Is the Rise in Scapegoating a Sign of Civilization Collapse?

In a prior post I explored a possible connection between polarization and theories of civilizational collapse.  In this post I want to explore the notion of Joseph Tainter and like minded collapse scholars, such as Thomas Homer Dixon, that energy is the key factor in bringing about civilizational collapse.  Simply put, these theorists suggest that "progress" is fundamentally an artifact (that is to say a direct effect) of the energy fueled increase in the complexity of societies made possible by the fundamental fuel sources of those societies. But when societies reach levels of complexity that represent the max of their energy budgets allowed for by their fuel sources, but their complexity throws up problems that require new energy levels to be achieved, collapse will occur.  Such problems are things like major environmental or social issues that are a direct result of the existing complexity.  Think of the environmental issues that global industrial societies unleash, or the wealth distribution/social issues (unemployment, tax exhaustion and the continued support of social programs, implications of deindustrialization being grappled with by those societies.  If societies had unlimited energy such novel problems could be easily dealt with.  We could simply add new complexity as needed: Desalinate water, scrub air of CO2 provide guaranteed incomes or shorter work weeks for everyone, etc.

Of course those of us of leftist inclinations will insist that we have the technology, wealth and natural resources to at least solve the social issues.  Just tax the hyper rich and everyone at least can be provided a modest modern lifestyle.  But such speculations even if true still run into the hard issues of our environmental challenges. It is not clear that even if we could achieve the communitarian ideals dreamt of throughout the 20th century, that societies would have the energy/wealth to also grapple with environmental challenges.  The Scandinavian countries and 20th century revolutionary communitarian societies, although having their successes were not complete paragons of environmental sustainability.  We must remember that Greta Thunberg comes from Sweden. It has a remarkably low fossil and carbon footprint compared to most other developed nations, driven by hydro, nuclear, and bioenergy. According to a quick AI search its fossil fuels account for only about 24% of its total energy supply, placing it among the lowest in the OECD. But that search also notes, when counting imported goods, Sweden's footprint rises because a significant share of its consumption pressures occurs abroad in supplier countries.  Even if Sweden actually represented something like an ideal progressive social welfare state as it is sometimes portrayed, and not an increasingly "dual speed" economy with a growing divide between rich and poor, there is no clear path for transferring its way of life to the rest of the planet.  

(https://youtu.be/o5sr5RDp3Ws?si=BBPEjyYDLVBC7RnT)

And there is no straightforward way we can simply assume that "Planet Sweden" would be able to achieve environmental sustainability.

If we cast our gaze beyond such cherry-picked and highly idealized examples and instead observe the advanced industrial societies more broadly, all of them are grappling with fraying public services and social safety nets, largely stagnant real wage growth, increasing populism and reactionary political movements.  It is common wisdom these days that unhappiness is stalking most lands.  Substance abuse and mental health "epidemics" (loneliness, anxiety, stress, misinformation via the decline of professional journalism) are increasing in most advanced industrial societies.  Fears about growing public debt and managing demographic shifts and population decline are increasing.  Again, easy access to new levels of wealth and wealth creation (via increasing sources of energy) could do wonders to help solve such problems. This is what happened in the second half of the last century when the increasing availability of relatively cheap fossil energy helped fuel the creation of vast social programs and public institutions to the benefit of ordinary people. But it goes without saying that the latitude for increased levels of taxation and public optimism about managing public debt is no longer available.  Thinking that we could also launch new "great society" projects like the people of those times did is simply inconceivable.  Today, the height of dreaming involves hoping for modest reductions in taxation that will nonetheless somehow be compatible with the increasing number of potholes on nearby streets being filled in.  And let's just hope that we don't have to grapple with a global pandemic again any time soon...

In such an unhappy time it is a common observation that polarization and various forms of populism have increased.  A major aspect of these political movements is a tendency to manifest various forms of scapegoating (or "othering").  In deindustrialized and deindustrializing Britain, it is Brussels bureaucrats and foreign workers/migrants who are singled out for blame. In America it is Mexicans and the Chinese but also increasingly simply all "other" countries, including Canada who are the source of ire. In Russia it is "the West".  In Israel--  Arabs.  In Europe it is Muslims and migrants.  But it might also be the Chinese if it weren't for the Americans (under Trump) abandoning their traditional role as "leader of the Free World", which forces them into the arms of China.  In the minds of many progressives and leftists, it it "the corporations", "hyper rich", "1%" or anti-progressive reactionary conservatives who are to blame.  For conservatives, it is naive social activists and their inscrutable social reform agendas, which would have their "sons chop of their own penises," or it is "elites" and their lackies in "traditional media" (i.e. professional journalists). The demons populating the land multiply at a fantastic rate and anyone might find themselves mixing and matching from the above list.

But what few seem to ask is why scapegoating (or othering) is increasing (or seems to be so). The collapse theorists point to the fundamental problem of societal overshoot of energy budgets.  Such a process is so abstract and detached from more tangible social effects that it would be almost impossibly obscure to discern by individuals.  As suggested by historians like Ronald Wright, societies undergoing collapse have rarely been aware of subtle shifts in energy flows as the fundamental cause of their decline.  Rather it has generally been "Barbarians" or internal "decadence" or various minorities tangentially attached to the subtle changes unleashed by shifts in the energy available who end up shouldering blame.  At best, as Homer-Dixon makes clear, people are aware of the cascade of "crises" of thrown up  as societies shift from going up the curve of the energy supply to going down after reaching the peak of whatever the main source is that they have been exploiting to fuel progress up the left side of the peak. For such specific issues ordinary politicians or technical specialists can simply be blamed for their failure to manage specific problems or for their individual corruption. As Homer-Dixon and Wright make clear there are very few examples of societies who have managed to selectively and carefully "walk back" specific aspects of their complexity to buy themselves the surplus energy needed to formulate some new lower energy/lower complexity system or to to reach boldly for a radically new energy system.  If the Romans had somehow been able to transition from a largely land/gain/animal-based energy system, to something like coal, their path of progress might have been able to continue.  Or if they had been more adroit at restructuring their society into a less centralized, less top heavy social system, the dark ages might have been a little less dark.  Turchin's historical work is relevant here. Societies that are progressing tend towards "elite overproduction," which can only hasten collapse.

Out of such reflections come some simple deductions.  If scapegoating is a phenomenon that occurs when societies feel stressed but are unable to properly grasp and resolve the problems they are facing, which is what leads them to seek irrationally for victims to simply blame, then if one's society seems prone to increasing scapegoating one must ask:  What is the problem we are failing to grasp/resolve?  In our global industrial civilization this might be our dependence on cheap high intensity fossil energy.  This energy clearly gave us the power for the last 200 years of building increasingly complex and affluent  societies, but when that energy source begins to dwindle or become environmentally problematic then the "engine of progress" begins to falter.  People's confidence in a future for themselves and/or their offspring begins to waver.  If they are unaware of theories like Tainter's that the process causing such feelings comes down to an energy crisis, then they can instead be easily tempted to scape goat.  But if they are aware, then they should apply the thinking of theorists like that of Homer-Dixon, who suggests that we must prioritize seeking new forms of energy and reducing our dependency on existing forms by selectively abandoning less vital forms of complexity.

