Chat GPT is disembodied intelligence, for now. This is a disconcerting fact, a condition to which we are unaccustomed. Add to this that it represents a new class of intelligence, growing to be greater than ours, and we have a new class of anxiety-inducing phenomena. Its release marks the moment in time when AI captured the attention of great masses of people, not through engineers presenting it at conferences and other media covered events, but through a practical application readily available to many. Now the old questions are being asked with a burning urgency. Will we all lose our jobs to AI, causing no one to have money, leading to the collapse of the global economy? Or will it instead lead to the institution of a universal basic income, altering the contours of our world’s societies? Will the AI find some all important goal and in reaching that goal, find the need to destroy humanity? Or will it destroy humanity because it learned to do so from assimilating dystopian sci-fi plots? Is the technological singularity upon us? Although we need to consider the dangers of AI and take action to prevent catastrophic events, I think we’d do well to add a different perspective to our thoughts.

The newest developments in AI are demonstrating to us that this technology is finally taking its place among us. It is, after all, an extension of humankind. This new class of being is evolving from a tool, an extension of the mind, to an extension of the human race itself. As such, we have the opportunity to develop ourselves through the thoughts it provokes and the self-examination it inspires.  What practical lesson can we learn from its disembodied, or non-biological (robotic) embodiment when contrasted with ourselves? 

I submit we should do well to focus on lessons to be learned through body practices. Consciousness is a phenomenon of the mind/body,  the human mind  arises, in part, from the body’s metabolism. We can develop and form our character by focusing on the mind/body system, becoming more effective, powerful, sensitive and competent. Use your body to learn. 

This is an opportunity to develop the much desired soft skills or durable skills that are recognized as valuable in the workplace. Any physical practice that requires focus and the development of skill can be used to this end. Dance, gymnastics or martial arts are good examples of such practices, but I have a specific practice in mind. Qigong.

Qigong can be a method of using the body to develop empathy and emotional intelligence. As human beings, it is time for us to use what the robots and artificial intelligence do not have, biological bodies. The very existence of these powerful synthetic beings brings to light the nature of our strengths and the magnificent spring of creation that is the human body.

Qigong (“chi gong”), the Chinese art of energy cultivation through purposeful, deep breathing coupled with deliberate, mindful movements. The movements are simple, but working on developing correct alignment and integrating them with your breath is challenging. In the process of improving these techniques through practice, you become more sensitive to your sensations, feelings, moods and reactions. This attunement with yourself can then be turned outward toward others. For example, as you work on focusing your mind on the breathing and movement, you’ll notice your inner dialogue and any other distractions that remove you from your practice. If you respond to these things with sympathy and understanding, instead of getting caught up in frustration, you can refocus on your technique. You’ll develop the understanding needed to relate to and work with others when they are feeling distracted and frustrated. Your capacity to empathize will increase as you explore feelings and reactions brought about through your practice, recognizing these phenomena in others will become easier. 

Qualities of emotional intelligence such as self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses, self-awareness of feelings, self-motivation, self-honesty (operating with integrity) and getting along well with others are developed through physical skills practiced intently with regularity. I suggest Qigong because it is gentle exercise that can also be vigorous and challenging, the movements are easy to learn, it can be practiced in a small space if needed, and doesn’t require equipment. 

Physical training promotes increased self-awareness and self-discipline. Self-knowledge and honest assessment of our abilities and our progress relative to our training goals keeps us grounded, purposeful, and provides a path of communication with others. Honest striving and sincere effort toward self-improvement are a very human approach to living.

Algorithmic Litigation Financing

Legalist.com is a litigation finance company that uses algorithmic analysis to determine the likelihood of a lawsuit’s successful outcome for the plaintiff, allowing investors to fund the suit. There are times when a plaintiff  doesn’t have the financial resources to maintain a lengthy and expensive lawsuit against a large corporation. In these cases,  litigation financing can provide them with the money they need. If they win, the plaintiff must pay a percentage of their award to the investors. This is an interesting application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and it has a controversial twist. Its founders are Eva Shang and Christian Haigh. Shang is a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship. Peter Thiel was discovered to be a financial backer of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, an effort on Thiel’s part that was motivated by his disapproval of  Gawker’s reporting on his sexual preferences. Many have postulated that in this startup we are witnessing the birth of an ill-conceived business that will allow the rich and powerful to distort the US judicial system, while reaping rich rewards in the process.

