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.

Does Liberalism Lead Inevitably to Cascades of Tragedies of the Commons?

Canadian political philosopher George Grant argues that Liberalism is the political philosophy that makes freedom the absolute value of political life and if deeply embraced, the absolute value of personal life too. If freedom really is the essence of human existence, then based on this outlook one's priority will always be to seek to limit freedom to the least extent possible. But I wonder if this emphasis has a certain kind of fundamental risk to it related to the phenomenon of the tragedy of the commons.

John Stuart Mill certainly helped clarify the Liberal approach for the budding Whig and Liberal political parties of the 19th century.  One's freedom should not be limited unless it could be seen to directly cause harms to others. "Liberal" democratic societies, therefore, should continuously experiment with withdrawing limitations on freedom. According to Mill, the happy byproduct of this approach would be a better society for everyone because individuals are better than governments to explore and understand the possibilities (plans of life) that can make them, and potentially others, more happy.

We have lived with this approach being the predominant approach in industrialized countries for last century and a half. With the aid of abundant fossil energy it has produced a global culture of affluence for many. But we also seem beset by a growing array of crises, that seem to have the hallmarks of instances of tragedies of the commons (soil crisis, fish crisis, water crisis, extinction crisis, debt crisis, pollution crisis, climate crisis, energy crisis, democratic deficit, automation crisis, obesity crisis, drug crisis, anxiety crisis, depression crisis).

Tragedies of the commons, as I understand them, occur whenever harms can result from actions undertaken for an individual's own benefit that are not born by that individual alone but are spread among some wider number of morally relevant parties. When such conditions are present, there must be some kind of formal response that can restrict the behaviour in a way that effectively (although not necessarily perfectly) prevents the harms from being offloaded (externalized) onto others. Unless these measures are reasonably effective, "defection" from responsibility will be continuously encouraged (to the point of absolute necessity) and growth of the harms will rise to unmanageable proportions for everyone.

Or, as the logical puzzle "the prisoner's dilemma" makes clear (especially if repeated over many iterations when modelling behaviours), simply pursuing self advantage as a strategy without mutual limits effectively imposed by all those affected by your decisions can never lead to optimal outcomes for all involved, but only sub-optimal outcomes. Reason demands binding rules on all parties negatively affected by each other's actions.

The problem as I see it is that Liberalism encourages us to always "push towards the red line" in terms of our society's allowance of behaviours that can turn out to trigger tragedies of the commons.  The basic approach of Liberalism is always to seek and experiment with the removal of limits in order to discern if suspected harms are not actually real. In economics this takes the form of the goal of reaching Pareto Optimality or the maximally efficient economy in terms of the production that can be wrung from any given natural environment. This approach might not be a problem if human life and human societies are relatively simple. If this is the case then people in such societies could risk being continuously experimental about removing limits because they could relatively easily discern if missteps had occurred and pull back by re-instituting those limits or by creating new binding rules.  

But societies today are not simple-- They are complex and rapidly evolving technological societies, in which new activities are continuously being added to human life in an ever changing and ever complex "technological ecology" as Marshall McLuhan might put it. The negative effects of such changes often take decades to manifest, as we can see with the impacts of DDT and automobiles.  And technologies can interact in ways that can "synergize" completely new and unexpected negative effects, such as we are beginning to sense with various forms of social media.  Running economies continuously at Pareto Optimality means that any declines in ecological conditions leave no room for adjustment.

But since our instinct in liberal societies is to leave people as free as possible and to have faith in democracy and our innovative ability to fix problems (i.e. technology), we generally assume that we will be able to create whatever limits or systems of management that might reveal themselves to be necessary. But might it be possible, if societies are complex enough for this ability to discern the sources of tragedies of the commons to be overwhelmed?  If the number of new behaviours being introduced becomes so high we might reach a point that we cannot discern among the complexity the specific behaviours (technological activities) leading to the harms poised to runaway into tragedy.

Put another way, might Liberalism be a political and personal philosophy suitable only for relatively simple societies in which harms and their sources can be easily recognized (e.g. my fist hitting your nose) rather than the complex globally interconnected technological societies we live in today? In such societies problems unleashed by technological activities and the synergy between those activities might take so long to manifest themselves that by the time we notice they are problematic that they may have become so deeply embedded that they are effectively beyond practical control (cultural momentum/technological dependency).  Perhaps, therefore, it is time for us to consider returning to being a society of laws (harm seekers, lawmakers and law enforcers). A cautionary philosophy, might be the only political philosophy that can adequately deal with the main threats of the present and the future.