The topic of seeking new sources of energy must become the main focus of political and social life, and considering and negotiating forms of walking back the energy used for nonvital aspects of complexity/progress and identifying false elements of "progress."  This latter option allows us to seek efficiencies and new reserves of energy to help orchestrate a "soft landing."  In the worst case scenario, where major new forms of energy do not become available or are not of a high enough energy density or EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) as old sources of energy, then the best we can hope for is to orchestrate a soft landing to a lower level of complexity.   So carefully sifting existing complexity and shedding less important or no longer functional forms of complexity is just as important as seeking innovation in securing new sources of energy.

The only alternative deductions we can make to explain the increase in scapegoating, unless we simply assume that most people globally are just becoming "more bad," it must comes from some other widespread cause-- something influencing people collectively.  Or perhaps, the perception of a growth in scapegoating is simply a misperception and there are better ways of characterizing what is going on in the political attitudes of people today.  But if this is not, any proposed alternatives will have to show how they are not merely ad hoc and how they can match the level of comprehensiveness of the explanation suggested by civilizational collapse theorists.

I have no doubt that there are some supporting contemporary phenomena contributing to the apparent rise of scapegoating.  The characteristics of the new media undoubtedly make the phenomenon worse. For example, unlike traditional broadcasting media, "narrow casting" modern media significantly undermine possibilities for editorial quality control and increase the quantity and incentives for the proliferation of false information.  Such a cause would increase the misunderstanding of the problem or problems we face.  But I don't think this mechanism can explain the existence or sense of fundamental increase people have about those problems.  Indeed, increasing confusion caused by increasing levels of falsehood could well tamp down awareness of problems as much increase awareness, leaving the overall sense of individuals effectively a wash in regard to their perception of problems and their severity.

Which leads me to conclude that we should more carefully consider the arguments of civilizational collapse theorists.  Their insights could enlighten social phenomena like polarization and issues like  scapegoating and othering, and possibly help explain their apparent increase.

Socrates' Real Method

Socrates real method is an outcome of his discovery and practice of a fundamental principle of reason: Arguments are only as strong as their strongest criticism. The acceptance and practice of this principle implies that your intellectual opponents and enemies are actually your greatest friends. This reversal of traditional Athenian morality, which called for you to keep your friends close and your enemies at a maximal disadvantage, is the cornerstone of the entire Western intellectual tradition. It is the foundation of the university, with Plato's Academy being its first tangible institutional fruit.

Socrates recognition of this principle guided his entire life.  He spent all his time (or so we are told) pursuing interlocutors with whom he could practice the quid pro quo suggested by his principle.  He criticized others' arguments for their most deeply held beliefs in the hope that they would return the favour.

Yet, traditional descriptions of "the Socratic Method" often leave this last part out.  Instead they emphasize only the former part of the method, in which Socrates poses probing questions that discomfit and confuse his discussion partners. These descriptions limit his aim to the attempt to promote self-reflection and self-criticism in the minds of his interlocutors. The result is the belief, as one of my colleagues once put, that the heart of Socrates' method and the discipline of Philosophy as a whole is to learn how to be "a professional pain in the ass." This turns Socrates into an insufferable know-it-all or mere provocateur, and completely betrays his personal mottos of "gnōthi sauton" (know thyself) and that the only thing he truly knew was "that he knew nothing."

I'm not sure what this core principle of Socrates should be called.  One can find on the Net one suggestion: "The Rubuttal Principle."  As a standard piece of logic advice goes:

"Check for rebuttals: Does the argument effectively address the strongest counterarguments? "

the author continues:

"Some ways that arguments can fail to meet the Rebuttal principle include: Misrepresenting the criticism, Bringing up trivial objections, Using humor or ridicule, Ignoring or denying counterevidence, and Attacking the critic instead of the criticism."

It is very difficult to imagine the full-scale cultural embrace of this principle in European intellectual traditions without the influence of classical Periclean Athens (and its public assembly with a requirement for voters' attendance at debates) and of Socrates.  His rejection of the Sophists and their techniques for winning debates makes no sense without recognition of something like this principle.

The Sophists were certainly not above (or so we are told by Plato) using many of the techniques listed above. But for Socrates Rebuttal Principle was clearly more than a piece of sage logical advice. It was not a mere question regarding argument formation. It was a call to action "Go find the strongest counter arguments!" Could there ever be an end to such a search?  The true recognition of this principle puts one on a perpetual quest, a quest tilted towards engaging your intellectual enemies, and away from your intellectual friends and supporters. This tilt is what ultimately led to his death. Clearly someone who did not frequently challenge people of a different mind on things would not have ended up having to drink hemlock. It is a dangerous and even a deadly principle.

Part of what made it so deadly was that Socrates clearly felt that it could not be practiced at a distance (at least permanently).  Apparently he could write, but he was not a "man of letters."  Instead, he chose to prioritize face-to-face discourse.  There are obvious advantages to this approach.  It is certainly more difficult to misrepresent, trivialize, ridicule or deny your opponent, when they are standing right in front of you, listening.  In his practice of this principle there is a warning for our mediated age.  You attenuate yourselves from your enemies at your peril.

Clearly, media today are not "broadcast" but "narrowcast." That is to say as Marshall McLuhan put it, "In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind … the globe is no more than a village" (1964, p. 5).  The "new media" do away with traditional "broadcasting", which only work by reaching out to broad general audiences from central points (newspapers, radio, TV).  These old media structurally tended towards creating forms of  "virtual agora/assembly" through competition between a limited number of these points.  This necessity of their very structure and operation allows for forms of quality control, editorial curation (the role played by "moderators" in non-virtual group discussions), which allows for the convening of accessible but not chaotic broad-based public discourse.  Instead, with the new media you have "all margins" and "point to point" communication that tends to create only loosely interconnected parochial networks "like villages", in which you have possibilities for the force of conventionalism to bear down on participants, while also providing endless possibilities for the creation of fragmented sub-groups and cliques ("echo chambers"). McLuhan used the phrase "village" to raise all the specters of "a place anyone with a right mind wishes to escape from", rather than misty nostalgia of the "there's no place like home" type.  Socrates would agree, and would undoubtedly largely eschew all the pseudo forms of "engagement" that social media create, and instead head downtown, to engage with his fellow citizens, for real.

