Tonight on Sunday Nights Radio we are going to talk about how AI and Tech Lords today sound no different than satire a few years ago. Somehow we give up our agency to them.
And we will get to know Lysander Spooner, a critic of the Constitution as there are few things we can learn from him.
Plus music, and musings of the The Mighty Humanzee. He provides the Overdrive.
Erlich Bachman – What Used To Be Absurd Now Passes As Genius
Quote 1
The age of artificial scarcity is ending.
The age of engineered abundance is here.
And you’re not too late.
You’re right on time.
Quote 2
Since the dawn of time…Mankind hath sought to make things smaller.
Quote 3
We are on the event horizon of the singularity.
Quote 2 is Bachman’s quote, but it’s not too far afield from the other quotes. There are a lot of breathless pronouncements that cloud our thinking. Engineered abundance? Is that different from the abundance produced by the engineering of the Industrial Revolution? Is the Singularity vested with such power that it will pull all things toward it metaphorically?
So because Elon or Julie says something makes that concept not bullshit? Silicon Valley illustrates with great humor the absurdity that arises when people believe that their aura brilliance lights up a room, at all times. Bachman happens to be deluded in a different manner than the other characters. In many cases it’s sheer bad luck that prevents him from obtaining greater wealth. On the show, those with great wealth also exhibit crazy behavior, and get away with it not because they are geniuses destined to change the world, but because they merely possess money.
Yielding Responsibility To Automation
Jaron Lanier is a pioneer in the field of virtual reality. His company VPL Research was the first company to sell VR goggles and wired sensory gloves in 1990. He held the position of visiting scholar at the Silicon Graphics, a company which focused on high performance graphics in computing. He currently is a research fellow at Microsoft, and has been vocal about the dangers of AI algorithms used in social media and the risk of yielding our agency to technology so readily. He is not a luddite by any stretch. Jaron does have an even handed view of the technological achievements of AI, but is a staunch proponent of the greater public gaining an understanding of the risks from AI. Those risks are not The Singularity or Skynet. Humans are the risk to other humans.
I share the belief of my cybernetic totalist colleagues that there will be huge and sudden changes in the near future brought about by technology. The difference is that I believe that whatever happens will be the responsibility of individual people who do specific things. I think that treating technology as if it were autonomous is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.
https://reasonandmeaning.com/2014/04/02/jaron-lanier-on-transhumanism/
Lysander Spooner – Never Yielding Your Natural Rights
Early Life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysander_Spooner
Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808. Spooner’s parents were Asa and Dolly Spooner. One of his ancestors, William Spooner, arrived in Plymouth in 1637. Lysander was the second of nine children.
Abolitionist
Spooner attained his highest profile as a figure in the abolitionist movement. His book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, published in 1845, contributed to a controversy among abolitionists over whether the Constitution supported the institution of slavery. The disunionist faction led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips argued that the Constitution legally recognized and enforced the oppression of slaves as in the provisions for the capture of fugitive slaves in Article IV, Section 2
The Treason of No Constitution
For Spooner, there was no no formal contract between the American people and the federal government. Spooner reflected many of sentiment of the Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. In other words the Constitution, because it didn’t behave like other contracts regarding renewals and participation with people signing or voting for continuing, was not a social contract.
Spooner believed that the U.S. Constitution as non-binding rests on his contractual theory of governance, emphasizing explicit individual consent and the inability of past generations to bind future ones. The Founding Fathers, particularly Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, articulated counterarguments through debates and writings such as The Federalist Papers. Here are their key rebuttals to Spooner’s claims:
- The Constitution lacks signatures from the majority of citizens it claimed to bind at ratification, violating basic contract law requirements of mutual assent and formal acknowledgment
- Even if some individuals consented in 1787–1788, Spooner noted that “the original parties to the purported contract … died with them,” nullifying any obligation for later generations
Legal instruments like wills or deeds require renewal by successors; constitutions, he contended, should be no different
Even if ratified by a majority in 1788, descendants cannot be bound by decisions made “eighty years ago” without their explicit agreement
By permitting slavery, the document failed to uphold natural rights, undermining its claim to moral authority
He rejected the idea that a flawed contract could legitimize coercion, arguing that “usurpers … practising this tyranny” lack ethical standing
Spooner believed that the Constitution, which did not have signatories from the current generation, precluded members of Congress from being held responsible. While this may not be accepted as a legally valid today, it does illustrate how our government is functioning.
For still another reason they are neither our servants, agents, attorneys, nor representatives. And that reason is, that we do not make ourselves responsible for their acts. If a man is my servant, agent, or attorney, I necessarily make myself responsible for all his acts done within the limits of the power I have intrusted to him. If I have intrusted him, as my agent, with either absolute power, or any power at all, over the persons or properties of other men than myself, I thereby necessarily make myself responsible to those other persons for any injuries he may do them, so long as he acts within the limits of the power I have granted him. But no individual who may be injured in his person or property, by acts of Congress, can come to the individual electors, and hold them responsible for these acts of their so-called agents or representatives. This fact proves that these pretended agents of the people, of everybody, are really the agents of nobody.
If, then, nobody is individually responsible for the acts of Congress, the members of Congress are nobody’s agents. And if they are nobody’s agents, they are themselves individually responsible for their own acts, and for the acts of all whom they employ. And the authority they are exercising is simply their own individual authority; and, by the law of nature—the highest of all laws—anybody injured by their acts, anybody who is deprived by them of his property or his liberty, has the same right to hold them individually responsible, that he has to hold any other trespasser individually responsible. He has the same right to resist them, and their agents, that he has to resist any other trespasser