Aleph Zero Categorical

On this blog, I am often critical of technology. But that is not to say that I am disapproving of every aspect of society, nor do I wish for all technology suddenly to vanish.

In fact, in many parts of the world, life is pretty good. If you pick any other point in history, chances are the average person had it way worse than now, and that is something to be thankful for.

Moreover, if all technology vanished overnight, then there would likely be large amounts of chaos where small, vicious gangs would form and there would be fighting of all kind.

Besides, dismantling all technology is unrealistic, even though some authors who caution aainst technology wish for such a scenario. For a more realistic life philosophy, those of us who have something need to be grateful for it and at the same time look for solutions to protect society from degenerating.

That is the danger of technology right now. It has brought us to the best place and rapid growth and innovation of technology is the active mechanism that has brought us here.

Unfortunately, we basically have an unbridled enthusiasm for technology, and that means we do not have mechanisms in place that could warn us of dangers if technology goes awry, which it already has in many ways. Remember, even though our society is good now, it may not be stable as good does not necessarily imply stable. A ball will reach a high point upon being thrown but that does not imply it will stay at the top forever.

In fact, it is because the modern world is relatively good that we should seek life philosophies and societal approaches that will make our society more stable, and less likely to be disrupted by advanced technology. Part of the danger is that technology can come in discrete and abrupt waves, and that is something we need to seriously think about.

At the same time, technology has an enormous momentum, which is why it is especially important not to mince words, and be as harsh as possible on technology. Technology is not a person and it will not be offended (at least not yet). In fact, the more advanced we get, the more cautious we should be of something destroying what we have, which is why I say we should be extremely cautious of technology.

Of course, not all technologies are inherently evil, but some may be such as AI, which is why I say we should be the most cautious of AI and some other technologies.

OpenAI, the company that has developed Dall-E and ChatGPT, is one of the most dangerous companies right now. They are dangerous because they are developing new artificial intelligence programs that will significantly destroy the natural way human beings interact with each other. These programs are the start of a system that will make human beings so little reliant on each other that a new level of mental illness may spread throughout humanity.

OpenAI is developing programs that produce creative work. Their progress is impressive and it means a society where very few creative people will be able to do anything of value. It thereby also serves to concentrate most of the wealth of the world towards tech companies.

Moreover, we do not know the implications of developing such technology, and humanity is not mature enough to handle it (and we may never be). OpenAI has a charter and they claim that they want their technology to benefit all of humanity. Such thinking is highly deluded. Let us go through their charter. They say,

We are committed to doing the research required to make AGI safe, and to driving the broad adoption of such research across the AI community.

Unfortunately, making AGI (artificial general intelligence) safe is impossible. Its very existence will disrupt humanity just by its mere existence. They say,

We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions.

By even creating the technologies they have made, they are already starting that race. It does not even matter what safeguards they choose. Other people will not use such safeguards, and in my opinion, there is no safeguard against the threat AGI poses to humanity. (Trivial safeguards such as content filters are irrelevant to my argument about the long-term effects of AGI. They say,

To be effective at addressing AGI’s impact on society, OpenAI must be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities.

The hubris of this statement shocks me. It sounds like they want to play God. As soon as AGI becomes even more powerful, its power will be seductive and it is doubtful that anyone at OpenAI will consider the ethics when billions of dollars is at stake.

Just imagine for a second if everyone at OpenAI found a way to become rich beyond their wildest dreams (which they probably already have). Are they really going to seriously consider any argument that might indicate that AGI/AI is actually bad for us? I seriously doubt that.

In my opinion, AI research now has become even more dangerous than biological weapons, because it is a crucial part of a system that will suck us in and away from being human, and perhaps even destroy us.

Thus, OpenAI is indeed an extremely dangerous company along with any other companies or individuals who develop AI to this level. The most ideal scenario at this point would be that OpenAI and any other such company would be stopped, and such research be made illegal. Unfortunately, mental damage is much harder to gauge than physical, which is why we ban assault weapons but not AI yet.

Even if this outcome is very unlikely, I urge every reader to avoid supporting OpenAI. Do not use ChatGPT, do not use any of their current or future products, and do not buy any of their stock if they go public.

I could be wrong about technology, but I think for the most part, I am not. And if you read this blog, you might think the message is “technology is bad”, and in some cases it is.

But my real message is not that “technology is bad” but that “we should think critically about all technology”, especially since right now, the only mechanism propelling it forward is primarily capitalistic and short term gain.

Thinking critically about technology includes making personal decisions to free yourself from any technology which you consider having a net negative impact on your life. Therefore, I advocate not just words but action: the action of taking responsibility for your own life with regards to the invasion of technology.

