My friend Jaron Lanier (computer scientist extraordinaire, he coined the term virtual reality and is also a musician and author) recently received one of the highest literary prizes, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In his acceptance speech, he speaks bravely and eloquently about the existential threats to our civilization. Its grim and uplifting at the same time. We should not be afraid to face the Truth. Heres an excerpt: Another popular formulation would have our brains uploaded into virtual reality so that we could live forever in software form. This despite the fact that we don’t know how brains work. We don’t yet know how ideas are represented in neurons. We allocate billions of dollars on simulating brains even though we don’t really know the basic principles as yet. We are treating hopes and beliefs as if they were established science. We are treating computers as religious objects. We need to consider whether fantasies of machine grace are worth maintaining. In resisting the fantasies of artificial intelligence, we can see a new formulation of an old idea that has taken many forms in the past: Humanism. The new humanism is a belief in people, as before, but specifically in the form of a rejection of artificial intelligence. This doesn’t mean rejecting any particular algorithm or robotic mechanism. Every single purported artificially intelligent algorithm can be equally well-understood as a non-autonomous function that people can use as a tool. The rejection is not based on the irrelevant argument usually put forward about what computers can do or not do, but instead on how people are always needed to perceive the computer in order for it to be real. Yes, an algorithm with cloud big data gathered from millions, millions of people, can perform a task. You can see the shallowness of computers on a practical level, because of the dependency on a hidden crowd of anonymous people, or a deeper epistemological one: Without people, computers are just space heaters making patterns. One need not specify whether a divine element is present in a person or not, nor precisely whether certain “edge cases” like bonobos should be considered human beings. Nor must one make absolute judgments about the ultimate nature of people or computers. One must, however, treat computers as less-than-human. *** To conclude, I must dedicate this talk to my father, who passed away as I was writing it. I was overcome with grief. I am an only child, and now no parent is left. All the suffering my parents endured. My father’s family suffered so many deaths in pogroms. One of his aunts was mute her whole life, having survived as a girl by staying absolutely silent, hiding under a bed behind her older sister, who was killed by sword. My mother’s family, from Vienna, so many lost to the concentration camps. After all that, just little me. And yet I was soon overcome with an even stronger feeling of gratitude. My father lived into his late nineties, and got to know my daughter. They knew and loved each other. They made each other happy. Death and loss are inevitable, whatever my digital supremacist friends with their immortality laboratories think, even as they proclaim their love for creative destruction. However much we are pierced with suffering over it, in the end death and loss are boring because they are inevitable. It is the miracles we build, the friendships, the families, the meaning, that are astonishing, interesting, blazingly amazing. Love creation.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 19:37:04 +0000
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