Artificial Intelligence and Values

 Artificial Intelligence and Values

Values can refer to money, power and influence.

Influence is the most likely value related to the interface between human and machine - there must be coherent interaction. Imagine a stacked system where degrees of power increases interactive breadth and depth, and this kind of access is related to relevant exchanges of money. Power can refer to levels of authorization and access to system capabilities, but power can also refer to the resources of directing and the vice of threat.

Some think that there are no values operative in technological design and organizational systems but there never was a value free judgment. Even Weber who addressed value-free research in the social sciences specified that it referred to the exclusion of subjective interests, not to objective standards.

Anyway, positivism is largely eschewed today, even if few people understand the relation of facts to values or values to reality.

The values of AI must refer to the incentive value of money and the directional value of power, at least.

First of all, value free is a notion that has long been discarded - decisions are determined by interests which can be evaluated.

The question is whether the interests behind decisions are responsible, moral- ethical or legal. So assuming they are, the relation between values and facts reduces to something like this:

If A causes B and B is wrong or does not work, don’t do A.

If A causes B and B results is a worthy outcome, do A.

Here facts and values mirror each other; to reject this kind of pragmatism is the height of arrogance, ignorance and irrationality but it is still very common.

The values at issue today are money, power and influence. If 

A value causes B fact, then do that value.

Keep in mind that these values are limited in their structuring effect: money incentivizes but too much money may corrupt. Vice is evil. 

Power directs or threatens but inappropriate power claims are antagonisms and cause fighting. Murder all the way down to harassment is evil.

Influence means follow the law, follow the rules, but strict demands for conformity leads to the avoidance of normative or institutional behaviors. Pushing and nudging people around makes for avoidance, alienation, and anomie, just the reverse of the spirit of freedom and equality.

So values and facts must be seen in the light of each other. Designing AI systems does not mean foreseeing all of the effects of these structuring, coordinating systems but it does mean evaluating their effects and being open to change. Institutional practices, especially those determined by technological innovations are often very resistant to addressing their inappropriate effects.

A Tolerant Person

 A Tolerant Person

Tolerate does not mean liking. To tolerate someone means to endure them. To tolerate is merely a negative act of decency. A person who is on friendly terms with all sorts of people has a tolerant personality who makes no distinctions of race, creed, social class, sex orientation, or gender. Such a person not only endures but approves of other people! Not to mention, also follows the law! Regardless of the groups to which others belong, the tolerant person expresses a friendly and trustful attitude. The tolerant person is still critical but not in dread of racial or ethnic differences, or different sexual orientations, or differences in social power. The tolerant person is permissive and lacks the threat orientation found in prejudiced types, delinquents, bad neighbors and hotheaded siblings!

Marcuse 1969 ‘Repressive Tolerance,’

“Tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled.”

If the rulers enforce capital punishment and permit deadly force, what do you expect from the unsublimated?

Marcuse, “The idea of tolerance implies the necessity to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent.”

Marcuse advocated a great refusal of all modes of domination and repression, not all social norms. Marcuse recognized that new forms of social control produced one-dimensional people who preferred consumption for false needs and were conditioned by advertising - were uncritical of mass media.

Excerpt from Karl Mannheim 1940 “Man and Society,”

‘Tolerance does not mean tolerating the intolerant. Democracy ought to do away with substantial irrationality, retaining merely those customs which facilitate the smooth working of social relations.’

5 years before Popper’s Open Society.

THE PARADOX OF TOLERANCE:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.” Karl Popper, 'The Open Society and Its Enemies' (note 4 to chapter 7).

Tolerance was supposed to be acceptance, but tolerance became repressive as it was practiced by separatism and shunning.

Who are you and why?

 Who are You and Why

How does each person become a kind or type of personality, identity, and subjectivity. Parental and cultural primary socialization is an ascribing and inscribing process based on the real social and economic circumstances of the family. Internalization is not merely the sensing of experiences and rudimentary understanding and judging resulting in externalized behaviors. There is a socio-economic structure in addition to parent/filiation techniques, disciplinary regimen/scheduling and learning during the early years which inscribes political orientations including political attitudes about gender, race and economic class. The parent’s fantasies and plans are not about their child’s purpose in life but about their own status and identity! Socio-economic circumstances apply financial pressures and specific types of social interactions which inform the expectations and skills learned during childhood. 

