This morning, while perusing the pretend-random YouTube feed that comes up on my sandboxed YT app, I decided to watch one titled, “Why AI agents are either the best or worst thing we’ve ever built“.
It was pretty much what you may expect if you have watched a bunch of videos on AI but slightly better than average in presentation. It wasn’t political, or philosophical at all. That is until about 7 minutes in. Then the philosophical issue of agency came up. The argument ran that instead of the more or less 1950 sci-fi imaginings of a human brain/agency and robot bodies, which we have had pretty much for decades now, we are switching to robot brains/agency and human bodies.
She brought on a guest. A philosopher, Niklas Lönnblad. I can’t tell between her accent and his name being strongly Scandinavian. Then it got interesting from our PoV.
Without using the term, ‘game-theory’ he started out by defining an aspect of it. The issue of limited time and resources hence each agency, be it a person or a state would necessarily prioritize for what goals needed to be addressed while ignoring the rest due to lack of actual agency/agents.
Time and agency will be removed from the equations of life, which means a fundamental shift. All animals factor in the time and effort required to achieve a goal. Imagine what would happen if that wasn’t a factor, and a Marxist state deployed that kind of game-change.
The example they used was, if suddenly the state, which they refer to as the government, were suddenly able, through the use of AI agents, to ticket EVERY car that went 1 KM over a speed limit, you would, as he put it, have a dictatorship within a democracy.
We clearly, clearly are approaching that exact example now without even having AI. Just speed cameras and regular old computers sending tickets to people who go over the limit based on licence plate connection to the car owner.
But the concept is worth extrapolating on, because it will be the case. The state can essentially criminalize everything and arrest or otherwise hurt any given person based on what the actual priorities of the state are, rather than a criminal justice hierarchy of crime.
In other words, they can know any minor infraction you did, and then arrest you because you denied Global Warming, or insisted on biological reality of human sexual dimorphism.
And again, this already happened in the Soviet Union as painstakingly detailed in the Gulag Archipelago decades before there were computers. Or even cell phones. But AI actually extends agency to the state to infinity. This will change a lot of equations. And might explain why Mark Carney was so adamant about building massive AI server farms as (at one point) his main campaign platform, while also BSing everyone that they all insisted on large amounts of “green electrical supply”. A lie anyone who bothered to think about it for a moment could see through instantly. No company ever cared where its power came from.
In the following excerpt from the video, the examples given of course are banal. But I would ask anyone interested enough to read this, or watch the video to extrapolate. See where this has already happened, or how it will be applied. As Mark Twain said, “History does not repeat itself. but it does Rhyme”.
“I’m not sure how to feel about this. So, we have autonomous AI agents already out there hiring humans to do their bidding, which sounds like the plot of a very bad science fiction film. But I called up my friend, the philosopher Niklas Lönnblad.
Nice, I’m so excited I get to talk to you about this. Likewise. Have you been playing around with OpenCLR? Of course I have, absolutely.
He had a different way to think about this:
Well, I think autonomy is widely overvalued, because autonomy means that it does what it wants. And we’re nowhere near designing bots that have a will of their own or agency of their own.
We call them agents, but they’re really delegates. Nature develops agency first. Intelligence is a resulting effect or emergent effect of the looping of agencies.
And then that’s how you get intelligence. Whereas we’ve done it sort of really backwards with the artificial intelligence project, where we build intelligence first. And then we’re now sort of going back to figuring out, can we do agency? What we want is to be able to delegate and extend our agency in different ways.
I think that will present a whole different class of problems for us. The troubling thing then isn’t yet that AI has too much agency, it’s that we do. Almost all societies are premised on the fact that agency is scarce.
Attention is scarce. We’re limited by time. Take a super simple example, like there is a concert and the tickets are being released.
You have people queuing up to get to this concert. And this queue works why? It works because there’s a limited amount of attention, time and agency that people can spend. Now, imagine a world in which you
can tell your agents that if there’s any concerts by this particular band and I want a ticket, so queue up for me virtually.
Suddenly there’s like this abundance of agency and the queue breaks. Think about a society where everybody can will 10 times more, 100 times more, 1000 times more. What does that mean if we increase the amount of will in society? A lot of our other concepts like justice depend on this too.
Because now flip the coin and imagine that the government has abundant agency, infinite agency. And suddenly every single violation of the law can be enforced. So imagine, for example, every time you speed and you’re three or four or five kilometres or miles per hour over the limit, you’re automatically issued a ticket.