I have to say this because I feel that in today’s society, very little weight is being given to thinking clearly. Instead, we are pressured into fitting into an ideology. I think this is a serious and dangerous mistake.

That is why I would never want to identify myself unidimensionally as left- or right-leaning. I say, take a fresh, critical look at all issues, and make sure you are looking at specific things. Never get caught up in supporting vague, general notions that mean different things to different people. And, if you are going to enter into a discussion with someone else, restrict your remarks and conversation to concepts that are both precisely-defined and agreed upon during your conversation!

Thus, returning to technology, I advocate a harshly critical view of it and to regard each piece of technology with extreme suspicion. For example, let’s say you were lost in a forest and you found a tasty-looking mushroom to eat. Wouldn’t you regard this mushroom with suspicion before eating it? Why then not regard technology, and new ideas in general, with equal suspicion?

Of course, part of the reason is that we soak up new information, probably because we are wired to hoard resources (both physical and informational). And while that was an adaptive mechanism in simpler times, it is has become partially maladaptive.

Therefore, I am not necessarily, uniformly anti-technology. I may also be wrong about some of its harms. But I am taking a critical look at it because it is a moral duty to do so. If you take such a critical stance, you will improve your existence immensely.

A frequent argument used to say that there is nothing wrong with technological development is to point to historical cases of development. “Horses were replaced by cars, and we coped with that”, is certainly something I’ve heard more than once. Or, “people of every generation complain about the weird practises of the next”. The more things change the more they stay the same.

People love to use this argument because it sounds right and perhaps on some level it is. However, using it with regard to the dangers of technology is fundamentally flawed. First, things definitely won’t always stay the same, regardless of what “things” you are considering. Our society can easily break down and we can even go extinct at some point, making life fundamentally different from before. Even if human behaviour doesn’t change, our world can get quite a lot worse.

Or consider one very dangerous technology: weapons. At some point, weapons were primitive but people kept making better ones, but all the while they were fighting just as they always did with them. But then something changed with the development of the atomic bomb: it was a weapon so powerful that after it was used twice on Japan, it was never used in combat again and hopefully never will be. Unlike every other kind of weapon that came before it, it was something of sufficient power that brought about the fundamentally-new concept of mutually assured destruction, which was never something that existed with conventional weapons.

This example shows that weapons development was not more of the same old stuff, but lead to a culmination point of something fundamentally different, something that could not have been deduced purely by analogous thinking.

We are close to reaching such a culmination point where technology will infiltrate our lives and introduce fundamentally new concepts into society that will change it forever. It is not more of the same old stuff, but something of a “critical mass” that will alter us so strongly that we may not ever be the same. This is why it is so dangerous to give into analogous thinking, because such thinking cannot reach or prepare us for such a radical change.

Furthermore, reasoning that we adapted from horses to cars isn’t very convincing either, because that stage was also crucial in bringing about the world on the brink of destruction that we have today. Without the internal combustion engine, it is unlikely we would have reached such a horrifying level of CO2 in our atmosphere.

We are going through some serious changes now, with the development of very advanced computer technology. And reasoning by analogy that we will be okay with all these changes not only is faulty and lazy reasoning, but the analogies hardly have any premise to start with because all such previous changes also caused serious detriments to humanity as well.

Of course, there is no doubt that technology has improved lives as well and made many of us more comfortable. Thus, in a future post I will treat this topic of the benefits of technology and how we can reconcile this with its dangers.

If you would like to receive occasional emails with tips about the dangers of technology, I am experimenting with a newsletter. I would not be surprised if no one subscribed because people who might be interested in combating technology might not even use email or read this website.

Nonetheless, if even one person subscribes, I will start sending out anti-technology emails. These will differ from the blog in that they will focus on tips on how to remove technology from your life. Perhaps one of those ways would even be unsubscribing from my newsletter (just joking).

Feel free to submit your email here, but you can unsubscribe using the link in the newsletter.

There are many arguments I could make against AI and advanced chat programs like ChatGPT. In some local contexts, ChatGPT is already banned. StackExchange temporarily banned it, basically because it gives plausible-sounding answers which are much too often incorrect.

In my opinion, this reason for banning it locally is irrelevant for my discussion, and is a rather superficial reason also. A far more thorough action would be destroying ChatGPT, all of the research pertaining to it, and similar AI research as well. In fact, I implore any researcher in this field to delete as much of it as possible and stop supporting this type of technology.

Why should ChatGPT be destroyed? First, it is one small step towards a system by which all of a person’s superficial survival needs are provided for by technology. The culmination or evolution of ChatGPT is a program that allows a person to get as much information as they need on any topic without the help of another human individual. This is extremely harmful, because a society in which you don’t need other people will become a society made up of extremely selfish people.

