NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Issue #136                                              September 26, 2002
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 A Publication of The Nature Institute
           Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

Can we take responsibility for technology, or must we sleepwalk
in submission to its inevitabilities?  NetFuture is a voice for
responsibility.  It depends on the generosity of those who support
its goals.  To make a contribution, click here.


CONTENTS
---------

Editor's Note

Quotes and Provocations
   The Evolution of Progress

What Are the Right Questions? (Kevin Kelly and Stephen L. Talbott)
    ... regarding machines and organisms

DEPARTMENTS

About this newsletter


==========================================================================

                              EDITOR'S NOTE

Due to a domain-name disconnect between O'Reilly & Associates (which hosts
the NetFuture website) and Speednames.com (the domain name registry),
www.netfuture.org was inaccessible for a week or two, until a few days
ago.  I was on vacation at the time the problem set in.  You should have
no difficulty reaching the site now.


                          ---------------------

With the relatively brief exchange in this issue, Kevin Kelly and I resume
our ongoing dialogue.  Given our previous difficulty in achieving direct
engagement, this current installment represents, I think, a kind of
pulling back on both our parts to reassess how we might proceed more
effectively.  This introspective pause appears to have been helpful, and I
am now much more optimistic about the prospects for a mutual illumination
of our two views.

                          ---------------------

A fair while back I mentioned a piece I'd written called "The Lure of
Complexity", an essay about complexity studies in science.  Part 2 of that
essay is now available on our website:

   http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic7/complexity.htm

SLT

Goto table of contents


==========================================================================

                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


The Evolution of Progress
-------------------------

A few notes from my re-reading of Historical Consciousness, a 1968
work by historian John Lukacs:

** "Those who keep talking about our Revolutionary Age of Dizzying Change
and of Unprecedented Progress [Lukacs writes] literally don't know what
they are talking about".  In particular, he argues that, for large numbers
of people in the West (and especially the U.S.), living conditions -- life
expectancy and infant mortality; the occurrence of physical pain; the
quality of personal medical care; the literacy rate; the comfort and
conveniences supplied by house-wide heating, indoor plumbing, electricity,
hot water, fans, elevators -- all these "changed more radically during the
fifty years before 1914 than at any time in recorded history before or
after".

** He goes on to note that the same thing holds true for communications:

   Napoleon could progress from the Seine to the Tiber no faster, and no
   differently, than could Julius Caesar two thousand years before:  yet a
   century later one could travel from Paris to Rome in less than twenty-
   four hours in a comfortable sleeping-car.  The locomotive, the
   steamship, the motorcar, the submarine, the airplane; the radio, the
   telegraph, the telephone -- they were all invented and put into
   practice before 1914, the only post-1914 invention of this kind having
   been television.  Of course, there is a difference between the
   supersonic jet plane and the Wright Brothers' contraption, but it is a
   difference in degree not in kind.  Sixty-five years ago one could
   travel from New York to Philadelphia in one hour and forty minutes, on
   comfortable and well-appointed trains available at every hour of the
   day.  Not only have comfortable and well-appointed trains, at least in
   the United States, nearly ceased to exist; but also, jet planes and
   superhighways and all the recent governmental double-talk about high-
   speed rail lines notwithstanding, I strongly doubt that we shall in our
   lifetime travel from city to city in such speed and comfort as could
   our ancestors more than fifty years ago.  (pp. 306-7)

This doubtless needs a qualification or two these thirty-four years after
Lukacs published those words -- for example, concerning the ease of travel
between cities on opposite sides of the globe.  There is also the question
of digital technologies, although one could well argue that, for many
people (teachers, for example), computers have brought more complication,
frustration, and distraction than positive change.

** In any case, my own suspicion is that the longstanding conviction that
we live in an Era of Dizzying Change and Unprecedented Progress is itself
a good place to look for really significant change.  If I read the trends
at all correctly, our idea of progress has been shifting.  Where, a
century ago, progress just seemed to be the way society and science and
evolution worked -- a kind of law built into the nature of things -- now
progress is increasingly felt to depend on fateful choice.  We find
ourselves situated on a knife edge, with a hopeful future on one side and
catastrophe on the other.  Not that we always have a clear idea which is
which!  But, one way or another, we sense that we are choosing our own
fate.  This is the result of the continuing emergence, or coming of age,
of the modern individual.  We are, in fact, more responsible for
the future than our predecessors were, if only because we have grown more
aware of the implications of our activity.