There’s something about this full enforcement of the law through abundant government agency that actually comes very close to a dictatorship, although we’re still in a democracy. Abundant agency in the hands of governments is potentially terrifying. But what about in the hands of an individual? Because one thing that you can say about humans is that we have no shortage of ideas.
What we have is a shortage of time and energy and frankly, the will to deal with the admin. Cass (the name of the AI agent they built, short for Casandra and is the name the AI agent picked for itself) has none of those problems. And so we thought what is the most ambitious thing that we could ask her to do? Not fix a pothole, not buy paperclips.”
It continues with an interesting idea about using it to create destructive propaganda. Their example is about trying to crash a stock. People might figure it out eventually, but by then the damage is done. This also is a perfect reflection of Western nation’s reality since 2020 or before. Covid, the vaxx, global warming, all of it was Maoist mass line narrative attacks, intended to create an effect. The state becomes less interested in preserving the narrative itself once the goal, which is the damage that is done to the target, has been achieved. At 12:50 more or less, she describes tasking an AI agent to create a mass line narrative attack in order to tank a stock. Again, extrapolate forwards, and interpolate backwards to see how this was already done to damage individualism. What is the multiplier on this effect AI will have, going forwards?
She also touches on another of Stephen Coughlin’s themes. Ultimately, the damage is done to trust in the systems altogether. This is what Stephen calls, “The liquification of reality”. A total destruction of our own ability to make decisions on any of the information coming our way.
(As a complete aside, for anyone looking for a temporary solution to the immediate problem of same, it is easy. Stop watching TV and stop listening to news on radio. Especially in Canada. For people who say, “Where will I get my news” the answer is easy, You are not getting news now. For information, search X. When you see anything interesting, query Grok, X’s AI agent as to the date and trtuth of the Tweet in question. So far I have found it to be on the whole, very good for that.)
Interestingly Canada is still preserving the Trans-narrative attack in spades, along with several others. Many thinkers are claiming that Canada is dropping the Global Warming narrative attack because no one believes it anymore.
Untrue on both counts. The elbows up crowd still chant it like life depends on it, and the state doesn’t give a rats kidney if people believe it or not. They are happy to have their useful idiots out on the street pushing these narratives, but they don’t care who believes them. They just care that people are afraid to oppose them. Because, as we often say, “with the left, the point is never the point. The revolution is always the point.” -David Horowitz Obama’s Rules for Revolution/Diana West.
Arguing against the narratives is ignoring the intent of them. And inadvertently working for the enemy, unless one includes the telos of the narrative. The effect the narrative will have on individualism and classical thought.
On to the list of indicators of the state of Western nations:
1. A decent example of Canada moving from a nation of rule of law to a dialectically driven, narrative based state
Click through to read the entire commentary.
2. Multiculturalism in Spain is going as expected
Also comments under that one.
3. This, like similar programs, are great for getting a few people that don’t already know what is happening with Islam especially in Gaza to wake up to the facts. People who are committed to the Islamic and ‘Palestinian’ cause of course, would just agree with the training and propaganda. it would make no difference to them. but at the end of the day, none of that matters. What does matter is: A: Do we have faith in our own right to exist, our culture, our beliefs, our history and B: are we ready to fight for it with the requisite amount of force and sacrifice to win.
Generally speaking I would say no. Most do not believe in either, and those that do believe in A are not ready to believe in B.
4. Ezra follows up with the whole Rocket Launch pad con that the Fed Guv and the socialist Nova Scotia provincial government set up. Of course most news that bothers to report on this at all, say, CBC, CTV and Global, IF they bother to write on this, will frame it as incompetence, or at worst corruption. But what they won’t ever say, is where the money goes. I would argue it goes to hotels and caterers who house, feed and otherwise pander to all the needs of the endless supply of Africans and Muslims being brought in to Canada and housed at Holiday Inns (at least one I know of in Ottawa’s East End) to replace liberty minded Canadians and deracinate Canadian-ness.
5. The political state of Canada. Watch all of these for a decent snapshot of how Carney and the WEF/Bilderberg revolution is coming along.
I wonder if the USA will have an issue with Canada deciding that Taiwan is rightfully Chinese now.
Passed Fact Check:
Thank you all for checking out this site.
A little something to add to the pile of the Global Warming narrative damage data.
Lastly, PLEASE if you are in or near Ottawa on Tuesday, don’t forget about this event!
There will be a Town-Hall with all the speakers in a panel and I think taking questions from the public Tuesday evening as well. The location is very central to downtown and there is parking not far away.
