American Prospect
3/12/01
Contra Totalism
By Harvey Blume
We associate manifestos with big ideas, combative theses
itching to change the world. While the roar of the manifesto has pretty much
faded from the culture at large, it can still be heard loud and clear in the
digital world. Digital culture continues to foster grand ambitions; it nurtures
not only the ongoing quest for the killer app but also the search for the one
idea that will make sense of most everything.
Jaron Lanier's recent "One-half a Manifesto" has
this heaven-storming quality. The 9,000 word document (available at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html)
flexes the usual manifesto muscles, but with one difference: It is dedicated not
to proclaiming a new theory but to deflating one that is already fully formed
and primed, in Lanier's view, to wreak havoc on the world. Lanier names that
theory cybernetic totalism. It is cybernetic because the computer is at its
core; and in a sense, the computer, more than any written document, is its
manifesto. It is totalistic because it aspires to an intellectual synthesis
loath to let much of anything escape its explanatory grasp.
Whatever you think of the contents of "One-half a Manifesto," Lanier has to be credited with nerve for issuing it. The thinkers he sets out to oppose are some of the most formidable writers and theorists of our time, including the geneticist Richard Dawkins, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker.
Of course, Lanier, too, is a name to reckon with. The
blue-eyed, dreadlocked, multitalented visionary made his reputation as a
prodigy in the mid-1980s: Still in his twenties, he coined the term
"virtual reality" and launched VPL, the first business to try to
implement the concept. Since then, he has consulted for major institutions such
as Citibank, Kodak, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Today, Lanier is lead
scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative (NTII), an organization
that aims to build virtual reality into the fabric of the Internet. When the
Internet goes broadband, as is anticipated, Lanier says that NTII will let
"users in different places interact in real time in a shared simulated
environment, making them feel as if they were in the same room."
Under no circumstances, then, could Lanier be mistaken for a
Luddite or a defector from the digital revolution he has helped to foment. To
clear away any possible confusion on this point, he pauses early in the
manifesto to declare himself "more delighted than ever to be working in
computer science," and to praise the "lovely global flowering of
computer culture already in place." He adds that a full manifesto, rather
than the half he has composed, would be sure to "describe and promote this
positive culture." Having affirmed his loyalty to the cause, he then feels
free to go after the villain of the piece: the technological elite, or the
"inner circle of Digerati," whose dogma of cybernetic totalism "has
the potential to transform human experience more powerfully than any prior
ideology, religion, or political system ever has."
What Lanier goes on to say about cybernetic totalism may
sound, at first, much like other recent alarms against digital overreaching.
The best-known of these is no doubt Bill Joy's article, "Why the Future
Doesn't Need Us," in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine. Joy is the
co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the author of the Java programming language.
That such a legendary hacker could suddenly be afflicted by severe doubts
concerning the whole digital enterprise gives his words extra weight. Joy
worries that the worst thing about some of our most outlandish digital dreams
is that, unfortunately for us, they can be realized. He fears, for example,
that if we do not put limits on the development of nanotechnology we will be
overrun by lethal, self-replicating mechanical viruses. Not long after Joy's
piece was published, the stock market began to deliver its own practical rebuke
to dreams of dot-communist utopia.
Lanier joins in this post-millennial mood of second thoughts
about computers and the Internet. But uniquely, above and beyond practical
concerns, he insists on a philosophical point: What he objects to most about
cybernetic totalism is the very fact that it is a totalism. He reserves some of
his strongest language to drive this point home-writing, for example, that
cybernetic totalism may well "catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or
Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially
built into the software that runs our society and our lives."
Although it's what's most distinctive about his manifesto,
Lanier's determined anti-totalism has made little or no impression on
respondents and reviewers, who prefer to take him up piecemeal and haggle with
him over practical matters. It is as if postmodernism, with its suspicion of
all-consuming syntheses, has passed digital culture by. The result is that
totalism can propagate freely within the digital culture, which has barely any
immune response to it. According to Lanier, the totalism to be most wary of
these days is built on Darwinism. Of the triumvirate of thinkers who rode
astride so much twentieth-century thought-Darwin, Marx, and Freud-only Darwin
survives into the new millennium with his reputation not just intact but
enhanced. While other grand narratives were being picked apart, Darwinism
mutated into a totalism that makes Marxism look like minimalism.
