By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
I REVIEWED, from the perspective of dariro philosophy (hunhu), more than five responses to the on-going controversy in the Western world over ChatGPT, one of several large language models (LLMs) of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) for which promoters and marketers claim intelligence, competence and consciousness far superior to those of most human beings, to the extent that it is widely claimed that these LLMs will outsmart and replace human persons in the workplace, in education, cultural production and even military strategy.
The dariro standpoint can be summarised briefly as follows:
– The centrality of relationships to human purpose and human values
Where Rene Descartes declares, with other narcissists: “I think, therefore I am,” the African philosopher says: “Umuntu, ngumuntu ngabantu” (I relate, therefore, I am).
Every child is born into human relationships, not human rights.
And it is the quality of those relationships which determines whether the human infant survives and thrives or suffers and dies.
Language itself is the collective product of relating and relationships.
Therefore LLMs, like ChatGPT, can send you love letters, flowers and poems far more beautiful than those any boyfriend or girlfriend or wife could ever afford; but cyber flowers or poems cannot offer a real relationship, which is love in terms of body, feelings, heart, mind and spirit.
– A balancing of outward adventure/prospect with homecoming/looking in
Every individual sitting in the dariro covers a bearing of the globe/universe and sees what is coming from that direction behind his/her opposite or counterpart which the latter cannot see.
The counterpart also does the same, until the circle, as dariro, is covered by self-organising participants for 360 degrees all round (kuonesana).
Africans invented this structure upon realising that each individual was limited to just two eyes that could see only in one direction at a time with a little bit of peripheral vision.
The whole concept of rear-view mirrors and sensors now originates from that realisation of individual limitations imposed by unidirectional sight outside the dariro.
In the dariro everyone is simultaneously looking in and seeing his/her opposite while also watching out for what might be coming from behind that counterpart.
Each participant looking out and covering a particular bearing of the shared globe represents a specialty or department, if you will.
But the return to dariro for reporting ensures that the specialties or departments do not splinter into fragments or silos away from the common human purpose metaphorically represented by dariro which all our efforts should serve.
Therefore dariro represents a collective desire for common human purpose in life. Creating, enlarging and evaluating human relationships is indeed one of the common goals of this structure.
– Relationships form the foundation of institutions of human solidarity and purpose — from family to church or school to university
There is no doubt, when one looks at technological inventions and innovations, including ChatGPT and all LLMs, that they are all fruits of collective institutional effort. Every institution is made possible through human relationships that enable us to organise/mobilise resources and to co-operate.
In his book, ‘Survival of the Richest’, Professor Dough Rushkoff documents how the tech billionaires have siphoned off the fruits of the highest institutions of society and are threatening the same societies which built those institutions, threatening even the institutions themselves.
– Kushaura nokutsinhira: call and response (dzefunde)
To make sure that those who venture out and experiment do not fragment society and go off on their hobby horses or in their spacecrafts and silos, dariro has built into it the principle of call-and-response.
The lead performer/singer or expert for each project must seek a response from the dariro which is expressed in Shona as dzefunde.
This required feedback is meant to protect the common human purpose in work, in creativity, in inventions.
The high tech escapists under attack in the current debate over AI are accused of denying that there is, or ever was, any common human purpose.
Rushkoff cites the example of Jeffrey Epstein and Richard Dawkins who teach that “…genes are the only things that matter; we live in an entirely material universe, there is no soul, humans can be auto-tuned, and anything in between the ones and zeros (of statistics) is just noise.”
The last of the five responses I have referred to reads as if it was written from the viewpoint of dariro philosophy.
It is by Professor Doug Rushkoff of the City University of New York (Guardian, May 28 2023, as reported by Edward Helmore).
According to this report, Professor Rushkoff concludes that all the tech billionaires are in escape mode: with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos competing to develop outer space migration and tourism; Mark Zuckerberg selling the idea of a wholly digital universe to replace the real but often problematic world we live in; and others toying with replacing the messy biology and anatomy of fertility, sex and human reproduction with human cloning and test-tube babies made to order in immaculate laboratories.