Why Ardent Atheists and Theists are Wasting Everyone's Time

I want to discuss what I think is a false dichotomy between religion and science, or more correctly between theism and naturalism. It is a basic working assumption of 10s of thousands of Internet debaters along these fault lines that there is a fundamental choice that must be made between believing in a world where magical stuff happens and a world that must be conceived of as having no possibilities for such. I am using the term magic here as a shorthand for anything that can't be fully accounted for by the operation of laws of nature i.e. of what we learn from physics and the other sciences. I could use the term “supernatural” but that term is problematic for reasons I can’t get into here. Another term I like to avoid is “miraculous,” since it can be defined in ways that it can either encompass the operation of laws of nature or not.

It is a strange confluence that most of the ardent religious and most of the ardent atheistic naturalists agree on the following fundamental dichotomy: The world either has magical elements or it does not. The bulk of religious people assert that it does, so they are able to assert their kind of supernatural theism. The bulk of atheists assert that it does not, so they reject the supernatural and assert the non-existence of gods or God.

This seems a false dichotomy. Two other possibilities exist. As the longstanding traditions of diverse forms of "Deism" make clear, and also newer perspectives like Slavoj Žižek's "Christian Atheism," it is possible for this world to be a place in which no magic occurs, but which none-the-less, has as its source some form of eternal agency. Or it is possible that there is no eternal agency, but that the world, is still capable of manifesting profoundly inexplicable events, such as the endless possibilities for weirdness thrown up by the vastness of multiple universes and/or quantum uncertainties. Recent fictional portrayals in movies well illustrate visions of such.

If people were truly to take all these possibilities seriously one would have to accept that one's assessment of evidence, or lack thereof, of the reality or possible reality of magical elements cannot decide the matter between the options theism and atheism.

So, the debate about God cannot just be a debate about the existence or non-existence of an eternal agent as as such. The debate must also discussion about what the presence of “the magical” indicates about reality. That is to say, theists must explain why it must be assumed that God would obviously  prefer to make a significantly magical world.  And for Atheists why it is obvious that a God or gods would never make worlds like those they assume would possibly result from blind material processes. In other words, they would have to explain in detail why this dichotomy must be accepted.

But as discussions of multiple universes and quantum uncertainty has proliferated, an increasing awareness has grown in popular culture of how inexplicable aspects of nature could be compatible with either theism or atheism being true. There are untold numbers of people who are skeptical about or even outright hostile towards the God of traditional theism, who still none-the-less believe in all kinds of wonderous "spiritual conceits" ranging from ESP, telekinesis, interacting with the dead, to more humble beliefs such as that “love conquers all,” or that there is someone out that they are "fated" to love.  As the saying goes “The truth is out there.”

But if one rejects the dichotomy and believes instead that the question of the existence of God or gods cannot be decided by one's assessment of the possibility of magical elements of reality, this raises a major new issue. Can we avoid agnosticism about naturalism?  Regardless of arguments about the issue of God one must also resolve this fundamental question:

1. Can we know that reality cannot involve radical departures from the normal expected operation of laws of nature?

One might be tempted to describe this as simply another variation of “the problem of miracles,” as many philosophers and theologians might be inclined to do, but it clearly refers us to a host of not specifically traditional religious topics. The problem of explaining the "everyday miracles" of human consciousness, the experience of meaning, free will and the power of moral obligation, and the possibilities of our speculations about alternate dimensions or universes, apparent evidence for fine tuning, the emergence of life from dead matter, and its very definition, etc. Theists have been accused of resting their faith irrationally on a “God of the Gaps”, which is to say, to feel entitled to believe in God as an explanation for aspects of nature not yet fully understood.  But it is just as much a matter of faith to believe in the inevitability of adequate future natural explanations of phenomenon like these.

In short, most theists are magical thinkers, but many, perhaps most, atheists seem to be magical thinkers too-- they are just magical thinkers in waiting.  Most theists think the contentious evidence of the magical is enough.  Most atheists think the contrary.  In the presence of any residue of uncertainty, such theists must live with the ever-present specter of doubt, as is well known, but as is less well acknowledged most atheists seem to live with the ever-present possibility as C.S. Lewis put it, of being "surprised by faith."  Why because, it is empirically impossible to do away with the possibility for reality to manifest indications of magic.

Both groups are in their happy place when engaging with each other about their ever-shifting personal assessments about the magical. For example, they both expect that the miraculous events portrayed in scriptures must have occurred as literally presented if they are to be adjudged religiously meaningful.  As such they ignore the mundane "miracle" of scriptures, which is that these stirring and challenging narratives emerge through vastly complex processes of human imagination and possibly reasoning working through entire cultures grappling with the implications of their metaphysical judgements through immense periods of time. They are wonderous because they emerge from such processes, not despite of these origins. That we today can also join these conversations simply adds to the wonder.  But atheist critics like Dawkins focus only on making fun of theists who feel they must "add fairies" to their gardens to evoke appreciation of the beauty that can be found there, while also arguing that so called "liberal theists," who are satisfied with the garden itself, are not "true believers."

It is for these reasons that I agree with Žižek that something like Christian belief is the only possible foundation for the embrace of a real materialism (the subtitle of his book on Christian Atheism is "How to be a Real Materialist"), although I disagree with his claim that this can only result in a paradoxical form of Christian atheism. Only by positing a creator can one imagine a world ordered enough to be significantly devoid of radical departures from the operation of pitiless material laws. The belief supposedly firmly embraced by naturalists of a world created from blind processes "red in tooth and claw" is fatally compromised when your outlook is fundamentally and perpetually open to the possibilities of being "surprised by faith." But a Christian vision of God doing the ethical work to discern the acceptability of creating substantially pitiless material worlds, that is to say, of worlds like those supposedly grimly embraced by "realist" naturalists.

There is a significant practical conclusion that can be drawn from questioning the supposed forced choice between naturalism and theism. First, in the absence of resolution to perplexing metaphysical matters people have the more achievable epistemological goal of discussing the ethical, self-identity and practical implications of their decision-making drawing on their working assumptions and speculations about such matters. So, exploring the empirical benefits and harms of religious belief or their rejection for individuals, therefore, should have much greater priority than abstract debates about the existence of God.

Second, the fact that many people inclined towards naturalism believe that their work is done if the possibilities of magic are put in doubt reveals that many of them simply assume that deities must be disposed towards magic and therefore barred from creating naturalistic worlds. It is only by this assumption that they can draw the conclusion that evidence for the absence of magic allows them to proceed directly to the conclusion that ultimate agency does not exist.  Otherwise, they would have to explain why the absence of evidence of magic necessarily implies the non-existence of an ultimate agent. In this blind spot they overlook what I call the core question of theism:

2. Is there a reason for a God not to make worlds and beings like those naturalists have expected to emerge from purely natural material processes?

