Philosophical Research:Preventing the robot takeover

If properly completed, Lithographica can prevent the takeover of machine learning.

How, you may ask? In what way?
That has a complicated answer. In order to understand it, you may just have to put aside for one second the way almost anybody parses almost anything. It's okay. You'll be able to go back to thinking in normal patterns and speaking normal language when it's over.

What is art?

Before we can ever become able to properly understand what is actually bad about machine learning or why it needs to be stopped, we first need to pause and think about what machine learning is, what jobs even are, and what any activity that might become displaced by machine learning even is. That's right: we must do metaphysics, but more specifically we must do metaphysics in the form of ontology. This step is critically important because if it becomes the case that we want to stop machine learning, we need to know what we are even trying to stop and what set of steps can stop it. But in order to know this, we also need to know exactly what set of processes and steps need to be stopped in terms of what set of processes and steps is being automated.

Let's start with something relatively simple and familiar. Why is it wrong for machine learning to displace a group of people who create art?

People may have various different answers to this fundamental question.

One person may say that each individual art creator inherently has the right to create poetic expressions of concepts we refer to as "art" and publish these expressions to the world; from this explanation it would follow that if machine learning bots spread all over an online social platform, the attention of every single person using the platform would be taken up by bots and no actual humans would get to reach anyone with acts of individual expression.

Another person may say that the purpose of art is actually to create representative models of real-life phenomena and present them to other people so that with the help of both easy-to-understand artistic models and further supporting non-fictional resources, people who have not had much experience with a particular real-life phenomenon can gradually become educated.
A physics graduate may create art to show elementary school students an easy-to-understand model of a black hole or virtual particles when if one were to directly present the university-level mathematics these would not be easy to understand. A zoologist may create a representative model of all the anatomical parts inside a tiger so that even though most people cannot come into the anatomy lab and look at all the cat skeletons and dissections of extant animals directly, people can still come to understand the physical diversification of different species of big cats in the history of vertebrate evolution.

A professor of modern inclusive history may create art to teach people about the history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and how the history of the United States on a large-scale national level was shaped by a number of more locally-relevant events happening in particular geographic regions and localized ethnic populations. Descriptive non-fictional history books are already available to any number of people looking for information on specific regional histories and the verifiable real-world happenings that constitute them, but even in light of that information being available, anybody looking to study history will soon find that there are far too many books to read and they do not necessarily know where to start. Textbooks may end up omitting entire events and regional histories purely because in all of history there is such a great list of books. The stated purpose of historical fiction and documentary art, then, is to make it easier for each individual to understand, or figure out with their own power of reasoning given various bodies of evidence, what parts of history are relevant without spending a long time on a specialist education.

Many decades ago in the Soviet Union, the country's art ministries promoted the creation of a particular kind of documentary art called "socialist realism", which despite its highly misleading name had a different purpose from most documentary art. The purpose of socialist realism was to present people with a representative model of something which did not yet exist but was entirely plausible to one day exist, using the methods of documentary-style realism to create a literal and representational portrayal of the future. In other words, socialist realism was essentially the same category of thing as hard science fiction: a category of speculative fiction operating in the realm of hypotheticals and counterfactuals, created to educate people in an accurate portrayal of what people can reasonably expect has the potential to happen in the real world. There was one major weakness in socialist realism: it did not account for the possibility of many similarly-likely futures all constituting different physically-existing societies with different internal structures which might each be portrayed in a style of documentary realism according to the real-world mechanics and processes that make each one possible. Within the emerging field of meta-Marxist analysis of the possibility of all potential societies, this improved form of socialist realism might be termed "meta-socialist-realism" or "meta-transitional realism".

There are at least two further-specified connotations within this representational definition of art. One is that people create representational art for purely informational purposes, to provide people with a general body of information to make their own decisions about the world as they see fit. In this understanding, the individual human being is sovereign over the individual human mind, and it is impossible to properly affect the decision-making power of the individual from the outside.

If a series such as Dragon Ball presents situations where characters are portrayed as terrible stereotypes of real-world gay or transgender , this will hardly be the end of the world, as long as there also exist artistic portrayals which actually give people accurate models of reality and they are then able to identify all the incorrect models as incorrect.

A third person may say that the creation of art is a valid way to contribute labor to society and receive a wage from other people who contribute to society with which to buy one's basic necessities and with which to live. Under this definition of art, the act of individual expression necessarily becomes secondary. Realistically speaking, the amount of productivity that can issue from each individual or household is limited, and each person has only so much money and effort to contribute to purchasing and consuming art. One can easily imagine conceptually taking every individual in society and sectioning all the conscious waking energy they have into equal segments, and under this model, there are always a finite number of energy segments to go around, meaning that if anyone who produces art for money wishes to actually earn any money they had better claim every one of these segments before anybody who does not produce art for money. Should some dreadfully successful spare-time art creator manage to create a smash hit that is available to everyone free that spreads across the planet with very little additional labor, everybody trying to sell art for money has a far lower probability to earn any money. At the same time, each time someone attempts to create art for money, that person will only have the highest probability to earn money if they anticipate exactly what kind of art their hypothetical fanbase would most like to purchase and create that kind of art over whatever would qualify as their most authentic individual expression. The person creating art may choose to optimize the definition of their ideal fanbase so that while it is as big as possible given other constraints it also comes as close as possible in its content to what an authentic expression would be, but this does not change the fundamental dynamic of this overall social process.

What is learning?

a great number of people have no idea what learning actually is

learning is made of signifiers arranged into sign equations

What exactly are learning-machines "learning"?

learning-machines are "learning" to optimize the arrangement of individuals into their ideal purposes and identities to create a stable society

in one sense we have no choice other than to do the same thing learning-machines do but better

the encyclopedia is dead

encyclopedias cannot actually educate people and change their minds

because the reason people are prejudiced is not that people choose not to learn, but that people are arranged badly. bad arrangements prompt people to complain about their bad arrangements and face people who cannot fix their bad physical arrangements and try to tell them about other problems with vitriol. in order to be compassionate, or to be anything in any mode of being, people first must be period. bad arrangements threaten the capability of people to be, and in so doing give them very little time to think about the correct things to do and correct ways to think during their process of being.