John Higgs's Octannual Manual #63

Not long now...

In a little under two weeks, this handsome fella will be released…

To celebrate, I’ll be doing a few David Lynch talks. The first will be in Whitby on 6 November, where I’ll be talking to David Barnett. Then I’ll be talking to Tom Huddleston - author of David Lynch: His Work, His World - at Stoke Newington Bookshop on 18 November. There will be news of more Lynch events soon.

Away from Lynch, I’ll be talking with Robin Ince about Doctor Who at the Write Idea festival in Tower Hamlets on Doctor Who Day, 23 November. That’s a free event, but you need to reserve a ticket.

Then on 25 November, I’ll be talking about William Blake with the artist Ben Edge in the beautiful Fitzrovia Chapel, where Ben is holding his new exhibition and revealing his giant Children of Albion altarpiece. For ticket links and more on his exhibition, see his website.

If you can make any of these events, it will be great to see you.

I hope you enjoy the new book!

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BLATHER

There’s been a lot of welcome attention on AI psychosis lately - the ‘insidious risks’ to a person’s sanity that come from talking to chatbots. The sycophantic approving attention that LLMs bestow on us feels safer than the messy unpredictability of speaking to humans, which can lead to an addictive cycle of increasing isolation and divorce from reality. LLMs are a bit like drugs – most people who experiment with them will be fine. But not everyone will.

AI companies are now trying to understand the extent of this harm. According to OpenAI, the amount of users who show signs of mania or psychosis is in the hundreds of thousands. But there is one curious side effect of all this. AI sycophancy gives normal people an insight into what it is like to be a billionaire.

Immense wealth is isolating in a similar way to LLMs. It leaves you surrounded by people who agree with you, regardless of what you say. This reinforces your sense of self worth, which can be deeply appealing, but it also comes with an underlying insecurity. Deep down, the rich must be aware that the people around them are there for the money, not because of their innate worth as a person. If the money vanished, so would most of the people in their lives.

Great wealth means that tech oligarchs can have everything they want - except for people they can relate to as equals. They have no-one who will tell them when they are being an idiot, for fear that this will hurt their position and income. And as a result, billionaires become increasingly deluded and insane as the years pass and their wealth grows. I’m sure we can all think of examples.

Robert Anton Wilson used to talk about how true communication can only happen between equals - a problem most apparent in hierarchical organisations. When a worker on the ground floor has to report to their superior – and when their livelihood depends on that boss’s approval – they naturally sugar-coat their description of the situation. When that boss then reports to their boss, they will also try to tell them what they want to hear. In this way, the understanding of the true situation becomes increasingly inaccurate as it rises up the ranks, until it reaches the big boss. This is the person who makes the ultimate decisions, despite having the least accurate understanding of the situation. In this way the whole sorry state of things plays out.

The danger of sycophantic voices has long been understood. It is the reason why medieval kings employed fools and allowed them the freedom to say what their courtiers wouldn’t. A few cruel jokes and harsh insults may have hurt their kingly egos, but that was better than sailing blindly and ignorantly into disaster.

My knowledge of the lives of billionaires is limited and largely gleaned from watching Succession. But even so, I’m pretty sure that someone like Elon Musk would not have a similar figure to a fool or an equal in his life - someone who could say things like, “Elon, people can’t live on Mars, it is a dead planet with no magnetosphere,” or “Elon, full self driving is not happening next year, no matter how much you say it,” or “Elon, fascism is a moral obscenity” - and not suffer any ill consequences.

Perhaps this is why billionaires are so impressed by LLMs. When you are already surrounded by attentive sycophantic voices telling you bullshit, chatbots must seem incredibly human. Tech billionaires are essentially getting high on their own supply, having their sense of importance reinforced by the digital flatterers they are building - rather than listening to voices criticising the financial insanity of this AI bubble.

Tech oligarchs dismiss all this because they believe they are in a race to create a sentient, God-like form of AI called AGI. After all, what could make them feel more important and superior than being the person that creates God? It is the ultimate narcissist’s fantasy. But belief in AGI is entirely a matter of faith - there is still no good argument as to how or why it could happen. They believe that because the 86 billion interconnected neurons in a human brain creates consciousness, then a digital model of virtual neurons will eventually do the same. This is like claiming that the map is the territory or that the menu is the meal.

Science fiction films like The Terminator or The Matrix warned that AI would become self-aware and then destroy the world. The real danger is that it doesn’t need to become self-aware to bring everything down. The economy could collapse because delusional isolated billionaires burn uncountable billions trying to make it happen.

I wonder what their LLMs will tell them then? I’m sure they would stick to the line that they were blameless, and that the problems were unavoidable, or someone else’s fault. I doubt they would be as blunt as the fool who, when King Lear was brought low, told him that “I am a fool, thou art nothing.” It would be deeply ironic if the quest for super-human intelligence collapsed for lack of fools.

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OTHER THINGS

Those of you who have read Watling Street might remember the story of Bletchley Park’s computer pioneer Tommy Flowers. It seems that at long last he is starting to receive the recognition he deserved - it’s great to see articles like this appearing.

David Bramwell’s spoken word show The Haunted Moustache is now a major motion picture! Or at the very least, a loving tribute to the filmed monologues of Spalding Gray. Its world premiere will be in the Brighton CineCity Film Festival, at Duke of Yorks on 6 November. Highly recommended for anyone drawn to occult heirlooms, 1990s subculture or cursed facial hair. Tickets and more details here.

And finally - Alistair Fruish and the Northampton Arts Lab have created a 50th anniversary tribute to Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies - a set of cards with creative prompts intended to inspire artists of all kinds. These new cards continue prompts from over 100 different artists, including Steve Albini, Alan Moore, Jimmy Cauty and Jeremy Deller. There’s one from me in there as well. They are really nicely designed so if you are curious, head over to Alistair’s site for more details.

Until next time!

jhx