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The
Deceiving Virtues of Technology
Steve
Talbott
The
following is the text of an invited address steve Talbott gave at the Cognitive
Technology 2001 conference at the University of Warwick in England, held August
6 - 9.
This
morning I would like to take a long view of technology.� A very long
view.� It begins with Odysseus and his beleaguered
companions penned up in
the
cave of Polyphemus, the great, one-eyed, Cyclopean giant, offspring of
Poseidon.� Polyphemus had already twice brained a
couple of the men by
smashing
their heads against the earth, then devouring them whole for a
day's
meal.
Odysseus,
of course, was desperate and, as he later told the story, "I was
left
there, devising evil in the deep of my heart, if in any way I might
take
vengeance on him, and Athena grant me glory".� So he hit upon a plan.
Finding
a huge beam in the cave, he and his companions sharpened it,
hardened
the point in the fire, and hid it beneath one of the dung heaps
littering
the place.� When Polyphemus returned
from pasturing his flocks,
and
after he had dined on a third pair of the companions, Odysseus offered
him
a wondrously potent wine the Greeks had brought with them.� The
Cyclops
drank without reserve, draining three bowls and then falling into
a
drunken stupor.� But before passing out,
he asked Odysseus for his name,
and
the warrior answered, "Nobody is my name, Nobody do they call me".
As
the giant then lay senseless, dribbling wine and bits of human flesh
from
his gullet, Odysseus and his comrades heated the end of the beam in
the
coals of the fire and then, throwing all their weight onto it, thrust
it
into the eye of Polyphemus.� Roaring
mightily, the blinded Cyclops
extracted
the beam from his bloodied eye, groped to remove the huge stone
blocking
the mouth of the cave, and bellowed his outrage to the other
Cyclopes
living nearby.� But when they came and
asked who was causing his
distress,
his answer that "Nobody" was the culprit left them perplexed.
"If
nobody is tormenting you, then you must be ill.� Pray to Poseidon for
deliverance".� And so they left him to his troubles.
At
this, said Odysseus, "my heart laughed within me that my name and
cunning
device had so beguiled" the Cyclops.�
Danger remained, however.
Polyphemus
stationed himself at the cave mouth to make sure no man
escaped.� So again Odysseus devised a plan.� He used willow branches to
tie
his men beneath the bellies of the giant's huge sheep.� Polyphemus,
feeling
only the backs of the sheep as they filed out of the cave to
pasture,
failed to note the deception.
The
escape, it appeared, was made good.� But
the Greek captain's bravado
would
yet endanger the lives of all his comrades.�
As they silently fled
to
their ship and plied their oars to distance themselves from the
frightful
abode of the Cyclops, Odysseus was loathe to remain an anonymous
"Nobody".� In his pride, he could not resist the
temptation to call ashore
to
Polyphemus, taunting him and naming himself the author of the
successful
strategem:� "O Cyclops", he
shouted, "Odysseus, the sacker of
cities,
blinded thine eye".
Infuriated,
Polyphemus broke off a huge piece of a mountain and hurled it
in
the direction of the taunt, nearly demolishing the ship.� Then he
prayed
to his father, Poseidon, asking that Odysseus should endure many
trials
and that all the company, if not Odysseus himself, should perish
before
arriving home.� Poseidon honored the
prayer; Odysseus alone, after
long
wandering and many sufferings, returned to his beloved Ithaca.
Devices
of the Mind
Now,
jumping ahead to our own day, I'd like you to think for a moment of
the
various words we use to designate technological products.� You will
notice
that a number of these words have a curious double aspect:� they,
or
their cognate forms, can refer either to external objects we make, or
to
certain inner activities of the maker.�
A "device", for example, can be
an
objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming
or
contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can
think
of to escape the charges against him.�
The word "contrivance" shows
the
same two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the
carefully
devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought.� As for
"mechanisms"
and "machines", we produce them as visible objects out there
in
the world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves.
Likewise,
an "artifice" is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery,
ingenuity,
or inventiveness.� "Craft" can
refer to manual dexterity in
making
things or to a ship or aircraft, but a "crafty" person is adept at
deceiving
others.
So
we find this interesting link between technological products and inner
cleverness.� Hardly surprising when you think about
it.� But we don't in
fact
think much about it.� If we did, we
might wake up to some of the
distortions
in our current relations to technology.�
To begin with, we
might
wonder why the element of guile or deceit figures so strongly in the
various
meanings I've just reviewed.
