The Strange Unpredictability at the Heart of Our Common Humanity
I wrote the first version of this before ChatGPT, LLMs and AIs became the hype-thing it is today, just for the record. 😉
But, I would argue that much of what actually characterizes everyday life — the creative moments arising out of artful improvisation on the spur of the moment — will still continue to be opaque to systematic surveillance: there will still be ‘strangeness in the commonplace’. It is these performative moments of narrative dissonance that we should be concentrating on (Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, 87).
The minutiae of our everyday lives are being captured and stored in data banks, then fed to powerful machine learning algorithms in hopes of predicting (and shaping) our future behavior. However, there’s one small problem — a wrench in the gears of this human futures trade: humans are not always predictable.
This unpredictability is a defining trait of our humanity. We often act in ways that seem random or inexplicable, and our motives are not transparent even to ourselves. Closing the gap between our predictable actions and what we actually do is crucial on the human futures exchanges. This involves narrowing our perceived possibilities, effectively controlling us at the level of our self-perception. Normally, we form our sense of self through the reflections provided by others in our world. However, our relationships are now mediated by technology, and our sense of ourselves and our possibilities are being shaped by the technologies we use.
Often, the reality we are sold is “futural,” meaning it does not exist in the here and now. Consider the promise of heaven: sacrifice now for a future reward. The desire alone is enough to shape our behavior and have us acting in a way that forecloses some of our possibilities. You won’t demand meaningful work or fight against dehumanizing conditions at work if you believe that starting a Substack and gaining 1,000 true fans will lead to a better outcome. But once you are on platforms like Substack, or TikTok or YouTube, your possibilities are no longer limited by the laws of nature in the physical world, or labor laws, but by the engineering of what is possible to do on the platform. Good luck arguing with an algorithm about injustice.
The gig and hustle economies many of us are driven into limit our ability to exercise our humanity and unpredictability. Being consistent and predictable is rewarded. We are being trained into consistency and predictability. Being on the content creation wheel is inhuman and dehumanizing. It often leads to burnout and depression, especially among those who are most successful on these platforms.
Did you know that machines can only simulate randomness? Anyone who has played computer games that require the machine to generate a random number (like the roll of a die in Monopoly) knows that it doesn’t “feel” random. You may not be able to put your finger on it, but we have a feel for true randomness that computers can’t fool. Machines cannot calculate randomness or account for the unpredictable at the heart of our humanity. It is a logical truism, much like you can’t logically prove a negative, algorithms cannot predict our future behavior — hold on tight to that for dear life.
They are banking on being able to minimize our unpredictability by habituating us to a superhuman consistency, even though it is sure to fail (and in ways that will be painful for us). They want to shape us towards their commercial or political interests, and use our strengths — our human adaptability and habituation — to create the world they envision. Unfortunately, humans are quite malleable and adaptable, as a part of our evolutionary equipment.
The danger of machine learning algorithms is not that machines will become smarter than humans or know us better than we know ourselves. Rather, the risk is that humans will become more like machines, acting in algorithmically predictable ways, easily programmed. Right now, a capacity is being created, a receptivity to this type of habituation. There is no question that many of us are in the grip of their addiction machines, becoming increasingly subject to algorithmic compulsions.
But realize that, try as they might, they cannot touch who really you are. Even when they tell you that they know you better than you can know yourself because they remember perfectly what you were doing a year, or ten years, ago. They may ‘know you’ in the form of your data stream, but you alone embody that experience in ways that, I assure you, cannot be captured. Double down on your humanity — use it or loose it! — or embrace the evolution away from humanity.
Go give Douglas Rushkoff a read here: Breaking from the Pace of the Net and join Team Human. Learn to assert your human scale and bounds, and protect your human integrity. Also, use tech in ways that are unpredictable and unexpected. For example, Rushkoff tells the story of how he put the idea of a scene he had already written to an AI, to see what it would write, then wrote out of his own version any overlapping ideas, on the premise that these are the most predictable ideas, and thus improved his own script. I’m definitely going to put that strategy to good use.
Just as you learned it was better to buy locally produced foods, and to shop at local small businesses, you can choose human made content and prioritize IRL relationships and community building. I recently heard someone repeat the saying: Wherever you are, that is where you dig.
But maybe you are thinking to yourself, good riddance, all hail our machine overlords. Certainly, it is possible to desire for a post-human world. This is the fantasy part of the fear/fantasy coin. The technological invasion of our private, imperfect, human all too human lives is all for the better — it is called evolution. Yes, there are days when I think that maybe machines are here to save us, even if they have to change us in the process. And there are days when I think we humans deserve everything we have coming to us. But at the end of each day, I come back to the realization that these feelings are just my tortured love for our common humanity. Let’s become more human together.
Now I am curious, what do you think makes us human? What is worth raising up and affirming in this moment?
Reference
Thrift, Nigel. 2007. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Routledge, New York). See at Powell’s Books
