Reality Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: AI as Batman and Why We All Live a Double Life Now
The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the opposite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning is in the group — none in the world: all is in the individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two. — Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Doppelganger Humans: The Uber Double as Rescuer
The word duplicity, meaning deception by pretending to feel and act one way while feeling and acting another, comes from Late Latin duplicitatem meaning doubleness. Long before AI, humans mistrusted doubling. Why? Because it brought into question the truth of a person or situation.
Today a strange question emerges from our use of perceptual tools that allow us to create a digital double of ourselves and the world we live in: what is real?
Perception of what is real now filters through tools that can, and often do, distort and confuse the nature of so-called reality. Today the medium is not just the message; it is a doppelganger of the thing itself, the unreal real thing. Yet this is not unfamiliar territory. The study of semiotics (begun in the 17th century, with John Locke) focuses on signs and symbols that are designed to stand for something else, and often double for that something. We’ve been up to this for a while.
Consider the doppelganger human. This notion, a human-looking double, has a long history of standing in for humanity. Throughout mythologies over thousands of years, we invented characters, or told stories about those we knew, to present a narrative of the thousand-faced hero as rescuer. Once we created this mythical double, the rescue myth soon followed. From Gilgamesh (the son of a priest-king and a goddess) to Buddha, Christ, and Mohammad, heroes of the oral and then written patriarchy traditions were (often but not always religious) males. They were like humans, but there was something different about them, usually entailing a divine connection. They came to earth, the story was told, to do the work of saving mankind from the scourges of hunger, discord, killing, misfortune.
The reasons why mankind needed saving emerged from the hardships of the day. Unable to resolve these difficulties through (then unknown) technology or ingenuity, humans invented the uber double, a doppelganger human; we reached beyond common experience to the supernatural to both explain phenomena and to invoke answers and explanations. Inherent in this idea was the notion of another reality, a second place, where things worked differently than in the real world: heaven, Valhalla, Vaikuntha, Nirvana, Mictlan, Gan Eden. Uber-double heroes came from this place or had a special connection with it. While this often resulted in magical thinking and preposterous tales, the hero as rescuer theme survived, remaining a constant trope and motif as we moved into the twentieth century.
Superman, perhaps a natural expression of the Nietzschean uber-mensch, captured western imagination and was a huge commercial success in the early 20th century. Superman came to earth from Planet Krypton and had powers well beyond what humans could dream. He was an evolutionary step from traditional religious figures to a secular world and audience. He was not simply a hero; while he assumed the human form of Clark Kent, he was — in the uber-double tradition — unlike humans in almost every respect.
Not Batman. With millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne as his alter-ego, Batman was a moral avenger with a taste for fast cars, hard-knuckle justice, and a distaste for protocol and cant. He was more like us. Batman’s powers felt more cognitive and contemporary; in this he was more human, more within reach, while his powers of deduction and perspicacity presaged the insights and capabilities of powerful tools that were coming on stream. (Batman made his debut in the comic book Detective Comics no. 27 in May 1939) This is the secret to his modernity; he is not a superhero; he is a flawed human being. His dual identity presages our own, while adding intrigue to his character.
The subliminal power he brings to the heroic tradition is the uber-double hero as rescuer; with him, that tradition revived. If you are in trouble, Batman — despite his quirks and foibles — might find you and save the day. He also wears a mask, as we do behind our devices, which unconsciously endears us to him and makes him more like us.
Today many fear that humanity is in trouble and needs rescuing: nuclear proliferation, pandemics, rampant pollution, wars, overwhelming border and immigration headaches and refugees, climate degradation, poverty and hunger — with a vast news infrastructure that brings all problems under our noses in seconds. The Batcave phone is ringing. We need a rescuer; we’re looking for someone to resolve wicked problems and put down wicked men and women.