The belief that gods or God would never make such worlds seems to be a mere assumption on the part of most naturalists and most theists. But if the presence or absence of magic cannot decide the matter of the existence of God or gods, both these groups may well be wasting everyone's time and distracting us from the discussion of these two much more critical and interesting metaphysical questions. I wish those debating the existence of God while ignoring these issues, who flood my Internet feeds, would move along.

AI Hype is a Distraction

I’ve been asked to speak on the social implications of AI, which I take to mean its ethical and political implications.  I suspect that I got this invitation because I teach a course on the Philosophy of Technology for which I have written a textbook (plug plug).  But I also suspect that I got it in part because I teach a course called “Minds: Natural and Artificial”, which focuses on the topic of “The Philosophy of Mind” and more particularly the issue called “the hard problem”, which considers the mysterious phenomenon of consciousness.  I won’t bore you with details, but I will note that the term AI often invokes in people’s minds issues of consciousness and the nature of mind and awareness.  One of the authors we read is Hubert Dreyfus who wrote a famous and contentious book called “What Computers Can’t Do” in which he argues that computers will never be able to manifest consciousness.  In the class I approach the “hard problem” as an open philosophical question.  It is a very fraught issue in which there is plenty of opportunity for debate.  I mention these points only because the question of whether computers can think often lurks in the background of discussions of “AI” and adds most of the frisson surrounding the term in people’s minds.

Many people associate AI with images like that of commander Data in a Star Fleet courtroom defending his right to be recognized as a person, or the robot from the movie iRobot pleading with Will Smith’s character to recognize the plight of his people at the hands of an exploitive humanity.  I mention my course and the “hard problem” because outside the context of a classroom, in more practical settings like this one, I feel obliged to speak more frankly about the prospects of machine intelligence.  I agree with Dreyfus that there are certain things that computers can’t do and that it is extremely unlikely that they will ever manifest a level thinking that would allow them to be considered independently creative or conscious.

Another issue I feel obliged to deal with is the issue of my technical grasp of the topic.  As a professor in the Arts and Humanities it might be easy to assume that I am somewhat out of my depth when it comes to a highly technical subject like artificial intelligence.  Computers are black boxes for most people, and philosophers might be considered about as far from the nuts-and-bolts of software engineering as you can possibly get.  I will just mention that I have been an active computer programmer, largely as a hobby, but in the past working on academic projects, for over 40 years.  I have written tens of thousands of lines of code over the years, including programs using what are typically described as AI techniques.  I would direct you to my Internet Archive collection of early 8-bit programs and my Github repository and pages to check my bona fides. (jggames.github.io and https://archive.org/details/AI8-bitBASICprograms)

So, on the issue of computer intelligence and creativity, I would qualify my prior opening remarks by stating that I think computer software, as has been well demonstrated over the past half century, can be a great aid to human creativity. For example, Eric Topol's 2013 book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, illustrates some useful possibilities for developing software to take up the load of medical diagnosis and better information management desperately needed in public health systems.  And Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, give a wonderful rundown on the economic positives of new tech.  But what these recent improvements in medicine and commerce illustrate is that what we are really concerned with is a much narrower definition of intelligence.  Computers can indeed “think” in the much more modest sense of carrying out tasks formerly carried out only in human brains. They have been doing so since at least the Antikythera mechanism built by the ancient Greeks to calculate astronomical events and the timing of the Olympic games, and ancient Chinese abacuses. There is nothing new about machines doing intellectual tasks except perhaps the recent substantial increases in the pace of change that is to be expected in a society at the apogee of a bonanza of cheap high intensity energy like that provided by fossil fuels over the last two centuries.

In brief, I see the term AI more as a contemporary buzz term, spurred by recent improvements in language recognition software in combination with advancements in visual and auditory generative programs made possible by access to vast amounts of data generated by the Internet. The recent tendency to use the term AI with its exciting connections to the “hard problem” is no doubt a convenient tool for anyone connected with the need to raise investment capital required in free market economies. But as a coder I really can’t see the term as anything more than a fund-raising or talent recruiting trick aimed at spurring on new projects dreamed up by software engineers. 

I am not alone in holding such views.  As Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system put it in a recent interview, it represents a bunch of people "with their hands out" and another hype-cycle like crypto or "cloud native."  Others have written books about AI viewed primarily as a marketing device.  I will just mention Katie Crawford’s well-received “Atlas of AI” and Merideth Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence.  Yuval Noah Harari has a fascinating chapter in his book Homo Deus on the new religions of Silicon Valley and what he calls “Data Religion.”  I would more observe that the real computer revolution occurred long before ChatGPT in the final four decades of the last century, when the application of mundane computer software and automation equipment de-industrialized our society and shrank the blue-collar sector from just over 35 percent of employment to something closer to 10 or 15 percent.  As economists and historians of deindustrialization have observed, most of that process did not result from the offshoring jobs but processes of automation carried on within our society.

If anything, offshoring occurred late in the process, the last decade or so, largely to help deindustrialized workers maintain their buying power.  Ten-dollar T-shirts from Asia have helped maintain family incomes that would have otherwise noticeably shrunk over the last decades.  The vast increases in productivity in the industrial sector was achieved as result of trillions of dollars of investment.  But trillions were also spent in the final four decades of the last century in the service sector as well, with almost no measurable increase in productivity measured, until recently.  As American economist Robert Solo famously quipped in 1987 “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

Through that period of deindustrialization people did not go on about the potential impacts of “artificial labour.”  The term “automation” was sufficient.  Since that time economists have been waiting for the shoe to drop in the service sector.  But employment just kept growing and growing in that sector, without significant attendant productivity growth, despite vast investments in computerization.  The result has possibly been the creation of a vast array of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” in his provocative book of that title.  Sometimes I am inclined to think that AI is simply a term preferred by white collar workers, me included, who feel somewhat threatened by the impending true application of automation to our bloated sector.  It grants the process the higher level of cache that we feel our work deserves compared to that of our blue-collar fellows.  Which brings us to the first major moral issue regarding AI, which is the issue of technological unemployment.

It is an open question whether technological development can or will eventually lead to an acute crisis of employment rather than the wage stagnation and heightening itinerancy with which we are familiar.  This is an empirical issue and still to some extent a future issue.  We have been able to keep many people employed, or occupied with education, early retirement or social supports, although anyone familiar with the various drug and mental health epidemics will tell you about the limits of such efforts.  Recent studies aside suggesting that we might finally be seeing a decoupling of productivity growth from levels of employment growth, there is a robust philosophical and ethical debate going on about whether the work that we do have and can expect to have will be of an edifying nature, regardless of whether enough of the resulting wealth can be appropriately shared.  Some people argue for a guaranteed annual income or other wealth distributing schemes.  I would simply note that such proposals do not grapple with the more fundamental issue of the quality and meaningfulness of work.  Figuring out how to make such judgements and how to best ensure that human beings can have enough opportunity to apply themselves to meaningful tasks is a critical question that continues to vex regardless of proposals regarding the sharing of wealth.