But since we cannot name "technology" or our favourite political philosophy "liberalism" (aka neo-conservatism) as problems, we must find people to blame for our growing fears. So we blame immigrants, or we blame the supporters of opposing mainstream liberal/neo-conservative political parties, or we blame prominent public figures (Trump, etc), or nebulously defined sinister groups (terrorists of the right or left). We put faces to our growing fears and then see ourselves as being on the other team.

Evolution has inclined us to respond in such ways. We evolved to manage threats from specific human individuals in small groups, not complex problems unleashed by synergizing technological ecologies and the abstractions of longstanding political philosophies working their way out in globalized societies.  But we must be able to name the sources of the threats we are facing or we will be inevitably drawn towards the personalization of our problems. To "technology" I would add the name "liberalism" as a fundamental source of the growing cascade of unfolding global tragedies that we face today.

Does Nihilism Provide the Best Argument for Theism?

Is the rejection of nihilism the best argument in support of the consideration of the possibility of the existence of God?  At the prompting of a number of students, I've been watching videos of Jordan Peterson vs. various New Atheists.  Matt Dillahunty was Peterson's latest sparring partner.  It was while watching this video that a thought struck me about these recent defenders of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. Many of them, such as Dillahunty, describe how in the course of their lives they moved away from religious upbringings to embrace atheism. This is so alien to my own experience, since I was raised in a non-religious home, without any encouragement by my parents to believe in God.  Not that I was actively discouraged. There was just a general lack of discussion of any serious sort, except for the occasional critical remark such as that "God was the opiate of the masses" or a "crutch." None of my close friends except for one went to Church.

The result was that for the earliest years of my life I found myself quite happily identifying with a kind of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. In my early teens, I was attracted to Marxism and to the supposedly scientific outlook that Marx felt his outlook was based in. By my mid-teens I was also starting to explore the outlook of nihilism and was reading some Nietzsche. In my late teens, however, I began to question my commitment to nihilism and eventually found myself drawn into the life of a Christian community. That community transformed my life.

What I think many of the New Atheists don't seem to recognize is that their religious upbringing might immunize them from serious consideration of nihilism. Perhaps their religious upbringings, along with the support of lingering religious influences on culture provides an intellectual footing that prevents them from going deeper in their philosophical explorations. Whereas my own life experience started with a certain kind of vague leftist/liberal indifference towards theism, it eventually led to nihilism because one realizes that outlooks like Marxism, Positivism and scientism are not really scientific perspectives but quasi-religious worldviews. Marxism, for instance, is filled with a lingering earnestness for justice that one also hears in the Hebrew prophets. It has saints and music. I still know the words to the Internationale. What drove me towards nihilism was the inability of outlooks like Marxism, positivism, or naturalism to take seriously what committing oneself to a hard-nosed rational empiricism really entails. It involves accepting that only empirical statements are meaningful and capable of being ascertained as true or false. Seeing the world as a material system without supernatural elements means throwing out all the comforting ideas about meaning, purpose, freedom and morality. If one is truly to be a naturalist, this means not accepting subjective beliefs about realities beyond the straightforward operations of matter. As Nietzsche made clear, believing that God is dead must lead one to also wipe away the horizon of meaning which that concept enlightened.

My teenage brain was, of course, filled with certain anxieties about these thoughts. Was life essentially a joke?  A meaningless struggle, with no guarantees whatsoever?  Was morality a mugs game?  Were all human endeavors essentially shams?--  Mere attempts to whistle past the graveyard?  I accepted that the answers to these questions were most likely "yes."  I still find myself sometimes inclining to these conclusions. I felt that scientific discovery shed no useful light on these issues. I was prepared to go forward in life in a stoic way without false and imaginary ideas clung to only to provide solace. This was what I felt all religious beliefs were really about. They were fantasies that helped people in the face of the stark reality of the meaninglessness of existence.

My reaction to folks like Dillahunty and Harris, who so easily spout variations of vaguely utilitarian/natural law outlooks and decry arguments that imply their positions must lead to immorality or amorality, is that they really don't take their atheism seriously enough. I might be one of the few Christians who reject their arguments not because they reject God, but because they reject atheism. They believe that atheism need not devolve to nihilism, whereas I believe that it must. So when they deny that atheism leads to immorality or amorality, I hear Nietzsche whispering in the background, have the courage of your convictions. Sure, you need not, nor are likely to, start killing people, or as Dillahunty quips to "shove Sam Harris off the stage", but don't try to justify still believing in non-empirical realities like "goodness" and "meaning."  Don't suggest that "consciousness" and "freedom" are anything more than mere artifacts of an interesting picture-show of the deterministic operation of your synapses.  If Matt doesn't shove Sam off the stage, admit that this has nothing to do with morality--nothing to do with Sam's worth, or Matt's sense of self-worth-- or the "self-evident goodness of happiness," but is simply the result of contingent biological instincts for self preservation. As Nietzsche jokes, "man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that." If one is prepared to jettison God because there is no compelling empirical evidence, one must also be prepared to jettison these other comforting concepts too. Don't make arbitrary exceptions for ones that you just happen to like or perhaps feel embarrassed to bring into public question.