Darwinism gives the new totalists what they take to be a bridge
between nature and technology, a way of translating between genetics and
cybernetics. Crucially, Darwinism offers the new totalists what any theory must
have to undo the constraints of reason: the sense of mounting historical
tension, the charged expectation of a watershed event--in short, an
eschatology. Cybernetic eschatology focuses on the coming of an electronic
species, an artificial intelligence that is nearly ready to peck its way out of
the human brain. Lanier defines the new totalist creed by its "astonishing
belief in an eschatological cataclysm in our lifetimes, brought about when
computers become the ultra-intelligent masters of physical matter and
life."
The work of Richard Dawkins plays a key role in cybernetic
totalism, whether or not Dawkins himself subscribes to the full package. In
books like The Selfish Gene, Dawkins shows that organic beings are no less
coded entities than computer programs. So what if one kind of code takes
evolution a billion years to assemble and the other can be thrown together by a
generation or two of programmers? Isn't it possible--or so the thinking
goes--that computer code and genetic code differ more in their details (the
time involved, the material employed) than in their logic? We know that
computer programs are governed by algorithms--simple, unambiguous sets of
instructions that in concert allow for the complicated behavior of operating
systems. Might not evolution be algorithmic, too?
For the new totalists, the answer is a resounding yes.
Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in the work of Daniel Dennett. In
Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett argues that evolution and software use similar
strategies to build complexity out of simplicity, intelligence out of mindless
routines. He writes: "The best reason for believing that robots might some
day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort
of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling,
self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural
selection." Dennett sets the stage for a possible encounter between
Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage, the founder of computer science, in one or
another of the Victorian drawing rooms they frequented. Each man's work, in
Dennett's view, completes the other's. Babbage launched the study of
computational algorithms while Darwin laid bare the trade secrets of nature, a
mindless but famously successful engineer. Whether or not Darwin and Babbage
ever compared notes, their followers have.
Dennett may be the closest thing to cybernetic totalism's
Marx-harmonizing its various intellectual sources, but as yet the movement has
no Lenin. Lanier observes, "Some of the most dramatic renditions have not
come from scientists or engineers, but from writers such as Wired editor] Kevin
Kelly and [author of NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny] Robert Wright, who
have become entranced with broadened interpretations of Darwin. In their works,
reality is perceived as a big computer program running the Darwin algorithm,
perhaps headed towards some sort of Destiny." Lanier wants to rescue
Darwin from this destiny. He acknowledges that "the movement to interpret
Darwin more broadly, and in particular to bring him into psychology and the
humanities has offered some luminous insights." He admits, further, that
as a computer scientist it is impossible not to be "flattered" by
narratives that put "algorithmic computation at the center of
reality." On the other hand, he prefers a more circumscribed Darwinism, a
Darwinism that hasn't gone nova. "While I love Darwin," he writes,
"I won't count on him to write code."
Still, Lanier recognizes that today it is Darwinism rather
than philosophy or theology that hosts the key debates about human nature. In
London several years ago, for example, a public discussion led by Steven Pinker
and Richard Dawkins reportedly drew 2,300 people and was sold out weeks in
advance. Pinker and Dawkins are in basic agreement on the big questions of
evolution. It is interesting to speculate about how many seats would be filled
by a no-holds-barred debate between Dawkins, say, and Stephen Jay Gould, the
chief opponent of the totalists in the quarrel over Darwin's legacy.
In such a face-off, Lanier would be in Gould's corner. He
sees Gould as providing evolutionary support for a belief in free will, whereas
Pinker, Dawkins, and Dennett would hem us in with determinism. After all, if
evolution is as algorithmic as the totalists--Gould calls them "Darwinian
fundamentalists"--would suppose, then a big-brained beast like Homo
Sapiens is well-nigh inevitable, with artificial intelligence inevitably to
follow. Lanier prefers Gould's view (as argued in Full House: The Spread of
Excellence from Plato to Darwin) that evolution is more familiar with
contingency than with inevitability. Summarizing Gould, Lanier writes: "If
there's an arrow in evolution, it's towards greater diversity over time, and we
unlikely creatures known as humans, having arisen as one tiny manifestation of
a massive, blind exploration of possible creatures, only imagine that the whole
process was designed to lead to us." That such a basic issue as free will
versus determinism is now being fought out on the grounds of Darwinian logic
helps explain why the Darwin wars have been and will continue to be so
venomous.