We can only function and get fulfillment out of life by helping others and forming community bonds this way. Once technology removes this need, people will become aimless and the only thing left we will do is amuse ourselves by creating even more technology.

You might argue: the internet has already allowed us to rely less on each other, and people still need each other. This is true, but it’s a very sloppy argument because the internet is just a baby step towards an extreme. It’s like saying eating one piece of cake a few times a year for birthdays is fine so it should be fine to eat an entire cake every day.

The internet has definitely made us less reliant on other specific individuals but it has not removed this reliance completely. Taken to the extreme, the evolution of ChatGPT will be part of a system that does remove this reliance completely. Of course we will still interact with others due to a basic social need, but it will be the kind of narcissistic interaction that occurs on internet forums: a mostly pseudo-anonymous interaction in which people don’t care about the welfare of anyone else.

ChatGPT is an example of a technology that mass-produces information synthesis on a scale that is hard to imagine. Our minds simply aren’t tuned to deal with such scales. It is just the start of a large development that will transform humanity for the worse.

Most researchers further knowledge simply for the sake of their intellectual amusement and also to keep their C.V.’s healthy. This approach is an efficient one for growing knowledge, but unfortunately it is hardly a good one for humanity.

Technology is very powerful, but unfortunately there are no restrictions on its development. There are restrictions and laws on researching viruses, because they have an obvious detrimental effect if they are released, either on purpose or by accident. I posit that technology can be equally dangerous, and often even more so. Thus, we should have restrictions and careful consideration before releasing it into the wild also.

Unfortunately, programs like ChatGPT are shiny and distracting, and most people think they are harmless. However, once you consider the bigger picture and what it means, it’s hard not to see how dangerous such things are.

If you are reading this and contribute in any way to AI, machine learning, ChatGPT, or other similar programs, strongly consider deleting all of your work and ceasing your contributions.

I believe that math and computer sciences courses should come with a mandatory ethics section. Math and computers have an enormous influence over life and that influence cannot be all good.

An ethics section of such a course would discuss the possible influences that math can have over the real world and to remind students to be responsible for their knowledge.

If a course curriculum doesn’t formally have such a section, then instructors should at least give a fifteen minute speech at the end of the course with a balanced discussion of the ethics of mathematics.

Topics of an ethics section would include: AI, machine learning, cryptography, modeling and statistics, and other topics that have immediate influence on the real world. Far from being all good, many of these developments have had a negative impact as well as a positive one.

Now that I think back to my teaching days, I am flabbergasted that such a section was not mandatory or that no one gave it any thought. I think that is partially because math is like a little delightful puzzle and everyone just gets caught up in it without thinking of the greater consequences.

The world is at some kind of breaking point, with environmental disasters occurring regularly, the climate going haywire, and very greedy people producing as much as they can for insane profit without regard to the consequences. Unfortunately, math plays a big part in that, and while math and computer science researchers happily solve little puzzles, the are also contributing to serious problems as well.

Thus, we need serious ethics training in technical fields such as math as one of many mechanisms to become more aware as a society of what we are doing to our planet.

I am making this list partially for myself, and partially for others who have realized the dangers of technology and how it is leading to our destruction.

1. Avoid creating especially dangerous technologies such as AI and machine-learning programs. This is especially true if you are a programmer.
2. Avoid developing any advanced mathematics that may lead to developments in computer science, especially in artificial intelligence fields.
3. Use as few social networks as possible. Companies like Facebook are especially aggressive in their pursuit of new technologies and if you don’t support them, they have a greater chance of crumbling.
4. If you do use any social networks, use them to spread the message of the danger of technology
5. Use the technology you have for as long as possible. Less upgrades means that development at large corporations will be slower and less profitable.
6. Take as many breaks from technology as possible. By taking more breaks from technology, you will be reminded that there is a whole world out there (the natural one) that does not depend on technology.
7. Make a list of all technology that you use and ponder carefully the pros and cons it has on life.
8. We can’t eliminate all technology from life, but we can minimize it. Concentrate efforts on the most destructive kind of technology, such as artificial intelligence.
9. Some technology might not be all bad, and might be crucial in achieving a world with technology under heavy moderation. Therefore, a critical approach examining all technology is important.
10. Emphasize reduction, and ways to live life and enjoy it without depending on the latest technologies. Eliminating everything isn’t possible or practical for most people, but some reduction can actually be very life-enriching.
11. The most dangerous technologies are those coming from large tech companies such as Google and Facebook. Ideally, such companies would be broken up because they have too much influence over society, and their direction is purely driven by profit. Thus it is imperative to watch them as closely as possible, and vote for government regulation that will stifle their innovation.

I will add more to this list as I think of it.