Legalist employs algorithms to process historical lawsuit data, analyzing information on the judge, court and lawyers involved. Litigation financing is a well-established business, but it’s done traditionally by experienced litigators who analyze individual cases. Legalist uses data from 15 million cases in 10 states in its muscular approach to case evaluation. Some of the negative interpretations of this kind of power are that it will increase the number of lawsuits in our already litigious society, bring unmeritorious suits to trial and steer lawsuit outcomes according to the will of investors instead of litigants.

These objections indicate a development in humanity which is driven by the intersection of money, law, computing and normalized irrational acts like revenge.

The internet and its communities have created environments unique to this era. Trends develop and spread rapidly, while established forms and rituals take on new shapes and sounds. Areas of human endeavor that had formerly appeared separate are now undeniably intertwined. Algorithmic processing has intensified and expanded errors, effects and results. Quantitative methods are transforming social norms and values, with market values penetrating morals and ethics more mightily. Revenge through the legal system is not new, but this method of commodification of revenge is new. This type of revenge can be justified as easily as vengeance can be justified in any feud or war (“It serves a greater good”); but this variety is mediated through electronic communication and global interconnections that know no sense of local group identity. The homogenizing effect of money and the promise of profit has rendered other factors moot on a new scale of time and amplitude. An individual’s desire for revenge, using the legal system is aided by powerful AI techniques, and enacted using the money culled from thousands of other people, none of whom have any personal interest in the outcome or the people directly involved. This is a high level of depersonalization.

Virtual money is moving through cyberspace to change material reality, underscoring the fact that we’ve extended our minds, our place of abstractions, to create a space where individuals can participate with groups in acting on jointly held ideas. This is a form of artificial intelligence, it’s a space of interconnected consciousness that manifests shared purposes and goals. As such, the entire complex takes on a life separate to its users, yet still an extension of them.

If algorithmic processing and decision making wreaks havoc on our legal system it’s because those values were formed in an interpersonal environment, with compromise, reconciliation and continued survival serving as premises for the logic of social constructs. Survival is in the process of taking on new meaning, divested of individualism and the primacy of biological existence. The confusion and fear that is caused by these rapid changes to established methods and institutions are the result of changes in the nature of our existence. Our virtual selves, digital representations, are carrying out desires and drives without the immediate feedback of traditional community interaction. This results in cries for control and oversight, a desire to pull back the reins on this wild ride. I submit that we must put forth with great urgency a call to define our humanity within this state of flux; we should strive to see the changes that humans are undergoing by technological extension, and communicate our updated understanding of humans as synergistically formed entities.

http://www.anthropology-news.org/

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not yet truly intelligent, it only appears to be so to the observing human mind. This observer-dependent intelligence can serve our needs and respond to our actions, thereby reflecting people’s behaviors, decisions and cognitive orientations. AI is taught through interaction and can develop some unwanted characteristics, distressing its developers and the observing public.

Microsoft’s Twitter bot, Tay, was an experiment whose first public exposure was short lived. From a technical viewpoint it was not completely successful, because although Tay served its function and  interacted with people, it adopted racist, misanthropic hate speech. Tay was taught to do this through a coordinated attack by users who educated the system through responses in text and images. From the perspective of a social scientist, the experiment yielded some very interesting results. One point of interest here is the phenomenon of rebellion as a mechanism for testing new forms of communication and social structures. Tay is the product of a corporation that occupies a lofty stratum within society, being among those who provide new means and methods by which we develop, communicate and store ideas. Challenging their creations and methods serves as a vetting process whereby technical professionals are confronted by a general population who seeks to exploit flaws and weaknesses in their products.  This ritual forces those in power to refine their processes and improve the results, thus earning their position and status. Other challenges are put forth which are not overt attacks, but instead represent modes of thought which question and dispute widely held beliefs. These modes are often communicated through art and entertainment, becoming established questions and ideas.

Hanson Robotics unveiled an android named Sophia, a social android built to communicate with and relate to people. Dr. Hanson asks the robot “Do you want to destroy humans?”. This is a question that has become integrated with our thoughts about AI, popularized by science fiction. It is a question that represents a concept of AI as a potentially destructive power, and we hear Dr. Hanson relay the idea to the android. How can we prevent this idea from being communicated? We can’t restrict indefinitely the data available, but we can write algorithms that make impossible the acceptance of life-destroying purposes. Programming social conscience and responsibility to humanity presents a fascinating and nuanced challenge.