** Ironically, science and high tech are perhaps the most backward
fields in this respect.  In complexity studies, for example, you see
a mechanical notion of automatic progress still fully enshrined -- and
almost worshipped.  And it is among computer and genetic engineers that
you are most likely to encounter the sentiment, "Progress is coming and
there's nothing you can do about it; resistance is futile".  On the other
hand, in the massively flourishing civil sector -- with its interests
ranging from environmentalism to disaster relief to reform of corporate
governance to feminism -- you find everywhere a humanly gripping sense
of divergent possible outcomes, and of responsibility to choose among
them.

It may be that we are so powerfully riveted by the idea of Dizzying Change
in part because unanswered questions of destiny -- questions only the
responsible individual can answer -- trouble our psyches.  An easy way to
disburden ourselves of the resulting unease, of course, is to project our
own responsibilities onto the external "mechanisms" of the market or
history or evolution, which will carry us forward in the right (or at
least the inevitable) way without any need for our conscious guidance.
But, clearly, this will not do for growing numbers of people.

** As always, however, one needs to look for contrary tendencies in
dialogue with each other.  We see not only the individual being called to
stand firmly within himself and to plumb his own moral resources, but also
the individual disappearing into the machinery of the age.  In this
regard, Lukacs notes "a monstrous kind of intellectual stagnation" whereby
"certain institutionalized ideas, no matter how absurd, live on":

   There are enormous institutions, in enormous buildings, employing
   enormous numbers of people, incarnating and representing basic ideas in
   which hardly any of them -- employees or beneficiaries -- really
   believe.  (Examples of such institutions:  compulsory education courses
   in the United States, compulsory Marxism-Leninism courses in the Soviet
   Union.)  (pp. xxxiii - xxxiv)

To Lukacs' examples of this "bureaucratization of intellectual life", I
would add many of the large commercial corporations of our time, where
huge numbers of employees spend their days serving ends they have no deep
convictions about.

** In a later "Conclusion" to his book (written in 1985), Lukacs quotes
William Barrett on the misunderstanding of "future shock":

   People are not shocked by technical novelty; they gobble it up like so
   much cotton candy.  And they are scarcely conscious of the way in which
   they are transformed in the process.  The shock .... comes from
   encountering the residue of the old and immemorial that is still with
   us -- the core of life that has not changed and that technology cannot
   master, the old emotions and the old quandaries.  (pp. 329-30)

We had imagined we were getting a new world, with all its exhilarations;
what could be more unsettling than to discover this world populated by our
same old selves?

** In our democracy, Lukacs avers, ideas may move remarkably slowly:

   Texts and pictures may be flashed across the world in seconds, tens of
   thousands of people are transported across continents in hours:  but
   the movement of ideas, together with some of the most essential forms
   of human communications, are slowing down, breaking down .... the dead-
   weight impact of an accepted idea may roll on and on, influencing men
   and events long after its original rational springs stopped flowing.
   (p. 142)

Nothing reminds me of this dead-weight impact more than our failure,
during these latter days, to renew and revivify our notions of patriotism
suitable to our current situation, as opposed to merely trotting out
symbols and rhetoric from the past.

** I found myself often wanting to quarrel with Lukacs on this or that
point.  One example.  In discussing the slow movement of ideas, he remarks
how, despite this slowness, Americans acquire and exchange things
with great rapidity:  "their possessions and their sense of possession are
extraordinarily impermanent".  In this fact he sees evidence that,
whatever else we may be, we are not a "materialistic people".

I will not venture a generalization one way or the other about our
being a materialistic people, but I do think Lukacs' remark reflects a
misunderstanding of materialism.  To value possessions and the permanence
of things is not to be materialistic.  Rather, it is to recognize
something more than mere materiality in the things.  It is to receive
the material object as a bearer of meaning and value, which suggests
that the object is not really material in its essence.  The true sign
of materialism, I would argue, is the disregard of material things;
they become mere interchangeable gadgets precisely because, on the
materialistic view, they can hold no value, no inner significance.

SLT

Goto table of contents


==========================================================================

                      WHAT ARE THE RIGHT QUESTIONS?

                    Kevin Kelly and Stephen L. Talbott
                     (kk@kk.org; stevet@netfuture.org)

This exchange is part of an ongoing dialogue about machines and organisms.
For the previous installment see NetFuture #133.


                          ---------------------

KEVIN KELLY:  Sometimes when two people disagree, they try their best to
explain and in the end they still disagree.  How can two who speak the
same language, grew up in the same culture, if not neighborhood, or maybe
even raised in the same family, read the same books, hear the same news,
talk to the same people -- how could they disagree on such fundamental
concepts?  How can one culture produce a Jimmy Carter and the guys
who believe the 9/11 disasters were engineered by a conspiracy?  How could
one culture yield both Steve Talbott and Kevin Kelly?  And we aren't even
the extremes.  It beats me, but that is the glory of the world.

