Patriarchal Ruse Governance

The backdrop to the conception of ASI was formed whilst thinking, rather circuitously, and somewhat unsuccessfully, about a complex idea, that for brevity’s sake, I refer to as patriarchal ruse governance—PRG; and so therefore a further preoccupation with the notion of governance. PRG can be defined as the looping capacity of misplaced authority to generate the means by which it renews its reason for being. This can be summed up by the pithy axiom: If you want peace prepare for war. There’s no denying that it would be prudent to defend yourself, so the logic goes, whilst man still seeks dominion over fellow man. That’s not ideology—a complex investment in systems of self-serving behavioral habits. It’s just plain sensible. Just as we invest in the power to do good, we must invest in the power to restrain harm. The problem with this logic, with this elemental sagacity, is that it creates the very conditions with which power can and does seek dominion over man. Power, we are also told, abhors a vacuum. It seems that collectively, and here I’m drawing this insight from lived experience, we would rather put up with the concept of obviously inept self-deceiving corrupt authority, than not have any authority to look toward at all. This is understandable because authority’s trump card is security, which is why PRG is such an intractable problem. The unipolar—department of defense—world we used to occupy has been dominated by the logic of what international relations theorists would defer to as realism. Don’t pay any attention to the fudged post war history of what’s been achieved, just pay attention to the contingencies in front of you. Look at the conditions on the ground they’d insist, and not the possibilities within your head. A realist response to this would be we no longer live in a unipolar world; this is a world about to be thoroughly immersed with the capacities of computational intelligence. There was life and behavior before the advent of AI; then there was the opportunity to evolve after it. That is with emergent AI there’s now, paradoxically, due to the powers that it possesses, a governance means to finally address the intractability, the infernal logic, of PRG.

Environmental Adaptation

An English born person living in the first decades of the new millennium unfortunately had to witness a cascade of political ineptitude that included: the response to the horrific enigmatic spectacle of 911, that somehow subsequently produced the wars of Afghanistan & Iraq; the injudicious response to the moral bankruptcy of the banking collapse; and finally, the identity crisis/political opportunism that was the fiasco of Brexit. This erosive-corrosive backdrop produced, as it may have done for many other conscientious individuals, a sense of not being able to inhabit, that is coherently participate in, a viable sense of the social contract; that if summed up with one phrase would be—a persistent queasy disaffection.

Along with the very real sense of the misplaced authority of the West unravelling, one felt and thought very alienated from this historical turn. What was glaringly obvious to me was the lack of a moral compass; that to this very day cannot be acknowledged by the significant players involved. So, what do you do when faced with this lived experience? Do you necessarily as perhaps the successfully obligated need, and so do, inhabit the public sphere as best you can, or do you, having taken the sheer embarrassment of the offences of your time personally, retreat into solipsism? I did neither particularly well, but I did find myself thinking about morality, about the relationship between morality and self-interest. From a self-governance perspective, as a potential participator in the social contract, is it in one’s best self-interest to conduct oneself with a certain inviolable moral integrity, with the possible political quietism that may result? I certainly felt to an extent unhinged from reality (that is from the acquisitive, consumptive, blinkered habits of democratic liberal individualism; if this is all it had to offer). Was time-out, an extended interregnum absolutely necessary?

Well perhaps a response to that question can be formulated by reviewing what’s on offer here. Certainly, you’d not advocate retreating from the world just because you felt that in some sense you were compromised by the idiocy of your fellow man (read largely men). This after all is a work in progress. But you could justify such a retreat if you felt you needed time to think about what was really going on: after all what’s the point in carrying on as you are if you can readily see the pointlessness of it: and what’s the point of complaining about it if not prepared—and granted this always borders on the fanciful—to resign yourself to the prospect of thinking your way out of it. A cultivated disaffection is a wonderful thing, but personally justifying such an exhaustive preoccupation fulltime is another thing altogether.

Thinking Acting Altruistically

What happened was not what I’d expected. There was some progress in thinking about a critical analysis of PRG, year after year, that is a workable hypothesis of the problem, but not anywhere near a viable solution. But what also happened was something that occurred of significance on the personal political plane. No doubt realistically thinking about my lack of progress, I felt-thought what else could be constructively done alongside my existing relational domestic obligations. It was then that I began, it would seem entirely naturally, to think about, and start doing things altruistically. I was inherently cautious of the idea of formalizing this inclination by volunteering for something, so the main outlet for my curiosity became contributions to the communal garden of wherever we happened to be living. With this emerged, in combination with the daily round of dog walking, the avid, somewhat clandestine, slightly comically self-important persona of a compulsive altruistic litter picker. So this was added to my daily routine. Also having worked professionally in the past helping those to help themselves (in a supported housing project) I was aware that encouraging people to help other people by volunteering was a productive way in which people might indirectly help themselves; especially those strung out in a variety of ways with what seems to be the sheer impossibility, or is it the crass inanity, of getting on. That is, doing something voluntarily, either something spontaneous, or such an activity, more formally, that adheres—as an identifiable good, that other people will appreciate—to what I’ve alluded to here as the principle of ASI. That is, put simply, a propensity to undertake activity or thought that benefits others can also be a benefit to oneself.

The LLM Moment

Fast forward to the third decade of the new millennium and the inherently scalable governance concept of ASI is back in my thoughts. Largely because, whilst returning to consider the rhetorical function of the symbolic metaphorical figure of TOKOGAE within the Hebrew Bible, there emerged a performative interest in why the bible texts of monotheism have had such an enduring influence. This communication, the scoping cybernomos agenda, would not exist had I not returned in late 2023, prompted by the visual creative potential of emergent AI, to reconsider the tree of knowledge figure. Which, with something of a communication theorist head on, had prompted me to consider the appropriateness of TOKII as a visual metaphor for encapsulating the quandary posed by AI alignment. Then, also, following this creative visual interest, as an early adopter of Chat GPT, the Socratic discursive potential of exercising my curiosity with the prompting and answer format. Just as originally thinking about the governance issue, from a self-governance perspective, produced an interest in the metaphorical figure of the tree of knowledge. That had taken me back to a much better grounding regarding its theological rhetorical purpose, so the concept of ASI has been enriched by considering this concept in terms of the advent and success of monotheism. Instead of doing the reasonable thing, and folding the possibilities of LLM’s into a creative visual practice, the advent of AI now presented an opportunity to address unresolved issues of broader governance import.