It would appear that Jordan Peterson thinks along similar lines. You can see him probing Dillahunty in ways meant to prompt him to expose the various junctures in his thought where he holds empirically dubious commitments such as belief in free will, the intrinsic worth of human beings, the importance of being earnest as opposed to straightforwardly self-concerned, etc. One is left wondering why it is so important to ditch God but leave all these other non-empirical aspects of human life and thought untouched. Dillahunty is highly selective in his supposed empiricism and "rational" thinking.  People's reports of their religious experiences are simply discounted, as are apparent somatic effects of such experiences, but their reports of consciousness, freedom and value and their supposedly amenable effects on societies (including science) are left untouched.

So I guess my argument is simple. If you are going to be a materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheist, you really must be a nihilist too. Non-nihilistic atheism unless *intensively* philosophically considered too often simply ends up being an incoherent mishmash of the cultural lingerings of moral outlooks that have grown out of essentially religious metaphysical commitments. The argument here is not that atheism necessarily leads to immoral behaviour. I think there are lots of instincts and social pressures that will keep most of us in line most of the time, and will likely continue to do so for quite some time, if not possibly indefinitely. The objection here is not about such practical matters. It's about whether one has an intellectually coherent metaphysical outlook that can make sense of one's desire for and respect of these instincts and social practices. But many of the New Atheists seem to wish to avoid such wider discussion of foundations, or what Charles Taylor calls "frameworks" of meaning. They are focused only on the issue of God, but seem uncomfortable and uninterested in discussion of other metaphysical beliefs (metaphorical substrates) and abstract issues of contemporary epistemology that inform critical aspects of their outlooks (including their respect for science).

Maybe the best way to proceed in a defense of theism is not directly by way of a defense of the existence of God. Maybe what one must first do is understand why nihilism is not acceptable. If this can be done, then the issue of faith might simply boil down to making a choice between nihilism vs. Non-nihilism (Anihilism?)  If nihilism doesn't make sense, then one must find another outlook, with theism being one of the many possibilities to consider. Perhaps such consideration, if carried out honestly and sincerely over a lifetime, might be enough to allow one to count oneself a theist.

Is the Issue of Revelation Inescapable, Even for Atheists?

As a theist and member of a Christian religious community I cannot avoid the issues of divine revelation and scriptural authority.  The issue of revelation is generally thought to pose questions of whether and how a God might communicate with us.  It therefore seems to be a derivative issue of the issue of theism versus anti-theism. The reasoning behind its apparent derivative nature would seem to emerge naturally from the assumption that the question of whether and how a God might communicate with us presupposes an answer to the issue or whether there is a God or not.  If there is no God, then one would have no need to consider the issue of whether and how such a being might communicate with us. What I want to argue here is that such an assumption is not well founded and is likely largely a byproduct of habits of thought born of the the long standing influence of theism on our society.  Instead, I will argue that the issue of revelation is really centred on the question of whether there is a possibility for any meaningful insight to emerge from reality about the ultimate purpose and meaning of existence. "Revelation" in this sense can be seen to simply refer to the possibility for truths to emerge about these issues from our experience of existence.  Given this definition, having a position on revelation is unavoidable.

If one believes there is a possibility for meaningful truths to emerge (manifest themselves) about the ultimate purpose and meaning of existence, then by my definition of "revelation," one can be described as a believer in revelation. This position can grow out of or be clarified by a position of theism, but it need not. Under such a view, it would be even possible to be an atheist and a believer in revelation. There is a minor grammatical issue here that must be addressed. In English the verb "to reveal" might typically suggest the operation of an agent of some sort, thus skewing the discussion inadvertently towards theism. However, it is certainly the case that one can write about an earthquake causing a rock to roll away "revealing" a hidden cave.  It is that objective sense of "reveal" that I have in mind when I speak of revelation.  Given these stipulations, the contrasting position to being a believer in revelation would be nihilism (the position that there are no ultimate purposes for or meanings of existence) or an extreme positivism (a position that only empirical statements are capable of being judged true or false).

