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A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN 1541-0099 22(1) –December 2011 |
Human Enhancement and the Computational
Metaphor
James Ogilvy
Global Business Network
Email address: jaogilvy@gmail.com
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 22 Issue 1 – December 2011 - pgs 81-96
Abstract
This
paper affirms human enhancement in principle, but questions the inordinate attention
paid to two particular forms of enhancement: life extension and raising IQ. The
argument is not about whether these enhancements are possible or not; instead,
I question the aspirations behind the denial of death and the stress on one
particular type of intelligence: the logico-analytic. Death is a form of finitude, and finitude
is a crucially defining part of human life. As for intelligence, Howard Gardner
and Daniel Goleman show us the importance of multiple
intelligences. After clarifying the notion of different psychological types, the
paper takes five specimens of a distinct type and then studies the traits of that type through their examples.
Seeking a pattern connecting those traits, the paper finds them bound together
by the embrace of the computational metaphor for human cognition and then
argues that the computational metaphor does not do a good job of describing
human intelligence. Enlisting the works of Jaron
Lanier and Ellen Ullman, the paper ends with a caution against pushing human
intelligence toward machine intelligence, and points toward the human potential
movement as a possible ally and wise guide for the transhumanist
movement.
The argument for
human enhancement is at once simple and complex: very simply, to quote
Zarathustra, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end”
(Nietzsche 1954, 127). Enhancement is paradoxically the essence of creatures
whose existence precedes their essence – the formula, if you will, for
existentialism. But once the door toward enhancement has been
so simply opened, questions about which enhancements, to whom, and in what
degree, become fantastically complex.
This essay makes
short shrift of essentialist objections to any and all enhancement. Most of the
essay is then devoted to the question: what’s wrong with the inordinate amount
of attention paid to life extension and IQ?
Short shrift
Let’s not waste
time with straw men. Shoes enhance the soles of your feet; clothes enhance the
ability of your skin and hair to insulate your body; glasses enhance vision.
We’re not about to go naked into the world, and once we acknowledge Nietzsche’s
“bridge” of enhancement as the slippery slope we stepped out onto long ago,
we’re not going to outlaw lasik surgery because we’ve
fixed on spectacles as part of an ahistorical human nature.
That said, there
are distinctions to be drawn between lasik surgery
available to anyone and life extension available to only a few. Likewise there
are distinctions to be drawn between making sure that all God’s chillun’ got shoes, and smart pills for an affluent few.
Surely there are
arguments that can be made against the injustice of unequal opportunities for
enhancement, and I don’t want to make light of such inequities. But in this
essay I am less concerned with issues of inequity than in how we make choices
about what to enhance. Once we see humanity as a “bridge”, once we take
seriously our existential historicity, then we’re bound to embrace a certain elongation of the human condition. That
is to say, some will always be further along than others. The good news of our
capacity for progress comes with the potentially bad news of an inevitable
unevenness of achievement.
I don’t want to
dismiss issues of inequality and inequity. They are real. But the focus of this
essay is elsewhere: I want to push back against the emphasis on (a) life
extension unto immortality, and (b) the enhancement of IQ. Both life expectancy
and IQ are eminently quantifiable. I would rather focus on quality of life. A
longer life is not necessarily a better life. Nor is a smarter person
necessarily a wiser person.
Finitude
and the lure of life extension
Consider life
extension. While increases in life expectancy due to improved nutrition and
healthcare are certainly to be applauded, the prospect of immortality
constitutes a violation of our finitude, and this, I will argue, is a bad
thing. The point is not simply that we don’t want to prolong decrepitude. Ray
Kurzweil (2005) is smart enough to see that we don’t want to feel like
centenarians for many centuries; he wants to feel forty forever. That’s why he
takes over 200 pills a day.
What is wrong
with aspirations to immortality? I’ll offer two arguments, one for the
individual and a second for the species. For the individual, the aspiration to
immortality, the denial of death, is the denial of a part of life that gives it
definition. Our finitude is not just a number like “fourscore and ten”; it is a
constraint that makes for meaning and significance. Heideggerian
being-towards-death isn’t so much a brooding about nothingness; it is better
understood as the embrace of somethingness rather
than anythingness. You can be a butcher or a baker or a candlestick maker . . . but not all three and anything else
besides.
The decisiveness
of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or is closer to the existential significance
of finitude than the fact that we all die sooner or later. While the affect of
Heidegger’s staring into the abyss might make it look as though life were being
enhanced by a simple contrast with death-whose-finality-is-fully-absorbed, I
think that this is the wrong lesson to take away from Heidegger. Once he turns
from the Teutonic weightiness of Being
and Time toward his later lectures on Nietzsche, we see a lighter embrace
of amor fati, a “love
of fate” that comes with the doctrine of eternal return. To be able to say of
one’s life, “Thus it was and so I willed it, and so would I will it again and
again for all eternity . . .” – this is not the denial of death but the
affirmation of a particular, unique, and finite life. Just
so.
