I’ve been informed that I live in a post-truth age. Exactly how I’m supposed to take this in a post-truth age is anybody’s guess. Is it a lie, a half-truth, a splitting of the difference? Or does it mean that all attempts to categorize sensory input fall impotent and that what we’ve really entered is a post-epistemology age? Is a post-truth age one that’s characterized by “flooding the zone” with epistemological slush? I wonder whether this goes for all truth claims. What does it mean—in a post-truth age—to say that the Earth orbits the Sun? If the post-truth age is a post-Copernican age, then I guess I’m not ready for it. I can accept with post structuralists and post modernists that ideas with the mark of too much human handling—with our mind prints all over them—are candidates for parental abandonment. But not every idea can be of this kind. I’ve a feeling that for most people, no matter how accustomed to hydroplaning on slush they may have gotten, there’s a place where they’d still like for the rubber of life to meet the road of fact. The post-truth age isn’t the one with flying cars—just Roombas.
If we’re on a Waterworld of veridical fluidity, how do individuals navigate it, how do whole flotillas of human institutions navigate it? In Greek mythology, if one goes too far, he runs up against Atlas’s muscled-up trapezoids. In post-truth mythology, if one goes too far, he runs up against the phalanx of factcheckers arrayed along its western edge. How long can these slender shoulders be expected to hold up before there’s a dislocation? And when the last factchecker, overwhelmed by the deluge of magical and conspiratorial thinking, has thrown up his hands, what kind of letdown is the world in for?
Giving equal weight to everything that issues from minds (what’s obviously true as well as what’s patently false) is to reject an organ whose central function has proven useful to our having made it as far as we have in the world. The brain is not a vestigial organ. The brain is not the appendix. Its usefulness lies in forming models that map onto realities; when mental models and realities agree well enough to permit successful navigation of physical and social spaces, this we call “truth”—with a lower case t. To be clear, we’re no longer asking for uppercase Truth. Even more important than Nietzsche’s saying “God is dead,” was his saying, “Uppercase is dead.” This makes what e.e. cummins was doing in the first half of the last century clear: “there are so many tictoc/clocks everywhere telling people/what toctic time it is for/tictic instance five toc minutes toc/past six tic”
Okay, let’s go with clear-ish. It’s much easier to work out post-truth implications in one’s own life. Keep telling your boss the toctic time at which she says she wants you to arrive for work is as semifluid as the clocks in a Salvador Dali painting, and soon she’ll have no choice but to hit you with the inconvenient truth of termination. Faced with the absurdity of waking as a giant bug, Gregor Samsa in the Metamorphosis knew enough to want to get to work on time. Even if your boss’s watch is only giving her the lowercase time, your failure to synchronize with it results in a collision with reality and your post-truth romanticism, forcing you to have to sell off your surrealist art collection if you want to put food on the table.
Before I’m taken for an anti-modernist rube, let me say that I’ve read (and believe I understand) metaphilosophically subtle arguments reducing consciousness and existence and all that goes with it to illusion and epiphenomena. But after serious consideration, I turn away in favor of the existentialist Nietzsche (whose outlandish mustache was better than Dali’s outlandish mustache, at least): “Any distinction between a ‘true’ and an ‘apparent’ world…is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life.” We who’ve witnessed the sea change from a truth age to a post-truth age have seen the truth about decadence and decline; we’ve read the lowercase writing on the wall where the TikTok clocks—also known as televisions—hang on pivoting wall mounts, and where our Roombas know to change direction.
It’s one thing to realize, with Shakespeare, that “the time is out of joint.” It’s another thing to know what one ought to do about it. I recall Alan Watts asking in one of his talks, “What would you do if you knew the world was about to end? Would you wind your watch as if it were just another day?” (It was around 1970, when watches needed to be wound to keep going.) There are some for whom the answer isn’t to wind a watch but rather to wind a robot with a key in its back and set it to work; there are some who’re counting on an AI bailout to save us from the post-truth storm, forgetting how we used AI to end up here in the first place. “Fate, it seems,” says Morpheus in The Matrix, “is not without a sense of irony.”
Still, it’s misleading to pin it on AI. “They know not what they do.” But we know what they do. The algorithms that inform AI’s behavior amplify select human behaviors. For instance, a Roomba amplifies your zeal for vacuuming. It can and it will vacuum all day. This is something you could never do—at least I hope not. (It’s sometimes said that we’ll know that machines have attained something like human intelligence when we observe them getting bored; this might be the real Turing Test.) Unfortunately, a Roomba can’t amplify—or even match—your common sense. If it could, it would know enough to stop vacuuming the instant it saw your dog’s business in its path.
Such demonstrations of “artificial stupidity” are funny, I suppose, as long as they’re not taking place in our own home. But the post-truth age is our home. And make no mistake, it’s been smeared. Just like the Roomba doesn’t know when it’s creating a hell that’s paved with, um, good intentions, social media algorithms don’t know when they’re defiling an entire age with what they’re tracking. If you’re an algorithm, you’re just going through your cycles. You don’t care whether you’re tidying up or making the place unlivable; that’s not your job. A social media algorithm’s job is to facilitate maximum engagement (this may be read as maximum return on ad investment), even if it’s tracking filth all over the house all while carrying out this command. There’s little real danger of AI turning us into paper clips, as the now cliché thought experiment of artificial stupidity has it. The real danger is that it’s already turned us into money clips, the work of old-fashioned human cupidity. “Commerce is our goal at Tyrel,” says the digital-age robber baron/replicant-creating mad scientist Dr. Eldon Tyrel in the 1982 film Blade Runner.