I don't think we can expect much agreement, Steve.  But that is not what I
was looking for.  This began many cycles ago because I felt that your
incredibly forthright essays were inadvertently dissing the very people
you hoped to reach.  You have thought a lot about these issues, and have
much wisdom, but will your language and stance allow it reach those active
in constructing what you rail against?  I have been engaged in this dialog
constantly on the lookout for some argument, some counsel that I could
bring back to technologists -- a bit of insight that would speak to those
making the world I describe, and perhaps change their minds. But I
feel empty handed.

So let me try this directly.

There are thousands, if not hundred of thousands, of creative humans
around the world currently building, directly and indirectly, the
convergence of life and machine.  You claim to not want to talk about what
will be, but about what is; nonetheless, in the near future there will
be beings which you, or your counterpart, will not be able to
distinguish between an organism or machine.  These entities will be both
in the lab and in our lives; some will be operating in the background out
of people's awareness, and others will be in our faces.  Some will start
as genetic organic beings and will end up like machines, and others will
begin life constructed and end up organic.  Their existence isn't a matter
of conjecture, or philosophy, or definitions.

My question to you:  What is your advice to those now working on these
projects?  If you had the chance to send them a short email that you know
that they would have to read, what would you tell them?  I suspect
references to Kant and Coleridge aren't going to cut it for this.  It
needs to be utilitarian.  What would you like them to do (or not
do)?  To keep in mind, or not keep in mind?

Would you tell them to stop now, stop working on these projects of
convergence, they are morally wrong.  Why are they wrong?

Or would you say, keep working, but as you work, make these new things
this way, a better way.  What way?

Or would you select some types of machine/organism cyborgs and say these
are wholesome and those are worrisome; work on these.  Which ones, and how
do you choose them?

In fact we don't have to wait a hundred years, because if you don't shift
definitions, right now, here and now, we already have artificial
intelligence, synthetic consciousness, directed evolution, man-made life,
genetic engineering, hybrid vigor, mechanical organisms, and the
convergence of the made and born.  In small doses it is here now.  We are
making the next version tomorrow.  Whether we come to agreement in
NetFuture or not, the work will go on.  It accelerates every year.

Is there anything you want to tell us while we make this new world?

If you can keep it to a few paragraphs, something they can paste up on
their cubicle, I can pass it on to the troops.


                          ---------------------

STEVE TALBOTT:  You are frustrated and would like a few paragraphs from me
to help clear the air, if not settle matters.  You want those paragraphs
to be utilitarian, instructing your engineer friends in what I think they
should do or not do.  And you would like me to address the fact that "we
already have artificial intelligence [and] mechanical organisms".

I will try, as far as possible, to give you what you ask for, all the more
because I think you have real cause for frustration.  What I offer,
however, may not come in quite the form you are looking for, and this
itself may help to clarify the differences between us.

But first, there's one place where, unfortunately, I cannot meet you at
all.  You keep telling me that we already have mechanical organisms and
that I should get used to it.  But isn't this exactly what we've been
debating?  You can't simply assert your hybrids into existence!  We both
have to look at the things we are talking about and offer criteria by
which to lump them together or distinguish them.  The question is then how
well our criteria fit the reality.

In case there remains any doubt:  I do not think our mechanisms are
on their way to becoming organisms.  The sense in which we embed
intelligence or ideas in mechanisms -- amazingly sophisticated though it
is -- is not the sense in which intelligence works in organisms.

Beyond this, I have to admit that supplying the "few paragraphs" you
desire seems a daunting challenge.  I'm hoping you will be able to see
why.

Suppose I asked you for a few paragraphs capturing the difference between
Spanish and English culture.  Or between the Van Gogh and Cezanne styles.
Or between the contemporary and medieval European mind.  Each of these
tasks would involve you in a deeply qualitative enterprise.  There is no
simple list of facts or well-understood ideas that would reliably do the
job for your readers.

Yet your paragraphs about Spanish and English culture might succeed
brilliantly.  If so, they would necessarily have a poetic element --
something that enabled the Englishman to make the various metaphoric leaps
enabling him to "get inside the skin" of the Spaniard.  But, of course,
your paragraphs would by no means nail the differences in any exhaustive
sense, and while some reader's might "get it", others would not.  And for
your readers to receive any of your meaning at all, they would have to do
a great deal of inner work.  In the end, a profound appreciation of the
cultural differences you were pointing at might require a lifetime's
effort.  Most readers might not bother, preferring the certainties of
their own comfortable thought-world.

