so would worsen inflation and inequality. After a week the process spat out two final contenders: foreign secretary Liz Truss and the recently-ex chancellor, Rishi Sunak (whose resignation undid Johnson). Sunak had orchestrated three years of pragmatic, Keynesian emergency measures to save the British economy from Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns – measures that included cash loans to firms and a furlough scheme to help them avoid laying off employees. This needed massive government borrowing and contributed to inflation approaching 9% and a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ that the popular financial journalist Martin Lewis has warned will lead to rioting in the streets. Liz Truss berated Sunak for not promising immediate tax cuts, and since these are the catnip the Tory flock demands to vote for a winner, he had to promise some too, albeit slightly later. As we all now know, Truss won.

This depressing tax-cutting obsession among the contenders is merely the latest manifestation of the fact that neoliberalism retains a solid hold, indeed a Gramscian hegemony, over politics in most of the world, despite the massive shocks of the 2008 financial crash and a Covid pandemic that might have been expected to improve the fortunes of the Left, or at least generate some doubt about the wisdom of allowing markets to rule everything. The two books reviewed here address two different aspects of this toxic political/economic landscape.

Gal Beckerman, senior books editor at The Atlantic magazine and formerly of the New York Times, wrote The Quiet Before about the factors that have sometimes brought people out to riot in the streets throughout modern history, and about why they almost always fail in their objectives. Thomas Piketty’s latest, A Brief History Of Equality, is the work I was hoping for when I reviewed his previous book, Time For Socialism, in this journal last year. It contains a concise distillation of the findings of his two great research projects Capital In The 20th Century and Capital And Ideology, applied to political economy rather than statistical economics. It contains little new material, though it does have a penetrating analysis of the nature of Chinese ‘socialism’: its intention rather is to reach readers who would be deterred by his previous huge tomes, and among them, with luck, might be those political activists whose lack of any credible economic program is the implicit subject of Beckerman’s book.

Beckerman’s book recounts, in an engaging narrative style, 10 historic events that occurred between the 17th and 21st centuries, in places from Aix-en-Provence to Minneapolis. Not all are riots or demonstrations though several are, but all of them do involve radical and oppositional ideas, and each illustrates the effect of some recent innovation in the means of communication that made them possible. The first describes how a Provençal scholar called Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1635 organised a group of volunteers from all over Europe, North Africa and even Canada, to jointly observe an eclipse of the sun so that he could measure longitude, and he used letters to communicate his detailed instructions to them all.

The second concerns a three-mile-long, million-signature petition delivered to Parliament by British Chartists in 1839, largely organised through the pages of Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star newspaper. The third (my favourite) describes the attendance of Mina Loy at a Futurist manifestation in Florence in 1913; the fourth recounts the career of Nnamdi Azikiwe (popularly known as ‘Zik’) who rose from editor of The African Morning Post newspaper in The Gold Coast to be the first president of an independent Ghana. Later chapters cover events and media from Roneo-copied fanzines and samizdat novels to emails and WhatsApp videos, US vaccine information during Covid to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and BLM riots in Minneapolis. Each chapter is written like a short story in readable and gripping prose, so that several are as moving as they are informative.

Particularly so is Chapter 7 on the Arab Spring and occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, an early example of mass mobilisation via the internet. The tragic failure of this movement crystallises a thought that permeates most of his later chapters, namely that the people so mobilised and their leaders (when they had any) were woefully lacking in any programme for what success would entail, any coherent plan for changing laws and institutions. This is in stark contrast to those Chartists of Chapter 2 who clearly aimed at gaining the vote and won it after repeated arduous struggles.

Among the user reviews of Thomas Piketty’s new book, A Brief History of Equality on Amazon you’ll find quite a few hostile critics saying it contains nothing new, which isn’t true but in any case misses the point that in it Piketty presents his complex suggestions for achieving participatory socialism in a compact fashion more likely to be widely read – had it been compulsory to read all four volumes of Das Kapital there would have been no Russian Revolution.

Piketty rehearses again the facts, that economic inequality has declined overall since the middle ages, did so fastest between the 20th century’s two world wars, and is now rising again thanks to neoliberal reaction against post-WW2 social-democratic reforms. He explains more accessibly his proposed raft of solutions, which include restoring steeply progressive taxes on income, wealth and carbon emissions; redistribution of wealth and ownership in addition to income through worker share holdings, universal benefits and capital endowments, and time-expiring shareholdings designed to obstruct the emergence of dynastic ownership through inheritance. A Brief History does also contain new matter to deepen his accounts of gender politics, racism and colonialism, which goes so far as to recommend payment of a permanent ‘reparation share’ from the developed North to the South in place of international aid. This expands considerably on his conviction that the worst failure of Western social democracy was its lack of international reach, its lack of weapons for taming global capital like a worldwide financial register to regulate capital flight, tax-havens and outsourcing.

