I recommend this essay's intro, parts 4-6, and the conclusion. The arguments presented by the author against the beliefs in the first 3 parts I pass over because they are rather embarassing, being either wrong, super-obvious, or irrelevant. But the author is knowledgeable within the bounds of his demesne. By his mode of negating the "cybernetic totalist" perpsective, he lays out one possible scenario of our technological future and gives his reasons. Essentially, he relies upon the lack of progress in software and the usual extreme slowness of natural evolution to ward off a singularity-style apocalypse. I do not know that these putative braking mechanisms will suffice. They do seem to be gook in the gears--yet what powerful gears! We have powerful forces facing off and enough unknown variables to leave me fairly agnostic.
Probably, we will be surprised at the speed of some advances, at the slowness of others, and at the interactions and ramifications of all the myriad factors at play. It promises entertainment value for years to come--unless the species takes a black swan to the head--though I wonder whether it would it even constitute a black swan at this point. At some stage in technological progress enough militaries possess enough species-threatening toys (not to speak of other organizations which may acquire similar capabilities) that our demise no longer resides at the outer bounds of the distribution of fate. In any case this essay's a good counter to Kurzweil's proclivity to head in a Panglossian direction at (almost) every chance.
I wrote the above before discovering some distinguished responses to the Lanier essay (this fellow is apparently well-known among the knowing)--and Lanier's response to them. I will reproduce here the most interesting reverberations.
From: George Dyson
Date: September 21 , 2000
Without taking one side of Jaron's dogma or another (place me somewhere else entirely) I would disagree strongly with his "Argument from Software" — which is as flawed as Bishop Wilberforce's Argument from Design.
Back in the days when programs could be debugged but processing could not be counted on from one kilocycle to the next, John von Neumann wrote his final paper in computer theory: "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" [in Claude Shannon and John McCarthy, eds., Automata Studies (1956) pp. 43 — 99]. It makes no difference whether you have reliable code running on lousy hardware, or lousy code running on reliable hardware. Same results.
What should reassure the technophiles, and unsettle the technophobes, is our world of lousy code. Because it is lousy code that is bringing the digital universe to life, rather than leaving us stuck in some programmed, deterministic universe devoid of life. It is that primordial soup of archaic subroutines, ambiguous DLL's, crashing Windows, and living-fossil operating systems that is driving the push towards the sort of fault embracing template-based addressing that proved so successful in molecular biology, with us — and our computers — as one of its strangest results...
Date: September 21, 2000
Dear George, your reply to Lanier is brilliant, profound, and also true. I remember that I wrote, at the end of Origins of Life, that the evolution of complex organisms became possible when the essential sloppiness and error — tolerance of life were transferred from the hardware to the software, from the metabolic apparatus to the genes. And now you are saying that exactly the same thing happened in the evolution of complex computer — systems. Obviously, that's the direction you have to go if you want to combine robustness with creativity. All I can say is, why didn't I think of that?
...So, directly to a basic point — beneath the CT [cybernetic totalist] position is a fundamental and unspoken axiom — the Pythagorean Conjecture that the universe is mathematical, and deeper still, that the universe is fundamentally understandable by humans. Pythagoras took it to a numerological extreme, but the fundamental myth still obtains with many people who work in science — everyone is looking for the Equation/Theory/axiomatic system that will explain Everything Forever. The CT position depends on this assumption. Yet, we have never had, nor do we have now, any conclusive proof that the universe is humanly understandable in the first place, much less representable in some reductivist symbology of mathematics or any other language for that matter. Indeed, with Godel et al, we have a number of theories demonstrating the very limitations of such endeavors in the first place.
The CT position assumes that the world is computable and their thinking machine project logically follows — logical machines for a logical universe.
My thinking is this: The Universe is beyond human comprehension, [Re: Haldane: "The Universe is not only weirder than you think — it's weirder than you can think" and Brockman: "Nobody knows and you can't find out."] and is therefore not computable...
Jaron doesn't have to worry about the cybernetic metaphor, because he says his main concern is that it has become sole metaphor of our time, or at least the sole metaphor of our tribe. If that were really true, I'd worry too. But it isn't.
What the cybernetic metaphor is is an extreme perspective, an inverted perspective that will eventually play out its usefulness. It is similar (and related) to Richard Dawkins' famous view of the selfish gene. Dawkins says that you can understand a lot which is new, and a re-understand a lot of the old orthodoxy, by looking at the world from the view of genes. In fact you can begin to look at everything that way, and for a while wherever you look, the world looks different. This view can unleash new understandings. What is important to remember is that while Dawkins looks at the world that way, this is not the only way he looks at it. In his daily life he adopts a quite ordinary view of the world. I have looked at the world in Dawkins selfish-gene way, and then the next minute I have looked at the world in Jaron's way. Most of the time (but not all!) I see more new things via Dawkins way. I might also look at the world via Freud's way, or Marx's way, but I usually don't see much interesting to me that way.
The new cybernetic metaphor, on the other hand, is very powerful. We can look at almost anything now, from physics, to emotions, to nature, to experience itself, and find new things when we imagine it as computation. We can imagine people as robots and learn all kinds of things....But the important thing is that right now almost anything we examine will yield up new insights by imaging it as computer code....
I think we have not come close to exhausting this metaphor, and as my earlier essay on it (called the Computer Metaphor) suggests, I think it will overturn our current ideas of physics and culture first, before we abandon it. It is dangerous, but not because it is our only tool.
From: Jaron Lanier
Re: Ray Kurzweil
...I see punctuated equilibria in the history of science. Right now we're in the midst of an explosion of new biology. Around the turn of the last century there was an explosion of data and insight about physics. Physics is now searching for its next explosion but hasn't found it yet.
I also see a distinction between quantity and quality that Ray doesn't. I see computers getting bigger and faster, but it doesn't directly follow that computer science is also improving exponentially.
Ray sees everything as speeding up, including the speed of the speedup.
I hope I can avoid being cast as the person who precisely disagrees with Ray, since I think we agree on many things. There are exponential phenomena at work, of course, but I feel they have robust contrarian company...
No comments:
Post a Comment