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🪵 The Threshold

Behavioral prediction closes the open future freedom requires

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tagsja-picks, xref, seed, causal_relationships, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@han2017psychopolitics, loc. 40

4 min read

Behavioral prediction closes the open future freedom requires

Evidence

If we do not think through this transformation or this plasticity, we dodge the most important question, which is that of freedom. If, in effect, the life of the brain is played out between program and deprogramming, between determinism and the possibility of changing difference, then the transition from the proto-self to the self is indeed the transition from the undifferentiated to the possibility of a transdifferentiation of self-the self, between receiving and giving form, being at once what one inherits and what one has created. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 229 (#expands, via linked claim)

Unlike Skinner, though, Pentland is careful to round the square, perhaps in the hope of evading a withering review by the likes of Noam Chomsky. … Pentland sidesteps the risks of Skinner’s jeremiad by taking a softer tone: “Some people react negatively to the phrase social physics, because they feel that it implies that people are machines without free will and without the ability to move independently of our role in society.” Like Meyer, Pentland acknowledges that humans have a “capacity for independent thought” but insists that social physics “does not need to try to account for it.” As Pentland sees it, the problem is not that “independent thought” is omitted from the picture but rather that “internal, unobservable” thought processes are just friction that “will occasionally emerge to defeat our best social physics models.” Fortunately, the models are not really in danger because “the data tell us that deviations from our regular social patterns occur only a few percent of the time.” The autonomous individual is but a statistical blip, a slip of the pen that is easily overridden in the march toward confluent action and someone’s greater good. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1406 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Microsoft’s patent returns us to Planck, Meyer, and Skinner and the viewpoint of the Other-One. In their physics-based representation of human behavior, anomalies are the “accidents” that are called freedom but actually denote ignorance; they simply cannot yet be explained by the facts. Planck/Meyer/Skinner believed that the forfeit of this freedom was the necessary price to be paid for the “safety” and “harmony” of an anomaly-free society in which all processes are optimized for the greater good. Skinner imagined that with the correct technology of behavior, knowledge could preemptively eliminate anomalies, driving all behavior toward preestablished parameters that align with social norms and objectives. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1315 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Pentland frames free will as a low-frequency statistical deviation from predictable social patterns — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1406; Human evolution selected for learnability and behavioral malleability, not fixedness; The physics view of behavior treats freedom as mere unexplained ignorance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1315 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

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