AI to Batman: I’ll Take It from Here
Except this time the rescuer is not a someone; it is a something. In the modern era the doppelganger isn’t a person, isn’t someone who might look like us, but has a different story; the new doppelganger to address these problems and hopefully solve them is AI. (Doppel because AI is “trained” on many someones and is effectively a double — a mashup — of all of us. )
In the 21st century, Batman is AI. Meta is using AI to combat political misinformation and hate speech. Microsoft is using AI to power Copilot, which enables GPT-4, Deep Search, and DALLE-3. Google uses AI to understand natural language queries, rank relevant results, and provide useful features such as autocomplete, snippets, and knowledge panels. A supermodel is using a metaHuman as her double to be able to spend more time with her children. Talent agency, Unsigned, and virtual production studio, Dimension, worked with supermodel Eva Herzigová to create her lifelike, 3D digital double. Eva’s MetaHuman can be re-dressed, posed and lit, have her hair and make-up restyled, and her body and facial expressions are ready to be animated using motion capture or traditional animation.
AI is beginning to be seen as a rescuer of humanity from common tactical errors like medical misdiagnosis or pharma formula ineffectiveness, moving on to larger issues like traffic congestion or climate change. Unwittingly we carry on the long tradition of investing our hopes and dreams in an uber-double artificial intelligence. Writing a term paper, creating real estate documentation, finding solutions to mitigate climate change, or waging cleaner, more precise wars — AI is our rescuer.
And in keeping with a longstanding human tradition, this new god is fearsome. The headlines are right out of Marvel world: AI will soon rule the universe; AI will take over the world; AI will colonize and imprison us, its creators.
Disinformation: The Double Life of Facts
Our technologies have created a smorgasbord of deeply immersive alternative reality platforms. We have interactive screens and cranium hugging headsets, multi-screen computers and gaming consoles that transport us to trick mirrors. Technology allows anyone to be an “interface cowboy” diving into heaven or hell; the alt to the real world is now a doubling matrix that augments the real world (in the case of Apple Vision Pro); further, we can access the innumerable imaginative forays of science fiction, fantasy fiction, comics, graphic novels, and cinema, or enter immersive worlds like the Metaverse and the Omniverse.
What is the basis for AI’s power, its strength, its revolutionary capabilities? The answer is one we have not fully digested: AI is fact-based. Factfulness at multiple levels provides AI with its Archimedes’ place to stand. At the same time, Janus-faced, the facts AI is built upon can live an alt-life, a false incarnation.
The notion of another world, a second place, where things work differently than in the real world — is now part of the real world. This second place is everything in the real world that AI touches. But what if, as Jia Tolentino writes, the mirror distorts reality? Warps it? Turns it slightly askew? Now we are set up for a double life of facts.
This creates unexpected paradoxes.
Good creates bad. [Paradox 1] This is the dark side of AI. This is deep fakes and using AI to steal identity and mask intrusions as pleasant invitations, including creating art that does not include human creators. This is AI taking over weapons systems and making decisions without human intervention. This is AI becoming so powerful that it colonizes humans and humans become its slaves instead of AI becoming a servant to humanity. Dark indeed.
I have said, and I believe, that using AI factfully will alter the long sad history of religion and superstitious dogma in favor of data assessments and a reality-based understanding of the world. Because humans entrain with the logic of their tools, and have done for millennia, I believe that humans will entrain with AI logic as well and so humans will — subconsciously as we have done with all our tools since the beginning of time — begin to look for and demand fact-based assessments of what is. This subliminal dynamic will fuel human perception as belief and faith have done for centuries. That is the good news.
The bad news is that the notion of a doppeled reality has not gone away. People are led to believe they can choose what is real, even that which is not data-based; not based in the real world. Technology can then be manipulated to appear to support fact-less reality — lies tarted up by high tech. This leads people to think reality is a choosing: you can choose to believe something is real (or false) simply because you want to.