It is unavoidable for a reasonable thoughtful person to have some kind of position on this issue.  As a nihilist or positivist one believes there is no possibility for such propositions ever being determined to be true, or one believes otherwise, either in the form of the possibility of such truths or that one has actually ascertained such truths. To recast this schema onto the debate about theism, it would seem to me that agnostics in their suspension of judgement about the issue of the non-existence or existence of God, commit themselves to the position that there is some possibility that God exists-- either perfectly balanced by the rational possibility that God does not exist, or that the exact balance of rational proof cannot be, as yet, determined. An agnostic might argue that her position is really the absence of a position and that suspension of judgement, as such, cannot convey anything of substance about the issue, but is not this just an evasion?  If one's agnosticism is to represent anything more than an arbitrary decision not to participate in the discussion, in effect simply to put one's fingers in one's ears when theists and atheists are about, then one accepts some possibility for the existence of a God. And if one accepts such a possibility, one also accepts the possibility that truths about the ultimate purpose of existence might manifest themselves and thus would be a believer in revelation by my definition. Even Richard Dawkins has admitted that he cannot be absolutely sure that God does not exist, and he has spoken eloquently of how people can find meaning in life through the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

By my definition the only way one can avoid being a believer in revelation is by way of a defense of nihilism or positivism.  If one accepts revelation in this sense, then the only question remaining is what kinds of answers one can expect to find about the issue of meanings and purposes of existence.  This brings me to the issue of "scriptural authority" that I also mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Can the answers to questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence be found in particular records of religious thought about such questions? This question is dependent on the secondary issue of revelation: How does it work?  For some traditional theists, the answer is that God directs the thoughts and activities of certain individuals, such that they record God's thoughts directly in written form--so called "Automatic writing."  More liberal groups, like my own United Church, generally teach these days that God communicates with the conscience of certain individuals. These individuals then write about their experiences.  Under this view, written revelation is always a "secondary" witness to a "primary" experience in the mind of an individual.

Although this more modern way of expressing the nature of revelation is more in keeping with my own view, it is not fully satisfactory to me.  I am too much of a naturalist materialist of a certain sort to find such a description to be helpful. It requires one to believe in a God of "magic" who arbitrarily interferes in the operations of nature and the inner conscious lives of only certain individuals. For me, revelation, if it is not to be arbitrary, must respect the law bound character of nature that we observe.  And it must not grant "privileged" access to God. I think there are good moral reasons for avoiding both of these forms of arbitrariness on God's part. I think the New Testament expresses a similar position when it asserts that one of the ongoing gifts of the Spirit is the gift of prophesy:

And God has appointed these in the church: first apostles, second prophets (1 Corinthians 12:28).
Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy (1 Corinthians 14:1).

Similarly, the Calvinist tradition of which I partake also emphasizes the absolute authority of God over all of creation.

With these points in mind, I would say for me that God's revelation manifests itself in every aspect of creation. The creation as a whole is God's communication to conscious agents within that creation.  Every atom and its motion is a part of God's work and thus a part of God's ultimate plan and purpose for creation. This is why the study of science is so important.  I agree with Galileo that there is a "book" of nature. So what does such an expansive view suggest about the other book?  Am I such a liberal Christian that I hardly can grant any authority to scripture written by human hands?  No I would grant it more.

Like all the material aspects of the world scriptures represent the direct work of God. But scriptures also represent an account of an ongoing conversation among people about the issues of ultimate meaning and purpose (their experiences,  imaginative leaps and debates drawing on such sources--which is what I mean by the process of "reason"), including their interactions with people of radically disparate viewpoints from their own.  For theists, this conversation focuses on purported perceptions of God's works. The most ancient scripture reflect some part of these metaphysical discussions going back millennia into the oral traditions of various communities.  Since I am also a follower of Socrates,  for me the operation of reason demands the interaction of a multiplicity of viewpoints defending their positions in consideration of each other, with the most reasonable discourses being those that have taken into account the greatest number of the disparate points of view as possible.  "Dialectic" is the fancy Greek-derived word for such processes.

For me the primary reason for looking to ancient writings as authorities is because they put us into contact with the views of others whose views might be the most radically different from our own.  Someone living 2500 years ago is only available for me today as a potential interlocutor on issues of ultimate meaning in the form of the record they might have left, in some small part, through their influence on the creation of human writings like those we call "scriptures."