This
odd association between technology and deceit occurs not only in our
own
language, but even more so in Homer's Greek, where it is much harder
to
separate the inner and outer meanings, and the deceit often reads like
an
admired virtue.� The Greek techne,
from which our own word
"technology"
derives, meant "craft, skill, cunning, art, or device" -- all
referring
without discrimination to what we would call either an
objective
construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver.� Techne was
what
enabled the lame craftsman god, Hephaestus, to trap his wife,
Aphrodite,
in a promiscuous alliance with warlike Ares.�
He accomplished
the
feat by draping over his bed a wondrously forged snare whose invisible
bonds
were finer than a spider's silken threads.�
The unsuspecting couple
blundered
straightway into the trap.� As the other
gods gathered around
the
now artless couple so artfully imprisoned, a gale of unquenchable
laughter
celebrated the guile of Hephaestus.�
"Lame though he is is", they
declared,
"he has caught Ares by craft (techne)".� Here techne refers
indistinguishably
to the blacksmith's sly trickery and his skillful
materialization
of the trick at his forge.
Likewise,
the Greek mechane, the source of our "machine",
"mechanism",
and
"machination", designates with equal ease a machine or engine of war,
on
the one hand, or a contrivance, trick, or cunning wile, on the other.
The
celebrated ruse of the Trojan Horse was said to be a mechane, and it
was
admired at least as much for the devious and unexpected turn of mind
behind
its invention as for the considerable achievement of its physical
construction.
The
Man of Many Devices
We
come back, then, to Odysseus, the trickster par excellence, introduced
in
the first line of the Odyssey as "crafty-shifty" -- a man of
many
turnings,
or devices.� One of his standard
epithets is polumechanos --
"much-contriving,
full of devices, ever-ready".� It was
he, in fact, who
conceived
the Trojan Horse, one of the earliest and most successfully
deceitful
engines of war.� Listen to how Athena
compliments Odysseus:
�� Only a master thief, a real con artist,
�� Could match your tricks -- even a god
�� Might come up short.� You wily bastard,
�� You cunning, elusive, habitual liar!
�� (transl. Stanley Lombardo)
These
traits, any psychologist will tell you, are closely associated with
the
birth of the self-conscious individual.�
The ability to harbor secrets
--
the discovery and preservation of a private place within oneself where
one
can concoct schemes, deceive others, contrive plans, invent devices --
is
an inescapable part of every child's growing up.� The child is at first
transparent
to those around him, with no distinct boundaries.� If he is to
stand
apart from the world as an individual, he must enter a place of his
own,
a private place from which he can learn to manipulate the world
through
his own devisings.
Granted,
such manipulative powers may be exercised for ill as well as
good,
and the Greeks sometimes appear to us remarkably casual about the
distinction.� But, in any case, the gaining of such
multivalent power is
inseparable
from growing up; to give people greater capacity for good is
also
to give them greater capacity for evil.�
In what follows, it is the
conscious
capacity that I will speak of as having been necessary for our
development,
not its employment in a negative or destructive manner.
What
I want to suggest is that, to begin with, technology was a prime
instrument
for the historical birth of the individual self.� And the
Odyssey
is almost a kind of technical manual for this birth -- for the
coming
home, the coming to himself, of the individual.� When you realize
this,
you begin to appreciate how the "My name is Nobody" story, which
seems
so childish and implausible to us, might have entranced Homer's
audiences
through one telling after another.� You
can imagine them
wondering
at Odysseus' presence of mind, his self-possession, his ability
to
wrest for himself a private, inner vantage point, which he could then
shift
at will in order to conceal his intentions from others -- something
no
one lacking a well-developed ego, or self, can pull off.� And they
doubtless
wondered also at his self-control, as when he refused his
immediate
warrior's impulse to respond in kind to the Cyclops' aggressions
--
an impulse that would have proven disastrous.�
Instead he pulled back,
stood
apart within himself, and devised a trick.�
In re-living Odysseus'
machinations,
the hearers were invited into that place within themselves
where
they, too, might discover the possibilities of invention and craft.
It
requires a separate, individual self to calculate a deceit.