We must use AI to create willing and inviting ties to what is, to what is real, what is truthful. We need to recognize the powerful attraction of alt-realities and use what we have to reinforce working solutions and eschew foolish notions. We have invention. We have imagination. We have a devious monkey-mind. Some among us would substitute what is false for what is true; what is fake for what is real. And the reason so-called leaders (geopolitical adversaries, for example) would do this: self-promotion, the spoiler effect, mischief, hegemony. Since so many of humanity’s beliefs and faith have been based on false premises of another reality beyond reality (the notion of heaven and hell, for example, which to date have no facts to support them), it is shooting fish in a barrel to tell people lies and then repeat them via modern media to reinforce falsehoods.
Tool logic usurps free will [Paradox 2] We make tools, then tools remake us McLuhan told us. But he didn’t say it was because we always entrain with the tools’ logic as we use the tool. We need tools to survive but in our fascination with tooling we surrender our logic to the tool. We have always done this and presumably always will. It is something genetic, perhaps part of our desire to use and profit from using tools. Our hopes and dreams, as they always have done, are hedged and challenged by real-world issues. Is it intentional or accidental (emergent) that we have created alternative realities at the same time as reality itself has become so fraught? What does it mean to invent a reality that competes with, even outdoes, what we believe to be real? As a species, we hardly know. We have known one earth, indulgent to human foibles and self-serving tendencies in the extreme; yet, that earth is beginning to remind us of our limits and our profligate ways. Is this a factor in choosing another reality, another world where other rules might apply? Perhaps. But I feel that speculation might be too far afield, too philosophical.
The closer answer, and one which deserves much more attention, is that humans entrain with the logic of their tools. We are so tool-mad — in the best sense of those words — that we excite ourselves with the possibilities tools offer us. And these possibilities now are truly mind-boggling. From Federated Learning and Neurolink to AI and quantum computing, human tools have reached astonishing heights. But our entraining with tool logic stays right where it always was: in our brains and genes. This is what we do; pattern recognition and delight in following tool logic is how we think and react.
Said differently, human involvement with tools is subliminal. It is below (or beyond) our conscious thinking patterns. Proof of this assertion (and at this point absent double-blind research, it is still an assertion): humans’ use of cell phones; teens’ use of social media; teenage boys’ involvement with video games; global engagement with the Internet; the practice of digital detox, the sense that your digital devices control your waking (and often sleeping) life; the suicidal spiral of young people; the feeling that vast numbers of people have that they would give up sex and other human activities in favor of cell phones — all are indications, flashing red lights, that it is difficult — think Odysseus tying himself to the mast of his ship so as not to be sent to his death by the enticements of the sirens — not to entrain with tools’ logic.
Reality is no longer real. [Paradox 3] Competition with reality undercuts reality. The realization that our day-to-day is no longer the only real world makes us question the world’s reality. We have multiple verses: metaverse, omniverse, and the universe itself. We are not content with fakes that are obviously fake; we want them to look and act real. This is how we create — because now we can create — alts to reality. Humans delight in re-creation; the more a creation looks real, whether that is a television screen or a video game, there are some of us who will start to prefer that reality (more drama, more tension, more escape, more distraction) to the so-called real world. What does this mean? It means that our tools have broken through to another dimension: they are not just tools per se; they are escape hatches from the real. We can go into them as going into a room, shutting off outside distractions, immersing in the dynamics — the tool logic — of a given application or software. For the first time in human history, we have created other worlds where we can enter, and decide, to spend time and escape the confines of conventional reality. Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Fortnite designers believed they were creating a game; some users want the game to be life, to live in their made-up world and they prefer it to their ordinary lives. This is not only a second life; it is an alt-existence.
To wit, Jon Haidt sees an entire generation of boys who have become tragically involved with video games and who no longer want, or are interested in, conventional reality, succeeding conventionally, or finding satisfaction in reality or finding a mate to share that reality. Youths and some adults become so tragically involved with TikTok that they swallow things, do things, take dares, follow lying poltergeists — the list of offenses grows daily — that makes them prefer the made up, the alt, the unreal — to the real. This will not end well, for the global cohort of young men or the world they are ignoring.