It appears to me, Kevin, that the distance between your and my views is at
least as great as the distance from London to Madrid.  It is, in fact,
more like the chasm separating the dawn of the scientific revolution from
our own day.  A tremendous effort is required of anyone who would leap
across these past four centuries so as to understand the broad disjunction
between the older mindset and our own.  Moreover, a crucial aspect of the
qualitative difference between these two eras has to do with the
progressive loss of sensitivity to qualities themselves, especially within
the primary cognitive enterprises of society.  This has been the result of
an explicit choice to ignore qualities within science, and is why the
artist and craftsman, who must attend to qualities, have so little
to do with science today.  (It was otherwise in Galileo's day, not to
mention Da Vinci's.)

So what I am asking you to consider is the possibility that these past
several centuries have brought us, not only many gains, but also the loss,
at least in relative terms, of certain cognitive capacities.  These have
to do with a discriminating sensitivity to the qualitative aspects of the
world.  And I am further asking you to consider the possibility that
everything I've tried to say about wholeness and organisms can only begin
to make sense through the recovery of what's been lost.  The only
wholeness we can talk about is qualitative wholeness.

That is, if wholeness is to be found, it is through attention to the very
qualities that science has assiduously ignored for several centuries.  So
you can hardly expect this wholeness to be a self-evident matter in our
day!

Many of those who are concerned to extend their cognitive reach find it
obvious that they should have to pursue various exercises for training
their perception and thinking.  This is certainly true for those
interested in the development of a qualitative, or Goethean, science (with
which my own organization, The Nature Institute, is concerned).  It
requires no less work to strengthen atrophied mental capacities than it
does for atrophied physical ones.

One thing I can recommend in general is the value of immersing oneself in
a different culture or a different historical era, then trying to
articulate as clearly as possible what is distinctive about the foreign
consciousness.  This involves one in a difficult, qualitative adventure,
and the effort cannot help but counter the mechanistic one-sidedness of
our contemporary culture.

So if I were to offer one piece of advice to your engineer friends, it
would be this:  read (and, for a few years, live with) Owen Barfield's
History in English Words.  (See below for ordering information.)
The suggestion may seem quirky, but it is quirky only in the way that all
such advice must be quirky:  it cannot fit everyone.

I realize that this is a long way from answering your specific questions
about whether engineers should work on this project or that one, and so
on.  But you have to understand how wrongheaded it would be for me to
focus my argument upon that level of advice, in view of what I am saying
overall.  I am pointing to a different way of seeing the world, a
different set of meanings.  Without these altered meanings,
whatever new things we do will turn out to have much the same old
significance.  But with these altered meanings, even the same old
activities will gain entirely new dimensions; they will no longer be the
same old activities.  (That principle of wholeness again!)  In the matters
of deepest import, what we do counts much less than what sort of people we
become.

Finally, you warn me that "references to Kant and Coleridge aren't going
to cut it" with your crowd.  Of course, I haven't asked anyone actually to
read Kant or Coleridge (and have probably read far less of them myself
than you imagine).  But the evident message in your warning leads me to
wonder:  do we really need to be so timid in challenging your friends?
After all, they bring a stunning intellectual subtlety and sophistication
to the complex technologies they work with daily (thereby, I might add,
complicating the lives of numerous other people, who have been forced to
cope with the unfamiliar terms of an engineer's world).  Why should these
engineers demand an absence of subtlety when they finally turn to the
traditions of humane learning many of them have ignored for so long?  Such
a demand would seem to reflect an assumption that nothing very profound is
on offer outside the sphere of engineering.

But perhaps you're just being too cautious.  I suspect that many engineers
will welcome the insights to be had from unexpected quarters, and will
accept the need to work for those insights.

As I mentioned, Kevin, I do think you have ground for frustration.  I owe
you a much fuller and more adequate characterization of the neglected,
qualitative pole of our mental functioning than I have yet provided.  Such
a characterization is central to everything I've been saying, and to the
differences between us.

I felt a bit sheepish, even guilty, when you said you'd come away from our
conversation empty handed.  After all, if the meaning-gap between our
positions is as great as I'm suggesting, then I am all the more obligated
to provide you with the leverage for a metaphoric leap across that gap,
something I clearly haven't done.  And, at the same time, I need
continually to assess whether I myself have adequately leapt the gap in
the opposite direction.  I guess we've both got plenty of work to do to
make this conversation blossom.