Schooling and culture inscribes upon our personality or self the stigmas, symptoms and anticipations of how and where we fit or do not fit with others. Although these are possibly values, they may operate as social norms and emotional patterns of response.

The ascribing and inscribing process upon our body and self - the requirements others force us to abide by or are resisted - at the bottom of all the fighting - leads to the ‘why’ each of us are who we are. What a person is in terms of abilities and expectations requires an extended description of their relationship to the social structures and social machines of sexuality, race and economic class position.

Was Marx a Hegelian?

 Firstly, there is a continuous underlying tone to Hegelian-Marxism - the Marxian disagreement with economism, with Engels vulgarization of Marx, with the authoritarianism attributed to Marx - is that Marx emerges with the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (of Right)” and other critiques. In that work, Marx’s asserts that the head of emancipation is theory, is philosophy, and the heart is the proletariat, the passive proletariat: the material basis which finds its material weapons in philosophy.

Examine Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ for his discussion of the ‘rabble’ which he was unable to rationalize! Is this rabble not the proletariat uplifted as peasants and skilled factory workers!?

Here, Hegel is important for Marx who describes the ideological problem as ‘the challenging of the institutions and conventions of society!’ For Hegel, the rabble challenges society while the bourgeois exploit and dominate this lower class. Hence, Marx posits “ideology-critique” as critique, as Critical Marxism, in contrast to economism which views ideology as a distorted reflection of the world - self interest inverts the world. 

The critical Marxist accepts that the mask of ideology conceals domination behind the elements of reason and reasonableness!

The Hegelian Marx emphasizes alienation. The older Marx breaks from Hegel and German Idealism by accentuating ‘structure,’ the base-superstructure relations, and science as distinct from ideology and criticism. 

The key difference between the Hegelian Marx and the later scientific Marx (Capital and the texts around it) regards historical change. Critical Marxism is grounded in Hegel where change involves the activity of the knowing subject and her knowledge. The scientific Marxist focuses on object-centered Darwinian change as the succession of a series of ‘natural’ forms.

Hegelian contradiction involves aufhebung: a process of synthesizing which produced a more encompassing whole that preserved the past and the objects while overcoming the ‘impossibility’ of a form of thinking or value orientation. Aufgehoben, however, produces a rupture: the object is dropped and forgotten along with the past. Here, the forces of production, science and technology, result in modernization: the modern world. Hegelian Marxism, critique or critical Marxism is humanistic but no less arrogant.

Critical Marxism has an Hegelian affinity which stresses sectarian internal conviction and authentic belief in contrast with reliance on the institutions, on conformity, on what is called today normativity or emotivism.

The relation of Marx to Hegel can be found throughout his oeuvre in different ways; perhaps the early emphasis on alienation, exploitation and domination serves as the motivation for Capital, Grundrisse, Theories of Surplus Value, and the historical commentaries ‘Class Struggles in France,’ ‘The 18th Brumaire,’ and ‘Notebook on the Paris Commune’ (when 6,667 people killed and counted while estimates ran as high as 20k), and on his journalism which described events in the American Civil War - over slavery, he noted!

I would not cut Marx in half as Hegelian or as economist, I would instead try to see these two “Marxisms” as sides of a dialectic.

Hegel posited work and labor as liberating, whereas Marx posited work as negative: the locus of alienation for Marx was the mode of production of work products and use values, commodities.

Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ explicates the authoritarian institutions as pushing contraception and promiscuity, marriage and family! Marx seems to miss this important aspect of (re)production but he comes around to Morgan’s analysis of kinship structures in his last work, “Ethnological Notebooks.” 

Hegel’s externalization and total alienation of man in Christianity is truncated into political economy where labor is the site of alienation. Marx accepts Hegel’s autonomous subject as the locus and agency of action. But, Marx moves the analysis of alienation from the anthropological level to the concrete societal level. 

Alienation for Marx refers to alienation from the products he produces and from the means of production which hinge on property relations. The ownership of the means of production sets up the difference between owners and workers and by extension between employers and employees. 

Marx relativized (watered down) and historicized (designated Hegel’s version to an earlier epoch) Hegel’s theory of alienation. The problem of alienation for Hegel was an insoluble tragic discourse, but for Marx there was a solution via politics, in the discourse of ideology!