In a somewhat related vein, there is the fundamental question raised by authors like Crawford, of the relation of AI to the more general environmental crisis.  It is a connection that is often overlooked, but it is a highly relevant observation to make, as she does in her book, that computers and electronics are high energy and resource intensive activities, both in their infrastructural requirements and typical applications.  One need only note that in the early 2000s the improvements made in Great Britain in terms of increases in energy efficiency achieved through intensive public actions and investments motivated global treaty obligations, were entirely offset by increases in energy requirements needed for the infrastructure of the digital revolution. Crawford’s exploration of the vast air-conditioned server farms needed to host our cat videos, not to mention the now vastly expanding AI infrastructures, is sobering.  But as Crawford also points out the infrastructure of AI is tightly interwoven with activities still primarily focused on exploiting natural resources, as has been the hallmark of commercial activity since the industrial revolution.  Nothing so far in the empirical data robustly indicates that AI represents a radical shift from this pattern of consumption. But the human species must collectively consider sustainable alternatives to this economic model as was well illustrated by MIT’s original 1972 Limits to Growth model and its recent updates in 1992, 2012 and 2022.

Finally, there are specific ethical issues related to the development of AI tools themselves and their application for specific purposes.  First, the development of Large Language Models and visual and auditory generative techniques have been highly dependent on access to vast amounts of human generated training data used to apply to the various “machine-learning” methods required to develop such applications.  These processes raise many issues regarding the use of “our” data to benefit other people’s commercial purposes. These include issues about copyright, intellectual property rights and privacy.  More broadly the incentive of big data companies to gain access to our information create many potential moral hazards regarding the farming of users for their information.  Since we are currently in the very midst of such processes of development it is easy to overstate the challenges and the difficulties of finding reasonable administrate and legal solutions.

A second example relating to application simply involves the possibilities of the new tools to facilitate new kinds of malfeasance, that we might be insensitive to simply because of the novelty of the activities attending the new tools.  This is an abiding issue of technological change. Are the newfangled automobiles love hotels on wheels for teenagers?  Is selling bootleg video tapes theft? Is hacking a kind of trespassing?  Is texting while driving recklessness?  And, of course, most recently, is not properly attributing material produced by machine a form of fraud?

A somewhat novel type of issue regarding AI development and application can be described by the term “the alignment problem” coined by Brian Christian in his book of the same title.  Since AI programing techniques like “machine-learning” apply the kind of programing techniques that coders at one time simply called “self-modifying code,” which we were told by our teachers represented the “ultimate” in programmer laziness and warned to absolutely avoid at all costs, means the resulting software has the unavoidable quality of a black box.  Unlike traditional algorithmic or heuristic methods, contemporary programmers don’t have a good grasp of how their system operate and will continue to operate in novel conditions.  This raises many issues about the handing over of tasks normally requiring human judgement to machines.  There are now famous instances of what used to simply be called “expert systems” manifesting hidden biases often resulting from tendencies buried deeply in the human created training data, but sometimes simply from the imponderables of the programing methods as such.

One specific example of an issue regarding the application of AI is the issue of robotic forms of warfare.  The questions of whether machines should be handed even greater levels of discretion regarding the exercise of lethal judgment on our behalf is a very challenging ethical question, although I would note that such issues have been around since poison gas and delayed action munitions.  So, I don’t think these types of questions are really an issue specific to what we are now calling AI.

I would to put most of these specific issues of development and use in the “scare the horses” category.  As in the case of the early automobile when people didn’t know how we would manage issues like maintenance, traffic flow and driving etiquette, these now largely forgotten vitriolic debates were quickly resolved.  But as the case of automobile would also suggest we might well have done a better job of looking at infrastructural issues, like what would happen with all the exhaust fumes coming out of vehicles and how their operating requirements would influence us in re-shaping our cities.  So, I would tend to weigh the issues of energy and resource use more highly.

It is a simple reality of physics that the development of AI to the degree being predicated by its main advocates will require vast increases in access to energy, both for running computer systems supporting AI processing, but also soon, for creating and storing the vast amounts of artificially created training data that will be needed.  The proposed levels of advances in machine learning will require much more data than even our prodigious current Net use could ever supply.  But the gurus of AI, when asked about these more mundane energy issues, quickly flip into modes of magical thinking, speaking about fusion and mining asteroids, and the like.

So, we cannot escape the preeminent technological issue of our age regarding energy.  And the complex systems of our energy systems raise many possible cases of whether there are some technological activities that simply should not be done, or as the Latins so concisely put it: ab esse ad posse non valet consequentia (just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be)  Considering whether there are limits to the creation and application of technologies are not as deeply considered questions as they should be, although I would note the positive signs that this may be changing illustrated by Canada’s leading role in the international treaty banning landmines and recent efforts to limit single use plastics.

Finally, although the word “technology” is one of the most prominent terms of our age, the definition of this concept turns out to be a highly contested philosophical topic.  The fact that such a key term could be so philosophically confused and misunderstood stands itself as the main moral failing of our age.  As Marshall McLuhan so sagely put it, “the medium is the message.”  Interpreting the meaning of technology as such is the preeminent moral challenge of our time.

Bibliography

Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (2013)

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI (2021)

Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence (2019)

Gerrie, James. A Plea for the Preservation of Early BASIC Game Programs Canadian Journal of

            Media Studies/Revue Canadienne d'études des médias,18(1) 2022, pp. 90-113.

Gerrie, James. "Software Preservation Insights on the Power of BASIC" in Game Science. Digital

            Humanities for Games and Gaming. (Disk Book). Melanie Fritsch, Stefan Höltgen,

            Torsten Roeder, Editors. Weimar: PolyPlay 2023.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Christian, Brian. The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (2020)

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus (2015)

Is political polarization in democratic societies a result of civilizational collapse?

I generally try to avoid succumbing to the temptations to catastrophize that I am prone to these days, but the United Nations recently reported that the earth is "well outside the safe operating space for humanity." As reported in the Guardian "The assessment, which was published in the journal Science Advances and was based on 2,000 studies, indicated that several planetary boundaries were passed long ago." These boundaries include categories like biosphere integrity, land use, climate change, fresh water, nitrogen and phosphorus flows, synthetic pollution, and ocean acidification. The scientists suggest that 6 of 9 major boundaries have already been surpassed and the others soon will be.