Surely it could
be argued that the constraint and definition of a life can be achieved in ways
other than snipping it short after a finite number of years. Yes, the
definition of different types and traits would be possible for immortal beings,
just as it was for the gods and goddesses in polytheistic pantheons. But the
denial of death has a further downside for the species, one that can be
captured by observing that heaven has no history.
There is no such
thing as progress in heaven. The problem with saying, “We are as gods and might
as well get good at it” (Brand 1968) is not simply
hubris. Rather, in taking the gods as models for an enhanced humanity, we would
deny our historicity and with it the temporality that is a significant part of
our humanity. Imagine life in a society of immortals. Where are there
opportunities for improvement? Selection by way of death is evolution’s way of
culling old models to make room for new and improved models. Obsolescence,
whether planned or unplanned, is a precondition for the possibility of novelty.
Gods and goddesses may have little use for novelty, but we do. Our species
needs death in order to evolve, in order to be a bridge and not an end.
Mortality is a feature, not a bug. Without it, we, as a species, would freeze.
For the “individual
existing human being” (a favorite phrase of Kierkegaard’s), it may be too much
to expect a willingness to “step aside” for the sake of the improvement of the
species. You don’t see many professors giving up tenure for the sake of making
room for new blood in their departments. Nor are political incumbents noted for
their willingness to give up their offices. But for that very reason – the expectable
self-interest of incumbency –
we who take the long view toward the interests of the species and not just our
own sweet selves should be especially cautious about supporting programs and
policies that indulge the denial of death. Tenure is a mixed blessing.
Intelligence. What?
What about the
enhancement of IQ, whether by “smart pills” or other means? Here again I’m less
concerned with the means, or with issues of equity, than with the aspiration in
the first place. Yes, it would be nice to improve one’s memory and one’s
ability to solve tough problems. Intelligence is a good thing. But what is intelligence? More precisely, is
there an important difference between human
intelligence and the computational power of machines that, according to
Kurzweil and others, will be able to match human intelligence by 2030 or so?
Like love and
consciousness, intelligence is famously hard to define. But just as the
intractability of love has not discouraged poets from counting the ways we love
one another, so psychologists have not been shy about trying to pin down
intelligence. Early approaches by Francis Galton, Alfred Binet
and Lewis Terman assumed that intelligence was a
single capacity susceptible to monolinear
measurement, and measure it they did with instruments like
the famous IQ test. Because there were obvious problems involved in measuring
something so ill-defined, tests for intelligence eventually served as
operational definitions for what it was they were testing. As Harvard
psychologist, E. G. Boring (1923) put it, “Intelligence is what the tests test.” But the uses to which such tests are put
led to criticisms: that the tests were biased in favor of those with a certain
culture or background; that the tests ignored certain capacities that could or
should be regarded as part of intelligence. Herrnstein and Murray’s influential
book, The Bell Curve (1994), provoked
a torrent of criticism for arguing that intelligence is a single property
distributed differently among different races.
Rather than
claiming that intelligence is one capacity that can be measured on a single
scale, Howard Gardner (1983, 1985, 1999) has built a
career around the exploration of multiple
intelligences. In his early work he lists seven: (1) linguistic, (2)
logical-mathematical, (3) musical, (4) bodily-kinesthetic, (5) spatial, (6)
interpersonal, and (7) intrapersonal. In his later work Gardner adds to his
list (8) naturalist (or ecological) intelligence, but balks at the addition of
spiritual intelligence, or something he calls “existential intelligence,” or
moral intelligence. Building on and adding to Gardner’s work, Daniel Goleman published his immensely successful Emotional Intelligence (1995). Can this
list of multiple intelligences be further extended? Is a sense of humor a form
of intelligence? Some have alleged that it should be, but that Gardner lacks a
funny bone.
Apart from quibbles
about the length or composition of the list of multiple intelligences, what has
become abundantly clear is that the capacity for logico-analytic
calculation is but a small component of what many of us would want to count as
intelligence. Computational capacity, whether measured in terms of storage
capacity or speed, is but a part of what counts as intelligence. There are as
many ways of being smart as there are ways of being stupid. In academia, we are
all familiar with people my wife would call, “smart in books but dumb in life.”
As David Brooks argues in The Social
Animal (2011), success at assembling the several parts of a good life – economic
success, happiness, and the maintenance of strong relationships – does not
correlate that well with purely cognitive capacity.
