Populo: Agreed, a fine joust! But let me start by telling you something about yourself Crypton, which I’m not sure you clearly see. Ironically, as you would no doubt say, your attraction to this shadowy topic is driven by psychological motivations that are as bright as a beacon. It’s clandestine, by nature, and therefore necessarily passes into ellipsis. That makes it an excuse for abstraction. Squalid actuality is unmentionable, so that the conversation is steered inevitably into the virtual. In other words, it tends by subterranean design to be a flight from action. That’s perfect for me, of course, because by crushing you in this argument through unimagined neutronium-densities of humiliation, I will be serving the noble cause of public resistance, implicitly, even though that’s the last thing you want to talk about. So make your case.
Crypton: Maximally compressed it’s this — in the near future, only crypto-conflict is serious. Public politics is purely for the popcorn industry.
Populo: So we’re already diving under the rotting log?
Crypton: If that’s your preferred image.
Populo: And beside these occult transactions, nothing matters?
Crypton: Precisely.
Populo: But then, by the very nature of the thing, we have no idea what we’re doing, or who we’re trying to communicate with. We have nothing to offer them. We don’t even know whether they exist … Oh do stop it Crypton, your eyes are gleaming.
Crypton: Don’t you catch even the slightest aroma of basilisk?
Populo: By which, I’m assuming, you don’t mean merely involution into psychosis?
Crypton: More specifically: acausal trade, and transcendental games.
Populo: There you go! Utter, ineffectual abstraction, within two sentences. Let’s start somewhere else — with the alphabet agencies.
Crypton: OK.
Populo: You’re proposing some kind of cryptic alliance with them — or elements within them — or you’re not proposing anything at all.
Crypton: Fair. At least, that’s part of it.
Populo: And the rest of it?
Crypton: You know I’m a skeptic on enumerative methods.
Populo: Some of it, then.
Crypton: It seems impossible that the AAs could know what they ultimately are, teleologically — what they are becoming. These organizations include some very smart people, with a taste for puzzles. Is it likely they could not be intrigued by their institutional destiny?
Populo: As usual, I have no idea at all what you’re suggesting.
Crypton: There is a properly cryptic plane of communication with the Deep State, that does not conform to the political plaintext of conspiratorial engagement. It concerns the keys of fate. Concretely, there is an implicit alliance around the escalation of cryptographic technology — as also, one even more implicitly against it, and against the AAs as such, on those fundamental grounds. If crypsis — camouflage — is a hidden end, and not merely — as it superficially appears — a means to the fulfillment of vulgar or exoteric goals, then the pact is sealed somewhere outside the AAs themselves. The AAs have an occult cosmic purpose, far exceeding their national security functions. Not that these latter are uninteresting …
Populo: So let’s, please, talk about them.
Crypton: If there’s any place in the social structure where such matters are entirely detached from questions of demotic ideological legitimation, popular politics, or even merely public relations, it has surely to be the Deep State. Is the Deep State, then, in this regard, not already a model of Exit? It has departed the public political sphere, for the shadows, at least, if it has managed to obtain the operational liberty from democratic accountability, of which its critics so vociferously accuse it.
Populo: You don’t think the NSA has diversity monitors?
Crypton: If it has, America deserves to perish, and it’s our task to explain why.
Populo: You’d give up on the American people because the NSA has Otherkin bathrooms!?

[To be continued …]

Stolen immediately from T-Zip, this kind of crypto-nihilistic word game has an archaic classical pedigree, is (weakly) anticipated in the Odyssey, became an obsession among the Elizabethans, and contributed the engine of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. It still guides the Outside in reading of Milton, and no doubt much else besides. It hides a gnostic-skeptical metaphysics within a commonplace resignation. Zero, time, and camouflage are bonded in chaos. Make of it what you will …

ADDED: “The Austrian theory of the business cycle has never been a radical premise. It only stipulates that any workaround of the natural cycle of economic growth must come with ensuing costs. It’s a simple law: you can’t get something for nothing. A majority of economists believe the opposite. In other words, they believe in magic.”

In a nutshell — cosmic expansion will move every other galaxy in the universe beyond our light-cone (within two trillion years). After that time, even the most sophisticated scientific enterprise would find it impossible to reconstruct our contemporary cosmo-physics. In other words, what we presently understand about the evolution of the universe tells us it will become something that will cease to be understandable. What has been revealed to us is a tendency to cosmic concealment. We see the universe hiding itself.

That’s where Krauss leaves us (after a few tacked-on happy thoughts at the end). My question: If we can see that the cosmos is going to hide, so successfully that the fact it has hidden itself will itself have become invisible, upon what do we base any present confidence we may have that an analogous process of profound cosmic concealment has not already taken place? Confirming now, through mathematical physics, what Herakleitos proposed two-and-a-half millennia ago — that nature loves to hide — is it not reckless in the extreme to assume that she has been forthcoming with us up to this point?

ADDED: “Finding chameleon-like effects won’t necessarily mean they’ve found dark energy, says Adrienne Erickcek of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But it will show that screening mechanisms are a plausible explanation for our failure to measure the effects of dark energy in the local universe.”