Lanier takes exception to the entire "cultural
temperament" of totalists who have become so "intoxicated" by
their system that they "seem to not have been educated in the tradition of
scientific skepticism." They grow reckless when they meme splice Darwin to
Babbage, and giddy when they add Moore's Law to the mix. They take Moore's Law,
according to which computer power doubles every 18 months or so, to guarantee
that tomorrow's machines will have a million times the speed and memory of
today's computers. With that kind of computing power driving them, machines
will hardly be able to avoid being jarred into sentience, or so the theory
goes. But Lanier has some bad news for totalists: Moore's Law applies only to
hardware. Software can be counted on to drag the whole thing down.
With tongue only somewhat in cheek, he suggests,: "If
anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors
become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly
slower and more bloated." The sad state of software, he continues, may
turn out to be humanity's best defense against the coming of any cyber species.
"Just as some newborn race of superintelligent robots are about to consume
all humanity," he writes, "our dear old species will likely be saved
by a Windows crash. The poor robots will linger pathetically, begging us to
reboot them, even though they'll know it would do no good."
Bad software gives Lanier a novel spin on the Turing Test,
which attempts to gauge whether machine intelligence has evolved to the point
where it is indistinguishable from human intelligence. Lanier suggests there is
another way for computers to get a passing grade than by becoming smarter, and
that is by making people more stupid. In his view, that is just what's going
on. He thinks that the Turing Test won't be decided in a single big event;
instead, "miniature Turing Tests are happening all the time, every day,
whenever a person puts up with stupid computer software."
Why does software improve so slowly, if at all? Lanier
blames cybernetic totalism, with its peculiar mix of outsized ambition and
downright complacency. If computers are rapidly advancing to the point where
they can write their own code, why bother about software elegance? Computers
will soon be debugging each other as naturally as monkeys groom each other's
fur. Until that day, pile on the features, bring on the bloat. Moore's Law is
coming to the rescue.
Still, none of this would seem commensurate with the direst
warnings of "One-half a Manifesto." It's true that if machines pass
-- or people fail --- the Turing Test, and human beings and computers shake
hands on the common ground of the algorithm, there may be little for a humanist
to celebrate. But that's no reason to raise a hue and cry about the
"suffering [of] millions of people" or to compare cybernetic totalism
to "history's worst ideologies," as Lanier does. But for Lanier, the
problems we have with software today give but the barest hint of the horrors in
store when the computer becomes integral to human genetic engineering.
He predicts "that the hardware/software dichotomy will
reappear in biotechnology, and indeed in other 21st century technologies."
When genetic code "becomes more manipulatable, more like a computer's
memory, then the limiting factor will be the quality of the software that
governs the manipulation." With software snarled by Moore's Law in
reverse, it will be expensive to rewrite DNA. Only the rich will be able to
afford the really good hacks, such as longevity; only they will have access to
the indisputable killer app, as it were, a genetically engineered elixir of
immortality. Here Lanier joins a number of other thinkers-including some, like
E.O. Wilson, on the fringes of cybernetic totalism--in fearing that we'll know
the real meaning of binding Babbage and Darwin together with Moore's Law when
the human race splits, roughly along the lines of rich and poor, into different
species.
Will this occur? It's, of course, impossible to say. But
"One-half a Manifesto" has value well beyond this or any other
particular prediction. It is the warning against totalism per se that stands
out in the piece, all the more so because techies and others have so adroitly
overlooked it. You can't know in advance all the specific dangers that will
issue from a grand synthesis; you can't forecast how much of the scenery it
will devour as it gains energy. But you can be alert, as Lanier urges. And you
can take the implication of "One-half a Manifesto" seriously, namely that
postmodernism has been only a lull before the gathering of another totalist
storm.
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