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/13/earth-well-outside-safe-operating-space-for-humanity-scientists-find and https://youtu.be/X-FJvzgrM00?si=JDCyILh3YhvcRx0L)

And of course our society continues to struggle with growing social crises such as the opioid epidemic, which according to the Lancet has killed over 30,000 Canadians since 2016, the Covid-19 pandemic, mental health crises of various sorts, such as anxiety, loneliness and depression, all amidst a declining health system. There is also the housing crisis, increasing family debt, stagnant family incomes for over 4 decades, the ongoing impacts of automation leading to deindustrialization, not to mention the nebulous oncoming threats of "AI."

(Klaas Van Egmond, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289977166_Sustainable_Civilization)

And yet in the face of such crises we also find our society increasingly politically polarized and riven by "divisiveness" (https://youtu.be/vRV_6XQrMoI?si=DFHGerT7NLkjtZGk), which undercuts our ability to respond effectively through democratic institutions. My talk today is a speculation about the root causes of this divisiveness, which concludes with some political recommendations for addressing it that goes against the grain of the suggestions made by many contemporary commentators.

Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt and their recent New York Times bestselling book Tyranny of the Minority have garnered some prominence and can serve as an example of one mainstream view. They blame American political institutions, which they see as skewed by the founding fathers too heavily against preventing tyrannies of the majority and too little against the obstructive powers of minorities. But as Zack Beauchamp argues in a review of their book, there are other countries with “crises with root causes strikingly similar to America’s, such as Israel and Hungary," not to mention other global examples such as the Philippines, Brazil Argentina, Bolivia, Slovakia and Poland, which work against an American exceptionalist explanation. But then again, Beauchamp proceeds to argue for his own explanation of growing extremism as based in “entrenched racial hierarchies” and their weakening place in American society. It is unclear how this hypothesis applies to Israel and Hungary and other global examples.
(https://www.vox.com/23873476/america-democracy-authoritarianism-tyranny-minority-levitsky-ziblatt)

My alternate hypothesis about the root causes of polarization grows out of the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter and his theory of civilizational collapse and the elaboration of that theory by political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon. According to Tainter, societies collapse when they reach a point of cultural/technological development where the energy available to the system is no longer sufficient to respond to the major social and environmental problems thrown up by that system. (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse)

In other words, as Homer Dixon describes the process, major problems arise as by-products of the current technological system taken as a whole, which that system is fundamentally energy deficient to address. Of course, major new sources of energy or efficiencies can allow for such problems to be addressed. But if the ingenuity required to open up such sources or to provide the needed efficiencies is unavailable or practically out of reach then a society will be unable to respond with new levels of complexity and will face what he calls an "ingenuity gap." He is doubtful that currently proposed new sources of energy and proposed efficiencies will be able to provide the new levels of required energy.

The inevitable result is some kind of contraction of the civilization in terms of complexity (i.e. its level of progress). Dixon argues that such contraction need not be catastrophic. There can be strategic walk-back of certain aspects of the technological system that can set the stage for future growth, but often civilizational collapse results where the unravelling of complexity takes the form of a cascading collapse of interconnected aspects of complexity triggered by "energy overshoot." The system needs to rise to new levels of complexity in response to consequences of its current operation but can't.

As such failure unfolds major derivative crises occur (environmental and social) that are the more obvious manifestation of the more fundamental lack of energy. Such crises as symptoms of collapse are identifiable by their intransigence. They are obvious, but the solutions are not, because there is fundamentally a lack of extra energy. So, they will go unaddressed. Lip service might be able to be paid to solving them, overblown panaceas can be floated, promises can be made, but in real situations of civilizational collapse nothing substantial will be able to be done because the society has maxed-out its energy budget supporting its existing level of technological complexity.

For Tainter and Homer-Dixon energy is the "master resource" because it cannot simply be skirted around by way of technological development in general, only developments that expand access to energy sources will address the crises. In other words, technology itself is not an energy source. It is only a facilitator of access to energy resources in nature. It is those resources that determine all technological possibilities, including those of accessing new energy resources. This aspect of the dynamic is known as the concept of EROEI or Energy Return on Energy Invested. It is ultimately this ratio that determines the amount of progress possible for society. In brief, all civilizational collapses are just energy crises masquerading as an array of more manifest crises.

In situations of energy overshoot, one would expect that democratic leaders would have an especially hard time of it. In times of excess energy, which has been our experience for the last 200 years, societies can always simply add new forms of complexity, typically in the form of new public services, if new problems arise. Politicians can simply propose these new forms of complexity to get elected because there is unused energy available to the system. They might still lie for selfish or strategic reasons and make promises they know they can't keep, but this will not be a necessity.

But once overshoot begins to take hold (I think of this as us collectively riding down right side of "Hubbert's Peak" (aka the "Peak Oil" curve represented as a giant roller coaster) and if ingenuity gaps manifest themselves, it will become increasingly tempting for politicians to become mendacious. Barring some kind of major energy revolution providing new high EROI sources of energy to replace the high EROI oil and coal that have fueled progress for the last 200 years, solutions will be limited to strategic compromises of existing aspects of progress, which will inevitably alienate some existing constituency. Since easy solutions that simply involve adding complexity will be increasingly less available, there will be an acute increase in the level of leadership skill needed to fashion political consensuses. Whether from necessity or fecklessness or both, the temptation will be for leaders to oversell panaceas, reach for desperate and extreme solutions, focus on issues where non-energy intensive moral victories can be achieved (possibly as a kind of distraction), or use nefarious rhetorical tricks to maintain themselves in power.

As choices for addressing problems diminish, voters will become increasingly disenchanted and political apathy will increase. Also, since little substantive difference in terms of addressing problems will manifest itself, the act of voting will increasingly become an exercise in random selection. If choosing one way or another makes little practical difference, there can be no actual rationale for choosing in one direction over another. Non-rational, essentially random features of human psychology, personality and circumstance aggregated across vast populations will become the deciding factors for how people select political parties. Political life will increasingly become an arbitrary exercise of "team picking", even as voters become splintered into ever finer and increasingly less-rational factions. In democracies, which must ultimately always filter choices through majority parties or coalitions, the teams will tend towards the mean (50% going this way, 50% going that way). Such a process will likely involve much scapegoating, blame-laying and intensifying vilification and demonizing of the other team as a psychological relief-valve for the persistent failure of their growing concerns to be addressed.

In short, political polarization in democratic societies would likely be an effect of, and sign of, those societies being in a process of collapse. Could such a process be happening to us? Certainly not if we take the perspective of many commentators on polarization, who often suggest that polarization itself is a cause of potential social breakdown. For example, Morgan Kelly, an author at the High Meadows Environmental Institute observes:

As social interactions and individual decisions isolate people into only a few intractable camps, the political system becomes incapable of addressing the range of issues — or formulating the variety of solutions — necessary for government to function and provide the services critical for society.

(https://environment.princeton.edu/news/like-a-natural-system-democracy-faces-collapse-as-polarization-leads-to-loss-of-diversity/)

In short, it is people's personal dispositions that create polarization, not wider forces affecting society that influence those dispositions.

