Despite all the drugs, and the alcohol, and the zombie politics, the average ‘boomer’ has a memory of things from the budding of the television age to the bloom of the internet, a period of about fifty years that encompassed a few other dawns as well, such as the space age, rock’n roll and artificial meat.
The ‘wild west’ of yore lasted for little more than half a century as well, roughly 1848 to 1898, from the epic of the Oregon Trail until a degrading war with Spain. Sure, there were scraps of it before and after that, but this short span encompassed the wars with the Plains Indians through the Gilded Age—roughly equivalent to the Hollywood wild west that informs the public memory. And now we have a recollection of cattle drives and dusty cowboys, gun fights in the street and stagecoach robberies that will forever be with us—however long forever might be these days.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, written in 1920 offered a broader thesis but his focus was not upon the key matters that matter here. His theme was on the aspects of that great trek that shaped our character as a nation, from first settlement, through conquest, unto the inevitable quieting with the coming of ‘civilization.’ Similar attention has been given to the onslaught of the automobile, and all the havoc and convenience that wrought, and of the airplane and the air age. If we survive our own foolishness, such grand designs of history will also extend to the impact of the space age.
Those more recent disruptions to an easier settlement of our lives, the automobile, the airplane and the rocket, continue into the present. But the ‘wild’ in our own generational ‘wild west’ began in the 1980s, with the introduction of the home computer and the Macintosh, and will not reach its first half-century until the 2030s. And we are in the very midst of all that. In this iteration of history, ‘Dodge City’ can be anywhere and our ‘O.K. Corral’ can happen whenever a Tombstone occurs in the ether. How long this particular stage continues before a stop to change horses is pure conjecture. AI is fairly useless for any telling of what may come, encumbered as it is by the prejudice of those sources of information it abuses, but for now it is a fair barometer of what is happening right now. With the evils of our own making so active in the midst of our chaos, and the dangers of our mistakes threatening, we need a Shane.
Living in the midst of such history can be both thrilling and enervating, but it is mostly as dull as coding instructions for the assembly of a sod hut, what with human beings becoming the mere intermediaries between financial interests and machines. It is difficult to set sarcasm aside when witnessing such self-immolation without cause. Screaming just won’t do. The decibel level of our hyper activities alone makes it a silent scream in any case. The degree of true pain is difficult to gauge when modified by chemical relief. And reading by such firelight isn’t what it used to be.
Given how often Elon Musk enters my thoughts I worry about becoming obsessed with him. But I make a deliberate effort to avoid articles that concern his personal habits so that I might keep my focus on the possible meaning of his words and actions. Unlike some of his contemporaries, I don’t believe he is evil. But I place him more in the roll of Thomas Edison than the Nicola Tesla he so admires. I think he is of good will, has a genius level of general knowledge beyond the usual savant, and an amazing prescience. Whatever missteps he makes in his efforts to help mankind in general, I won’t blame him for trying. We do need help.
The problem Musk faces is that so much of mankind, and the mind of mankind, is captured by stupidity. And in the current chaos of poor thinking, whatever is said critically about that stupidity is considered provocative. Facts don’t matter. In the age of AI, facts are manufactured faster than reality can keep pace. And this is at least partially Elon Musk’s fault. His desire is for truth, his purchase of Twitter and all the risk that was inherent to that is ample proof of his righteous intention to defend freedom of speech, but the consequences of at least some of his projects are to remove the human equation that makes any value to truth worthwhile. Elon Musk is our Shane.
I feel for him. Such existential angst is very real. That he might fail or finally succumb to failure might keep him up at night. Just imagining that degree of worry keeps me up. But that is an aside. The battle is afoot. The anti-human war has engulfed us. What must be kept in mind are the things that should not be forgotten, or lost, or destroyed in the process of saving. Human values. And these do not necessarily require speed, or efficiency, and certainly not perfection. I wouldn’t know perfection if I saw it. But I know something about beauty. And truth I can know because it requires the use of human values to know. And what are those? What are human values?
Amazingly, in the midst of an age of cynicism, the most important of those human values are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American values. And the consecration of those ideas requires the last full measure of devotion to truth and beauty. AI can have no comprehension of such ideals.
Shane understood these things. For all the critical theory I can apply to any reading of American history, when placed in any larger context, it has been an astounding success. The age-old curse of slavery still exists in parts of the world but it is now universally condemned and well understood as the evil it is. The concept of conquest remains a deadly flaw inherited from our past, but that should not be confused with a preservation of American values, nor the necessity of that preservation.
The confection of human ideals that made up our founding was not perfect. We have paid mightily for that. But it was a better cake than any Marie Antoinette could imagine. Ours may be a hardscrabble farm, but it is the farm that Shane must defend. And there is no hyperbole to this. In the same way as it was absolutely necessary to gain control of nuclear power, it is now necessary to manage artificial intelligence.
One characteristic of human stupidity, apart from all other human fallibilities, is that our stupidity so often involves power. Specifically, power over others. I equate this directly to the ancient rites of slavery. But with human slavery now out of favor, the impulse to use machines to control others is now the fashion. I can only hope Elon realizes the depth of this danger.