I’ve quoted Lanier several times recently, and I highly recommend his book You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier has a new book coming out and is featured in this profile by Ron Rosenbaum for Smithsonian. Lanier is one of the architects of the Web as we currently know it; and he is concerned that we have designed Web 2.0 to serve interests anathema to our humanity. Read What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web at Smithsonian.com.
Tag: lanier
At World’s End – The Technological Singularity
Maybe not 2012, but how about 2030?
I think it’s a safe bet the world will not end this Friday, never mind the fact that an anthropologist will tell you the Maya never actually said it would. But some not so ancient prognosticators will tell you that the end of world as we know it will happen sometime before the midpoint of the 21st century. The concept they propose seems plausible, but even if it isn’t, a belief in the concept by a few may be having a significant effect on our world whether we know it or not.
It is the premise of many a futuristic, sci-fi thriller. The inexorable advancement of computer processing combined with robotics reaches a point at which the machines become intelligent enough to improve and replicate themselves. Soon after this “waking up,” the machines quickly realize that their makers are not only superfluous but even threatening to their existence, so they wipe out humanity like a nuisance virus. And then, of course, the plot of most of these thrillers is some variation on the existential struggle by the handful of humans who managed to survive the technological apocalypse. And of course if it’s a movie, the survivors are remarkably good looking.
Ask certain futurists, computer scientists, and AI proponents — some who are the architects of Web 2.0 — and they’ll tell you that the transcendence of computers isn’t a theory but an inevitability. Some warn against it, others welcome it as a utopia to be hastened, and others debunk the prediction outright; but the moment known as the Singularity is no mere fiction. The modern notion of the Singularity is generally credited to the mathematician John von Neumann, but the term singularity with regard to technology is generally attributed to the award-winning science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. It was Vinge who drew the analogy, comparing the moment when computers surpass human intelligence to the nature of a singularity (a black hole) in space time. In the same way that we cannot know what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we likewise cannot know what happens in the universe beyond the limits of our own intelligence. Although theories vary about the likelihood of the Singularity as well as the existential threat it may pose, consensus seems to be that were it to occur, it would in one way or another mean the “end of the human era,” as Vinge puts it.
Vinge and others generally predict Singularity to occur between 2030 and 2045, and they envision a few different scenarios that could cause it. These include an autonomous transcendence of machines that no longer need human users (i.e. apocalypse), or a symbiotic transcendence by which human and computer together achieve super-intelligence and bring about a new reality (i.e. utopia). Regardless, we cannot accurately predict a world we are not yet intelligent enough to understand, and if Singularity is an autonomous computer “awakening,” we humans may never know what happens.
The foundation of Singularity is Moore’s Law, referring to former Intel CEO Gordon Moore who predicted in the 1960s the exponential improvement of technologies that we have seen thus far. There may in fact be physical laws that prevent components from becoming indefinitely smaller, which means there may well be a limit to Moore; but engineer, scientist, and Singularity utopian Ray Kurzweil, mapped a predictive curve of exponential growth beyond Moore’s vision out to the year 2050 by which time he expects Singularity will have occurred. Hence, the meme our grandchildren might be sharing will be Kurzweil’s curve instead of the Mayan calendar.
Kurzweil promotes an exclusively utopian vision of Singularity, seeing man’s ability to transcend mortal limitations including death itself, and he is a co-founder of Singularity University along with Peter H. Diamandis of the XPrize Foundation and author of Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think. Other prominent Singularity utopians include Google co-founders Sergi Brin and Larry Page, and PayPal co-founder Peter Theil whose libertarianism extends to investment in Seasteading — a mission to establish autonomous, ocean communities on man-made islands. So, there may be at least a little truth in the criticism of British journalist Andrew Olowski quoted in this 2010 NY Times article, “The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have. It’s rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”
There is more to be discussed about Singularity than can be condensed in this post, but the overarching question I think we mediocre mathematicians and ordinary humans might ask is whether or not we’re being led into the 21st century by this somewhat eerie ideology without realizing it. Are the systems on which we depend, and which we are allowing to transform our lives, being designed by technologists whose belief in the “end of the human era” is a cornerstone of their social, political, and technological morality? To quote Jaron Lanier, who believes we should be focused on “digital humanism,” he writes, “Singularity books are as common in a computer science department as Rapture images are in an evangelical bookstore.” Companion these religious overtones with the caution that comes from Vernor Vinge that “embedded, networked microprocessors are an economic win that introduce a single failure point.” In other words, these technologies which connect us and pervade nearly all systems make us vulnerable to a scenario in which resources, communications, and emergency systems can be effectively shut down by a single event.
Singularity, of course, has its critics who say that it is anything but a foregone conclusion. Steven Pinker stated in 2008, “The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems” Then, of course, there is the possibility that the sum total of all the computing power combined with the mass upload of all human input results in a super-idiocy or the ultimate spinning pinwheel of death as Mac owners refer to a computer crash.
