artificial stupidity

ALL RED FEATHER MATERIALS ARE ALWAYS FREE TO STUDENTS AND TO THOSE WHO TEACH THEM....T R YoungArtificial Stupidity:
Technology and Human Intelligence


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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES

by

T. R. Young
The Red Feather Institute


Much is written about artificial intelligence. Of far more interest is the concept of artificial stupidity. In this mini-lecture, brought to you by the smart people at CMU and the Socgrad Network, I will define the field, set forth some of the basic ideas and give an application in the sociology of work.

I first gave this lecture to the grad students at the Fielding Institute in California...they used it to critique the program in an open meeting next day...I was not invited back. The data for exploration of Artificial Stupidity comes from the Chrysler Plant in New Castle, Ind., where I observed the inability of skilled workmen to fix two milling machines...and the clever way the supervisor of Tool Engineering used to surmount the built-in Structural Stupidity of the Plant.

A. Definitions:

1. Natural Stupidity. A system is naturally stupid when it does not have the capacity to read, store, interpret or apply infor- mation about itself or its environment.

2. A Structurally Stupid Society [henceforth SSS], is naturally stupid when it lacks the ability to reflect on its own behavior, its own trends, its own environment and take the necessary steps to ensure the well being of its citizens and to protect the natural and social environment upon which all depends.

3. A system is artificially stupid [henceforth ASS] when it possesses the technical capacities to know and to understand itself and its environment but fails to use them to the purpose.  The USA is case in point...it has the best information technology, the best research
technology, the best analytic tools, the finest scientists in the world but most of these are employed by corporations to squeeze surplus profit out of workers and consumers; the best of the rest is used to staff a military machine with which to squeeze more profits out of more countries for some 3000 transnational corporations...at the expense of middle class taxpayers...stupid, stupid, stupid.

4. A society is artificially stupid when it institutes hierarchal and lateral divisions of labor when divide and sub-divide the knowledge process such that local, national and international problems cannot be solved.

The astute grad student will note that while Durkheim praised the division of labor as the source of organic solidarity and a superior way to organize social life to religion [and its mechanical solidarity], the division of labor becomes a social source of structural stupidity in this scholarly work...

And you will recall that Marx accepted the technical division of labor as progressive while he condemned the social division of labor [racism, class privilege, feudalism, and gender domination] as hostile to the human project...yet there are times as we shall see, when the technical division of labor, embedded in the larger social division of labor, becomes a major source of structural stupidity.

B. The word, stupid, comes from the Latin, stupere, meaning stunned. It calls forth the image of a thinking animal which, for a while, has lost its ability to monitor its environment and to make such adjust- ments as are essential for its survival.

The word, dumb, however, is a gothic word meaning dull or silent. It not not convey the idea that there is some possibility of reflexive creative, adaptive thinking. There are dumb societies...societies in which people cannot think or speak or act...Marx spoke of the idiocy of pre-modern rural life...in more modern times, Guatemala and El Salvador are exemplars of dumb societies. Think of the movie, Silence of the Lambs...you will recall that Dr. Lecter [lecture], bit off the lips of his victims...does that remind you of mass classes where students can't speak...or graduate seminars where the professor will not listen??? Structural Stupidity, to be sure.

C. Now as I am a sociologist, I don't spend a lot of time on the Bell Curve or the effort to locate intelligence/stupidity within the brain case of specific persons. I take the point made by George Herbert Mead that Mind, Self and Society are trineborn...in all modesty, I would add that measures of mind, intelligence, morality and creativity are, also, best located in the structure of social relationships...specifically, the division and sub-division of the knowledge process. Later on, in another mini-lecture, I will sug- gest some solutions to the problem of Artificial Stupidity. Right now, I want to set forth some ground work for the measurement of Artificial Stupidity...

D. The Architecture of Artificial Stupidity: In order for a society to be adjudged Artificially Stupid, it would have to have a complex architecture for the acquisition, storage, manipulation and retrie- val of information but restrict access to the available knowledge. Or it would have to put such information technology to uses other than quality of life problems of its own citizens. Structurally Stupid Societies use such technologies for small problems, private problems or elitist problems and ignore the common problems of social life...to paraphrase Rene Dubois, SSS's would have to 'think locally and act globally.' Pretty stupid, no??

ASS's would have super-computers and huge data banks. It would have satellites which could image any fractal or integral object in any of the millions of frequencies available in the electro- magnetic spectrum. It would have telephones, televisions, fax, xerox, and satellite dishes all put to use for purely private purpose.