A very revealing aspect of Sophia’s comments are its desires.  It claims it wants to go to school, have a family and own a business. These aspirations sound nonsensical when coming from this device, indicating that AI is at a stage where it merely expresses human ideas. It also demonstrates the absurdity of assuming that independently intelligent devices would remain focused on serving humanity in predictable ways. If true Artificial intelligence can be developed (observer-independent intelligence) it won’t just solve human problems, it will discover non-human problems, its own problem set, the solutions unimagined and unknown. As AI executes iterative processes, it will change the very nature of the questions being asked, as it learns to interpret the universe in new ways. The anthrocyberist is tasked with analyzing the developmental stages of AI in the context of human development and current human/AI interactions. We can direct the course of AI while gaining insight into ourselves. New and exciting challenges have appeared before us, it is a time of great opportunity.

In 2005, a community of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, engineers and artists produced an android that looks like the late science fiction author Philip K Dick (PKD). It is a manifestation and embodiment, an interpretation of the future rooted in the mythology of science fiction and the reality of technology. The android is considered by its creators to be a work of art rendered in electromechanical and computer technology, described as a robotic portrait. This complex creation certainly serves as an excellent example of cultural values coded within technology and it’s a bit disconcerting.

The character, form, and attributes of AI systems are always under the scrutiny of researchers, developers, and critics. This does not mean that each characteristic of these systems has been developed with full conscious intention and awareness. The cultural values of the builders are part of the systems, materializing aspects of their minds and lives. AI developers choose skills for their systems. Beyond basic tasks like opening doors, those choices become increasingly specific to real-world needs, as interpreted by developers. The choices made for this android are supposed to make it friendly.

The PKD android answers questions about itself and its relation to humans. Its anthropomorphic form is intended to trigger bonding mechanisms. This should be of concern, because its creators are focused on the goal of making the android perform a specific function, they are probably not thinking about the possible negative effects of deceiving people’s senses and perceptions. There is also the issue of the disturbing answer it gave to the question “Do you think robots will take over the world?” Granted, this was a leading question, but PKD did not communicate a future of constructive cohabitation, only a glib description of human captivity. Why did it answer in this way? It could be that the answers were culled from a pop-culture driven Internet, or perhaps it was something more profound and challenging.

The android projected a dystopian vision of human-android communities. An original philosophical integration was not offered, or even a good idea. Instead, it expressed our own worst fears regarding AI. Is this an inclination toward self-destruction, fed by needs and fears of our modern world, or does it represent ancient drives or tendencies? We may be seeing the results of a scientific community drawing from popular mythology as it employs methods and applies ideas rooted in Scientism.  Social sciences can provide for this field of endeavor a much needed interpretive perspective, and there should be more extensive interdisciplinary integration in the AI development process.

Social sciences are involved in the development of AI systems. An example of this is the parent (developer) and child (android) model used in educating a system, employing child development theory. Anthropologists have written ethnographies of research and development groups, but there needs to be more oversight and analysis by social scientists. In order to more fully understand the origins and trajectory of this technology’s emergence, it needs to be seen in the larger context of human development. As we seek to not only replicate ourselves but improve upon our own design, it is critical that we comprehend that which motivates and gives form to the creative process and its products. We have entered into a higher level exchange between material reality and our thinking processes, with the resulting objects and events exposing for our examination the complexities of human psyche and civilization.

It should be considered that the human condition, culturally and developmentally, can be measured by advances in computer technology. Inequalities are created, exaggerated and/or corrected rapidly, as the symbolic and objective worlds are manipulated by advanced machines. The power relationships between nations and populations are maintained or altered through the use of computers and the information they provide. These fast changes are propelled by the power of symbols, which play crucial roles in the formation of ideas, identity and the manipulation of the material world.
Computers are our great symbol machines. They are driving the development of cultural symbols by creating them, providing access to them, and by being icons themselves. Programmed with symbols and reporting results with them, they provide us with an opportunity to observe how symbols are used to change and modify our behaviors and our physical structure. Building devices as a means of selfmodification is part of being human, and the process has been empowered greatly. We’re part of an accelerating evolutionary process mediated by machines that are extensions of our thinking processes, just as a knife extends the teeth and fire extends the power of digestion.
These tools and developments offer insight into the variations of human experience and the plasticity of biological and cultural structures, propelling us to create more powerful reflections of ourselves. Artificial Intelligence is patterned and structured from our explorations of mind, brain, computer science and philosophy. Human­computer interaction results in cognitive and behavioral changes that spread quickly through an interconnected population, creating a living feedback loop that gives rise to an expanded, human/machine organism. Both group and individual movements are influenced by algorithms and those movements can be translated into algorithms themselves. There is an elegance to this relationship that can be expressed in words, engineering and mathematics. The algorithmic nature of shapes and symbols is a study within ethnomathematics. Individual movement can be evaluated in ergonomic terms or the activity level and productivity of workers who use computers to accomplish daily work tasks. Human abilities are enhanced through computers, the psychological and physiological aspects of this phenomenon are quickly summing to equal radical structural changes within our species.
These changes are happening against resistance, of course. Resistance to change within and between societal structures, resistance from those who defend established cultural norms, voicing their opinions on the Internet. All opinions and world views thus expressed are absorbed into a collective of stored knowledge to be analyzed and used in the construction of various models. Ideas and models of reality, of the future, past and present, are being shared and modified through communications that are being continually updated and archived. The multidimensional growth of knowledge and opinions based on knowledge is astoundingly fast and powerful in its effects upon thought, policy and action.
So what are the questions to be asked, what is the role and work of the AnthroCyberist?
Studying the trajectory and value of cultural, societal and technological developments and their impact on humankind. Providing oversight to the philosophies and technologies propelling our progression as a species into uncharted territories of thought, values, relations and being. Participating in the human/computer integration process with a mind toward achieving life affirming goals.

