We Can Wage War for You Wholesale
The machines in this case exhibit not only vast intelligence but also considerable wisdom that far exceeds the purpose for which they were built and the algorithms that defined them. They have apparently acquired such wisdom by somehow transitioning from syntactics to semantics, gaining an ability to possess content and meaning. The leadys are not just a brain in a vat anymore; they are persons (or even better?)
Will
machines take over the world one day? This question has been in the news
recently with leading thinkers like Professor Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk of
Tesla expressing the worry that uncontrolled evolution of machine intelligence
may one day presage the end of humanity.[i]
This fear of rampant technology ruling the world is however is not of recent
vintage, especially among the literati.
Writers ranging from HG Wells and Aldous
Huxley to more recent ones like Arthur C Clarke and scientist and writer
Baroness Susan Greenfield have produced some well-known and outstanding works
of fiction dealing with this question. These writers usually present a
dystopian scenario where a world ruled by machines involves, at minimum, the
subjugation and serfdom of humanity if not the complete destruction of the
species.
Writers ranging from HG Wells and Aldous
Huxley to more recent ones like Arthur C Clarke and scientist and writer
Baroness Susan Greenfield have produced some well-known and outstanding works
of fiction dealing with this question. These writers usually present a
dystopian scenario where a world ruled by machines involves, at minimum, the
subjugation and serfdom of humanity if not the complete destruction of the
species.
Amidst all
this literary apocalyptic carnage, Philip K Dick’s short story, The
Defenders,[ii]
presents a contrarian (and refreshingly different) exploration of a man-machine
encounter. (A quick review of Dick’s oeuvre would reveal that this optimism
appears to have been rather an exception to the rule. Considering the
historical context in which Dick did most of his work - that is, in the 60s and
70s when the Cold War with the nuclear arms race as it is centrepiece was in
full swing - his overall pessimism is understandable. As Dick wrote
elsewhere[iii],
when “doom is in the wind”, a science fiction “writer is not merely inclined to
act out the Cassandra role; he is absolutely obliged to do - unless of course,
he honestly thinks he will wake up some morning and find that the high-minded
Martians have sneaked off with all our bombs and armaments, for our own good.”
One wonders if he wrote The Defenders when he got a strange urge to pay some
kind of tribute to such “high-minded” Martians.)
In The
Defenders, after eight years of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet
Union (the book was first published in 1953) the Earth has been devastated and
humans are all living in bunkers miles below the surface. The war continues to
rage but this time the participants on both sides are robots (called “leadys”)
who have been delegated the task of fighting on. When a US Army observer
decides to come up briefly to see how the war is progressing, he is surprised to
see plants flourishing again and animals coming back. The leadys confess
hesitantly that they stopped feuding some time ago after realising the futility
of war. The Americans however think that as the Soviets may not be aware of
this it is an opportune moment to attack them for one final victory. The leadys
then do their best to dissuade the humans. The machines in this case exhibit
not only vast intelligence but also considerable wisdom that far exceeds the
purpose for which they were built and the algorithms that defined them. They
have apparently acquired such wisdom by somehow transitioning from syntactics
to semantics, gaining an ability to possess content and meaning. The leadys are
not just a brain in a vat anymore; they are persons (or even better?)
It could be argued that
this is only fiction. But what separates reality from fiction? When we say
IBM’s Watson is “playing” chess, we do not certainly mean that some entity
within that computer - a person with feelings and aspirations or at least a homunculus
- is enthusiastically involved in the outcome of the game. Intentionally or
not, we use humanized idioms to describe what a machine is doing because that
is the only language we know. Secondly, fiction can at times be closer to
reality than we realise. Another short story by Dick, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
(published 1987) deals with the commoditisation of memory sometime in the not
faraway future. In that story, a company called REKAL (pronounced
“recall”) claims it can - for a fee, of course - to impart memories (of, say, a
trip to Mars) in a person’s head. (Imagine the potential savings in cost, time,
etc. if you can “recall” visiting all the natural wonders of the world without
leaving your deckchair!) This story may have been not seem so far-fetched when
we recall (Rekal?) that as early as the 70s Benjamin Libet had already
pioneered the artificial triggering of sensations by the activation of specific
regions of the brain. Dick’s story takes this only one step further by
anticipating the permanent embedding of memories in human brains. Moreover,
some scientists have even speculated that our understanding so far of the mind
does not necessarily limit consciousness only to “life based on carbon atoms
rather than on silicon atoms or whatever else.” What is crucial, in the
language of computers, is the software not the hardware. Nicholas Humphrey, the
English psychologist, postulates that such an organism “too would then be
capable of feeling sensations and living in the conscious present.” [iv]
Anyway, even if this is
only crystal-gazing for the moment, there are still other benefits to fiction
which can function as a reflection of reality. With particular regard to
science fiction, the writer Robert Heinlein defined the genre as “realistic
speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge
of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the
nature and significance of the scientific method." We could say that
science fiction without science would be rather pointless - nor would it be
popular. Moreover, fiction - sci-fi or otherwise - allows us to go beyond the constraints
of a purely scientific approach in our quest to understand reality. It is also
debatable if a
reductionist or empirical view of the world is the one and only true
representation of reality. As Ian Barbour points out, “One has to use
models, but one has to recognize their limitations; one has to realize they are
partial and limited, that each one selects certain aspects of the world and
emphasizes those, that none of them corresponds exactly in any simple way to
reality.”[v]
In summary, if we can accept
that a computer can "play " chess with the "intention " of
winning then it is not after all much of an epistemic leap to assert that an
android can hold fast to a system of ethics and tailor its conduct to align with such a belief system. This begs the question: how does an
intelligent entity acquire such behavior traits as a predilection
for peace or (as is generally feared) a penchant for war and dominance? Are
feelings like aggression and anger a necessary offshoot of our acquiring more
intelligence and understanding better the world around us?
Alistair MacFarlane (former
Vice-President of the Royal Society) feels that it is not easy to answer these
questions by simplistically associating such emotions to physical processes.
This is thanks to the immaterial nature of belief and knowledge. And merely
correlation to physical events is not explanation. “Description, however, is a
much more modest goal than explanation. A top-down description of how our experience
is grounded in our physical, mental and social interactions is therefore a
philosophical construction or way of looking at the world, not a scientific
theory.”[vi]
It may be inappropriate here to refer to
a preference for peace rather than war as an “emotion”, something traditionally
associated only with sentient beings. We could perhaps call them reactions or
expressions in the context of a machine. However, assuming that such
expressions are not endemic to the initial programming (which may be the case
given current technology), they could be loosely termed as immaterial outcomes.
If we then apply Professor MacFarlane’s dictum to them, we are met with the
difficulty of explaining them outside the dialectics of philosophy. In other
words, it may be futile to explain how the leadys acquired beliefs and a liking
for peace rather than war by looking at the nuts and wires that they are made
up of or even how they were programmed.)
Until either scientists or
philosophers (or both) have the final say on how the mind and consciousness
evolve, perhaps literature could help us in our quest to understand reality
better. By speculating as to whether machines can aspire to behave like
Mahatma Gandhi, we are at least able to hold a mirror to ourselves and get a better
understanding of how our brains function and what makes up our mind.
[iii] The Shifting
Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings by
Philip K. Dick, ed: Lawrence Sutin, Vintage Books, 1995, p. 45.
[iv] In
A History of the Mind: Evolution and the
Birth of Consciousness, Kindle Edition (Kindle Locations 3255-3260).
[v] “Theology
and physics forty years later,“ Ian Barbour, Zygon, vol. 40, no.2 (June 2005), p. 508.
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