AI the Lamb and the Wolf

Over millennia humans have found ways to build communities of strangers, based on clans, faith or none at all, trade along the Old Silk Roads, and in nation-states. History records our dis-ease with reality. History maps our unease. Time heals the fissures across our faces. And while we can use our imaginations to stitch together a tapestry of steadiness, we remain Stone Age Hunters.

In his “veneer theory,” Frans de Wall argues that the world is a jungle. We camouflage this ageless reality beneath a shrill and unsettled veneer of myths and rituals. But these mythologies become the tools used for the domination of the majority by the few. The existential risk for Latin America and the Caribbean is that artificial intelligence (AI) will make these myths, including the prejudgements and prejudices of the Enlightenment, more concrete, focused, and concentrated.

What sets AI apart from previous upheavals is that it demands an unprecedented amount of trust and self-regulation. AI is a human. AI is not a new form of intelligence. It is an unprecedented form of agency. Our modern world is fading. But the world that will replace it cannot describe or even sketch itself. It knows only what it has just-now-ceased to be. This predicament may create new points of power.

An all-out competition for power is the inescapable condition of the present international system. AI has heightened this competition as it erodes foundations and dissolves the charters of many institutions. Regulating AI requires the forging and maintaining of international agreements. However, this requires major adjustments to the way the present international model functions. Humans have managed to regulate dangerous technologies in the past like nuclear and biological weapons. So how do we plan to regulate the proliferation of artificial assemblages?

John Mearsheimer theorizes that states are primarily concerned with fashioning ways to survive in a world where no institution on the horizon can protect them from each other. Mearsheimer asks, how much power do states want. He answers that all states want as much power as they can amass. He argues that the present international system creates powerful incentives for nation-states to seek out opportunities to gather power at the expense of rivals.  In “Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace” (1949), Mearsheimer concludes that the ultimate objective of states is to be the hegemon in the system.

Here La-Fontain’s tale of the lamb and the fasting wolf drinking at the pure stream is of heuristic utility. The lamb lives in the mindfulness of the consequences of making muddy the drinking water of the wolf. So the lamb drinks downstream of the wolf. However, after some dialogue and parliaments over the contents of the accords, the wolf carries the lamb off into the forest and devours it, without any other form of process. The fable’s moral is: the reason of the stronger is always the best.

But living by this proposition has its risks. The wolf must always be the best since it is possible that one day, the Shepheard and his dog may come searching the forest for the lost lamb, and upstream the wolf as it were into a cul-de-sac. On that day, the wolf becomes the object eaten, not the one eating. The risk for the wolf is always that he must make “a maximal move,” one that freezes the game space in a single pattern of order and hierarchy.

The ongoing shift from material-based economies to knowledge-based economies reduces the potential gains from war as new leading industries like the semiconductor industry based on technical skill, grounded knowing, tacit knowledge, and institutional know-how cannot be acquired by military conquests.

Regulating AI requires a deep and clear understanding of the law of the jungle. The Amazon rainforest is a multi-layered life-world of interconnected species, ecologies, and human cultures that contribute to the well-being of everyone on the planet. It holds more than ten per cent of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity, stores an amount of carbon equivalent to fifteen to twenty years of global CO2 emissions, and its evapotranspiration which has a net cooling effect helps to stabilize the Earth’s climate.

The Amazon contributes up to fifty per cent of rainfall in the region allowing other biomes and economic activities to thrive.  It is a jungle bustling with symbiosis, cooperation, and the altruism of countless animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. Large parts of the rainforest rely on symbiotic relationships with fungi, and countless vascular plant families thrive on symbiotic relationships with microorganisms.  If organisms in the Amazon rainforest abandon cooperation in favour of competition for hegemony, then the rainforest and all of its inhabitants will die. This is the law of the jungle.

In his poem “The Law of the Jungle,” Rudyard Kipling writes: “Now this is the Law of the Jungle, as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back, For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”