However, in subsequent remarks Kelly points to other factors based in the new media as potential culprit for these negative personal dispositions. His comments, and those of many other popular commentators on the issue, raise the possibility of what Marshall McLuhan called, in the regrettable culturally insensitive terminology of his time, the "tribalizing" effects of new media or what theorists drawing on his work now call "narrowcast" media, such as the social media platforms with their tendency to create "echo chambering" in public discourse. McLuhan would also add that such media also, paradoxically, embody possibilities for increasing exposure to negative and critical viewpoints, which he described as "the global village" effect, which can lead to a disruption of the development of a sense of personal identity. He observes that situations of the loss of identity either individually or in societies almost always result in violent responses. Such complex effects are real, but I would argue that they might only feed off and accentuate a process of polarization like that described above.

My reason for questioning the suggestion that the echo chambering effect is the primary cause of polarization is because this suggestion only explains increasing insensitivity and decreasing tolerance of public discourse, not the increasing sense deadlock and decreasing confidence in political life. As reported by the Carnegie institute, several trends developing in democracies seem to characterize polarization in Both North America and Europe, such as:

• popular confidence in political institutions has plummeted
• U.S. and European voters are disenchanted with mainstream political parties
• High levels of partisan polarization, especially in the US (https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/06/21/comparing-democratic-distress-in-united-states-and-europe-pub-76646)

The last point's connection to the prior two is somewhat baffling. Why, if confidence is so low in institutions and parties, would substantial numbers of voters be inclined to cling more ardently to parties? Why would others choose to move to extreme groups rather than simply, as has always been the tendency in democracies, nudge dominant parties to take up new policies and transform them into mainstream policies? Instead, we find societies increasingly split. For example, in the last Canadian election the victorious Liberals won 32.6 percent of the popular vote, whereas the Conservatives actually won the popular vote with 33.7 percent (https://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/1867-present.html). It seems increasingly that elections hang on knife edges. In the U.S, Trump only pushed over the top because of the archaic state-elector system and recent elections in Israel required new levels of coalition building. There seems to be an increasing tendency in democracies for a lack of clear mandates. Instead, slim minorities often determine major shifts in political direction, such as in Brexit. What can explain this phenomenon of oscillation around the middle?

If the effect of echo chambering was main cause of polarization, the effect would be to coarsen debate between existing party constituencies as they increasingly lose contact with each other. But this hypothesis alone does not explain the growing sense of gridlock. Indeed, if new media and their echo chambering effect decrease the awareness of other groups, we should expect that the effect would be to simply to solidify existing groups at the numbers that existed before their effects took hold. But what we seem to find instead is societies gravitating towards equally balanced fundamentally opposed pluralities.

Such a tendency for oscillation around the middle of the political spectrum might be what causes the sudden major flips on issues with only the narrowest of margins, as in Brexit, or the paradoxical victories parties who lack popular support, but who eke out victories due the arcane minutiae of electoral systems. This split at the middle of the spectrum does not seem widely discussed by commentators on polarization. Rather, the focus is on the vitriol and extremity of groupings making up the coalitions of left and right (https://youtu.be/x_Q9ynm2Rfg?si=j6_z83RbH2NJzby8).

As Kelly's comment exemplifies, commentators frequently point at personal tendencies of thought and communication as the main causes of polarization. In a TEDx talk titled "That Open Secret About Political Polarization" Jake Teeny points out, for example that surveys indicate there is an increasing tendency for people to report feeling reluctant to engage in discussions with political opponents because of an "expectation of being unheard." In response he presents some practical suggestions for overcoming and managing such feelings.

Tainter and Homer-Dixon's analysis suggests a different explanation for why people might be having feelings of being unheard. They suggest that it could be the inherent intransigence of the problems in situations of energy overshoot and the encouragement such a situation creates for exploring desperate measures. Such desperation and the inevitable fruitlessness of addressing side-effects could be the cause of an increasing sense of frustration with political discourse, at least in democratic societies.

In contrast, as Homer-Dixon and the historian Ronald Wright explore in some detail, in authoritarian societies one might simply find increasing inequality between marginalized groups and elites as elites leverage their power and privilege to preserve and even expand their interests in the lead up to collapse. Wright in his Short History of Progress discuss actual empirical evidence of this, such as can be found in surveys of the bone density of skeletons of different classes in societies that have experienced collapse, such in meso-American societies like the Maya. Such inequality will undoubtedly also manifest in democratic societies, but conceivably to a lesser extent. Instead, polarization might be the primary political effect.

If Tainter, Homer-Dixon and Wright’s portrayal of civilizational collapse is accurate, societies experiencing it will need to focus their leadership expertise on addressing the root causes of this kind of situation. Priority must be put on seeking radically new energy sources, major new efficiencies in current usage and possibilities for walking-back non-essential aspects of so-called "progress," to allow for controlled forms of "collapse" in the meantime.

Attributing blame to who is being most intransigent will not be helpful. Nor will seeking ways for ameliorating polarization directly, such as suggestions like that of Henry E. Brady of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy who recommends better "civics courses." If polarization is largely a symptom of a largely unrecognized dynamics of collapse, viewing civics as a "giant killer" of the phenomenon might be a mere panacea, no matter the intrinsic value of such educational activity. Instead, what will be critical will be civic activism focused on the fundamental energy and technological systems dynamics feeding collapse. Think of the case of the recent American government shutdown, where an ultra-conservative minority held a slim balance of power that allowed it to hold the operation of the entire U.S. government hostage. Many in both the right and left news media were happy to portray that minority as mere ignorant attention seekers. Far too few were inclined to look for deeper causes for why conservative people were increasingly behaving like political nihilists and anarchists.

So instead of seeking to lay blame we must unrelentingly demand of our political leaders to explain what they are doing to find new forms of energy, and energy efficiency and what existing technological system they think are not as vital as most believe. As a catch phase we would need "innovation and discrimination about innovation." Political leaders and our own political discourse must be judged in terms of these priorities, until civilizational collapse has been managed or fundamentally averted, if collapse is indeed occurring.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank all those who provided feedback on my presentation of this piece at the Atlantic Regional Philosophical Annual Meeting in Charlottetown and especially Dr. Will Sweet and Dr. Pamela Courtney-Hall.

Is the Rhetoric of AI just a Cover for Big Tech?

The Guardian published an opinion piece recently:

Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

Does the advent of machine learning mean the classic methodology of hypothesis, predict and test has had its day?

by Laura Spinney

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/09/are-we-witnessing-the-dawn-of-post-theory-science

This piece by Spinney strikes me as sensationalism that is exploiting common anxieties and misperceptions about AI loosely connected with some legitimate concerns about the declining momentum of scientific progress ("The End of Science" a la Horgan and the challenges of "Big Science"). One remark in particular makes me question the author's judgement:

particularly a form of machine learning called neural networks, which learn from data without having to be fed explicit instructions.