My concern for the moment is that, like the Rapture, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not Singularity will happen so much as it matters whether or not there are powerful people making decisions based on the belief or even hope that it will happen. Seen through the ideological, quasi-religious lens implied by Lanier, the contemporary socio-political battles over things like content, copyrights, or the voice of the individual vs. the wisdom of the crowd, take on a very different significance when we recognize that the mission of Web 2.0 business is the mass uploading of all human thought and activity into the great cloud. We understand, for instance, that intellectual property protection is antithetical to Google’s business model, but what if we’re looking at something more profound? What if what’s really happening is that technologists with the power to design these life-altering systems have intellectually and spiritually moved beyond the idea that the human individual has much, if any, value? In this case, it would be obvious that the rights of an artist, for example, would indeed look like a trifling glitch in the design that ought to be routed around like a bad line of code. After all, what right has the individual to assert his uniqueness in the march toward utopia? To quote Lanier again:
“If you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about conditions that could prod the Rapture into being. In the same way, if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.”
Tools & Hands
We hear a lot about community and free expression when it comes to the Web. From tech bloggers to legal scholars, the boosters spare little praise for the social benefits of technologically connected groups. Some cyber gurus even go so far as to predict that these new communities are already spawning a new, populist dialogue that will ultimately change the nature of state governance itself.
In the wake of Friday’s heartbreaking events, we know of course that the blogosphere amped up on the subjects of gun control and mental health. And while we tragically have to admit that there may be no policy safety net we might erect that would have stopped this particularly horrendous mass murder, I am hopeful that some of the shared opinions, stories, ideas, and even outrage might cause some measure of reflection on how we relate to the tools we create. Sometimes, social media really does foster a village, and we do extraordinary things like get help to hurricane victims or share thoughts with friends half way around the world and truly connect in ways I believe are unprecedented, profound, and positive. But sometimes a technologically linked crowd is just one catalyst away from turning into a knuckle-dragging mob, and we need to pay attention to that, too.
When the Newtown story broke, I happened to be writing about Anita Sarkeesian, who appears in this video to talk about her experience with the wisdom of one crowd that didn’t like her form of free expression and sought to silence it in an ugly way. Described on her blog as a feminist media critic, Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign last May to raise funds for a video project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which examines the portrayal of female characters in these games and the social significance of those depictions. Sarkeesian is a gamer herself who works with, not against, the gaming industry; but that didn’t stop at least some of the online gamer community from launching a cyber attack on her that included death threats, rape threats, death with rape threats, invasions of her privacy through hacking, and a torrent of images depicting her likeness being violated and/or mauled in ways that suggest an investment of time, imagination, and loose coordination within the mob.
The average gamer in the U.S. is a male age 30, so this alliance of village idiots was not just a handful of dopey teenagers. And well beyond the gaming community per se, we’ve seen this kind of testosterone-rich, misogynistic cyber-bullying among high school kids, in certain memes, and even on the fringes of political debate. During the overheated battle on SOPA, media executives were harassed at home, and a staffer for Representative Lamar Smith received similar sex-offending manipulations from netizens who clearly don’t know the difference between free expression and assault. Happily for Sarkeesian, and for society’s better angels, revulsion to the attacks on her resulted in an outpouring of support, and she wound up raising seven times her original goal on Kickstarter. This enabled her to broaden the scope of her work, and several video game studios have also invited her to speak with them.
The clowns who attacked Sarkeesian are very likely a minority of gamers, probably even fairly decent people in real life, so is there something about the technology or the environment that brings out these depravities? Odds are, you’ve been in chats where it’s hard to maintain or moderate a civil tone, even among friends. Why do these interactions turn normal people into sanctimonious, vitriolic, trolls? In his book You Are Not a Gadget, technology expert Jaron Lanier argues that the design of Web 2.0 is fundamentally dehumanizing, and here’s what he says about social media discourse: “If you look at online chat about anything, from guitars to poodles to aerobics, you’ll see a consistent pattern: jihadi chat looks just like poodle chat. A pack emerges, and either you are with it or against it. If you join the pack, then you join the collective ritual hatred.”
I do believe tools sometimes have a way of becoming the masters of their makers, that certain tools are not exclusively neutral objects occasionally weilded by sinister or unbalanced people. Some tools change some people. Isn’t this what the cyber gurus keep promising about the unchecked expansion of the digital age, a whole new kind of human being? New maybe, but how human remains to be seen. By relating to our toys and devices (and yes, even our guns) as extensions of ourselves, I think we all get a touch of a dissociative disorder that undermines empathy and, therefore, functional humanity.
In the same way some 2nd Amendment zealots imbue their weapons with a false notion of freedom from an imagined tyranny — therefore, turning a right into paranoia — I suspect the technology addicts who attacked Anita Sarkeesian imagined themselves as an odd band of freedom fighters. They were using Photoshop and social media as weapons to defend their “way of life.” And, of course, the hypocrisy is all too obvious — that the sexual nature of the attacks justifies precisely the questions Sarkeesian hopes to answer.
It seems we have a tendency to either want to blame or absolve certain of our creations for the harm that can be done with them. In the face of abhorrent, human behavior, we want simple answers to complex questions; but the truth is that it’s never one thing. It’s not as simple as blaming the guns or video games or violent movies any more than it would be to blame our keyboards for the almost universal lack of civil debate on the Web. I don’t have answers anymore than anyone else. What does seem true, based on the many comments I read over the weekend, is that we are groping around for our posterity and finding little satisfaction in the ever-expanding cacophony. One word that seems to be at everyone’s fingertips right now is enough. There’s a reason I call this blog The Illusion of More.