The Rise of Digital Technocracy | Jerm Warfare

Jerm (0:30)

My name is Jerm, this is Jerm Warfare, the Battle of Ideas. All right, Jobst Landgrebe, thank you for joining me in the trenches again.

Jobst Landgrebe (0:38)

Hi, thanks for the invitation, Jerm. Pleasure to see you.

Jerm (0:42)

It's a pleasure to see you. We were just talking about global warming, and global warming is now arriving here in South Africa for the next six months or so. And then I suspect after that, is we're gonna experience some global cooling.

Jobst Landgrebe (0:54)

Okay, so it's spring, summer, and then autumn and winter, I get it.

Jerm (1:02)

You know how they say, never talk about the weather. But I think that's a great way to get into a conversation about digital technocracy. There's absolutely no segue, but there we go, I forced it.

Which is your new book?

Jobst Landgrebe (1:17)

It's actually a paper in a book. This is the book here. It's called Rise of Digital Technocracy, edited by two Polish scholars. One is a Briton who lives in Kraków, the other one is a Krakowian. And in this book, I have a paper about digital technocracy with AI. So how AI can enhance digital technocracy and what it is and where it comes from.

Jerm (1:39)

Okay. So your central argument is what?

Jobst Landgrebe (1:45)

My central argument is that though AI is not, there is no artificial intelligence, that artificial intelligence is a mathematical tool that can greatly enhance digital power.

And digital power is a new form of power that starts maybe with the radio, right? Though the radio was an analog medium, it's still an electronic medium. And then we have television and then the internet. And now we have digital power, which is much stronger than all the other media I mentioned so far for two purposes, for influencing human beings, which is called propaganda, but also for monitoring and supervising and controlling them.

Jerm (2:33)

Yeah. So you and I have spoken about AI in the past, and I think anybody who's interested should go and listen to those conversations. But let's just quickly recap your argument there, because you just said now a moment ago, AI doesn't exist.

Intelligence cannot be engineered, is what you're arguing.

Jobst Landgrebe (2:49)

Yes. Yes. And the core argument is that we don't know how animals and humans perform intelligent acts, how we can be intelligent. We can just describe what it is. And what it is, is the ability to suddenly react in an appropriate manner to a situation that is novel to the individual, without the individual having been trained or prepared for it. That's intelligent. And the important thing is that it must be novel for this individual, but novel to mankind, for example. And so also stupid human beings perform intelligent acts every day, because everybody encounters here and there a situation that he hasn't encountered before. And when you then you react appropriately to the situation, that's an act of intelligence. And you don't need to be highly intelligent to perform it. You just need to be intelligent.

High intelligence is only needed for novel situations that are very complicated or have a difficult structure. But basically, that's what intelligence is. And machines can never behave in this way, because they are always prepared for every situation they deal with, because they can only perform pattern behavior.

And intelligence is patternless. And so therefore, that's in very short terms, the core argument of our book.

Jerm (4:08)

I was just going to say, you're right, intelligence cannot be applied on a sliding scale, because that metric doesn't make any sense. For example, is a Bushman dumb?

Jobst Landgrebe (4:24)

I know, because a Bushman who survives in the wilderness has a lot of skills, and their cultural skills have been developed over a long time.

And also, the Bushman is of course able to react to another situation, he has situations that he hasn't experienced yet. So intelligence has nothing to do with the level of evolution of society. And by the way, they are also intelligent animals. They just don't have symbolic expression. They cannot speak or count, but they have also intelligence. They also basically fulfill the definition I just gave.

Jerm (5:00)

And so if intelligence cannot be engineered, and you say it's about responding, that's pretty much what AI is. It's an algorithmical response, isn't it?

Jobst Landgrebe (5:10)

Yes, but it can only respond adequately to situations that it has been prepared to react to. And that's called configuration of the AI, or also called training. And if an AI encounters a situation for which it hasn't been trained, or for which it doesn't have any configuration, it will misreact.