PHILOSOPHY AND THE ALGORITHMIC ABSOLUTE

Algorithms have become near mystical beings. Here on earth they make their users happy and their creators very rich. Every minute a few algorithms manipulate millions of Uber drivers and their customers. It turned Garrett Camp, the Canadian inventor of the Uber algorithm and co-founder of the company, into the transcendental choirmaster of the ride-sharing world and a billionaire to boot. Currently the third richest Canadian, Camp knows a thing or two about evolutionary algorithms. Uber is not the only algorithm playing a greater role in our daily lives. Self-improving AI machines diagnose cancer with far greater accuracy than your harried family physician. Almost twenty-five years ago IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov at chess. Today Go masters are no match for Google’s AlphaGo. EMI, not the record label, but the company Experiments in Musical Intelligence, composes Bach-like chorales that are, embarrassingly, extolled in blind reviews as far better than the real thing by classical connoisseurs. Most evolutionary biologists interpret organisms algorithmically. Neuroscientists study “thinking” in terms of patterns in the brain’s regional centres of operation. From medicine, to economics, to finance, to law, it is hard to find a discipline or profession today that does not increasingly employ algorithms. There are some laggards, especially in the humanities such as philosophy or literary criticism, but maybe their days are numbered as well. The possibility of the sidelining of humanity by algorithmic entities, that may eventually assume legal-personhood status, has been popularized of late by the world historian, Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and self-appointed philosopher Yuval Harari, author of Homodeus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014). In Homodeus he forecasts a “Great Decoupling” of intelligence from consciousness. In this disenchanted future non-conscious intelligence reigns supreme while humans become superfluous adjuncts far more burdened than enlightened by conscious awareness. Our calculative wit will decline steadily as machines relieve us of the toil of doing “maths,” as our mothers used to say. In fact, given our room temperature IQ in relation to AI entities, humans are more likely to get in the way of algorithmic progress. There would be no accidents on the road if all cars were driverless, propelled by unconscious algorithms. The question is, what will humans do in this utopia/dystopia? The growing algorithmic presence in modern civilization has dire consequences for some beloved ideals. The individual self of the Enlightenment and classical liberal philosophy, replete with inalienable rights and the inviolable borders of legal personhood, is portrayed by Harari as a myth that science can no longer tolerate. In fact, anything that comes out of the human imagination, any idea, concept, notion, universal, or generality, is a myth usually deployed for the purpose of eliciting human cooperation, but obviously devoid of objective reality. Modern secular humanism, a more stridently subjectivized variant of the ancient Protagorean “man is the measure of all things” humanism, is now being supplanted by a post-humanist technology that will algorithmically design “meaningful” individual experience and feeling. This will, of course, de-individualize the human pursuit of happiness and certainly impede our imaginative aspirations. The homogenization of meaning and value will make us all one of Voltaire’s bastards to invoke John Ralston Saul’s less than felicitous phrase. The ascent of the all-devouring algorithmic state will be littered with the carcass of just about every traditional philosophical absolute or disposition. Many of our modern philosophical orientations, especially in the idealistic tradition, are derived from the elevation of consciousness, or more preciously self-consciousness, a term Harari assiduously avoids, to primary referential status in the realm …