The
classicist, George Dimock, has remarked that Homer makes us feel
Odysseus'
yearning for home as "a yearning for definition".� The episode
with
Polyphemus is symbolic of the entire journey.�
In the dark, womb-like
cave,
Odysseus is as yet Nobody.� Homer
intimates childbirth by speaking
of
Polyphemus "travailing with pains" as his captive is about to escape
the
cave.� Only upon being delivered into
freedom, as we have seen, can
Odysseus
declare who he is, proclaiming his true name (Dimock 1990, pp.
15,
111).� Further, every birth of the new
entails a loss -- a destruction
of
the old -- and the thrusting of the sharpened beam into the great
Cyclopean
eye suggests the power of the focused, penetrating, individual
intellect
in overcoming an older, perhaps more innocent vision of the
world
(Holdrege 2001).
To
grow up is to explore a wider world, and Dimock points out that, first
and
last, Odysseus "got into trouble with Polyphemus because he showed
nautical
enterprise and the spirit of discovery" -- not because of
recklessness
or impiety.� "In Homer's world, not
to sail the sea is
finally
unthinkable".� Perhaps we could
say, at great risk of shallowness:
in
those days, to set sail was to embark upon the information highway.
There
were risks, but they were risks essential to human development.
Homer
certainly does not downplay the risks.�
Having been warned of the
fatally
entrancing song of the Sirens, Odysseus plugged his sailors' ears
with
wax, but not his own.� Instead, he had
the others lash him to the
ship's
mast, sternly instructing them not to loose him no matter how
violent
his begging.� And so he heard those
ravishing voices calling him
to
destruction.� His desire was inflamed,
and he pleaded for release, but
his
men only bound him tighter.
You
may wonder what the Sirens offered so irresistibly.� It was to
celebrate
in song the great sufferings and achievements of Odysseus and
his
followers, and to bestow upon them what we might be tempted to call
the
"gift of global information".�
In the Sirens' own words:
�� Never yet has any man rowed past this isle
in his black ship
�� until he has heard the sweet voice from our
lips.
�� Nay, he has joy of it and goes his way a
wiser man.
�� For we know all the toils that in wide Troy
�� the Argives and Trojans endured through the
will of the gods,
�� and we know all things that come to pass
upon the fruitful earth.
�� (xii.186-91; transl. A. T. Murray)
"We
know all things".� The rotting
bones of those who had heeded this
overpowering
invitation to universal knowledge lay in heaps upon the
shores
of the isle of the Sirens.� Only the
well-calculated balance of
Odysseus'
techne -- only the developing self-awareness with which he
countered
the excessive and deceitful offer -- enabled him to survive the
temptation.� As Dimock observes about Odysseus lashed to
the mast:
�� Could a more powerful example of the
resisted impulse be imagined? ...
�� Odysseus has chosen to feel the temptation
and be thwarted rather than
�� not to feel it at all.
Here
we see the perfect balance between the open-hearted embrace of life
with
all its challenges, and artful resistance to the ambitions of hubris.
The
temptation of knowledge leads only to those rotting bones unless it is
countered
by the kind of self-possession that enables us to resist our own
impulses.� The external gifts of techne come, in
the end, only through
the
strengthening of the techne of our own consciousness.� When you look
today
at the mesmerized gaze of web surfers as they hypnotically respond
to
the sweetly sung promises of online information and glory, you realize
that
our own culture honors the Sirens far more than it does the healthy
respect
for risk, the self-discipline, and the inner cunning of Odysseus,
man
of many devices.
Balance
and Separation
If
my first point, then, was that technology can serve as midwife to the
birth
of the individual, the second is that this midwifery requires a
well-calculated
balance between the challenges we take on and our self-
possession,
our wide-awake, conscious resourcefulness.�
This sensible
calculation
is part of what it means to be grown up, notwithstanding the
widespread,
if impossibly foolish, notion today that whatever can be
attempted
ought to be attempted.
There's
a third point here.� The Cyclopes,
unlike Odysseus, lived in a
kind
of state of nature, and they spurned all advanced technologies.
Never
faring upon the open sea, they refused voyages of discovery.
Odysseus
describes them this way:
�� To the land of the Cyclopes, violent,
innocent of laws,
�� we came; leaving it all to the gods
�� they put hand to no planting or plowing;
�� their food grows unsown and uncultivated,
�� wheat, barley, vines which produce
�� grapes for their wine; Zeus' rain makes it
grow for them.
�� ....
