While computers and robots are not my areas of specialty, I have been doing some thinking about them lately in light of an essay in the latest issue of Lapman’s Quarterly that Feb shared, which discussed the future as one “made by and for machines,” and in light of some recent journals from Ved, the most recent of which marveled at the possibility of a digital world for robots to exist in. Because I feel that this issue, our future with machines, is connected to my project, I want to offer a few comments.
As I’ve explained in a number of previous journals, man is the source of meaning in the universe. That is, because man is the sole possessor of consciousness, of self-awareness and conceptualization, it is man alone who defines things and draws connections between them. Because man recognizes this arrangement of elements as iron, or as a house, does not mean that other creatures do so as well. The universe appears as it does to us because that is how we see it. Moreover, man cannot make use of his material environment until he ascribes it with meaning. Until man understands that a tree is made out of wood, and that the wood can be used to keep him warm or keep out the rain, the tree is not a resource for material to aid in those tasks. Oil, for many years, was not an economic good, despite the great value it currently holds for mankind, because man did not understand it or its uses, and thus did not ascribe to it the meaning it holds today. The human mind did not classify it as a good, and thus is was not one. Furthermore, the status of an economic good, whether it is a present good or a future good, a consumer’s good or a producer’s good, a valuable good or a negligible one, are all determinations that are made by the human mind, regardless of the physical properties of the good. The material is judged based on its relation to a human need that the mind perceives.
Man generally views his material surroundings in one of two ways: as givens, which he cannot change or control, or as means, which he can change and control. Much of the development of civilization can be attributed to the progressive tendency of man’s material surroundings to be viewed as means to be manipulated rather than givens that must be accomodated. Means are goods or services that are used by acting man to attain his ends. Because our means are limited by the scarcity inherent in the physical environment, contra the world we imagine in our heads, there are not enough means available to attain every end, and man must choose which ends he values more so that his means can be allocated in the most economic fashion. More ends can be attained either through an increase in the amount of means available, or through the technological development of means that can be used to produce more ends. Tools, machines, and computers are all advanced means, capital goods that man has created to aid him in his quest to attain as many ends as he can.
Because machines are material means, man has every incentive to make them as effective as possible. And, to that end, much research and advancement has been made in recent years to make our machines smarter, to give them artificial intelligence that will allow them to make their own decisions and learn on their own and communicate with each other. Theoretically, this will make the machines more efficient and better able to serve humans, but many are concerned that once machines reach a certain point, where their intelligence surpasses humans, they will, like humans, begin remaking the world in their image, and this image may not include humans. Lapham’s article, while noting the differences between human consciousness and machine intelligence, expresses this concern.
I have expressed elsewhere, years ago, my doubts about the abilities of machines to approximate the mental processes of man. My work this year has done nothing to shake me from that view. I have no doubt that machines may be made to imitate man, and to do many of his mental tasks far better than he can. But I do not think machines can imagine. They are separated from us in this, like all other forms of life. As I described it on YouTube once, there are two parts of the human mind: there’s the calculating part, the part that connects means to ends. This is the part that computers approximate, and may surpass us at. But, for humans, there’s also the part that chooses ends. Or, rather, creates ends. Machines can be told to make decisions, can be told to create tasks for itself. But these themselves are tasks. We input the computer’s ends. And, as uneducated about computers as I am, I do not see how we can program computers to do something that we can hardly understand ourselves. I don’t see how we could ever program something to think for itself beyond the program. It seems like an insoluble contradiction. This doesn’t mean that machines might not get to a point where they try to wipe us off the face of the Earth because they interpret their instructions thusly. But I think that humans will survive such an attempted extermination, precisely because we can imagine something new, while machines can only complete the task they have before them.
But, I think that this trait of human beings, our ability to see things unseen and drive to change the world into our own image, is what will make this war between machines and man unnecessary. First of all, even if we do somehow make machines think like humans, in that they’ll have desires and want to create new worlds, it seems quite likely that they will, in fact, create a new world, rather than take over ours. That is, why would machines want to conquer our world of scarcity when they could inhabit a world of limitless potential: the digital world. Why would machines choose our world over their own, when theirs is not subject to the same limits as ours. Human beings are defined by our struggle against scarcity; all we do is an attempt to overcome it. If we really gave that human spark to a computer, it would flee immediately into the superabundance of the cyberworld. What a marvelous idea, Ved!
Furthermore, it must be remembered that machines are means. They are, at this time, the most effective means we have in our struggle against scarcity. But, they are also merely the latest iteration in a long line of evolving means. Just like we cast aside the carriage for the car and the spear for the gun, so we may one day cast away the computer for something better. Humans are special because we can imagine new worlds and build them. There may come a time when that world does not include the same kind of machines we deal with today. It does, indeed, seem that the future will be one of increasing technological advancement and domination. But that future isn’t necessary and unchangeable. In fact, it is the nature of man to change it.
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