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From Bad to Worse, I Myself Would Say

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Roey Tzezana, Rulers of the Future (Hebrew, Tel Aviv, 2017).

Dr. Roey Tzezana is an Israeli computer expert who works for Tel Aviv University among other places. His book was recommended to me by my son, Eldad van Creveld, who plays a key role in teaching computer networking here in Israel. Like so many other computer experts from the famous Ray Kurzweil down, Dr. Tzezana is trying to look into what a computer-dominated world might be like. His conclusions are not encouraging, to say the least.

As most of us have already realized, and as those who have not will discover soon enough, we are going through a truly revolutionary period. For the first time in history everything—and I mean, everything—that takes place anywhere can be recorded. Driving this development are millions upon millions of miniature sensors sufficiently small and sufficiently cheap to be mounted wherever they are wanted. On the streets. In cars and other vehicles. On doors and windows. Inside buildings. Inside individual rooms. In the sky, on board drones so small that they are hardly noticeable. Inside every kind of gadget, however innocuous. On the clothes we wear. Inside our bodies, should that be considered necessary or desirable and in case the legal hurdles are removed.

Once recorded, the information can easily be stored and kept forever. And edited, and altered, should those in charge feel inclined in that direction. With the aid of artificial intelligence capable of discovering patterns, it will also be analyzed and searched for whatever it may mean. Your health, your habits, your movements. The things you eat and drink and wear and carry with you. The things you see and hear and say and read and watch and do. The kind of relationship you have, or do not have, with anyone else. The things you take up and put down and lose and find (and do or do not return to their owner) and lend and borrow. And every financial transaction you make, of course.

Briefly, Goebbels’ claim that, in Nazi Germany, privacy only existed in people’s dreams looks as if it is about to become reality (some scientists believe that even dreams will end up by becoming transparent, but let’s not go into that here). To say nothing of any thoughts and emotions you may have. The question Dr. Tzezana raises is, qui bono? Who profits? It is at this point where leviathans, sharks and clouds come in.

Leviathans, obviously enough, are named after Thomas Hobbes’ famous 1651 book. Starting at least as far back as the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, rulers have always done their utmost to obtain whatever information they could about their subjects. The more and better information they had, the more able they were to hold those subjects in check, increase and perpetuate their own power, prevent rebellion, etc. Thus one possible, in many case even likely, outcome of the enormous network of sensors, data links, computers and artificial intelligence now being constructed by every more or less “advanced” state would be a tyranny. One which would make even North Korea looks as harmless as a Fischer-Price Toys Chatter Telephone.

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In China something of the kind is being constructed even now. Meet the so-called Social Credit System. See, for the details, R. Botsman, “Chinas’ New Viral App Could be Straight Out of Black Mirror,” 21.10.2017, Wired, at http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion.). Supposed to be completed in 2020, in principle it will resemble today’s credit rating system. Gathering all the above-mentioned kinds of data and then some, it will automatically rate every citizen on a scale ranging from 350 to 950 points. Are you neatly dressed? Your score goes up by so and so many fractions of a point. Did you obey your doctor and lose weight? Ditto. Did you cross a street without marching to the next pedestrian crossing first? Down it goes by another fraction. Did you raise your voice at a government official? Did you try to access a foreign-generated article on the situation in Tibet? The results will be used to determine whether you will or will not have access (and under what conditions) to any number of desirable things. Starting with credit and ending with health services, the right to enter certain educational facilities and work in certain fields, the right to travel, and a great many other things.

All these decisions, whose number will run into billions per day, will be made automatically. In charge of the computers that run the system will be the government, of course. Its officials will decide exactly how many points each piece of praiseworthy behavior (e.g. telling people that Xi Jinping is the greatest leader, as well as the nicest man, in history) or transgression will add to your score or cost you. From time to time, the rules will be changed so as to take account of changing circumstances. Some will no doubt be published so as to help people understand what is wanted of them. Many others will not be, leaving them in the dark as to what is happening to them and why.

At the moment China is the only country publicly known to be building such a system. But this will probably change. I do not mean just tin-pot dictatorships such as exist in many different parts of the world. But also highly developed Western countries such as Canada, or Britain—the latter, in my experience, has already in many ways been turned into a mixture of political correctness and police state—or the Netherlands, or Switzerland. And he US, of course.

Technologically speaking they, and a great many others, can easily do what China can. The only thing that stands in the way are laws concerning privacy, transparency, and respect for the individual. However, should terrorism turn into a more serious problem than it already is, surely such laws will be quickly and quite easily swept away.

So what to do? Enters, says Dr. Tzezana, something he calls DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Such an organization will use the same methods to collect just as much information as China’s Social Credit System will and process it in similar ways. Instead of keeping it secret and available only to the country’s rulers, though, the information in question, as well as the rules by which it is classified and used, will be available to any member of the Cloud. Somewhat like Uber and AirBnB, but without their centralized headquarters. Operating in such a way, it will provide members with such benefits as “peer to peer insurance, peer to peer conflict resolution systems, peer to peer document storage and peer to peer support.” All incomparably faster, cheaper, and in some ways more reliable than anything available today. That way, Dr. Tzezana hopes, sharks and leviathans will be thwarted and democracy preserved. The flipside? Everyone will be publicly rated by everyone else on everything all the time.

From bad to worse, I myself would say.

Just Published! A Biography of Conscience

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M. van Creveld, A Biography of Conscience, London, Reaktion, 2015.

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Many would consider conscience to be one of the most important, if not the most important, quality that distinguished humans from animals on one hand and machines on the other. However, what is conscience? Is it a product of our biological roots, as Darwin thought, or is it a purely human invention? If so, how did it come into the world? Who invented it, where, when, and against what social background? What did the ancient philosophers have to say about it? How does it relate to religion, Judaism and Christianity in particular? How did conscience survive the secularization of the Western world after 1600 or so, and where is it today? Are there any societies that, not recognizing the idea of conscience, have developed and used other methods for internalizing social control? If so, what are those mechanism like?

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The present volume, the only one of its kind, attempts to provide answers to these and other questions. Well-documented but written in simple, jargon-free language, it starts in ancient Egypt. From there it leads all the way to present day campaigns aimed at hammering issues such as human rights, health and environmental into our consciences. Readers will learn about the Old Testament which, erroneously as it turns out, is normally seen as the fountainhead from which the Western idea of conscience has sprung. They will also meet Antigone, the first person on record ever to explicitly speak of conscience, syneidēsis in Greek, as a basis for action.

Next they will encounter the philosophers Zeno, Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca; outstanding Christian thinkers such as Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and, above all, Luther with his famous saying, “here I stand, I cannot otherwise;” as well as modern intellectual giants. The list opens with Machiavelli, the man who, drawing a sharp line between private and public behavior, admitting conscience into the former but not into the latter. Next come Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Burton Skinner.

Separate chapters are devoted to Japan and China. Both are societies that, rather than relying on conscience as a method of social control, put their trust in shame and reverence instead. There are chapters dealing with the Nazis—starting with Hitler and proceeding downward, did the Nazis have any kind of conscience at all?—as well as the most recent discoveries in robotics and brain science. On the way readers will follow the evolution of conscience in many of its numerous, occasionally strange and even surprising, permutations.

The book concludes by arguing that, the claims of workers in artificial intelligence and brain science notwithstanding, we today are no closer to understanding the nature of conscience than we have ever been. In the words of one contemporary computer expert cum psychotherapist, probably we shall be able to build machines able to mimic conscience before we ever know what conscience really is.