– Half-hidden fantasies
In the book, ‘Survival of the Richest’, Rushkoff accepts Robert D. Romanyshyn’s view that: “The technological world is a work of reason but of a reason that reaches deeply into dream (and fantasy). Conscious intentions shade into unconscious motivations, some and, perhaps even most of which are, not just unknown (silent) but also repressed.”
Therefore, at the heart of these tech experiments, such as ChatGPT and BARD, is a deep dislike of society and the human world as they exist, a technicist exceptionalism similar to what motivated eugenicists and racists to espouse the doctrines of white supremacy and the dispensability or disposability of those considered inferior.
But this time, having failed to rid the earth of its undesirable hordes of natives, the tech billionaires resort to the next best thing — escape in all sorts of guises.
– Development and growth as radial, not linear
As the original birthplace and home of the human race, African society experienced expansion not as a queue or a single column.
No, Africa’s children fanned out radially to all directions of the earth and Africans in the dariro, to this day, continue to look out radially.
The tragic exception was the disastrous loss of those captured as slaves and driven away in columns with their necks and hands shackled.
That has left a permanent searing memory of the human column which, centuries later, returned as the colonial Pioneer Column of Cecil John Rhodes and of death and destruction.
– Dariro and movement
The dariro can be viewed as encompassing four related concepts of movement.
One is the African view that the Creator moved from East to West, counter-clockwise and along the path of creation; which is why trees, plants and crops germinate with the rising sun in the morning, reach maturity at noon, are harvested in the afternoon after which they have their seeds planted to die at night, only to germinate again (so to speak) in the morning in the East
The dariro, therefore, marks the four stations of the Creator’s cyclic movement from sunrise to sunset and night and back to dawn.
Alternatively, one can just say, elliptical movement following those East to West stations is in accordance with nature’s cycle of growth and renewal upon which our own lives depend and it also mirrors rhythms of the universe with its stars, planets and moons.
In the third place, human life itself follows the same path; birth, infancy, adolescence, maturity, age and death, before rebirth or resurrection in the morning, so to speak.
And, in the fourth place, one can say we move along the stations of the dariro in recognition of the path already taken by our ancestors — conceived in the South, born in the East, reaching maturity at noon, ageing and dying in the West in the evening, only to be buried like seed in the South at night and to resurrect or to be born anew with dawn in the East.
Obeying these natural movements, growth is accounted for radially and concentrically, not linearly. When there are more people at the pungwe, we widen the dariro or form concentric circles.
To use a cliche, we enlarge the cake or pie. Indeed, some statisticians do reckon growth or shrinkage by using pies and crescents, not straight lines or columns.
From all this, it is clear that the straight line or queue crosses or violates those four movements along the stations of natural growth.
That is why the Earth Movement, the Ecology Movement, opposes the linearised production system of capitalism: Because linearism literally crosses the path of the Creator and the path of nature’s growth; and it reminds Africans of the columns of slavery and the Pioneer Columns of colonial death and destruction.
What ChatGPT and other LLMs have done contrary to dariro philosophy
According to Jim Dermott, LLMs represent theft of intellectual property in which those who have been robbed can no longer individually recognise their creations. This is like stealing a million bulls and cows, grinding them up into a huge mountain of minced meat, and then saying: ‘Since none of the original owners can identify which bit came from his/her particular beast, this mountain of minced meat now belongs to the grinder’.
Otherwise the content constituting the programmes for prompting ChatGPT, for instance, has all knowingly been culled from original creations of initial authors. LLMs no longer recognise nor reward original authorship. They destroy its identity by cutting up and dicing the originals into tiny bits which now form the dataset upon which to train the chatbot.
Dariro philosophy does try to recognise contributions of different participants by granting each a separate totem (mutupo) in the form of an animal from real nature which must be celebrated for its uniqueness and perspective while remaining in the circle.
