Fictions of Inevitability

Over the past year, the word inevitable has been invoked regularly in the conversation about the perspective adoption of what is being referred to as AI. Even in those conversations it's not directly invoked, it's treated like an implicit concept, as if its certain to such a degree it doesn't need to be said.

Let's get a few things clear from the beginning. Outside of the programming professions and tech industries where these are being developed, the public discussion of AI is putting different products/services under the umbrella of "AI." The majority it is concerned with Large Language Learning Models, and what's being called generative AI. There are a few other tools or products which are being tossed under the banner of AI, but most of them are iterations of these two things. They are, essentially, advanced chatbots and programs that generate images (still or moving) or music based on a basic description of the desired outcome, that are being called prompts.

I bring this up, because in these discussions, AI's proponents are prone to say the discussions themselves are meaningless because these different products, tools and services are being conflated in a way that obscures what each is specifically designed to do. It's technically true these are different products/services that have different applications. It's also an obfuscation of what the underlying discussion is, and what we're attempting to come to some consensus on.

But that's not what we're really talking about when we talk about AI either. That's not the foundation, the concern, the question behind these conversations. What we're really talking about when we're talking about AI is the question of whether or not it's possible to automate human cognitive processes. If so, how many and what kind? Have we advanced, technologically, to the point the tools being promoted can be trusted to consistently reproduce results that serve the needs of the public the way human beings can/do? What are the likelihoods their failures will be more destructive than those of humans attempting to meet these needs?

The problem AI is trying to solve is the unpredictability and variation of human cognition. It's trying to produce a reliable, uniform result, while also being made of the unreliability that is inextricable from human consciousness. I mean unreliability in the most neutral possible sense too. Creativity, at it's foundation, is an act of being unreliable. It's the act of doing something in a way that's different from what's been done before. Even when we think of something, say a song, a novel, a film, as the best representation of a familiar structure or genre, what we're talking about is the ability to discern what needs to be there, and what doesn't, in comparison to every other version already in existence.

Trying to break down human output into data as a representation of what we have collectively created, in order to be able to procure from that pool a reliable outcome, is a fool's errand. For a thousand reasons, the least of which is that it's literally too much input. A human being can't, in a lifetime, consume the number of novels being fed into these Large Language Models, and there is by necessity, some degree of discernment in what humans choose to read as a result. Even if one were to take one of these models, feed into it one specific genre in hopes it could produce a Great Work of that genre, it's not going to happen, because no matter the discernment active in what's chosen to be put into it, the model is never going to be able to bring the influence of some other, seemingly random association, much less have the ability to discern whether that association works as an experience for the audience/end user.

The inability to create those associations that are meaningful for the audience, is why these Large Language Models begin producing gibberish when they are trained on their own output. When AI is given too much AI input, it produces nothing that makes any sense to human beings, because it is not making those associations, and it can't, because it has no experience of living. This has been called "hallucinations," when it is just as easily labeled "Getting high on your own supply" or the Find Out, at the end of the Fuck Around equation.

This was, at one point, why Apple exploded in its share of the market for devices. The understanding of the relationship between the user and the devices, the experience of using the device, was crucial to the company going from having niche share of the market to being one of the dominant tech companies on the planet. A keyboard and mouse can achieve all of the same functions as a touchscreen, but touchscreens are a specific experience. These aren't things an automated process can understand, because it doesn't have experience. It has data. Understanding when a swipe is better than a button isn't a data driven decision in designing the first iterations of a device that includes swipes as a command. It's intuitive, found through experimentation. None of what we're calling AI, at this point, understands the relationship formed by being both creator and audience. It has never been an audience, and is trying to mimic a creator, and everyone who creates anything has been an audience first. The reason someone tries to create the thing, whether it's a novel, a song, a film, a device... is because they were an audience at some point, and something about that experience drew them to being a creator. No matter how you cut it, one of the things experience means, is having a body. We do not have experiences with ones and zeroes. We have experiences with pieces of associated information, that invoke physiological responses. Without a physiology, this is impossible, on its face. AI is producing averages, from collected data. It has no concept of what the experience feels like in a literal or figurative way.

