(Quoted at length because I don’t feel like editing it).
He explained in an interview with WND that the brilliant entrepreneurs who formed Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and other tech innovators have a vision that goes far beyond profits and technological progress, noting they speak of their aims in prophetic and religious terms.
Their ultimate objective is to create a new “system of the world,” Gilder said, in which all of its data is compiled in a single “place” to be analyzed by increasingly sophisticated algorithms that transcend the human mind’s capabilities.
But Gilder contends this “flat-universe theory of materialism” is the fundamental flaw, describing it as a deterministic “neo-Marxist political ideology” that considers the universe sheer matter, ruled by physics and chemistry, leaving little room for human consciousness and creativity.
“Marx essentially believed that humans had solved the problem of production back in the 19th century with the first industrial age, and in the future the challenge would be distributing wealth rather than producing it,” Gilder explained to WND.
I see Google making the same error in the 21st century, imagining they’ve solved the problem of production in the future with robotics and machine learning and artificial intelligence, and in the future the only problem will be redistribution of wealth.”
Gilder said Google’s “arrogance even exceeded Marx, because Marx didn’t imagine that the new technology would eclipse the human mind.”
“But Google imagines that its architecture will achieve a singularity that will eclipse human intelligence,” he told WND, referring to the concept promoted by futurist Ray Kurzweil and others of a technological, artificial “superintelligence.”
“But we shouldn’t mind,” Gilder added in jest, “because we can all leave for the beach and collect a guaranteed annual income while Brin and Page, and Elon Musk fly to other planets in a winner-take-all universe.”
He affirmed that if carried out to its logical conclusion, Google’s future is “dystopian to the extent that they eclipse the creativity of human beings and imagine that essentially their new machines make humans obsolete.”
“They really don’t grasp information theory,” he said, noting it’s a central theme of the Discovery Institute.
“The creation of the universe is really beyond our grasp,” he said. “Intelligent design is just a way to show that the universe is created, and human beings in subsets are creative in imitation of their creator.”
He points to a set of propositions underlying the internet articulated by Claude Shannon, the American mathematician known as the “father of the internet.”
“The computer and all these great information technologies relies ultimately on a definition of information as surprise, as unexpected bits,” Gilder said.
Gilder also cites the 20th century German-born economist Albert Hirschman.
“He said creativity always comes as surprise to us. And if it didn’t, we wouldn’t need it,” said Gilder.
And, Gilder added, if it didn’t, “socialism would work.”
I got to thinking about all this. If “information” is defined absolutely as the novelty of some new piece of information in a given chain, with 4 in 1 2 3 4 having zero information, and “pink unicorn” in 1 2 3 Pink Unicorn having considerable informational value, then anything which breeds out the unknown and randomness inherently acts to reduce “information”.
And in large measure, this is the Socialist vision, in which chance is bred out of life. You don’t need to worry about losing your job, because you can’t lose your job. You also can’t lose your home. Your health care is paid for automatically. Your car drives itself to prevent unnecessary accidents. Your internet protects you from “unsound” ideas. Your library is digital and sanitized to prevent exposure to unsafe ideas.
If we posit, as I do, that the point of life is learning, and if learning is regularly being exposed to unknown stimuli of all sorts, then the aim of Socialism is to prevent life.
And picture a perfect, hermetically sealed system, with no breaks, no flaws, no Robert de Niro in Brazil: creation is impossible.
I need to go to bed, but in my understanding that Kurt Goedel, or someone applying his ideas, noted that no qualitative novelty can be found within a formally bound system. Creation must take place outside of it. Matter itself, it was argued, does not contain enough information to form itself as it manifestly has, which implies something outside the system ordered it into life.
This, by the way, is what I believe.
But applying this to a hermetically sealed Socialist paradise, we come up with the Talking Heads Heaven, where “nothing really happens”.
If you cannot learn without risk, then risk must be introduced in order for learning to happen. And if risk is introduced, then the system is no longer fully safe. And if it is no longer fully safe, can we not ask what the original objective was? Is it to give us more life? Can we not do that without totalitarian control?
This is all perhaps a bit foggy, as I have had a couple beers, but please consider.
It is my sense that, say, Mark Zuckerberg may, possibly, have within his heart something truly generous. Maybe he really does want to improve people’s lives. But the system of control he and Google and others are building can be used by ANYONE. There were a lot of genuinely good people in the French Revolution. They were guillotined. There were genuinely good people around Lenin. They were shot. Same with Mao. Same with Ho Chi Minh. Same with Castro. Same in Nicaragua. Same pretty much everywhere.
If a system which CAN be used for oppression is being built, it is not only reasonable but in my view NECESSARY to assume the worst. If it is not being abused yet, it will be. This is the nature of the world, and the nature of human kind as it exists at this moment, and as it has existed, indeed, for all the time recorded in our histories.