The Internet Has Set Us Free

What Dickens, Orwell and Blackadder teach us about the control of information. It's time to take The Sniff Test.

Who Judges Superintelligence?

How will we know when AI reaches superintelligence? Machines are better and faster at spotting patterns than humans. Who’s to say they aren’t making them up?

OpenAI is abandoning non-profit status. This means it will stop looking out for humanity and start looking out for shareholders. That’s good news.

A guardian of humanity requires three things. An ability to control progress, a threat to humanity and the right to speak on its behalf.

None of this is true for OpenAI, or any other entity. There are still plenty of self-appointed AI ethics experts, however, and history is littered with those who believe they speak for everyone.

So how do we know humans aren’t making it up?

The end of the age of experts began with the internet. For the first time, authority figures lost control of the flow of information. As a result we are overwhelmed with claims and counter claims.

Today, there is a way to handle this.

A Wild Claim

There is a scene in early Blackadder, when the cowardly Edmund is asked which nobles he killed in battle. He claims Warwick the Wild who “took some finishing off”. His brother Harry responds, “Yes, indeed -- I killed him myself at one point”.

How we interpret history depends on the records we read. For millennia, the control of communication is how authorities maintained power. The internet removed that control and the experts want it back.

In 2004, 60 Minutes claimed George W. Bush evaded military service in the 1960s. Then the ‘Buckhead’ internet account revealed that evidence was written on a modern word processor. An anonymous individual humiliated CBS and esteemed anchor Dan Rather.

This story is told in the forward to Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public. The book is about the end of the era of mass media and the resulting loss of trust in institutions. The story concludes,

If the existing order is only torn down, not replaced, the outcome could be chaos and strife. - Arnold Kling, forward to The Revolt of the Public.

Gurri argues that information grows in waves. First came writing, then an alphabet, a long wait before the printing press, and now the internet. The first three enabled expert authorities, while the fourth undermines them.

Gurri does not forecast. It is not hard to imagine, however, a fifth wave of information controlled by machines. Does that fill you with optimism or pessimism?

The Noise of the Internet

Two years before Brexit, the UK authorities defeated a referendum on Scottish independence. As a result, they assumed that scaremongering about chaos calms the electorate. It didn’t work twice.

The argument was that only the government can prevent disaster unfolding. Today that is a rod to beat its back.

The internet enables Wikileaks-style revelations about the connivances of our masters. It also allows sharing of doom and gloom and hand-wringing about a lack of government action. It’s a common belief that protest alone can force government to save the earth, stop the war, or end poverty.

In Dickens’ Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby spends long days working to improve ‘the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger’. Meanwhile her children run wild and neglected. There is nothing new in believing individual action can influence world events.

The internet magnifies this belief through repetition. We look to impotent governments, spurred on by spurious facts and figures. What should be done about the noise of the internet?

The Distance from the Crowd

Brian Leiter rages against the loss of expert authority. The Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School argues for reinterpretation of constitutional rights. Free speech is top of his list. Where once the holy book or monarchical decree was the controlling mechanism of society, today it is the law.

Leiter talks of epistemic authorities, a fancy phrase for the means by which the masses learn the opinions of experts. His three examples are mass media, the education system and the courts.

What matters most to Leiter is social cohesion. This requires an acceptance of truths, even when they are occasionally wrong. It is the case that a lack of common understanding undermines society, but is that justification for suppressing criticism?

John Stuart Mill argued that a rabble rouser may be silenced when seeking to incite an angry mob. The same person may publish his views in the newspaper. The distance from the crowd, in time and space, provides the context in which free speech is allowable.    

Leiter claims the internet, social media and cellular phones, mean we always stand before the mob. There is a permanent need to suppress ‘fighting words’, as defined by the Supreme Court in 1942. How do we ensure the public remains informed but not incited?

Of all disciplines, the law come closest to using individual action to influence world events. The interpretations of specific cases create broad and lasting precedents. The courts are the way that modern day Mrs. Jellybys exert influence.

At this point politics is inevitable. Leiter reveals his by claiming The New York Times and BBC are permitted authorities, while Fox News is not because of its opposition to vaccines. Google would need to be shut down in times of tension, because it surfaces unsavoury opinions.

This is the plot of 1984. A perpetual crisis is used to justify permanent censorship. It’s 2024 and the experts believe you cannot be trusted with information.

Set Yourself Free

Matt Ridley published The Rational Optimist in 2010. A key theme is that the exchange of knowledge and technologies is behind the undeniable improvements in global living standards. Ridley is Honorary Chairman of the newly established Rational Optimist Society, which you can join here.

It is impossible to be part of any group today without being labelled by its opponents. Rational Optimists are no different. They are pilloried by those who see privilege in every outcome and therefore find reason for constant protest.

Rational optimism says, take a look at the data and think about what it shows. Go behind the opinions of others and decide for yourself. Let’s look at three examples.

In 2004, the UN Global Compact published Who Cares Wins, summarising important non-financial issues as environmental, social and governance. The investment industry was quick to co-opt ESG as a label, which conveniently helped rescue its reputation after the Financial Crisis.

The cornerstone of this philosophy is the control of greenhouse gas emissions. The chart below shows that US emissions peaked in 2007, before the financial crisis. France, Germany and the UK topped out even earlier. The investment environmentalists are fighting yesterday’s war.

Emissions have rocketed in China, but no country is doing more to advance green technology. Its population has peaked and that alone will slow energy consumption. Indian emissions are rising, but policing Western companies is not going to change that.

Of course, individual company’s emissions rise as they grow. Technology companies are no exception. But what matters is the intensity of emissions, or whether pollution per unit of production is declining. At the national level, despite all the growing companies, emissions are falling.

The belief that controlling individual companies controls the big picture is a category error. No government or regulator has that reach. Why would you even try, when the unregulated effort of those companies has reduced emissions for the past 17 years?

One argument is because of the tipping point. This is the idea of planetary boundaries, which once breached, lead to Armageddon. I argued in Spaceship Earth that this is logical nonsense, and there’s no supporting data.

The chart shows deaths from climate disasters. The same trend exists in deaths from air pollution and famine. Bob Geldof got all Live Aid on us after a temporary change in trend. Ethiopia’s issues were cause by the Marxist military junta. The subsequent economic recovery is down to the 1995 federal constitution rather than food parcels.

But surely the forests are still burning? Well, Earth has more trees than 35 years ago and the US more than 100 years ago. It does matters where those trees are and a biologically diverse rain forest is worth more than the monoculture of tree farms. But the trees were chopped to produce food and the good news is we grow much more on the same amount of land.

The spread of information continues to erode trust because the authorities cannot respond in time. The answer is faster decision making, less bureaucracy and an end to one-size-fits all health and educational edicts. AI enables this.

Yet experts are as scared of the unknown as they assume the electorate to be. Their instinct is to lash out, to censor and control, and to silence the plebs right to free expression.

The battle will be long but they cannot win. The latest understanding is just a few clicks away. AI makes it easier to find, and to project outcomes to cross check the claims of experts. Much of AI will be powered by clean energy.

When watching the news or reading a blog, ask if the journalist or author is making global claims based on local data. Do they present arguments as facts. Together we are the guardians of humanity. There is plenty of information and we just have to want to find it.