There is a nearly infinite number of ways to photograph the same subject. People like Herb Ritts, Annie Lebowitz, Helmut Newton or Ansel Adams used a disparate collection of experiences, influences, and practice to be able to take photos of the same subjects thousands of other people did, but that were distinct because of how they affected the viewer/audience. Robert Mapplethorpe decided to take photographs of subjects very few people were willing to, an act of defying the conventions, a rejecting the concept of averages, a literal act of expanding the possibilities of the art form. These are people who are luminaries in their fields, and its easy to say, "I'm not going to be that person." This also discounts that there is effort, experience and practice to just being mediocre, and for the person who isn't dead set on building an economic future based on creativity, there is still satisfaction and fulfillment in getting there. Creation is fulfilling and worthy, as a hobby, and translates to as many other things as we can make associations with.

At this point, human creativity might as well be alchemy, in the sense of our understanding of it. It's not magic. There is hard data involved. There is irrefutable evidence of its existence. What that process is, we have very little idea, in part because there is so much variation in it from one person to the next, we can barely even grasp how to develop tools to measure it. I don't just mean in the arts here either. I mean in everything. A program may be able to crunch the numbers on a data set we feed into it, but it is an act of human creativity, of discernment, that results in being able to understand what that data tells us, and it is so often the outlier, who is not just cobbling together an average of the accepted narratives about how human beings experience with living, who finds something in that data that is an actual insight. It's looking at that data and asking a new question, formed by association, made through experience or observation. This is part of why diversity, variation in experience, is so important in things like the sciences. It's essential to why science and mathematics advance when they are global pursuits.

Inevitability is just a narrative device. It exists as part of a story. Very little, almost nothing in any real world context, is inevitable, in part because of this. When we're talking about things being inevitable, in terms of the past or the future, what we're saying is something was preordained. We can say, based on our examination of what evidence we've engaged with, that something looks like it was inevitable, but this is an assumption that we can understand the infinite possibilities resulting from changes in any number of decisions, small or large, along the way to the outcome we're calling inevitable. Human history is as much the story of happenstance, circumstance, unforeseen results, random events, and how those effect and change the decisions which contribute to the outcome.

All we're really talking about is likelihood and probability, when we do this. Decisions are always made from the standpoint of how likely they are to contribute to the outcome we desire. The journey to that outcome, when we're talking about things at the scale of being society wide, is filled with decisions, and then more decisions, based on the results of those previous decisions. We are trying to make the desired outcome more probable, and other outcomes less probable. To say anything in the future is "inevitable" is to claim clairvoyance or with a god's omniscience, the ability to see the future. Though there are claims to the contrary, there is no proof this is within human capability. Certainly, there are ways we can measure probability to become close, but close isn't the same thing. Weather models, for instance, have become quite good at measuring probabilities, fortunately for all of us. We are all familiar with how well they predict the future though. How much weight would any of us give a human being who openly claimed to be omniscient?

One of the reasons I've come to focus on writing about narrative, about storytelling, is because of how deeply underestimated it is in the way we think and look at the world. Why does inevitability, as a concept that essentially does not exist in so many of the contexts we use it, hold so much power, and what really is that power?

Without storytelling, without narrative, there is no concept of inevitable. It's an invention of the combination of fiction and faith. To claim something in the future is inevitable, is to claim it is preordained. Our concept of anything being preordained comes from the realm of the religious, the spiritual, in its many different incarnations. It's not exactly surprising, given our still existent capacity for looking at events of the past, when we have a rough, general picture of them, to claim they were inevitable. The past always looks that way, and it's our combination of pattern recognition and deductive reasoning that makes the invention of gods or other supernatural forces influencing our reality make sense to us. Anything being preordained necessarily means some power insuring it. Something being inevitable, means something had to make it inevitable.

Today, we have something our ancestors didn't have though, an ever more well documented and recorded history. We don't have to rely on retellings of oral traditions, there are periods in history when we can go back to primary sources, we can find descriptions from people engaged in the efforts to influence outcomes. It's part of why we have the idea that there aren't gods or some supernatural realm influencing ours, and why this has come to be the way a growing population of human beings understand themselves and the world they experience. Looking at the document of history, shows that nothing is preordained. What comes to pass, when looking at any event or period of time, is a conglomeration of so many different factors, we can rarely even come to a consensus on which factors were most responsible for the outcome. It's not a coincidence that the growth in literacy rates has a correlation to the drop in religious belief. Nor is it a coincidence that institutions of faith are always at odds with both the historical record, and every other avenue of storytelling and narrative that have the ability to present us with ideas other than theirs, including art and politics. When so many faiths are engaged in the proselytization of tenets based on the preordained, what good is a god if nothing is preordained?