�� For the Cyclopes have no red-cheeked ships,
�� no craftsmen among them, who could build
�� ships with their rowing benches, all that
is needful
�� to reach the towns of the rest of the world
as is common --
�� that men cross the sea in their ships to
meet one another;
�� craftsmen would have built them handsome
buildings as well.
�� (ix.106-30; transl. George Dimock)
If
"nature is good to the Cyclopes", observes Dimock, it is "not
because
they
are virtuous. Rather, the kindness of nature has deprived them of the
stimulus
to develop human institutions".� To
venture out -- to separate
themselves
from the womb of nature -- would have brought risk and pain,
but
it could also have brought self-development.�
Technology, I would add,
is
an instrument, a kind of lever, for this necessary detachment of the
individual
self from a nurturing surround that otherwise can become
stifling,
as when an infant remains too long in the womb.
My
third point, then, is this:� technology
assists the birth of the
individual
in part by separating him from the natural world.� To begin
with,
this separation, this loss of paradise, reconstitutes the world as
an
alien, threatening place, continually encroaching upon the safe
habitations
fortified by human techne.
Reversals
But
here things begin to get interesting, for if you look at technology
and
society today only through the lens of my argument so far, you will be
badly
misled.� After all, nearly three millennia
-- most of recorded
history
-- lies between Homer's day and our own.�
Things have changed.
What
we see, in fact, almost looks like a reversal.
There
is, to begin with, the "inversion" of nature and culture that
philosopher
Albert Borgmann talks about.� Early
technological man carved
out
his civilized enclosures as hard-won, vulnerable enclaves, protected
places
within an enveloping wilderness full of ravening beasts and natural
catastrophes.� We, by contrast, live within a thoroughly
technologized and
domesticated
landscape where it is the remaining enclaves of wildness that
appear
painfully delicate and vulnerable (Borgmann 1984, pp. 190 ff.).
Today,
if we would set bounds to the wild and lawless, it is the ravening
beast
of technology we must restrain.� If
nature still threatens us, the
threat
is that it will finally and disastrously succumb to our
aggressions.
A
second reversal is closely related to this.�
You will recall that the
Odyssey
opens with its shipwrecked hero on the isle of Ogygia, where the
beautiful
goddess, Kalypso, has kept him as her consort for seven years
while
urging him to marry her.� She would have
made him a god and given
him
a good life, free of care.� The name
"Kalypso", of course, means "the
Concealer",
and her offer of an endless paradise would in effect have kept
Odysseus
unborn and nameless, concealed within an immortal cocoon.� But he
chose
instead to pursue the painful path to his own home so as to realize
his
mortal destiny as a man.
The
contrivings and devisings of techne, as we have seen, served
Odysseus
well in his striving toward self-realization and escape from
anonymity.� But now note the reversal:� as Neil Postman has famously
elaborated
in Amusing Ourselves to Death and other works, today it is
technology
that cocoons us and promises us endless entertainment,
distraction,
and freedom from cares.� I'm sure I
don't need to elaborate
this
point for you.� Just watch the
advertisements on television for half
an
hour.
I
remarked earlier that when Odysseus set sail on his perilous journey
over
the high seas, he was, in a sense, embarking upon the information
highway
of his day.� But I added that the
comparison might be a shallow
one.� Why shallow?
Well,
look at the differences.� Odysseus'
journey was a continual risking
of
life and happiness.� It was a journey of
horrific loss as well as gain,
so
that preventing the ultimate loss required every ounce of strength,
every
bit of cunning he could muster, every crafty art he could set
against
the temptation to abandon his mission and therefore also himself.
He
wrestled not only with the foolishness of his companions and the armed
might
of his opponents, but also with the enticements and hostilities of
the
gods and the despair of the shades in Hades.�
Faced with the Sirens'
promise
of boundless knowledge, he could not simply lean back and choose
among
the knowledge-management systems offered by high-techne solution
providers.� Any lapse of will or attention on his part,
any succumbing to
temptation,
would have been fatal.
When,
by contrast, I venture onto the information highway today, I put
almost
nothing of myself on the line.� I know,
we hear much talk about
transformation
-- about the coming Great Singularity, the Omega Point, the
emergence
of a new global consciousness.� But, to
judge from this talk, we
need
only wire things up and the transformation will occur --
automatically.� Complexity theorist Ralph Abraham says that
"when you
increase
the connectivity, new intelligence emerges".� Our hope, he adds,
is
for "a global increase in the collective intelligence of the human
species
.... a quantum leap in consciousness".�
And computer designer
Danny
Hillis tells us that "now evolution takes place in microseconds ....
