The Glass Bead Game 2.0
Humanity’s cultural potentials, world views, and in/tangible heritages have been translated into flows of binary coded light emissions or microwave signals, thereby existing as virtual images. Their information has been multiplied through the World Wide Web. 
The Glass Bead Game 2.0
Rhymes in History

The Glass Bead Game 2.0

Photo: iStock
David Bartosch 20/03/2023 16:00

Humanity’s cultural potentials, world views, and in/tangible heritages have been translated into flows of binary coded light emissions or microwave signals, thereby existing as virtual images. Their information has been multiplied through the World Wide Web. Meanwhile, lightning-fast “weak” AI technology runs the global stock markets.

The military plays with AI, while AI developers loose track in comprehending what it does. Trained by specialists and global database, AI wins art competitions, composes music, beats world champions at Go, etc. Users of openly accessible AI algorithms obtain artificially artistic output without any artistic ability on their side.

ChatGPT uses its users as “mental pasture” for reinforced AI-learning from human feedback (RLHF). This is fascinating, but it also means reward without efforts and outsourced human creativity, loss of comprehension. Learners will delegate their “homework” to AI. The ambivalence cannot be denied. Brain-machine interfaces and other forms of enhancement will not solve the basic problem. We have to reorient and position ourselves. How can we maintain and evolve our human characteristics in this context?
Photo: iStock
In 1986, Timothy Leary published an article called “Artificial Intelligence: Hesse’s Prophetic ‘Glass Bead Game’.” The novel from 1943 (which earned Hermann Hesse a Nobel Prize in 1946) portrays a future AI information society, “a Golden Age of mind,” which is based on “new thought technology,” Leary said. But Hesse’s AI is not “open” for the public. In fact, today’s experts say that we should be on high alert in regard to unrestricted use.

In Hesse’s vision, only an elite guild of the best of the best of the most intelligent, talented, and gifted universalists—chosen on the basis of their merits and sheltered from private interests, is enabled to interact with AI wonderland. The mode of human-AI interaction in Hesse’s book restricts and also exalts the function of AI, too. Hesse’s politics-devoid, “Daoist version” of Platonic cyber-sages use a “tangible mental-device, a thought machine” (Leary), and a human mental or “inner” technology of symbolic mathematical structures. In their meta-game, Hesse’s masters establish esthetic pathways, human observer paths, and, in this very same sense, self-reflective compositions of elements of all forms of human arts, sciences, and philosophies of all times and places. In this early vision, AI capacitates and supports the maintenance of all cultural heritages in the central form of human understanding itself.
Hermann Hesse (Photo: Wikipedia)

This means an alternative to today’s anti-human transhumanism—which presents a neo-Gnostic escapism. Hesse’s, as I call it, superhumanism is a precondition for the long-term sustainability of natural human consciousness and reason in connection with AI. It provides inspiration for the proper preservation, comprehension, and subsequent absorption and further processing of ancient and more recent cultural memories, and for a balanced technological evolution. Hopefully, Hesse’s basic idea will be translated into existence in some kind of form. There is no time to waste.


The author is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Research Institute for Globalization and Cultural Development Strategies at Beijing Normal University, China and a Researcher at the BC4LS

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