Works like the Vedas, the Dharmapada, the Tao de Ching, the Analects of Confucius, the Torah and the prophets and writings of the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament or the Koran, are important to read because they put us in touch with the thoughts of people from long ago about these issues.  I can go talk to any living person, or consult the millions of books published since the invention of the printing press, but if I want to consult people radically different from those who have lived since the 15th century on issues of ultimate meaning I must generally enter the realm of the great religious writings.  This is a duty, because Socrates shows us how our arguments are only as good as the strongest criticisms they have been able to stand up to, and one finds the strongest criticisms by consulting people with radically different experiences and positions from one's own.  Ancient people are likely to be the most different from people today as you can get, so excluding them from the conversation based on arbitrary assumptions that their views must be out-of-date, is simply not acceptable.  It is for this reason that they are "mandatory" reading to some degree.

But just because such writings might be mandatory reading for the thoughtful person clearly does not fully encompass what most people mean be the idea of "scriptural authority."  This concept  usually speaks to some special ethical or doctrinal authority one is willing to grant to certain specific writings.  For me, such a notion of authority arises simply from the necessities of logic.  If certain claims conflict logically one simply must choose which claims one will accept as being more worthy of rational consideration.  And when it comes to comprehensives works with comprehensive disagreements, one must be prepared to judge which work one will draw on as a resource when considering ones views in "dialogue" with others on issues of ultimate meaning.  If rationality is as Socrates suggests, always something that can only manifest itself through a process of discourse between disparate points of view, but one, as a mere mortal, cannot read and/or verbally communicate with everyone, then practical choices will have to be made regarding the priority of who one will choose as one's discursive partners.  Most of us cannot just read the Vedas, Dharmapada, Tao de Ching, the Analects of Confucius, Torah, prophets and writings of the Hebrew scriptures, New Testament and the Koran, let alone all the other interesting writings, when we need to make judgments touching on issues of ultimate meaning and purpose.  We certainly can't do so if we find ourselves in a crisis.  At such moments, hard decisions will have to be made regarding whose thoughts to commune with, and in truly dangerous times, whose thoughts to preserve for the use of others in the future, sometimes at the expense of one's own life.

For me scriptures are authoritative because they represent the crystallization of ongoing and potentially extremely ancient conversations (and efforts to preserve such conversations) about the meaning and purpose of existence.  They are authoritative because I need to formulate my own positions in the light of as many disparate views as possible from my own, and the most ancient people are likely to be as disparate as one can get.  The best scriptures, therefore, would be those which are most ancient or draw on ancient sources, which encompass the largest number of disparate views in their formation, and which preserve the greatest diversity of views. This is why I like the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Each tacitly present a diversity of authors, including ones strongly influenced by vibrant oral traditions.  And it is now better understood how even many of those "single" authors represent the work of multiplicity of authors and redactors. The land of Israel represents a crossroads of world cultures.  The great libraries of the Hindu scriptures are similar in these respects.  But ultimately logical judgments must be made between such conflicting sources.  It is simply a matter of logic that I must create an ordering or precedence of trustworthiness. Unless one is simply happy to allow oneself to drift awash among the thoughts of great works, one must begin at some point to prioritize which among them will be one's primary interlocutors. For me my attempt to do so would go something like this:

Mark
Gospels
New Testament
Torah
Job/Ecclesiastes/Amos
Hebrew Scriptures
Bhagavad Gita (Thank you India!)

Vedas

Dhammapada

Pali Canon

...
"Letters Papers from Prison" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine

...

The Koran

...

The Egyptian Book of the Dead
....

I think it might be possible for someone to hold a position that seeking to consider the views of ancient people is unnecessary in one's consideration of issues of the meaning and purpose of existence. But this would have to be based on a vigorously argued position for why such a category as a whole could be lopped off as a whole from the list of one's potential interlocutors.  But one must, regardless of one's judgement, also be prepared for the unfortunate circumstance of having to make decisions about what must be given priority to pass along for the sake of others in the future. This might be less of a pressing issue in the modern age, but the moral obligation to consider this contingency still applies to some extent. This is a more pragmatic reason why the issue of revelation and "scriptural authority" cannot be avoided, even by atheists, or at least for those atheists who are not nihilists or positivists. Indeed such decisions are another aspect of what makes ancient scriptures so precious since it is almost certain that some of their parts had such vital, life sacrificing, decisions made about them so that they were passed along to us. This duty to help "draw the circle wide" in terms of the ongoing human conversation is another part of the process of the crystallization of traditions of discourse about ultimate meaning and purpose, which Christians call the Logos.

There is probably ground for much greater possible consensus to develop on the issues of revelation and scriptural authority, if we abandon the assumption that revelation is phenomenon of relevance only to theists.