We're
taking off .... There's something coming after us, and I imagine it
is
something wonderful".
Call
this, if you will, "Evolution for Dummies" or "Plug-and-Play
Evolution"
-- just add connections and -- presto! -- a quantum leap in
consciousness.� What easy excitements we revel in!� But our excitement is
not
for the potentials of our own growth; what we anticipate, rather, is
our
sudden rapture by the god of technology.�
No blood and sweat for us,
no
inner work, no nearly hopeless perils of the hero's quest.� If, through
our
own folly, we face the end of the natural world, no problem:� we will
be
spared the Tribulation because technology, in a singular saltation,
will
translate us into altogether new and better conditions of life.
Victory
of the Contrivance
Personally,
I see a rather different promise in all the machinery of the
digital
age.� The techne we invest in
outward machinery always gains its
character
and meaning from the techne of our inner devisings.� What we
objectify
in the hard stuff of the world must, after all, first be
conceived.� Look at the technologies heralded by people
like Abraham and
Hillis,
and you will notice that the conceiving has a distinctive and
limited
character.� We have invested only
certain automatic, mechanical,
and
computational aspects of our intelligence in the equipment of the
digital
age, and it is these aspects of ourselves that are in turn
reinforced
by the external apparatus.� In other
words, you see here what
engineers
will insist on calling a "positive feedback loop", a loop almost
guaranteeing
one-sidedness in our intelligent functioning.�
This one-
sidedness
is nicely pictured in the lameness of Hephaestus, the craftsman
god.
You
can see, then, why it is not really such a great paradox to say, as I
have
often told audiences, "technology is our hope if we can accept it as
our
enemy, but as our friend, it will destroy us".� Of course technology
threatens
us, and of course it calls for a certain resistance on our
part,
since it expresses our dominant tendencies, our prevailing lameness
or
one-sidedness.� The only way we can
become entire, whole, and healthy
is
to struggle against whatever reinforces our existing imbalance.� Our
primary
task is to discover the potentials within ourselves that are not
merely
mechanical, not merely automatic, not reducible to computation.
And
the machine is a gift to us precisely because the peril in its siding
with
our one-sidedness forces us to strengthen the opposite side -- at
least
it does if we recognize the peril and accept its challenge.
Unfortunately,
there does not seem to be much recognition yet.� In fact,
in
many quarters there is nothing but an exhilarated embrace of one-
sidedness.� Where, for the Greeks, techne always
had two complementary
but
never completely separable aspects -- the increasingly self-aware
inner
originating and the outer result -- our technology has become so
much
gadgetry and wiring and abstract protocols and transistors in one
physical
state or another.� We have forgotten the
crafty inner origin and
essence
of the techne that once served our ancestors so well.
And
so we reconceive the interior space within which Odysseus hatched his
plots
and secured his name, telling ourselves that it is merely filled
with
mindless brain mechanisms, more gadgets, not coincidentally, exactly
like
the external ones we are so adept at making.�
In other words, the
techne that devises is being
co-opted by its own devices.� Odysseus
was
on
his way to being a true contriver; we seem content to be mere
contrivances.
Compare
Homer's man of many devices with Silicon Valley's man of many
gadgets,
and you will immediately recognize a reversal of emphasis within
techne.� Where the individual's consciousness of self
once became more
vivid
through the experience of his own capacity to objectify his inner
contrivings
in the outer world, today the objects as such have engulfed
us,
threatening the originating self with oblivion.
Rousing
Ourselves
All
this suggests to me that if we are to escape the smothering
technological
cocoon, our techne today must, in a sense, be directed
against
itself.� Our trickery must be aimed at
overcoming the constraints
imposed
by our previous tricks.� What we must
outwit is our own glib,
technical
wit.
Or,
putting it a little differently:� we are
engaged in a continual
conversation
between what you might call the frozen techne already
embodied
in the vast array of our external devices, and the conscious,
living
techne we can summon from within ourselves in the current moment.
It
is always disastrous for the future of the self when we abdicate the
living
half of this conversation, as when we yield ourselves uncritically
to
what we consider the purely objective promise of technology.
In
Odysseus' day, techne was a conscious resourcefulness that had
scarcely
begun to project itself into the material apparatus of life.