That is one of the purposes of the genre called ‘Madetembo emitupo’ (totem poetry).
The perspective of a zebra is different from that of a giraffe, which also differs from that of a monkey or rabbit.
But all should be celebrated and harmonised in, and by, the dariro.
McDermott’s article is titled: ‘ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence. It’s Theft’.
Then came Neil Saunders citing psychologist Gary Marcus in ‘The Conversation.com’ for May 16 2023 who pointed out that part of the problem of defining and locating LLMs in society came from careless uses or abuses of language. The article was titled: ‘Evolution is Making Us Treat AI like a Human Being, and We Need to Kick the Habit’.
According to Marcus, LLMs represent the mere scaling up of mechanical competence without comprehension as once explained by cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett: “This means that while ChatGPT can produce paragraphs filled with emotive language, it doesn’t understand any word in any sentence it generates.”
The writer then voiced support for a world-wide petition calling for formation of an international agency (dariro?) to promote safe, secure and peaceful AI technologies. One suggestion was to pass a rule requiring all products of AI technologies to bear a watermark serving as a warning to potential users.
A rather unique critique of LLMs was from AdExchanger titled: ‘It’s Time to Defund Misinformation…’ by Allison Schiff who interviewed L. Gordon Crovitz, founder of NewsGuard.
News Guard estimates that over US$2,6 billion of funds from honest top brand advertisers ends up inadvertently financing fake news and misinformation web sites.
So NewsGuard, for a subscription fee, will offer a rating service on news outlets so advertisers can avoid tainted outlets and platforms. This suggests the need for a media dariro of sorts except that this is no longer a real community on the ground but a series of computers probably checking and rating products of other AI-based outlets!
That may even compound the confusion already plaguing digitised journalism.
Understanding language, human purpose and values is the task of philosophy
Last, but by no means least, is the critique of LLMs by Professor Phillip Goff of the University of Durham who argues that the challenge of LLMs such as ChatGPT cannot be met by disciplines or sectors that exclude philosophy. The article in ‘The Conversation.com’ for May 17 2023 was titled: ‘ChatGPT Can’t Think —Consciousness Is Entirely Different to Today’s Artificial Intelligence’.
Argues Professor Goff: “These systems can produce text that seems to display thought, understanding and even creativity…But ChatGPT (for instance) is an unfeeling mechanism (sort of advanced predictive text) that has been trained on huge amounts of human-made data to generate content that seems like it was written by a person.
It (ChatGPT) doesn’t consciously understand the meanings of the words it is spitting out.”
As I have already suggested, AIs do not seek or create relationships that do not already feature in the datasets or algorithms fed to them.
Threat to journalism
The total lack of feeling, lack of morality, lack of doubts, and total dearth of reflection coupled with ability to deploy articles full of feelings of hatred, love or passion pauses a real threat to society at large and to conventional journalism.
For example, journalists in Zimbabwe promised that media wars would end and ethical standards would prevail only if the journalists were allowed to regulate themselves.
But in the wake of LLMs like BARD and ChatGPT, these journalists won’t even know who is a real person and who is a chatbot within the media.
Employers will direct and drive their machines as they choose.
The entire Writers Guild of America is on strike because LLMs threaten to take over their jobs and relegate the writers to an occasional correction or polishing up of manufactured script here and there.
The cohesive and collective discipline required to self-regulate will no longer be there once LLMs displace most of the journalists and creative writers.
Back to hunhu/ubuntu
Professor Rushkoff agrees with African proponents of hunhu/ubuntu that the answer for the future of humanity lies in us re-asserting our humanness in an increasingly alienated and alienating world emptied of meaning in order just to pander to capitalist billionaires and their machines.
“The only way to rebel is to be human and aware…Be social, get your feet on the ground, make eye-contact, have sex, meet people, breathe the air…”
“I relate, therefore I am!”