A social media algorithm’s job is to keep you engaged while sponsored ads flash on your retina and din in your ears. Unfortunately, the kind of content that keeps most of us maximally engaged skews toward the salacious and the untrue—what we’ve always thought of as gossip. When we demonstrate to the “supervised” machine learning algorithm that we engage better with content from category A (content that happens to be salacious and untrue) than we do with content from category B (content that happens to be bland and true), it learns to feed us more from category A—ad nauseum. The thing to remember is that the algorithm doesn’t know or care that it’s salacious and untrue; all it “sees” is engagement, which it “seeks” to amplify through recommendation algorithms that flood our visual and auditory fields with tappable salacious and untrue content. We’re on an algorithmic hamster wheel of our own making. We show the algorithms where the buttons are that light us up. Meanwhile, the algorithms we taught are enriching their investors by churning out the content for which we told them we have a weakness. “Nero fiddles while Rome burns.”
In time, it won’t matter that the content you’re seeing is salacious and untrue; you’ll start to think it’s all there is to the world: the “pale blue dot” becomes, “As The World Turns.” In time, all that matters to you is that you keep getting fed more of what you’re addicted to. The post-truth age is the engagement age. The post-truth age doesn’t care whether a post is true, just that it gets clicked, liked and shared. What’s good for the algorithm is good for the digital capitalist—and bad for the truth. As long as we continue to incent the peddlers of tantalizing distortions by allowing ourselves to be played by the algorithms they’re using, the more we’re adrift without an Archimedean point by which to gain our bearings. The Archimedean point of the engagement age is engagement itself.
Our hope that AI is our way out reminds me of the opening series of acts from an iconic 1968 film. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’re introduced to our past selves somewhere around four million years ago. In the portrayal, we’re indistinguishable from great apes, and we’re on the point of extinction. Enter the Monolith. It’s a matte, black, 20-foot tall, crisp, 3-d rectangle standing upright in the middle of the Rift Valley. It appears before the waking eyes of a band of ape-men in extremis, having spent the night cowering in fear of the nocturnal hunters that would make a meal out of them. What ensues can only be interpreted as handsy worship on the part of the ape-men. (I hope the Monolith wasn’t abandoned by its parents). The implication is that AI (Alien Intelligence) bailed us out of an extinction event while supplying us, by way of a wetware upgrade, the insight to recognize the tools that would lead to the next stage of our evolution.
Fast forward four million years, and here we are again. On our bad days, we’re still indistinguishable from apes. And it feels like extinction is in the offing. But in today’s movie, “2024: An AI Odessey,” it’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) we’re intreating to pull us out of our present fix. I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing a pattern. We’re always calling for “non-human” backup: God, aliens, AI. And the backup is always something that’s got our mind prints all over it. We’ve even created backups for our backups. That’s what paternalistic aliens and paternalistic AI are to paternalistic God.
We who rejected God because of his old-fashioned values and sometimes abusive tendencies, find that it’s not so easy to get on without Him. We look to form new fraternal bonds with fathers who are no less remote. God, in Christopher Hitchen’s view, “Comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species.” We’re still in that infancy—something I think Hitchens knew even as he tried to pacify us with eloquent polemics. “Despite all that science has revealed about the universe,” writes Swedish physicist Ulf Danielsson in The World Itself, “we have not succeeded in liberating ourselves from a worldview that is fundamentally religious.”
On inspection, all the backups act exactly as we would expect them to act if we’d created them. One of the first things an alien-tutored ape-man in 2001 does is bludgeon another ape-man with a bone. Are we sure this download was an upgrade? Sure, we carried on, but so does the Roomba. With or without alien intervention (I think, without), we’ve evolved from swinging bones to throwing spears to firing guns to launching nukes. The thing that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin hails as superseding the biosphere—the noosphere or “sphere of reason”—doesn’t quite pass the smell test.
“The importance of distinguishing between human values and false idols,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in his book Team Human, “is at the heart of most religions, and is the starting place for social justice.” Throwing more AI at problems stemming from our AI addiction feels a bit like using a Roomba to sweep up the hair of the dog that bit you. Apologies to ancient astronaut conspiracists, but superintelligence didn’t rescue us four million years ago and—apologies to Singularitarians—AI isn’t going to rescue us now. When we’re ready to get serious about clawing truth back from the algorithm, we’ll find that it starts with the simple, human embodied movements involved in tapping and swiping. This means we’ve got to be ready to curb our appetite for digital comfort food. We’ve got to be ready to take the algorithms in hand and lead them to category B. Training our palettes to appreciate digital content rich in fiber while rejecting its processed and microwaved counterparts is the way forward. If this sounds too much like dietary proselytizing, I’m sorry. But I borrow the metaphor from the technology itself. Have you ever thought that our feeds might be named that for a reason?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
