This is our paradox: We know that uncertainty is the substrate of the universe, is the crucible of creativity, is the path to truth, and yet we spend our lives searching for certainty. The word auspicious derives from the Latin auspex — one who examines the flight of birds for omens and divinations of the future. Today, our birds are made of bits — wind-up larks of our own making we call algorithms — but they serve the same function: to let us believe that we can divine the future in order to respond to it; to sedate our anxieties of living by selling us the illusion of control over the unknowable.
All power structures are prisons we choose to live inside and all prediction technologies are power structures. Prophets have always been the true governors of empires, first counsels to kings, final ventriloquists of the future. We can never break free from the uncertainties of living, for we ourselves are bright violations of probability, but we can break free from the prison of prediction in order to be more alive: The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves — that our future is not the computational sum of our past and our destiny not a deterministic equation but an ongoing process constantly creating itself, the way a memory reconstitutes itself with each retelling.
Every algorithm that tries to tell us what we will like or do next based on what we have liked or done previously is stealing our self-respect — the respect for the fundamental capacity for self-surprise that makes life worth living — and selling it back to us at the price of the product. How to defend this vital aspect of our humanity, of life itself, from the merchants of prediction is what Carissa Véliz explores in Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (public library) — a book that, in an epoch when it is difficult to say anything original about AI, offers a revelatory look at the prison we have chosen to live inside and a key out. The computer scientists of today play the same role in power and prophecy as the oracles of the ancient world, the astrologers of the Middle Ages, and the social scientists of the nineteenth century, as we will see… Prophets are merchants of prediction… Artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi.
The likes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Eric Schmidt sharing drinks with presidents and prime ministers is reminiscent of Nostradamus advising Catherine de’ Medici, and Rasputin counseling Nicholas II. Predictions are often power moves disguised as quests for knowledge. Even when predictions are sincere, they can create currents of political influence that change the world.
She offers a fascinating history of how such technologies of power became possible, became desirable, became the norm — a history that chronicles the shift from the spiritual to the statistical, from faith to blind trust: With God gradually moving into a background position, the grip of fate loosened. Along with worldviews that could make sense of and contemplate the notion that chance might play an important role in the world, the invention of printing with movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century facilitated the development of abstract numerical thinking, and with it, scientific inquiry and bureaucratic organization. Trust in numbers was partly born out of distrust in people.
It was not only the Church’s disapproval that led to a decline in traditional forms of divination; common people were tired of depending on experts to catch a glimpse of the future. Reading animal entrails or the flight of birds is not obvious, and astrology is technical. The opaqueness of these methods facilitated fabrication, errors, and corruption.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