So when Ray
Kurzweil tries to put a date on when computers will “exceed human
intelligence,” the question we should be considering is not so much about the
speed or capacity of computers; the question we should be considering is whether
Kurzweil has a proper understanding of just what human intelligence is. I
have no doubt that computers already exceed my capacity for a range of tasks
from finding cube roots to remembering names and dates. But when it comes to
good judgment, or what the Greeks called phronesis (practical wisdom), neither the progress in AI (artificial
intelligence) to date, nor its prospects for the future, invite optimism.
Computers are great at calculation, but they lack common sense.
Questioning
of aspirations
With respect to
aspirations to immortality on the one hand, and the enhancement of IQ on the
other, the question is not so much whether we can, but why would we want to?
Yes, of course, an added increment to length of life or IQ looks like a good
thing in particular cases, but a generalized obsession – as manifested, say, in the
consumption of over 200 pills a day – may lead to too much of a good thing.
It strikes me as one-sided, intemperate, almost
pathological.
Now this is a
lot to claim – not
that Kurzweil and his transhumanist colleagues are so much incorrect in
their estimates for a competition between computers and humans, but rather that
they are somehow sick for even
wanting to go there. The argument ceases to be logical and evidential,
and swerves dangerously toward the ad
hominem. But that is not exactly the nature of the argument I want to make.
I don’t want to accuse transhumanists of being crazy
in some psychologically reductionist and dismissive way. But I do want to
identify a syndrome, a type if not a stereotype, an
historically emergent combination of cultural, psychological and technological
factors that are coming together in ways that are both pathological and highly
functional.
To say that I am
suggesting some new category for the next edition of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV 2004) would be to take a stance
that is too narrowly psychological, and too tilted toward the pathological. I
prefer an approach that is less reductive, more holistic, and more in the
tradition of critical theory but without the Marxism. Let me explain with
examples.
Psychographics,
history, and character types
After the Second
World War, in the wake of consternation at how a literate and civilized people
like the Germans could plunge so tragically toward the atrocities wrought by
Fascism, Theodor Adorno and some of his colleagues
undertook a research program with linked objectives: (1) to identify the
character type that is susceptible to fascism; and (2) understand its etiology
in sufficient detail so as to assure that such atrocities would happen never again. Given the recent history,
it was apparent to them that they could not simply ask the man on the street,
“Are you a Fascist?” Instead they identified a series of seemingly innocent and
seemingly unrelated questions and corresponding answers that were in fact
highly correlated with Fascistic behavior. They published the results of their
work in an impressive tomb entitled The
Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. [1950]
1969). Meanwhile renegade psychologist Wilhelm Reich stepped out of the narrow
confines of Freudian psychology to fetch a wider cultural-historical compass in
his equally weighty book, The Mass
Psychology of Fascism (Reich [1946] 1970). Flawed as they may have been – Reich ended his
life certifiably insane –
both of these works share the merit of seeing the human condition whole. Both
works respect the incredible complexity of both nature and nurture; both weave
rich tapestries combining instinctual dynamics from the (subjective) inside
with cultural and historical conditions on the (objective) outside. Neither
narrowly psychologistic, nor reductionistic
toward cultural or economic determinism, both works take the intellectual high
road toward an ambitious comprehension of social, psychological, cultural,
historical and economic factors all wrapped up in the syndrome known as the
authoritarian personality.
And they are not
alone. Others have acknowledged that psychopathologies have histories – that different
decades in different cultures have their sickness du jour. For Freud’s Vienna it was hysteria, whose etiology bore
traces of the outside influence of a repressive Victorian culture and morality.
During the 1950s and 60s, paranoid schizophrenia gained in currency as a
presenting symptom. Erik Erikson (1968) coined the term “identity crisis” to
capture a syndrome he identified among WWII vets whose symptoms would later by
classified as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Here again the unique
historical sources of the “stress” represent outside influences quite
independent of the psychic drives and instincts studied by a narrower Freudian
psychology.
During the 1970s
and 80s the fashionable pathology became the narcissistic borderline
personality disorder, whose portrait was painted not only by clinical
psychologists like Heinz Kohut (2000), but also by
sociologists like Robert Bellah (1985, 1991), Philip Slater (1990), and Christopher Lasch (1978). Here again we were asked to acknowledge not
just the psychic inner workings of some ahistorical drives and instincts, but
the historico-cultural influences of a uniquely
American hyper-individualism.
Even as these
several “outside-in” approaches to the psyche from the broader realms of
culture, history and economics were enhancing our understanding of the history
of madness, humanistic psychology and the human potentials movement were giving
us a psychology of health rather than sickness. In the works of Abraham Maslow
(1968), Carl Rogers (1989) and Michael Murphy (1992), we find an appreciation
for the higher reaches of human performance. In the words of R. D. Laing
(1965), a psychologist who was also sensitive to broader social and cultural
dynamics, sometimes what psychologists see as a “breakdown” may in fact be a “breakthrough.”
