The inside out mirror
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CURMUDGEON CORNER
The inside out mirror Sue Pearson1 Received: 30 September 2020 / Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
The automated algorithms in artificial intelligence are reflections of the brain’s own algorithms, so that the online world can act as a mirror to reveal previously hidden internal workings of the brain that have impacted society for millennia. This inside-out mirror offers the possibility of transforming society itself. The earliest part of the brain to develop in a baby is the reptilian core in the Primal Brain at the base of the skull, inherited from the age of predatory cold-blooded reptiles. It is connected to the unconscious, the underground energy store of unused, rejected or overused human potential that in some people can be twisted into negative thinking and behaviour. Like computers, the reptilian core uses binary algorithms to run internal automated systems, including survival responses to threats, and to create the foundations of the brain’s mental constructs that process information and predict future events (Pearson 2015). However, if these simplistic binary categories of black or white, kill or die, ‘me’ or ‘them’ are not later updated by complex information from more evolved parts of the brain, they can cause difficulties for the individual and divisions between social groups. AI, the internet and social media’s use of binary algorithms can over-stimulate the automated algorithms in the reptilian cores of their users, releasing extremist or nationalistic ‘us’ or ‘them’ thinking, and twisted fake news, hatred, misogyny and abuse from their unconscious. In the “Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, Shoshana Zuboff (2019) exposes the misappropriation of internet users’ surplus data to modify and manipulate their behaviour for the benefit of third parties. If we turn the mirror of the internet inwards, we see that this hidden extraction of ‘waste data’ is not unprecedented. The unconscious has always taken unused human potential to later modify, manipulate and take control of behaviour in mental illness, violence or psychopathy. * Sue Pearson [email protected] 1
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Twisting the relative importance between artificial automated algorithms and human intelligence reflects the twisted thinking of the unconscious; for example Steve Fuller in AI and Society (2019) said that “the brain should be seen as a biologically based form of AI” (my emphasis). This contortion is a twisted thread that runs through thinking about AI’s future role in society, but it also coils back to the failure by the reptilian core in some early humans to adapt to changing circumstances. Early groups of hunters and gatherers were egalitarian (Boehm 1999). That changed when gatherers, using their knowledge of plants and caring for the young, began growing crops, enclosing land and animals to build communities in the Agricultural Age (Scott 2017). It was the beginning of civilisation. This evolutionary leap forward reflec
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