The Artificial State -The New Yorker- a call for possible means of human messaging we'll have to maintain

Last edited Tue Nov 19, 2024, 01:40 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/the-artificial-state

The artificial state is not a shadow government. It’s not a conspiracy. There’s nothing secret about it. The artificial state is a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse. It is the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement. An entire generation of Americans can no longer imagine any other system and, wisely, have very little faith in this one. (According to a Harvard poll from 2021, more than half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believe that American democracy either is “in trouble” or has already “failed.”) Within the artificial state, nearly every element of American democratic life—civil society, representative government, a free press, free expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion. In lieu of decision-making by democratic deliberation, the artificial state offers prediction by calculation, the capture of the public sphere by data-driven commerce, and the replacement of humans with machines—drones in the place of the demos...

There was no grand plan, no sinister scheme. Instead, there were dedicated people trying to do their jobs as effectively as possible using the latest technologies, with the result that year by year and decade by decade, in both politics and journalism, automated data processing and targeted messaging replaced face-to-face interaction and mass circulation in the interest of speed, efficiency, and personalization. Meanwhile, polarization grew and trust in government fell, and, for reasons that, to be sure, were driven by forces that went beyond technological change, Americans became lonelier and angrier; more susceptible to conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and frauds; and also more likely to believe that much of what they once thought was true was in fact a lie...

In the virtual political reality of the twenty-first century, much of public discourse is controlled by private corporations that manufacture, and profit from, political extremism, even as they purport to be committed to democratic governance. At every stage in the emergence of the artificial state, tech leaders have promised that the latest new tools would be good for democracy, and for freedom, no matter the mounting evidence to the contrary. In 2014, Twitter released what it called “The Twitter Government and Elections Handbook,” which informed legislators that its platform is “the Town Hall Meeting . . . in Your Pocket.” The company, which has since become X, is a privately held corporation that could withhold from public scrutiny data about its users or operations. It is not a democratic institution. Facebook’s vaunted mission as of 2017 was “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Facebook, now Meta, is a corporation that has historically been ruled by the mantra of its C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg: “company over country.” It is not a democratic institution. “The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech,” Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, wrote in 2019. “There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.”

Newer social-media companies have not forged a different path. Nearly half of American TikTok users under thirty say they use the platform to follow politics or political issues, and about the same percentage believe that TikTok is “mostly good” for democracy. In 2021, a report by the Department of Homeland Security concluded that TikTok’s algorithm had unintentionally driven support for the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. This year, a study conducted in Germany alleged that TikTok promoted far-right candidates to young voters. It is not a democratic institution.

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It’s not as though these platforms couldn’t become good for democracy, if they were to be reinvented as well-regulated, public-interested digital utilities. “Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI,” an extremely thoughtful 2023 book by the British Labour Party M.P. Josh Simons, offers a political theory of machine learning—explaining the politics of search-result ranking, for instance—and expresses confidence that legislators can “develop structures of governance within which corporations design infrastructural ranking systems that create a healthy public sphere and civic information architecture.” This isn’t a new idea, and it’s one shared by Risse, who follows many earlier writers, including Ethan Zuckerman, in proposing a public-interested digital infrastructure, “like creating parks and libraries for the internet.”

Where Risse endorses epistemic rights as a new kind of human right, Simons proposes an A.I. Equality Act, to “assert political equality as a guiding principle in the design and deployment of predictive tools.” If twenty-first-century democracy feels half dead, Simons believes that working through these challenges will bring it back to life. That can’t happen fast enough, because, year by year, the problems get more difficult to solve.

In the artificial state, at least as much political speech is made by bots—programs that, mimicking human behavior, execute automated tasks—as by humans. The Internet became “inverted” in 2012, when, for the first time on record, bots were more active online than people were...Social media made many things worse. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” Elon Musk tweeted, when he was taking over the company in 2022. By 2023, X had, by some estimates, become inverted: one study found that nearly two out of three of its accounts appeared to be bots. (An X-commissioned study said that the amount was closer to eleven per cent.) Despite Musk’s promise to rid the platform of them, X now seems to have more bots than ever before. Earlier this year, Musk estimated that there would soon be two, three, or four bots for every human on the planet. (He’s building the technology that could allow us to abandon the planet, so long as no pesky government stops him. “Unless current trends for absurd regulatory overreach are reversed, humanity will be confined to Earth forever,” Musk recently declared.)...

This fall, Musk not only endorsed Trump but, dressed in black and describing himself as “dark maga,” appeared at a Trump rally to warn Americans that, if they don’t vote, “this will be the last election.” But this very sense—the dark and uncanny precarity of it all, the exhausted rhetoric of existential risk, the fear that everything might collapse because everything is at once so fragile and so fake, so untrustworthy and so unreal—is itself a creation of the artificial state.

The building of the artificial state came at the expense of the natural world. “The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen,” Rachel Carson warned in the preface to a 1964 book called “Animal Machines,” the “Silent Spring” of factory farming, which involved the raising of animals from birth to death in cages hardly bigger than themselves. “Yet the evils go long unrecognised,” Carson wrote. “Even those who create them manage by some devious rationalising to blind themselves to the harm they have done society.” The artificial state is the factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community. Meanwhile, the immense energy and water consumption required to build, expand, and maintain the coming A.I. infrastructure threatens to roll back gains made by environmental regulation in the past half century...

Having built an information infrastructure that classifies and divides humans and drives them to ideological extremes, these same people and corporations are now building machines that purport to undo the very damage they have caused, much in the same way that geoengineering schemes seek to address catastrophic climate by using the very logic and tools that created the problem. In a study funded in part by M.I.T.’s Generative AI Initiative and published in Science this fall, conspiracy-minded Americans were subjected to long exchanges with a deprogramming chatbot. “The treatment reduced participants’ belief in their chosen conspiracy theory by 20% on average,” the researchers concluded. They don’t seem to have bothered to establish control groups who might, for instance, have been asked to read articles and books, or—seemingly beyond the realm of imagination—converse with another human.

The same spirit of inquiry-as-boosterism lies behind “The Digitalist Papers.” It brings together venture-capital magical thinking about a Grand Democratic AI Utopia with the kind of social science that imagines improving machines but cannot imagine helping people by way of, say, funding for public education...Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google, boasts that “the coming of AGI may herald less of a new world order and more of an improved version of our current liberal order: Democracy 2.0.” John Cochrane, a Hoover Institution economist, delights at this news: “As birthrates continue to decline, the issue is not too few jobs, but too few people. Artificial ‘people’ may be coming along just in time!” All but alone among the Digitalist Papers’ contributors, the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig sounds a note of caution: “The likely effect of AI will make an already broken political system even worse.”

The artificial state is not alive; it cannot be killed. But, because it is something built, it can be dismantled, if enough people decide to sell it off for parts. Other very stubborn systems for organizing human societies have been dismantled before. The divine right of kings, feudalism, human bondage. Compared with those, this one might be easy. It begins with naming it.


How AI generated media and priority messaging maps out...
https://www.multistate.ai/updates/vol-27