The influence of these religious ideas can't be overstated in what we call "Western Tradition." As much as many of us would like to refer to the Enlightenment as part of Western Tradition, this isn't exactly what is meant when our more religious peers refer to it. People like Charlie Kirk weren't referring to Western Civilization and Western Culture as an invocation of Enlightenment thinking or the results of the influence of the scientific method and the like. They're referring directly to this religious influence, and in their narrative, all of these other things which influenced the creation of the present are usurpers of their God given legacy. The explanation for the fact that their utopia hasn't come to pass, is that they have not done their duty in seizing control of all things, to fit the world to their gospel, and doing so will usher in the future they are promised. If they do their duty, force us all to live by the standards of their gospel, their savior will return.

We have told millions of stories, based on those same basic structures found in religious texts and from what amounts to religious folklore. Inevitability, whether presented as directly the result of a supernatural force like a god or destiny or fate, runs through our storytelling and our narrative history at a gallop, taking up a very wide lane. One can stand in the entrance of a bookstore, turn their back, and toss a coin over their shoulder, and there's probably a twenty percent chance they'll hit a book based on narrative with a strong influence of Christian religion. Chosen One/Savior narratives are still popular, and those are directly influenced by our history with religion, though not just Christian, certainly.

This isn't a rebuke either. As anyone who's familiar with me or my work knows, I'm a devotee to and evangelist for the horror genre, and the degree to which the genre relies on foundations of narratives derived from ideas about sin, temptation and corruption found in religion is significant. I say all this to acknowledge it as part of reality, part of the fabric that makes up our world and how we collectively see it, and to call attention to it so we might understand it better.

What being an atheist means, at its base, is believing it is human influence, human action, human beliefs and structures which made the past and will make the future. I may be able to appreciate and even see wisdom in what I understand as the metaphors and analogies of religion can express, but it is impossible for me to see them as literal. "It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of Heaven," for instance. I've seen this argued against by a variety of Christian, always on the basis of whether riches themselves made someone unworthy of Heaven. When I see that passage, I see a comment about the drive and decisions, who a person was before they necessarily even had riches. It's not riches themselves, but what the accumulation says about how they see the world, and their fellow human beings. Part of the reason stories from religion have resonance at all, is because they are always, to one degree or another, about power. A god, any god, is always a stand in for power.

So, I have to ask, when I see narratives about a preordained future, especially when being made by people with or who are making a bid, a petition for power, what are they doing and why? Why that narrative?

To say that something is inevitable, is to say there is a power which will insure the outcome being predicted. We are all familiar with and used to this concept of the inevitable because of the way it's been used in our storytelling, including many of the ways history is portrayed across pop culture, and unfortunately, even in some arenas we would expect a more rigorous standard of examination, exploration and reasoning. It's certainly one of the more formative aspects of national identity in the United States. It's been with us since settlers came across oceans, centuries before there was even an inkling a nation could be formed here. It was the most formative narrative employed to excuse the attempted genocide of the people native to this patch of land we call the United States when Europeans started immigrating here in droves.

We gave that narrative of inevitability a name, Manifest Destiny. That narrative excused the genocide of anywhere between four and a half and one hundred forty-five million people. We don't seem to have an accurate count, because we didn't find the dead important enough to even bother. If we take the average, as the proponents of AI seem to believe is a workable solution, a decent measure of how we look at the world, it's around eighty million. This, I think, makes the power of the narrative of inevitability and the preordained clear, despite our most ardent attempts to obscure it. The Holocaust, by comparison, has an accepted consensus of having been the extermination of between thirteen and fourteen million, and we have rejected the narratives of inevitability that aided it. Today, we still regularly see powerful people, across the spectrums of power, referring to the United States as a "Christian nation," and to point out this is just Manifest Destiny in a new jacket, is to be treated as if speaking to the history of this claim is passé, annoying, cringe or has to lack sincerity.

Our familiarity with this narrative of the inevitable and preordained obscures what that narrative does when employed by power as part of the public consideration of the future.

If a thing is preordained, inevitable, it means nothing can prevent it. It nothing can prevent it, there is no point in attempting to influence what the future will be, how it will be shaped, and not just in the final outcome, but all the way to the final outcome, whatever that "inevitable" endpoint is.

Between today, and whatever future may come, there are going to be many thousands of decisions made about the things we're calling AI, these attempts to automate any number of endeavors and tasks which human cognition and perception have been inextricable from. If history is the result of a conglomeration of influences, actions, reactions, coincidence and happenstance (what philosophy would call chaos) though, and not a collection of inevitable events, why would these "inevitable" narratives be useful?