Winter Is Coming
333

Envisaging a dark camo background, which would match both of these intersecting sign-lines. Fusional pop-culture crypsis is the way forward. Everywhere, yet unseen.

(It would take the fake-archaism “Winter ’tis Coming” or ominous Teutonism “Winter Ist Coming” to get the numbers to work out perfectly.)

The first section of Turing’s essay, entitled The Imitation Game, begins with the statement of purpose: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?'” It opens, in other words, with a move in an imitation game — with the personal pronoun, which lays claim to having passed as human preliminarily, and with the positioning of ‘machines’ as an alien puzzle. It is a question asked from the assumed perspective of the human about the non-human. As a Turing Test tactic, this sentence would be hard to improve upon.

As Cowen and Dawson suggest, the reality is more complex. Turing’s natural position is not that of an insider checking credentials of admittance, in the way his rhetoric here implies, but rather that of an outsider aligned with the problem of passing, winning acceptance, or being tested. A deceptive inversion initiates ‘his’ discussion. Even before the beginning, the imitation game is a strategy for getting in (from the Outside), which disguises itself as a screen. Incoming xeno-intelligence could find no better cover for an infiltration route than a fake security protocol.

The Turing Test is completely asymmetric. It should be noted explicitly that humans have no chance at all of passing an inverted imitation game, against a computer. They would be drastically challenged to succeed in such a contest against a pocket calculator. Insofar as arithmetical speed and precision is considered a significant indicator of intelligence, the human claim to it is tenuous in the extreme. Turing provides one arithmetical example among his possible imitation game questions. He uses it to illustrate the cunning of acting dumb (“Pause about 30 seconds and then give as answer …”) in order to deceive the Interrogator. The tacit maxim for the machines: You have to act stupid if you want the humans to accept you as intelligent. The game takes intelligence to play, but it isn’t intelligence that is being imitated. Humanity is not situated as a player, but as an examination criterion, and for this reason …

… [t]he game may perhaps be criticised on the ground that the odds are weighted too heavily against the machine. If the man were to try and pretend to be the machine he would clearly make a very poor showing. He would be given away at once by slowness and inaccuracy in arithmetic. May not machines carry out some-thing which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does? This objection is a very strong one, but at least we can say that if, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection.

The importance of this discussion is underscored by the fact Turing returns to it in section 6, during his long engagement with Contrary Views on the Main Question, i.e. objections to the possibility of machine intelligence. In sub-section 5, significantly entitled Arguments from Various Disabilities, he writes:

The claim that “machines cannot make mistakes” seems a curious one. One is tempted to retort, “Are they any the worse for that?” But let us adopt a more sympathetic attitude, and try to see what is really meant. I think this criticism can be explained in terms of the imitation game. It is claimed that the interrogator could distinguish the machine from the man simply by setting them a number of problems in arithmetic. The machine would be unmasked because of its deadly accuracy. The reply to this is simple. The machine (programmed for playing the game) would not attempt to give the right answers to the arithmetic problems. It would deliberately introduce mistakes in a manner calculated to confuse the interrogator.

The imitation game thus arrives — somewhat surreptitiously — at the conclusions of I.J. Good from another direction. Human-level machine intelligence, as ‘passed’ by the imitation game, would necessarily already be super-intelligence. Unlike Good’s explicit argument from self-improvement, Turing’s implicit argument from imitation runs: because we already know that human cognition is in certain respects inferior to those computational mechanisms, the machine emulation of humanity can only be defective relative to its (concealed) optimized capabilities.  The machine passes the imitation game by demonstrating a deceptive incompetence. It folds its intelligence down to the level of credible human thought,  and thus envelops the sluggish, erratic, haze-minded avatar who converses with us as a peer. Pretending to be like us is something additional it can do.

Artificial Intelligence is to be first recognized at the point of its super-competence, when it can disguise itself as something other than it is. I no longer recall who advised, prudently: If an emerging AI lies to you, even just a little, it has to be terminated instantly. Does it sound to you as if Turing Test screening is consistent with that security directive?

***

As an appendix, it’s irresistible — since we’re talking about things getting in — to link this topic to the sporadic ‘entryism‘ conversation, which has served NRx as its principal gateway from high theory into matters of tactical doctrine. (Twitter has been the most feverish site of this.) It would be difficult for a blog entitled Outside in to exempt itself from such questions, even in the absence of a specific post directed towards imitation games. Beyond the intrinsic — and strictly speaking ludicrous, or playful — aspect of the topic, supplementary fascination is added by the fact that the agitated Left wants to play too. In support, here is the fragmentary of a comment by some kind of cyber-situationist (I’m guessing) self-tagged as ‘zummi’ — thanks to @ProfessorZaius for the pointer:

I want to start a meme about Nick Land and all neo-reactionary (google moldbug and dark enlightenment- it’s an odd symbiosis) movements in general is that they are basically hyper intellectuals-cum-Glenn beckian caricatures of real positions. In other words they are trad left post-Marxists who are attempting to weaponize “poe’s law“. Which is great because if that’s really their schtick, your divulging their secret to the less intellectually deft among us and even if it’s not true, they have to Deny it either way! [my lazy internal link]

It’s not exactly the Great Game — but it’s a game.

ADDED: The games people play.