(Note:  Readers can order Barfield's History in English Words for
$10.95 plus shipping by calling 800-856-8664 or going to
http://www.anthropress.org/BooksPages/History%20in%20English%20Words.htm.)


                          ---------------------

KK:  I am in awe of your gentle and graceful admonishment.  You have put
your perspective and hesitations very clearly here, and as usual you have
done it with honesty and sympathy.  I feel you have done all you can to
meet me at least halfway, if not further.

I take your point and accept it:  there is an outlook on the world that
people in the past had which is very difficult to us now to either
understand fully, and sometimes to appreciate.  It takes work, effort,
discipline and practice to connect with such outlooks.  Those kinds of
alternative world-views are so attractive to me that instead of going to
college I spent my time in Asia, trying to look at the world through its
eyes.  (I eventually married a native Asian, and our kids are bilingual in
Chinese.)

But it's been the world of the past that has offered me the most in other
views.  Most of my reading these days is history.  I particularly love
material that helps me get into the mindset of people living with less
technology.  One of my favorite books is The Long Ships by Frans
Gunnar Bengtsson.  This work of historical fiction is little known in the
US (in fact it is out of print here, but you can get copies in the UK),
but this is the book that almost any Swede will hand to you and say, if
you have to read one book that will help you understand the Norse mind,
this is it.  No other text has immersed me so deeply into what the
medieval mind (not just the Vikings) were thinking.  For the first time I
got what superstitions were about, what religions were to ordinary
unschooled folks then, why dignity was more important than life, and so
on.  By the end of this saga, I felt I could almost think medievally.

A likewise little known masterpiece from Russia is the only other work to
have transported me to the medieval mind so thoroughly.  It's a
breathtaking film about a historical wandering medieval icon painter
called Andrei Rublev (the film is called "Andrei Rublev") and everything
about the film is as unHollywood as it could possibly be.  No chase
scenes, no love scenes, no third act, etc.  Imagine if you could somehow
give a bunch of medieval monks and craftsmen back then a 35mm Black &
White movie camera and asked them to make a film.  They'd have a weirdly
different point of view and unconventional (to us) manners and filmic
language.  That's what this film -- which was banned by the Soviets for
decades -- is all about.  Seeing the world from a bygone view.  Strangely,
disturbingly beautiful, too.

I will seek out Mr. Barfield's opus per your recommendation.  Quite to my
surprise, nerds and geeks are often far better read than I, and the
engineers I know have no trouble appreciating the ideas of Kant and
Barfield.  But the reason those philosophers aren't going to cut it in
this assignment -- to give some advice to machine makers -- is that (IMHO)
their ideas are not up to speed and they are not going to help the
engineers make decisions today.  For better or worse the philosophers
whose works are influencing the engineers are science fiction
authors.  Why?  For the very reason you have brought up -- there is a
different perspective now, a different cultural matrix, a whole different
conceptual language, and those guys don't speak it, but the science
fiction authors do.  You can either force this generation to speak the old
philosophy, or else breed some new philosophers who speak the new.  I was
trying to urge you -- who know the old perspective -- to speak to the new.
But it is okay if you don't want to.

You said:  "In case there remains any doubt:  I do not think our
mechanisms are on their way to becoming organisms."

I love it when you are so clear!  Let's take this crystalline statement
as a forking path.  If I am wrong, and indeed mechanisms are not only
not becoming organisms, and never will, then what should we -- the people
making the future -- be doing differently?  Well, I guess you might say
we should pay more attention to your ideas of qualities, and the science
of qualities.  And how might that help us?  (This is your cue .... )

On the other hand, what if I am right?  What if machines are on
their way to becoming organisms.  What if I could present evidence that
convinced you of that.  If you accepted that idea, what would your
response be?  If you woke up one morning convinced that by gosh, oh my,
egad -- machines, those cold  critters, really are merging into living
organisms!!!!!  What would you do differently?

Finally, I would ask you, what would you need as fully convincing evidence
that machines and organisms are truly becoming one?  What would the needed
proof for you look like?

Go to the next installment of this dialogue"

Goto table of contents


==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2002 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
newsletter for noncommercial purposes.  You may also redistribute
individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this
paragraph are attached.

NetFuture is supported by freely given reader contributions, and could not
survive without them.  For details and special offers, see
http://netfuture.org/support.html .

Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:

    http://netfuture.org/

To subscribe or unsubscribe to NetFuture:
    http://netfuture.org/subscribe.html.

Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #136 :: September 26, 2002

Goto table of contents