What
apparatus existed was an enticement for further creative expression
of
the nascent human self.� While the
technology of the Greeks may seem
hopelessly
primitive to us, it is worth remembering that the balanced
awakening
heralded by Homer culminated in a flowering of thought and art
that
many believe has never been surpassed for profundity or beauty
anywhere
on earth.
Today,
that balance seems a thing of the past.�
The powers of our minds
crystallize
almost immediately, and before we are aware of them, into
gadgetry,
without any mediating, self-possessed reflection, so that we
live
within a kind of crystal palace that is sometimes hard to distinguish
from
a prison.� The question is no longer
whether we can use the
enticement
of clever devices as a means to summon the energies of dawning
selfhood;
rather, it is whether we can preserve what live energies we once
had,
in the face of the deadening effect of the now inert cleverness bound
into
the ubiquitous external machinery of our existence.
This
machinery, this inert cleverness, is the greatest threat to our
future.� We require all our highest powers of
contriving to overcome our
contrivances.� In the end, the contriving -- not the
contrivance -- is the
only
thing that counts.� There is a law of
human development traditionally
stated
this way:
�� Whoever has, to him shall be given, and he
shall have an abundance; but
�� whoever does not have, even what he has
shall be taken away from him.
�� (Matt. 13:12)
It
is a hard saying because it makes no sense in regard to our external
possessions,
where it would be pure injustice.� But
when you realize that
it
is a natural law of our inner life, the meaning becomes clear: we
either
grow and develop, reaping inner riches upon inner riches, or else
we
lose whatever we started with.� For the
self is a conscious power of
originating;
there are no external gains for the self, and there is no
remaining
in one place.� We cannot be
static selves; the only life
available
to us consists of self-realizings or self-abdicatings.� The
image
of the semi-comatose, automatically responding figure in front of a
screen
is the image of the self extinguishing itself -- and in some ways I
suppose
it recalls the image of Nobody in the dark cave of the one-eyed
Cyclops.� Odysseus managed to rouse himself.� Our own choice is not yet
clear.
Reckoning
with the Scoundrel
Before
proceeding to a conclusion, I would like to make one matter fully
explicit.� To admire Odysseus for his self-arousal is
not to deny that he
was,
in many ways and by our lights, a scoundrel.�
On their way home after
the
fall of Troy, he and his men sacked the city of Ismarus simply because
it
was there.� Likewise, as Helen Luke
reminds us, they came to the land
of
the Cyclopes seeking plunder, so it is hard to blame Polyphemus for
responding
in the same spirit.� The Cyclopes
themselves were a pastoral
folk
who kept peaceably to themselves, and the crude Polyphemus was able
to
speak quite tenderly to his sheep (Luke 1987, pp. 13-15; but compare
Dimock
1990, pp. 110-15).
Nothing
requires us to repress our own judgments about Odysseus' behavior.
But
it is always problematic when such judgments are not tempered by a
sense
for historical and individual development.�
None of us would like to
be
judged solely by what we have been, as opposed to what we are becoming.
And
all human becoming is marked by certain tragic necessities, partly
reflecting
the progress of the race to date.
This
is clear enough when we look at the developing child.� "Blessed are
the
little children" -- profoundly true, for they have a wonderful
openness
to everything that is noble, beautiful, healing.� But children
have
also been characterized as beastly little devils, casually inflicting
horrible
pain upon each other.� This, too, has
its truth.� The point is
that
neither judgment makes a lot of sense when taken in the way we would
assess
the well-developed character of a fully self-conscious adult. The
child
is only on the way to becoming an adult self, and much of what we
see
in his early years is less the expression of the individual to come
than
it is the raw material -- both noble and diabolical -- from which the
individual
must eventually shape himself.
History
Matters
In
light of all I have said, perhaps you will not be surprised when I make
a
fourth and final point, concerning history.�
Today the computer gives us
the
reigning image of the human mind, and it seems to me highly curious
that
those researchers aiming to formalize this image and make it more
rigorous
almost completely ignore the history of what they are trying to
understand.� One hundred and fifty years after Darwin,
when we have
learned
to explore almost everything from bacteria to galaxies in a
developmental
context, how can we blithely set about explaining the human
mind
-- and even trying to implement it in software -- without having made
the
slightest effort to see what it is in historical terms?� Can we expect
to
be any more successful than those biologists who sought to understand
what
a species was without any sense for biological evolution?� (Barfield,
1981)
Look
at it this way.� When we try to create
an artificial mind, are we
trying
to program an Odysseus or a Danny Hillis?�
It makes a difference!
