Alan Turing and the Myth of A.I.
By “myth,” I don’t mean “fictional narrative” but rather the great story that shapes our understanding of the world independent of its truth-value.
Jaron Lanier is computer scientist and considered a founding father of virtual reality. Here’s him on artificial intelligence:
Tweedie: In your book, you describe AI as a wrapping paper that we apply to the things we build.
Lanier: Yeah, you could say that. AI is a fantasy that you apply to things. The issue with AI is that we're giving these artifacts we build so much respect that we're not taking responsibility for them and designing them as well as possible.
The origin of this idea is with Alan Turing, and understanding Turing's life is important to understanding that idea about AI because he came up with this notion of AI and the Turing test in the final weeks of his life, just before he killed himself while he was undergoing torture for his sexual identity. I don't want to presume to know what was going on in Turing's head, but it seems to me that if there's this person who is being forced by the state to take these hormones that are essentially a form of torture, he's probably already contemplating suicide or knows that he'll commit suicide. And then he publishes this thing about how maybe computers and people are the same and puts it in the form of this Victorian parlor game. You look at it, and it's a psycho-sexual drama, it's a statement, a plea for help, a form of escape or a dream of a world where sexuality doesn't matter so much, where you can just be.
There are many ways to interpret it, but it's clearly not just a straightforward, technical statement. For Turing, my sense is that his theory was a form of anguish. For other people, maybe it's more like religion. If you change the words, you have the Catholic church again. The singularity is the rapture, you're supposed to be a true believer, and if you're not, you're going to miss the boat and so on.
I think our responsibility as engineers is to engineer as well as possible, and to engineer as well as possible, you have to treat the thing you're engineering as a product. You can't respect it in a deified way. It goes in the reverse. We've been talking about the behaviorist approach to people, and manipulating people with addictive loops as we currently do with online systems. In this case, you're treating people as objects. It's the flip-side of treating machines as people, as AI does. They go together. Both of them are mistakes.
With the caveat that Jaron Lanier is much smarter than I am, I think he’s ultimately going to be wrong about the capacity of A.I. to be something radically different. What’s missing in his framing is the ability of sufficiently intelligent A.I. to recursively self-improve until it’s smarter than humans at certain tasks. And given enough time, smarter at most tasks. Once a general-purpose highly intelligent machine is possible, it makes less sense to think of it as a product and more useful to view it as a partner or enemy.
At the same time, he captures quite well an insidious mindset that pervades through certain corners of the tech world — that of essentially welcoming our new robot overlords. A surrender to technology, a giddy accelerationism that envisions A.I. lifting us to the stars (or alternatively, replacing us with something better), and cavalier dismissal of anything all too human within us. At the utopian end of this spectrum we have trans-humanism and The Age of Em.
On the more prosaic end, Mark Zuckerberg:
At Facebook, this is something we’re really committed to. You know, I’m an engineer, and I think a key part of the engineering mindset is this hope and this belief that you can take any system that’s out there and make it much much better than it is today. Anything, whether it’s hardware, or software, a company, a developer ecosystem, you can take anything and make it much, much better. And as I look out today, I see a lot of people who share this engineering mindset. And we all know where we want to improve and where we want virtual reality to eventually get…
The magic of VR software is this feeling of presence. The feeling that you’re really there with another person or in another place. And helping this community build this software and these experiences is the single thing I am most excited about when it comes to virtual reality. Because this is what we do at Facebook. We build software and we build platforms that billions of people use to connect with the people and things that they care about.
When he says he can take anything and make it better, he means your life. Just don’t assume his criteria for “better” will be anything like yours.
Where this leads, I believe, is a kind of learned helplessness in the face of advancing technology. The future is being built, quickly, by people far more capable than us, and it’s their values and vision that will shape the world. The best thing we can do is grab on to the train and hope it doesn’t crash. We forget that the existence and function of any technology can be made subject to public opinion. Put another way — the internet was not inevitable, nor is its current form the best way we could have used it.
There is a way out of this cultural lock-in, and it starts with expanding our imagination regarding what technology can be. This requires a better historical consciousness of what other options are out there and what other options have been tried. The open source movement, for all of its flaws, built the modern software ecosystem on the bedrock of altruism, healthy status competition, and creative expression. There are mechanisms by which outsiders can learn the trade and contribute ideas. So it should be for the rest of technology. As long as a system is at least partially composed of human beings, it’s amenable to change. All it takes is a critical mass of high-status individuals to make it so.
We who build technology must constantly advocate for its purpose as serving the humans that are in front of us rather than the humans we might wish for. To fight for a world where we have ample space to decide our own values and relationship with machines. A world where, if one wishes, one can just be.