The real world is no longer home. [Paradox 4] Our ability to manipulate reality now outstrips our ability to understand what this means. And especially to see the implications of our new manipulative abilities. As we understand the real world more fully — whether that is appreciating the wisdom of whales or the long misunderstood history of women — we begin to reckon factfully. In order to see the facts of the real world, we can and will employ artificial intelligence. We will begin to see things that our traditions and social structures kept hidden. This creates alternative narratives to what we have been taught is real.
The emerging phenomenon from this understanding is that some will begin to doubt the reality of what is real; what we have been told; what we learned was true. This then leads to larger numbers of people jumping ship. Not just amusing ourselves to death as Neil Postman put it, but choosing to live elsewhere. Home is where the art is. Reality dodges are already profitable; that profit will skyrocket with the conflation of fake or ersatz facts and worlds with what we know to be true based solidly on facts and truths. We all live a double life now: our home life and our tool life.
So how are we to adjust to this new state of affairs?
AI and the Foundation of Factfulness
AI is based on a new kind of factfulness. The value of AI rests on its truth and relevance. The power of AI has its roots in the Enlightenment with increases many times over due to the advances of science, experiment, and innovation. AI runs on data and that data must be accurate; it must be true to the reality and dynamics of a given situation or process. If not, the AI is useless. Imagine a manufacturing scenario where AI is being used to make the process safer, more efficient, less costly. If all the data were wonky, if there were no truth to the assessments of line production dynamics or pricing, or end user wishes — the AI investment would be wasted. It would be of no value.
Yet AI may generate knowledge that is unlike what we have known before. AI may take what we know and tell us what we don’t know, or haven’t thought of; it may look at what we have done and show us what we didn’t do, or didn’t consider. Why does this matter? Why is this important? Because while truthfulness is a sine qua non of AI, it is also elusive; a goal with some, but not total, clarity. I believe this is such a stunning and far-reaching effect that it will transform how we look at reality. For thousands of years, so-called leaders and prophets ‘made up’ their version of how the world works; they made windy pronouncements and gave speeches — often based on some text they deemed holy — and condemned those who disagreed as devils and heretics. But that system is in decline now. AI, dependent on facts and truthfulness, makes us, its inventors and users, dependent on facts and truthfulness as well. It also should make us skeptical of getting too enamored of the facts themselves, since AI bias or hallucinations can fool our perceptions.
In other words, we’re out of the dark woods of superstition and belief; we’re no longer dependent upon self-serving demagogues and power-mongering so-called rulers who manipulate prejudice and fears for their personal gain. We have an objective tool that demands that we adhere to one simple premise: use me (AI) for what is true and factual. Factfulness— AI — is our new saving grace. Yet we must be mindful of the wayward aspect of both the tool and our ability to understand the tool.
This sets up the new mission of education. As the military trains its soldiers to understand terrain and threats, and yet stay fixed upon the mission at hand; education must now train young people in factfulness and teach them to eschew fakes and false information as destructive to the new system of assessing reality. And, make no mistake, this is our new system of assessing reality.
CODA: A Few Paradox Antidotes
1. Recognize our double destiny. We can build a meta level into our tools so we can see tool logic in action.
2. Acknowledge our double natures. Humans always have and always will entrain with the logic of their tools, which can be at odds with personal intention.
3. Celebrate factfulness. The more we use AI, the more we become wedded to what is true, what is provable.
4. Police deviousness. The more we use AI, the more devious people will try to distort factfulness, subvert it to their own nefarious ends.
5. Acknowledge multiplicity. We are heading into a world of multiple realities — conventional reality is over.
6. Embrace uncertainty. We have built social structures based on certainties, but these are no longer so certain. We must learn to embrace randomness and uncertainty.