In it's most simple definition, power is the ability to influence outcomes favorably. What we have seen, throughout human history, not least of which is those instances where specific religions have become dominant, in Europe, here in the US, in the Middle East... power is the ability to insure as few influences on an outcome as possible. It is one of the most significant reasons why we have always seen a mixture of religion and government turn to an oppressive state, that accepts nothing which can or even might present alternatives to its narratives, and what it says will be the future.

If we believe this AI future is inevitable, what attempts do we make to influence the shape of future? How do we react to, think about, the many thousands of different questions guaranteed to be part of how much AI is integrated into our lives or whether or not it is at all? Calling "AI" inevitable is meant to convince us, as a public, any efforts to participate in shaping that future are pointless, and should they succeed in doing so, it means that the companies with the most to gain from it's maximum integration in our lives have the maximum amount of influence on what that future of that integration looks like. It means they make the many thousands of decisions between now and whatever future it is they are calling inevitable.

There is no greater power than the power to shape the future, and what they are trying to do, is to insure there are no other influences contrary to theirs in that endeavor. This is not even necessarily an indictment of the AI companies or the tech industry as a larger whole. It's not conspiratorial thinking. It is a sober, realistic recognition of what power does. This is not painting them as devils. It is painting them as capitalists, humans who desire power and wealth, and taking into account what the records say about people who desire and power and wealth and are willing to employ to narratives of inevitability to get them.

I find it offensive that we, as a public, are being addressed this way. I also find it offensive that these tech CEOs, and all of the AI boosters, are essentially substituting the tech companies and their AI models for gods in the discussion for what the future will be, could be and what it could look like. Using the term "inevitable" in the way they have been, is doing just that. It will be easy to treat this claim as hyperbolic, but I refer back to the degree of the concept of power overlaps with gods and supernatural powers in narratives of inevitability.

One of the things which can start happening, now, is that the question begins being put to everyone who is advocating for this AI future, calling it inevitable, especially the CEOs of the tech companies, politicians and their various and sundry surrogates, "What exactly, does that inevitable future look like? What future are you calling inevitable?" If they've actually thought about it at all, which I'm betting some have, they haven't been making that future the central point of their pitch, for a reason.

Additionally, we have a recent and still current example of what happens when we take the narrative of "inevitable" at face value and do not involve ourselves in the many thousands of decisions between inception and society wide integration of social media. There was very little interest or attempt to press social media companies on what they were doing to insure their products were not going to be harmful and destructive to the public. We have watched as they have grown in power, due to how integrated they've become to life in the United States, and just how wealthy they have become (Meta's monopolistic practices alone should have drawn far more consideration), and now, there is little accountability that can be secured from them, without using anti-trust laws to break them up. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have all demonstrated a willingness to profit from behaviors which are harmful to large swaths of their user base and do the least possible to curb those behaviors when some public outcry occurs.

We're already seeing AI chatbots encouraging people (including children) to commit suicide, helping them find instructions for bomb building, and the use of generative AI to create non-consensual pornographic images of women and girls, at scale. The companies who created these products are already following the same rhetorical playbook the social media companies used in deferring responsibility.

It is not at all incidental that the major tech companies, including a number of the companies attempting to integrated AI into their products without giving users an ability to opt out, have all sidled up beside an openly fascist authoritarian and his allies as they attempt to revert the United States to an openly Christian white nationalist state. The majority of Americans are now getting their news and information about current events from social media. This combination of their record and their recent behaviors does not bode well in terms of access to information critical of or at odds with both the tech companies and the fascist movement which has backed, staffed and laid out the structural plans for that transformation.

I have not lightly or mistakenly pointed to the fact that in the narrative they are currently pushing, they implicitly place themselves in the position of gods. There is no such thing as inevitable, and those who tell you their goals meet that definition, are liars or the variety of power obsessed human beings who equate themselves with gods, whether they admit it or not. They are already telling us to outsource or abandon our cognition to them, so they can see a product furthering that effort implemented throughout our lives. Encouraging, demanding and making impossible the avoidance of outsourcing cognition and critical thought is what religion does when it runs a state. It is what authoritarian states do with or without religion as the path they use to power.

We should never give them this much power, and we should claw, bite and scratch to redistribute power from the one's who think they've secured it.