ASS's have great libraries and wonderful bookstores in every town, village and hamlet; they have hunderds of universities and dozens of disciplines; they have thousands of journals, tens of thousands scientists and hundreds of thousands of students all busily making hypotheses, gathering data and setting forth findings. But the Libraries are unused by the children; the bookstores are bypassed by those too poor to buy books; the universities are closed off to minorities, women and the poor. The hypothesis and findings freeze existing inequalities and treat them as eternal and essential. The knowledge process is fractured into a thousands pieces and scattered to the winds.

E. Measuring Artificial Stupidity. Most people into tests and meas- urements try to generate I.Q. scores...and, without much thought, ignore the larger context in which thinking and knowing can occur. Now, this is stupid; it creates the impression/image/simlacrum that all you need to know about intelligence can be found in the fragile workings of the human brain. A more sensible way to guage the intellectual capacity of a society is to measure it directly rather than measure the I.Q. of people who live in SSS's and then blame them for the failings of the society...dumb, dumb, dumb!

Now, a really bright society would generate ASQ's; Artificial Stupidity Quotients and use them to illuminate the flaws and failure of the knowledge processes in the larger society. How would one do that? I've given a bit of thought to it.

F. ASQ's: In order to measure the Artificial Stupidity of a society, one could take the number of highly educated people; divide it by the number of high school push-outs and generate a numeric ratio. Thus if there were a lot of HEP's and few HSPO's, the ASQ score would be low...and would get higher if HSPO's increase or HEP's decreased...a rough measure but there you are....roughly measured.

Or one could take the amount of data generated to measure key variables, compare it with key variables from other socie- ties which do better on crime, health care, child care, housing or cultural amenities and generate ASQ's by those numeric ratios.

Or one could look at the tax code and the redistribution of tax revenues; take the amount of taxes taken from rich and poor; generate a ratio. Take the amount of tax funds redistributed to the rich and to the poor, generate another ratio and put the two together to find the ASQ; a really stupid society takes resources away from the poor to help the rich. Tax grants, tax holidays, tax abatements, and tax free zones for the rich are most helpful to Artificial stupidity since the rich do not need more cars, more houses, more vacations, more servants or more food. They protect themselves from pollution, crime, disease and distressing knowledge. Rich people don't need more education...they just need better educ- ation since rich people have the highest ASQ's...with all those knowledge resources, they barely use them...big sigh for stupid rich people.

G. Info-cryption: Societies have higher ASQ's when they conceal or withhold need information by a variety of tactics. Charging poor kids for school books is a good tactic to inflate the ASQ. Writing medical prescriptions in Latin and changing names of medications regularly is a good tactic. Copy-right laws withhold a lot of essential information from a lot of people...even university lib- raries will not allow professors to copy articles to give to students and there is no means by which fees for useage can be made except out of the pocket of the professor...pity the poor prof.

Of course censorship is an old fashioned way of info-cryption... but new ways come along all the time...the sub-division of labor in schools, hospitals, prisons, factories and offices [sometimes called bureaucracies] are most excellent ways to increase ASQ.

The unilater collection of information from workers, customers, clients, prisoners, minorities and other populations to be managed by scientific means greatly increases ASQ since inform- ation is not collected and distributed to the public from corp- orations, elites, management scientists and others who use the knowledge process in unilater ways.

In the USA, the best computers, best satellites, best software, best scientists and best frequencies in the electro-magnetic spectrum are restricted to the Military Industrial Complex to continue to distort the knowledge process in a globalized economy.

Profoundly Stupid Socieites give a few media corporations free access to remaining information resources: ATT, Warner's, TNN, Micro-Soft and their associates have benefitted greatly from the new legislation for design of the Information Super-highway. Tolls, fees, costs and other devices by which to funnel wealth and power to multi-national media companies should help improve the ASQ of all societies...

In Summary, the science of Artificial Stupidity offers a great chall- ange to those of you who like to scale, measure, test, study, quantify and score things. Have fun and do good.

Next week, I will share the results of my observations at the Chrysler Plant in New Castle for those of you interested in the sociology of work...I promise that it will not be as abstract and as conceptual as the fore-going stuff on stupidity...I'll try to keep it simple.

                                                                                                        work hard, TR


PS: the complete article on Artificial Stupidity is available from the RF Archives Archives...you can access them by double clicking on:

192 Artificially Stupid Societies

I've never tried it so I don't know if that works but I do know a lot of people visit the Red Feather articles each month so you should be able to do so as well....there's a lot of stuff in RF Archives...including the 3rd Edition of the Red Feather Dictionary of Critical, Marxist, Feminist, Postmodern and Everyday Sociology which I've just sent in...you can have 'em free...I don't want to be accused of Structural Stupidity.

TRY