Likewise Kohut was quick to acknowledge that many of
the so-called narcissists he treated were very successful, highly performing
people.
The
psycho-social typology game is not just about ad hominem reduction and dismissal. It is instead a hermeneutic: a
means of interpreting various markings as
symptoms of various traits. Its varieties are legion, from astrology (Tarnas 2006) to the Enneagram (Riso
and Hudson 2000). I, for one, find almost nothing useful in these latter two
interpretive systems. But I understand the impulse behind them: there really
are different types of people, and
wouldn’t it be nice to have a tidy system for classifying them all, and doing
so respectfully, without seeing each as a species of pathology.
Where astrology and
the Enneagram are, in my opinion, lacking in empirical validation, other
typologies have been subject to rigorous confirmation. For several years in the
1980s I served as director of research for the Values and Lifestyles (VALS)
Program at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute). Arnold
Mitchell (1986) invented a typology based on a creative synthesis of Maslow’s
famous hierarchy of needs bisected by David Riesmann’s
(1950) distinction between the “inner-directed” and the “other-directed.”
Mitchell’s typology contained nine different lifestyles that differed not
simply by demographic characteristics of age, income and education level, but
also by the different values espoused by members of very similar demographic
segments. Schooled in the kind of public opinion survey techniques initiated by
Adorno et al. in their research on the authoritarian
personality, we in the VALS Program conducted national probability sample
surveys of Americans that were then rigorously correlated with purchase patterns
as tracked by Simmons Market Research. Using the results of this research,
advertisers and marketers were better able to target the right consumer with
the right message about the right product through the right media channel. To
cite just one example that will show just how wrong things can go when there’s
a mismatch between economic supply and psychodynamic demand, consider an ad for
0% financing for Chevy trucks that was broadcast during a break in a rerun of Brideshead Revisited. Yes, this stuff works, as is
most clear when it doesn’t.
Labels for other
psycho-social types – characterized
not only by their psychology but also their socio-economic context – will be
familiar, viz. Yuppies (young urban professionals exuding a get-rich-quick
ambition); or David Brooks’ (2000) construct, the Bobos
(bourgeois bohemians – aging hippies who make some money and then take on
the trappings of suburban family life).
Now it is in the
spirit of this intellectually rich and lively tradition of psycho-social typologizing that I would like to identify the traits of a
new type: the noble nerd. We’ve all heard the usually derogatory term, “nerd.”
I add the modifier “noble” with the explicit intention of not wanting to pathologize this new type.
Even as I would acknowledge that pathologies are possible – even that we
know them chiefly by their pathologies – still, like Kohut and his narcissists, or Brooks and his Bobos, I want to respect both the good intentions and high
achievements of many a noble nerd. Nonetheless, I would have you see them as one
type among other types, not as models or paradigms for the human condition.
There is a syndrome that has both its positive and negative characteristics. As
with some of the other psycho-social types we have just surveyed, noble nerds
represent a complex coming together of social, psychological, cultural,
historical and economic influences at a particular juncture in the world problematique. Precursors can be found in prior eras.
Successors will modify the type. But here and now, in places like Silicon
Valley, Boston’s Rte. 128, Raleigh’s Research Triangle, and Austin, Texas, this
type runs rampant.
Getting to know the noble nerds
Ye shall know
them by their Facebook pages, their LinkedIn profiles and their Twitter feeds.
So-called “social networking” is their massive compensation for their
fundamentally asocial instincts (they are heirs to Lasch’s
Culture of Narcissism). But how much
better that they reach out and at least click someone rather than receding into
the solitary existence of Japan’s hikikomori. Who?
In today’s Japan there are more than a million young people, mostly male, who
will not leave their bedrooms. According to Michael Zielenziger,
who parlayed his eight years as Reuters bureau chief
in Tokyo into a book on the subject (2006), these young people are not
clinically crazy. If air-lifted out of Japan to Hong Kong, Vancouver or New
York, they often thrive. Nor are they the victims of some sort of digital
addiction to their computer screens. Yes, as Sherry Turkle,
has informed us, too much Life on the
Screen (1995) can be dangerous to
your mental health. But for the hikikomori, their
withdrawal seems to have more to do with a mismatch between their personal
aspirations as twenty-first-century globally informed youth on the one hand,
and on the other the social constraints and expectations imposed by a very
strong and homogeneous Japanese culture.
Hikikomori is not a good candidate for DSM V. This
new type is not just a new species of psychological pathology. The hikikomori, I would argue, represent a
particularly unhappy version of noble nerds. Their experience may be intensely
psychological, and for the most part painful, but its etiology has a lot to do
with a unique juncture of social, cultural, technological and historical
circumstances.