Perhaps the most interesting addition is Chapter 10's section on ‘Chinese Socialism: The Weak Points of a Perfect Digital Dictatorship’, in which Piketty analyses the nature of the Chinese regime – a crucial political question as it concerns Taiwan, support for Putin’s war in Ukraine, trade relations with the USA and much more. As expected he supports his opinion with statistics about ownership patterns:

“Barring an unexpected collapse, over the coming decades the People’s Republic of China is likely to become the greatest economic power on the planet, even if no one can predict how soon and for how long ...[ ]... The share of public capital (all levels of governments and collectivities taken together) was about 70 percent in China in 1978, at the time when reforms were begun. It declined sharply during the years 1980–1990 and until the middle of the 2000s, and has been stable at around 30 percent of the national capital since then ...[ ]... If the Western powers persist in an outdated hypercapitalist ideology, it is not at all certain that they will succeed in limiting the growing influence of the Chinese regime”.

China’s authoritarianism is anathema to his own desired participatory democratic socialism, but it might bestow the ability to enforce counter-measures to the climate crisis that democracy will prevent the West from achieving.

I suggested earlier that these two books between them offer hints as to why the Left is languishing rather than flourishing since the 2008 crisis, which demands some further explanation. Piketty offered these terse explanations in Capital And Ideology, namely that “a dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement” followed from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that “the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the Left now favour the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds”. Both of these observations suggest that Marxist ideas of class and class-struggle no longer retain much political traction among Western working populations, who were relatively happy with the compromises won by social-democracy after WWII and whose anger at having them removed by neoliberalist reaction is easily deflected onto immigrants and college-educated Leftists who tell them off for not struggling hard enough.

The legacy of Marxism to Western leftists, faint as it is, has been mostly a hindrance: a vote-losing moralism and a contempt for social-democracy as a partial solution that falls short of full state socialism. This situation has generated an important debate among contemporary Marxists about the precise nature of late, technological capitalist states and their huge increase in inequality: are capitalists losing faith in investment and innovation altogether and becoming pure rentiers; have they become less reliant upon extracting surplus value through the wage mechanism and now expropriate value directly (for example when Google and Facebook ‘steal’ users’ data for free); is colonialism really over or does it persist in disguised forms?

A few, Piketty included, synthesise these doubts into a more realistic picture which abandons dogmatic adherence to Marx. From its inception during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, ‘capitalism’ has never been purely dependent on surplus value extraction but has always plundered too – South American silver and gold, slavery, unpaid housework, cheap eastern labour – and reinvested the proceeds into ‘pure’ European capitalist production. Jason Moore, another unorthodox critic puts it thus: “capitalism thrives when islands of commodity production and exchange can appropriate oceans of potentially Cheap Natures – outside the circuit of capital but essential to its operation.” In A Brief History Piketty moves further in this direction, extending his earliest concerns of property, borders and education into greater emphasis on gender politics, racial and colonial matters, as well as by frankly describing his recommendations as both democratic and participatory socialism.

A largely technophobic Left is prone to exaggerating the malignancy of the giant US tech corporations. Their global communications system of unprecedented power is currently being abused for surveillance, high-speed speculation, tax evasion and the operation of 'gig' companies like Uber and AirBnB to undermine regulation and organised labour. However it could with sufficient political will be made to serve progress, as several of Beckerman’s stories suggest and as Piketty acknowledges in a closing section called ‘Will Money Creation Save Us?’ Experience of the Covid pandemic has shown what can be achieved by printing money, and if that causes inflation then the proper cure is not austerity but more robust collection of corporate taxes: “In theory, nothing forbids us to go further. Today, no currency is defined in relationship to gold or to a material referent: currency is above all an electronic sign on computers, which the central banks can create without limits. There are even plans to set up central bank digital currencies in the near future. Individuals would have digital accounts at their country’s central bank, which would permit banks to directly credit individuals’ accounts, rather than routing through private banks and enterprises…”

What a fine irony if Engels’ ‘withering away of the state’ were to be finally achieved by the banks working together with severely-chastened tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook. Piketty concludes that “Economic questions are too important to be left to others. Citizens’ reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the battle for equality. If this book has given readers new weapons for this battle, my goal will have been fully realized” – to which I would merely add that reading Gal Beckerman's book as well will prepare them better for the travails they face before achieving it.