Page 40 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
Viktor is convinced to turn his attention to modern science and chemistry. In an ambitious merging of the fantastical dreams of the alchemists with the logic of hard science, he seeks to create a new race of beings – but his experiment goes awry, producing a monster so deformed and terrifying in appearance that Viktor runs away from it, leaving his creation unsupervised. Though he tries, the monster is unable to successfully integrate himself into human society, a reality that results in the death of many people – including Viktor’s younger brother and his new wife. Like Faust, Viktor Frankenstein’s quest for super-human knowledge becomes his ultimate downfall.
Though hundreds of years old, these stories are particularly pertinent in the age of AI, where the drive to know more has gained unprecedented momentum and led to an attempt to produce a thinking creature, created in our own image. The goal of unsupervised deep learning is to use vast amounts of data and advanced
processing algorithms modelled on the human brain to make machines that are capable of doing things more accurately and more efficiently than we are capable of in our normal human state – and to drive us, like Faust, towards a place of infinite knowledge. But like Frankenstein’s monster, modern AI has emerged out of an ambitious combination of mysticism and science, with little regard for the moral implications of such a pairing. The pioneers of Big Tech were, after all, once the hippies that drove an LSD-laden counterculture movement.
The idea that humans – in their normal, mortal state – are somehow limited in their ability to access and understand infinite knowledge is a theme that has been explored throughout time and across cultures. Psychedelic drugs have often been at the centre of the pursuit to access a higher level of consciousness, from the peyote used by the medicine men of North America, to the iboga used in initiation ceremonies by the Babongo in Gabon, the kava that features in the sacred rituals in the Pacific Islands, and the yagé used by tribes in the South American rainforest. And in contemporary Western society, we have lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).
LSD was first synthesised by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 and produces a range of perceptual, emotional and cognitive effects in varying degrees amongst different users. Common experiences include visual and auditory hallucinations, vivid mental imagery, synaesthesia, a broadening and intensification of access to one’s emotions, and increased cognitive flexibility. In the most powerful “trips”, users report a total sense of fluidity between the self and the external environment – a so-called oneness with the universe.
Neuroscientific investigations into the link between the pharmacological and phenomenological effects of LSD have produced insights about the drug’s biological effect on users. These studies have largely focused on the drug’s ability to improve communication between different parts of the brain through increased synaptic connections. In humans, the more synapses between
In the most powerful “trips”, users report a total sense of
fluidity between the self and the external environment – a so-called
oneness with the universe.
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