To get a better
sense of the complex dynamics of the noble nerd, some case studies are in
order. Here the method is that of the naturalist. Go out and trap a few that
you think are representative. Put them together in a display case and examine
them to see whether they have any common traits. By an inductive process of
generalization from particulars, try to identify some common themes. Weave
those themes into a coherent tapestry of mutual affinities (much looser than
necessary entailments), and then test the results by making some deductive
inferences that are falsifiable.
This method is
eminently subject to errors. In investigating what she takes to be fish, if the naturalist nets some
dolphins and/or turtles along with all of the salmon, cod and haddock, some odd
inductive inferences will follow. Features that characterize some instances of
the class may not apply to others. We are creating a construct here, not
discovering a natural kind. Its dimensions are less defined by natural
evolution than by historical and cultural change. Its boundaries are therefore
fuzzy and in flux. Its validity should be measured less by its faithful
correspondence to some objective silhouette and more by its usefulness in
generating insights.
With that much
of methodological caveats out of the way, let me boldly state that my
candidates for the display case include not only Ray Kurzweil but also Herman
Kahn, Marvin Minsky, Steven Wolfram, and Ed Fredkin. Is there a “dolphin” in this mix, someone who
looks like a member of the class but isn’t? Perhaps.
Mistakes will be culled in further iterations of the method, but for now we
will look to these men as paradigm cases of the noble nerd. Each one is widely
regarded as a genius. “Criminally intelligent” is a phrase that sits easily on
Herman Kahn, whom many regarded as a moral monster for his ability to joke
about mega-deaths in his classic, On
Thermonuclear War (1960).
But what kind of
“intelligence” is this that is obsessed with gaining more life and more intelligence?
In deriving a profile based on these Übermenschen, I hope to tell a
tale that is cautionary rather than aspirational for the transhumanist
movement. Beware of what you want. So-called human enhancement may not be all
that you hoped it would be. And/or, it may be more of some things you should
fear.
So what are some
of the “traits” of the noble nerd? Let’s begin with the most obvious: smart,
socially inept, jocular, ambitious, numerate . . . you know the type as a type. But to understand the
syndrome better, let’s drill down on some examples and then see if we can
connect these dots to some other less obvious dots.
Smart: Each of our specimens has been
often and publicly heralded as brilliant. Wolfram won a MacArthur “genius” award.
Friends of mine who know Minsky joke that if one were
able to quantify just how much knowledge there is in the world, the unit of
measure would be in Minskies. When Kahn was given an
IQ test in the course of joining the military, he got the highest score ever
recorded by his testers. Ed Fredkin, at 34, became a
full professor at MIT.
Socially
inept: Ed
Fredkin:
I
couldn’t conduct a conversation with a girl or arrange for a date or get
invited to a dance. I was not invited to a single party or dance throughout my
whole high school time. Not once. . . . [K]ids would be choosing sides for a
game of something – it
could be touch football. They’d choose everybody but me and then there’d be a
fight as to whether one side would have to take me. One side would say, “We
have eight and you have seven,” and the other side would say, “That’s okay.”
They’d be willing to play with seven. (Wright 1998, 16f.)
Herman Kahn was
a great conversationalist and very gregarious . . . but his was not an ordinary
way of interacting. “At least as important as adulation was condemnation. He
really wanted to be cursed and damned. He just gloried in it” (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 82). Read chapter 3 of Ghamari-Tabrizi’s remarkable book on Kahn, The Real Dr. Strangelove, and you be the
judge.
Jocular:
Kahn’s
humor offended many. How could he crack jokes about mega-deaths? Kurzweil
concludes many chapters in The
Singularity is Near with fanciful and amusing “conversations” among the
likes of Charles Darwin, Ned Ludd and Tim Leary. Fredkin,
said a colleague, “doesn’t really work. He sort of fiddles.”
“Very
often he has these great ideas and then does not have the discipline to
cultivate the ideas” “There is a gap between the quality of the original ideas
and what follows. There’s an imbalance there.” Fredkin
is aware of his reputation. In self-parody, he once brought a cartoon to John Macone’s attention. In it, a beaver and another forest
animal are contemplating an immense man-made dam. The beaver is saying
something like, “No, I didn’t actually build it. But it’s based on an idea of
mine.” (Wright 1998, 35)
Ambitious: Wolfram’s
ambition bleeds from the very title of his book, A New Kind of Science; its
size – over
a thousand pages; and the sheer number of disciplines he attacks. And he has
made a lot of money from his software, Mathematica.
Likewise, Kurzweil writes very big books on just about everything under the
sun, and makes a very good living from the several companies he has built. Fredkin bought an entire island in the Caribbean with the
fruits of his brilliance. He wanted to develop an institute that would use
artificial intelligence to disambiguate the language of diplomacy. “This particular brainstorm was but one reflection of Fredkin’s impulse to save the world” (Wright 1998, 45).