--
and, if I may say so, it is vastly easier to capture aspects of Hillis'
intelligence
in a computer than it would be to capture much of Odysseus'
intelligence.� We have, after all, spent the last several
hundred years
learning
to think computationally, to formulate and obey rules, to
crystallize
our thoughts into evident structures of logic.�
It was on this
path
that we felt compelled to develop computers in the first place, and
it
is hardly surprising that these computers turn out to be well designed
for
representing the kind of Hillisian thinking embodied in their design.
But
to glory in this fact as if it were the solution of age-old puzzles
about
the mind -- well, as many have recognized in recent years, this is a
bit
premature.
History
can help us to counter our preoccupation with external devices.
When
Odysseus' heart laughed within him at the success of his cunning
device
in beguiling the Cyclops, he was rejoicing first of all in the
developing
awareness of his inner capacities as a centered and conscious
self.� He reveled in his devices because they arose
from an intensifying
experience
of his own powers, not because he saw in them a wholly
independent
promise.
Our
crisis today is a crisis of conviction about the primacy of our
conscious
powers of devising.� What Odysseus was
gaining, we are at risk
of
giving up. �The evidence of our
self-doubt is on every hand:
**
Media gurus such as Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec are telling us flat
�� out that our devices will soon render us
obsolete by taking over all
�� devising for us.
**
The discipline of cognitive science, compulsively outward-oriented as
�� it is toward devices rather than toward the
self-aware potentials of
�� the deviser, has all but declared the
problem of consciousness to be
�� intractable.� It seems easier to some simply to deny consciousness as a
�� significant fact -- or, rather, as the
stage upon which alone
�� significant facts can manifest themselves
-- than to accept that we are
�� more than devices.
**
Futurologists lead us in an orgy of prognostication about what sort of
�� life our gadgets will bring us, instead of
facilitating a societal
�� conversation about what sort of future we
might want to choose.� The
�� human being as devising agent vanishes from
the discussion.
**
The corporations driving our future run more and more like machines
�� merely calculating the bottom line.� Especially in high-tech, the next-
�� generation product is cranked out based
purely on technical and market
�� feasibility.� Employees cannot comfortably ask the one question most
�� urgently dictated by responsible
selfhood:� Toward what end are we
�� making this product?
**
International capital flows are becoming mere data flows, so far as our
�� participation in them is concerned.� The automatisms governing these
�� flows -- which are the flip side of our
abdication of selfhood and
�� responsibility -- leave us little room to
concern ourselves with the
�� concrete effects of our capital upon the
world's communities.
In
sum, what the global picture reveals is a radical displacement of the
devising
self by its own devices -- not because of any necessity, but
because
the devising self has hesitated, become unsure of itself.� And at
this
moment of crisis, the Cyclopes in their might and the Sirens with
their
enticements confront us from every one-eyed screen, every newspaper,
magazine,
and billboard, every mechanism for social transaction,
persuading
us that we are powerless to affect the technological future and
inviting
us to dull the pain of consciousness and responsibility by
partaking
of the delights and wonders that await us.
We
are, in other words, being asked to become Nobodies again.� But the
invitation
toward self-dissolution is at the same time an opportunity to
seize
ourselves at a higher level than ever before.�
Everything depends
upon
our response.� In contemplating our
choices, it would not be a bad
idea
to look back to the Greeks and to Odysseus, man of many devices, for
some
wily insight into our current predicament.
Thank
you.
References
Barfield,
Owen (1981).� "The Nature of
Meaning".� Seven, vol. 2, pp.
32-43.
Borgmann,
Albert (1984).� Technology and the
Character of Contemporary Life:
A Philosophical Inquiry.� Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Dimock,
George E. (1990).� The Unity of the
Odyssey.� Amherst MA:
University
of Massachusetts Press.
Holdrege,
Craig (2001).� Personal communication.
Luke,
Helen M. (1987).� Old Age: Journey into
Simplicity.� New York:
Parabola
Books.
Steve
Talbott is the editor of NetFuture and author of The Future Does
Not
Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst.
www.oreilly.com/~stevet/index.html.
Copyright
2001 by The Nature Institute.
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