The highlighted part is overstatement. All machine learning(including "neural networks") begins with basic assumptions and methods, and specific goals ("end points"). These starting methods just allow for their own refinement and alteration through the processing of large amounts of data, which the digital revolution has made available. This is simple feedback, which has been a part of programming from as far back as Ada Lovelace. But it is made so much more "sensational' when buzz words like "neural network" "AI" and machine learning are used instead of mundane programming terminology. 30 years ago, we used terms like "self-modifying code" for such mundane techniques of software development.

Pieces like this one indicate to me that there is something very strange at work in the lives of computer programmers and software companies today that has led them to develop this rhetoric about AI, machine learning and neural networks. I worry that the "sexing up" of software engineering in the face of the failure of real AI by these folks is being exploited by big IT to act as a cover for its activities of getting lots of people to buy into the inanities of our largely unregulated tech industry.

By even using the terms "AI" and "machine learning" instead of more accurate descriptors like "clever coding" or "data mining" automated programming", members of the public have already ceded the issue of whether these applications should be embraced or avoided, legally limited or left to users to guide completely by themselves.  Who can be apposed to the application of intelligence?  Who would want to limit "a learner".  The reality is that these terms are mere marketing hype which non-programmers should refuse to use.

Does the Trolley Problem Present a Reductio Ad Absurdum Argument Against Utilitarianism?

I have been thinking about the Trolley Problem and the Teselacta from Dr. Who. Typically trolley problems are viewed as thought experiments that highlight competing ways the predominant Utilitarian and Deontological theoretical traditions can go about deriving answers to moral conundrums. In other words, they're meant to provide a focal point for debate between these two traditions. But what I think they actually do is highlight the deficiencies of Utilitarianism.

What Trolley problems reveal about Utilitarianism is that other factors besides happiness/utility are absolutely necessary for moral decision-making. In the problem's simplest form, choosing the death of five people or switching the track to kill one, a Utilitarian analysis, and I would argue, any kind of proper moral analysis should have one try to save the five. The truly interesting debates arise once one begins to add other factors, such as relationships with the other parties involved. In the empirical studies utilizing trolley scenarios people begin to substantially change their answers when other such factors enter in. And this makes sense if other things can also be considered good besides simple "happiness experiencing potential" of the sentient units possibly influenced by one's choices.

A more interesting variation of the trolley problem (this is where the Teselecta part comes in) might be to ask if the tracks had only one individual on each track: Hitler and Gandhi, both appearing through time vortexes immediately before their actual historical deaths. Your action of killing them would make no significant historical difference. Both will be killed and then swept back to their own time as dead bodies leaving the subsequent timeline intact. No further lives will be saved or influenced by the act. The train is hurtling towards Gandhi. Should you change the track and switch it to Hitler?  How should you make choices about such, as my son called them, "micro utilities?"

One might argue that the scenario is null-- One's choice will make no significant moral difference. Leave the train to run over Gandhi, and then let him be swept back in time to have the assassin's bullet hit his lifeless body and subsequent events unfold.  Or switch the track and play a role in "giving one" to Hitler just before he would have given one to himself with his pistol in the bunker. Since there are no significant differences in consequences for history, Utilitarianism might say there is no real moral issue at all. But how would one be able to reach such a conclusion?

If one could reduce suffering even by a tiny amount more, then the maximization of utility in the universe might only be achieved by putting Hitler out of his misery just a few moments earlier. Whereas, killing Gandhi who was conceivably feeling fine before the assassin's bullet felled him, might not be so effected by losing a few seconds of his general equanimity.  How could we weigh those few seconds against each other?  Is eliminating a few seconds of the undoubted anguish of Hitler in his last moments more weighty than shortening a few seconds good feeling of Gandhi basking in the praise of his supporters?  What if he happened to be worrying about something? Which tittle of utility should decide the matter?

And how does my own feeling factor in?  If I might feel good at giving one to Hitler, would this tip the balance?  Clearly it would be needed to be added to the scale.  But what if I experienced discomfort at being forced to make such a decision?  Having to think these potentially weighty matters through, especially under time pressure, might have its own displeasure attached to it.  I should certainly not let that displeasure rise to a level that I would tip the balance of the universe's utility in a lower direction than it might be otherwise. So perhaps I really should simply make an arbitrary decision to avoid such a possibility?  But what of possible regret?  Shouldn't be a problem.  Just try to make a reasonable estimate of the utility in the time allowed and choose (don't be a Chidi Anagonye).

When dealing with such minuscule amounts of possible utility/happiness, we are faced with a complex decision involving a possible return on investment of our moral unease and earnest concern.  Mere seconds at issue with the feelings of the subjects of our decision weighed against our own discomfort resulting from having to take our basic moral responsibility under Utilitarianism seriously.  If  situation were real, such reflections would likely be moot. Aristotle might be right that ethics in real life requires well established habits rather than complex accounting of consequences. It is only when the scenario is hypothetical that we can lavish time on trying to think such matters completely through.

But one thing we can't avoid is at least risking undergoing some uncompensated discomfort from undertaking our duties under Utilitarianism in order to provide the beginnings of an assessment of what the possible return on our own initial moral unease might be versus the possible utility that could be obtained from a possible moral decision. In other words, Utilitarianism demands such an initial investment of our own moral discomfort. We might, after having made such an investment, discern, as I suggest above, that maybe it is simply not worth my discomfort to intensively engage with a specific moral problem, but we can't be guaranteed that we might not overshoot before being able to make that judgement because we can't know what our assessment will turn up before we have undertaken it.  But if we discover that we have suffered more than any possible suffering that we could have prevented (when weighted against pleasure obtained), and then decide to cut our losses, this does not change the fact that Utilitarianism demands of us that we should have undertaken the initial assessment. We always must make such an initial investment of our possible moral discomfort REGARDLESS of the utility that might result.

In other words, seeking to maximize potential happiness cannot be the only criteria worth considering when when it comes to fulfilling our moral responsibilities. We would end up in a infinite regress otherwise.  Should I make the initial investment of moral discomfort to discern whether I should make the initial investment of moral discomfort?  Where could such processes of thought end?  Clearly, I need a principle: One has a prima facie duty to risk reducing the world's overall utility from what it otherwise might be to undertake a basic moral assessment of any situation possibly requiring moral assessment. And I should discern whether Utilitarianism is the right way to frame such questions, which will require undertaking even further risks of possible unrecoverable moral unease, unless I can simply assert that it is impossible in principle for Utilitarianism to be wrong. In other words we have a prima facie duty to engage in theoretical inquiry of a certain sort, regardless of possible maximization of utility. As Krishna say, you have a right your labours, but not the fruits of your labours.