And Kahn, too, was out for nothing less: “We take God’s view. The President’s view. Big. Aerial. Global. Galactic.
Ethereal. Spatial. Overall. Megalomania is the standard occupational hazard” (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 70).
Numerate: I
choose this little used word carefully in order to point toward a worldview
that is as metaphysical as it is mathematical. It’s not simply that these men
like to count and calculate. It’s rather that they believe that absolutely
everything is denumerable. And, consistent with their ambition, they like to
traffic in very big numbers, exponentials, ten to the
nth where n is often a double or
triple digit. Look at all the logarithmic plots in The Singularity is Near. Listen to Kahn
carry on about the difference between 40 million and 80 million deaths
following a nuclear exchange. Marvel at the sheer number of neurons in Minsky’s Society of
Mind (1985), whose basic argument is that intelligence will result if you
correctly wire together enough stupid
agents. For Wolfram, whose arguments often depend on the emergent outcomes of
thousands of iterations of his cellular automata, “More is Different,” to quote
the title of Phil Anderson’s famous article (1972). And finally, for Fredkin . . . I’ll let science writer, Robert Wright,
describe the situation better than I can, but first you need to know that Fredkin believes that the universe is not just like a computer. “Ed Fredkin
thinks the universe is a computer. A really big one” (Wright
1998, 4).
Fredkin has
an interesting way of expressing his insistence that all physical quantities be
rational. (A rational number is a number that can be expressed as a fraction – as a ratio of one integer to another. In
decimal form, a rational number will either end, like 5/2 in the form of 2.5,
or repeat itself endlessly, like 1/7 in the form of 0.142857142857142 . . . )
He says he finds it hard to believe that a finite volume of space could contain an infinite amount of
information. It is almost as if he views each parcel of space as having the
digits describing it actually crammed into it. This seems an odd perspective,
one that confuses the thing itself with the information representing it. But
such an inversion between the realm of things and the realm of representation
is common among those who work at the interface between physics and computer
science. Contemplating the essence of information seems to affect the way you
think. . . “I’ve come to the conclusion,” he says,
that the most concrete thing in the world is information.” (Wright 1998, 26-27)
So
much for this quick tour through selected evidence for the first five and most
obvious traits of the noble nerds. Now for the less obvious. How do these dots fit together? Is
there a pattern that connects? I believe that there is and that Fredkin, the least famous of our five specimens but maybe
the most extreme exemplar of the type, holds the key. His somewhat bizarre
belief that the universe is a
computer goes one step further, a step toward literalism, in what others speak
of as “the computational metaphor.”
The
computational metaphor and its consequences
Marvin Minsky is among the earliest advocates of so-called “strong
AI,” the belief that the brain functions like a computer and that once we have
enough computational power, we will achieve artificial intelligence. Both
Wolfram and Kurzweil are clearly committed to the view that the human brain
works like a computer. We haven’t achieved artificial intelligence yet because, on the one hand, we don’t
have enough computing power, and on the other, we don’t really understand how
the brain works. But we will. It’s just a matter of time before a computer will
pass the Turing test. Kurzweil is convinced – and has placed bets to back his
conviction – that
computers will surpass human intelligence sometime before 2030.
But again, what is intelligence? Whether or not you
acknowledge all of the types of intelligence described by Howard Gardner and
Daniel Goleman, it’s possible to question whether
digital computation provides a good metaphor, much less a rigorous model, for
human intelligence. Among the strongest critics of the computational metaphor
for the brain are two Berkeley philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle. In
1972, Dreyfus published What Computers
Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. Given that Minsky was a real scientist and Dreyfus a mere philosopher,
Dreyfus was, at the time, the contrarian considered to be in the minority.
Nonetheless, his book kicked up enough of a storm that he felt called upon to
publish a revised edition in 1979. Then, in 1992, he published What Computers Still Can’t Do, in which
he writes:
Almost
half a century ago computer pioneer Alan Turing suggested that a high-speed
digital computer, programmed with rules and facts, might exhibit intelligent
behavior. Thus was born the field later called artificial intelligence (AI).
