Relevance « GABlog
I'm dealing with the problem of being unpredictable. Not in the sense of being random, but of having agency that can't be reduced to socio-political predictive mechanisms. Being unpredictable in this sense is necessary to have a clear view of disordered power structures and to be of use within well-ordered structures. So, what makes someone predictable, first of all? To predict, you need to reduce something to a few abstract elements whose interrelation you can map and even quantify. Behavioral modification would be an obvious example: through a closed system of rewards and punishments you can make animals or humans predictable. This kind of system relies on the most widely shared human characteristics: fear, hunger, sexual desire, etc.--buttons you can push that will make people predictable. We can see that making people predictable is almost synonymous with controlling them. The algorithm is, then, the latest and most advanced means of predicting and rendering predictable. OK, this is already known. The tougher question is, what makes one unpredictable--and that, of course, is what the area in bold is trying to answer. I'm saying that it's obedience that makes one unpredictable. Now, that doesn't sound right--if someone is obedient, isn't he completely predictable--give him an order and you know what he'll do! But if we mean "obedient" in the sense of seeking out the worthiest commands to obey, the situation is very different. I may obey my immediate superior, but if he's incompetent or abusive, I will obey him in a way that makes his command better than he is. And I can do that because I'm obeying an even higher command, from the center, to "fill in" the commands to which I am subject with intelligence, good will and good faith. This makes me unpredictable--even when you have a good idea of *what* i'm going to do, you don't know *how* I'm going to do it, and the how might be more important than the what. You couldn't construct an algorithm to bypass this unpredictability, because part of this mode of moral action entails interacting with others, enabling them, "shoring up" what they are doing, and this will always be, to a significant degree, specific to each situation.
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Yes. Unpredictable--but reliable.