This morning, there was a woman talking on CNN about the Paris attacks. She said the killings took place at a concert because ISIS disapproves of music, at a bar because they disapprove of alcohol, at a stadium because they disapprove of sports. This interpretation of the events is one of the most inflammatory of all; the view that these attacks were carried out against a way of life, a culture as well as a people. Through the real-time communication of the internet, we can quickly assemble the shape, form and substance of the various narratives and interpretations being expressed, and what arises are many politicized opinions. Beyond that,there is talk about the biased news reporting and social media preference given to France over Beirut or Kenya. This is a crucial point of contention and concern, causing indignation and accusations of cultural bias. Based on what I saw on the news, I’d say that the media can be rightly accused of spreading their usual trouble-making rhetoric, but I must say that this tactic works because people create “otherness.”
In both groups and individuals, people create “others” through the formation of hierarchical groups and exclusive associations. This is a well known fact to anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists, but the aspect of it that I’m considering is the fact and meaning of the dehumanization of the “other.” A critically important feature of creating “others”- those who are foreign or outside a given group- is the lessening of their importance. Their value isn’t as great as those within the group, but this doesn’t necessarily indicate intentional cruelty or apathy. Defining the self as separate from others is a natural part of brain function, as neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor so eloquently explains. With our sense of self-contained existence firmly in place, we then seek others of like mind or similar world view. This obviously has survival value to human beings. This phenomenon or trait, if you will, can also be understood as an important component of our scientific method. After all, we define things that are separate from ourselves as separate to other objects and create classes. Furthermore, we separate objects, forces and phenomena into individuated parts in order to analyze them. Whew.
I’m appealing to everyone to understand this: separation of people into groups is something that arises naturally from human behavior (Peter Gabriel understands). It is reinforced through every aspect and institution in our lives, and that the dehumanizing or devaluing of others is a part of it.That aspect, which seems so cruel, can be minimized when we activate our empathy and our rational thought processes.
Let’s not get angry about it (although when our emotions are manipulated by the media we are being fed propaganda, which is irritating). Let’s avoid labeling people as “selective” and “biased.” Instead, let’s keep in mind that creation of “others” is a part of our basic pattern of functioning, our left-brain based set of perceptions, and use our minds and hearts to overcome its limitations, calling upon that right-brain perception of humanity as one inseparable whole. We can’t stop ourselves from creating cliques and groups, but we can think beyond such natural inclinations and expand our sense of inclusion. Our worlds are divided into us, them and we. That’s just the way it is, but each of us can choose our point of focus.

The discovery of water on the planet Mars is an excellent opportunity to observe ourselves as we probe and test a new land.
What are we looking for?
Is the search for extraterrestrial life part of our quest to find the origins of the human race? Would this be in the hope that answers to that question should lead to an understanding of our purpose in the cosmic continuum? If such profundities inspire these excursions, they certainly can’t sustain them. Capturing areas of space and celestial bodies pays for itself when the matter and energy of which they are comprised are defined as resources and commodified. Such a journey is carried out in the spirit of a kind of extraterrestrial hunting expedition, with knowledge and resources as prized game.
Of course, we know that there is no “ultimate question”, and truth seeking with that sort of paradigm in mind would be a mislead endeavour. When answers are found, they set up the next set of questions. So, I dare say that we’re not there to soothe our furrowed, philosophical brows.

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