After fifty years of effort, however, it is now clear to all but a few diehards
that this attempt to produce general intelligence has failed. This failure does
not mean that this sort of AI is impossible; no one has been able to come up
with such a negative proof. Rather, it has turned out that, for the time being
at least, the research program based on the assumption that human beings
produce intelligence using facts and rules has reached a dead end, and there is
no reason to think it could ever succeed. (Dreyfus 1992, ix)
Dreyfus’
colleague, John Searle, has also taken aim at the computational metaphor for
consciousness, first in a famous article (Searle 1980) and then in a series of
books (1984, 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007). His critique centers around
his so-called Chinese Room argument. He asks us to imagine a person, possibly
Searle himself, who is ignorant of Chinese sitting in a closed room:
Imagine
that you carry out the steps in a program for answering questions in a language
you do not understand. I do not understand Chinese, so I imagine that I am
locked in a room with a lot of boxes of Chinese symbols (the database), I get
small bunches of Chinese symbols passed to me (questions in Chinese), and I
look up in a rule book (the program) what I am supposed to do. I perform
certain operations on the symbols in accordance with the rules (that is, I
carry out the steps in the program) and give back small bunches of symbols
(answers to the questions) to those outside the room. I am the computer
implementing a program for answering questions in Chinese And
this is the point: if I do not understand
Chinese solely on the basis of implementing a computer program for
understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on
that basis, because no digital computer has anything I do not have. (Searle
1997, 11)
Searle’s thought
experiment serves to illustrate the following simple logic:
1.
Programs are entirely syntactical.
2.
Minds have a semantics.
3.
Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself
sufficient for, semantics. (Searle 1997, 11)
I think Searle’s
argument holds water, as do Dreyfus’s arguments in What Computers Still Can’t Do, but the fact of the matter is that
there have been over a hundred published attacks on Searle’s argument,
including a sustained argument in The
Singularity is Near (Kurzweil 2005, 458-69). This debate is not over, the case has not been settled. Despite confident
declarations of the death of strong AI by Dreyfus and Searle, the computational
metaphor is alive and well. See, for example, how the founding editor of Wired magazine,
Kevin Kelly, explicitly embraces the computational metaphor for mind in his
recent book, What Technology Wants:
We
tend to interpret the mysteries surrounding life in imagery suggested by the
most complex system we are aware of at the time. Once nature
was described as a body, then as a clock in the age of clocks, then a machine
in the industrial age. Now, in the “digital age,” we apply the
computational metaphor. To explain how our minds work, or how evolution
advances, we apply the pattern of a very large software program processing bits
of information. None of these historical metaphors is wrong; they are just
incomplete. Ditto for our newest metaphor of information and
computation. (Kelly 2010, 63-64)
And Kelly is not
alone. Though I don’t have poll data to prove it, I would guess that most noble
nerds embrace the computational metaphor for mind. But there are consequences
to this embrace. For one thing, it becomes very difficult to defend free will
if you think that the brain is a computer. Like some others, Kelly tries to
rescue freedom by appeal to quantum indeterminacy (Kelly 2010, 307-311). But
the freedom so gained is the freedom of a leaf in the wind, a negative lack of
constraints rather than a positive choice of purposes for reasons rather than
causes. No less a philosopher than Daniel Dennett (1984) gives a definitive
refutation of the argument from indeterminacy.
So another
consequence of embracing the computational metaphor, and lacking an adequate
defense of free will, is to simply bite the bullet of determinism, which is
what both Wolfram and Kurzweil end up doing (Kurzweil 2005, 521f n. 65).
Yet another
consequence of embracing the computational metaphor – and here we come
to the main point of this paper – is this: Rather than claiming that machines can
rise to an equivalence with or supersede human intelligence, what the noble
nerds are ultimately doing is lowering human intelligence to its most
mechanistic aspects.
Listen closely
to Kurzweil:
The
Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological
thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still
human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction,
post-Singularity, between human and machine. (Kurzweil 2005, 9)
Fredkin, per
usual, is even more explicit and extreme:
In
the early 1980s, Fredkin – tired, presumably, of beating
around the bush – taught
a course at MIT on saving the world. The idea was to view the world as a giant
computer and to write a program that, if methodically executed, would lead to
peace and harmony –
the
“global algorithm,” it was called. Along the way, an international police force
would be formed and nations would surrender some of their autonomy to
international tribunals. “It’s a utopian idea,” Fredkin
concedes, but he adds with emphasis that it’s not anything so
simplistic as a formula for instant utopia.
“This is a series of steps . . . that
gets you to utopia.” If more people would take the plan seriously, he says, it
could succeed. “I’ll make this strange sort of arrogant statement that the reason people think my ideas aren’t practical is that . . .
they don’t understand that if they would just sort of act like machines it
would all work.” (Wright 1998, 45-46)
Precisely: If
we’d all just act like machines . . . then surely we’ll lose out in the
competition with machines that are getting ever bigger and faster. Then
computer “intelligence” will surpass human intelligence for sure.
The question,
then, is not about the rate of advances in computing power. The question is the
nature of genuinely human intelligence. And the answer to this question,
according to Dreyfus, Searle, and even more persuasively, Berkeley
anthropologist Terrence Deacon (1997, 2011 forthcoming), is that human
intelligence is not at all like that of a computer, however grand the dreams
and/or the achievements of the AI research program.
