book# #
I just read the book Blood Meridian. It’s said to be one of the greatest American novels. The book, or the Judge in it, makes the point that:
“war is god, war was there before men ever were, waiting”
In it, war is something eternal and fundamental, a force, an entity on its own.
The book is imposing, deep, and forceful. Ideas, or open wounds where ideas would be, will occupy my thoughts for quite a few more nights. But I have objections to this basic premise.
War may be eternal, like the shadow of an eternal object under an eternal sun is. But it is still just a shadow, of something else.
life# #
I think war is just a shadow, a visible manifestation, of life. Life in a constrained environment, where resources are finite.
And environment is always constrained, life always balances with resources, it fills the gradients, grows, until it matches them, and eventually consolidates. It creates its own constraints, scarcity.
Life under scarcity creates competition, competition over life sustaining resource creates conflict, and higher level, structured conflict is what we call “war”.
war# #
We gave a name “war” to visible manifestation of a fundamental occurrence (life). We named it, we started creating stories around it, ritualized it, even created institutions around it.
Institutions first and foremost seek to sustain themselves. So war got a reason to exist on its own. War for sake of war. But deeper down, it’s similar to roleplaying, a form of LARP-ing.
casualties# #
Even if LARP, once it has its own institutions, it no longer needs the original reason. People get hurt for the shape of the thing instead of the substance. Soldiers with nothing to gain, no scarcity to resolve, no resource at stake for them personally die anyway. Because the institutions need to sustain themselves. War for the sake of war.
Institution is a vehicle to power.
intelligence# #
Are we taking all the same steps with (artificial) intelligence?
Intelligence, like war, is not an entity on its own. Intelligence could be seen just as an observable manifestation of life, a name we gave to life navigating scarcity.
And our LLMs are even trained on just traces (shadows) intelligence leaves behind, a written word. We could say we seem to be LARPing intelligence.
But we are already making AI into an entity (some even say “god”), we are building stories about it, rituals, institutions. Unfathomable amounts of funds, physical and energy resources are being funneled into these institutions already. Do we even know what the gains are, and who would gain, exactly?
Are the often cited dangers of AI (job displacement, algorithmic bias, surveillance, energy waste, AGI existential risk, …) here because of AI, or these institutions trying to sustain themselves? Their power play?
This is a continuation from another book/AI themed blogpost: The Cognitive Dark Forest