In relying on
faster computers as the means to enhance humanity, we run the risk of actually
degrading humanity. This is a large part of the point of Jaron
Lanier’s important book, You are not a Gadget:
People
can make themselves believe in all sorts of fictitious beings, but when those
beings are perceived as inhabiting the software tools through which we live our
lives, we have to change ourselves in unfortunate ways in order to support our
fantasies. We make ourselves dull. (Lanier 2010, 156-57)
What kind of enhancement
is this?
Kurzweil is
intriguingly ambidextrous in the way he both conflates and distinguishes “nonbiological intelligence” and human intelligence. On one
page he writes:
Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human
brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine
intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all
along), at least doubling in power each year. In contrast, biological
intelligence is effectively of fixed capacity. Thus, the nonbiological
portion of our intelligence will ultimately predominate. (Kurzweil 2005, 28)
And then on the
very next page:
Ultimately,
the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the
destiny of the universe . . . We will determine our own fate rather
than have it determined by the current “dumb,” simple, machinelike forces that
rule celestial mechanics. (Kurzweil 2005, 29)
The universe
will become saturated with our intelligence?
A genuinely human intelligence? Or won’t it rather be
saturated with the intelligence of what Kelly (2010) calls “the technium”?
Tucked away in a
footnote on page 505 we find Kurzweil again equivocating: “The Turing test is
intended as a measure of human intelligence;
failure to pass the test does not imply a lack of intelligence” (Kurzweil 2005,
505 n.30). What is this other non-human intelligence? Artificial intelligence. But if we accept a real distinction
here, then the computational capacity of AI isn’t even in competition with genuinely
human intelligence. It’s a race among
machines that can become unbelievably fast and capacious without ever passing
the Turing test.
The risks we run
in trying to become more like our machines are subtle, as Ellen Ullman shows us
in her beautifully written and sensitive book, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its
Discontents (1997). Just as Fredkin’s wife, Joan,
describes her husband as having “cultivated . . . an ‘impersonal intelligence,’
a detachment from day-to-day affairs that protected him from his own emotions”
(Wright 1998, 20), so Ullman paints a portrait of life among the computer nerds
in Silicon
Valley that ought to give us pause:
I’d
like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there
is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. Like the
rock-and-roll culture, it forms an irresistible horizontal country that
obliterates the long, slow, old cultures of place and custom, law and social
life. We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we
are making it in our own image. We call the microprocessor the “brain”; we say
the machine has “memory.” But the computer is not really like us. It is a
projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that
portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we took the
game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence. (Ullman
1997, 89)
But life is not like
chess. It is much messier. We neaten it up with our technologies at our peril.
Ullman, who dallied with Marxism in her youth, likens the dangers of
techno-determinism to the rigors of the dialectic:
During
my days in the party, we used to say that Marxism-Leninism was a “science.” And
the party was its “machine.” And when the world did not conform to our ideas of
it – when we
had to face the chaotic forces that made people believe something or want
something or do something –
we behaved just like programmers. We moved closer to the machine. Confronting
the messiness of human life, we tried to simplify it. Encountering the dark
corners of the mind, where all sorts of things lived in a jumble, we tightened
the rules, controlled our behavior, watched what we
said. We were supposed to want to be “cogs in a wheel.” (Ullman 1997, 30)
Yes, we’ve been
here before: megalomaniacal “programs” for the improvement of humankind. Didn’t work so well for the Soviet Union, or Cuba. Perhaps
we want to be a little cautious before trying to enhance humanity again.
This is not to
say improvement is either impossible or wrong. In reviewing the literature of transhumanism, I find myself leaning away from the
conservatism of Fukuyama (2003), the President’s Council on Bioethics (2003),
and Michael Sandel (2004), and more towards the work
of Arthur Caplan (2004a, 2004b, 2009). Recall, I
started by quoting Nietzsche, the philosopher of the Übermensch. But when it
comes to choosing specific directions and techniques for enhancement, I find
myself more drawn to the human potential movement than to the laboratories of
computer scientists. Particularly in the work of Michael Murphy (Ogilvy 2010)
there is a vision of possibilities for the human condition seen whole that
reflects real wisdom rather than a narrow obsession with logico-analytic
intelligence. True, there are parts of the human potential movement that fix on
particular sidhis like telepathy or levitation that
strike me as misguided. And there is a strong strain of denial of death in the
preoccupation with the survival of bodily death. But on the whole, and for the
sake of the whole, I think that the human potential movement has a lot to offer
the transhumanist movement. Like Nietzsche, both
movements see humanity as a bridge and not an end. We can do better. We can be
better. But we must choose our tools and our techniques and our directions
wisely.
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