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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2017-08-06 09:48:40 -0300
committerSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2017-08-06 09:48:40 -0300
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You're not a gadget
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+[[!meta title="You're not a Gadget"]]
+
+## Information Doesn’t Deserve to Be Free
+
+ “Information wants to be free.” So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder
+ of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.
+
+ I say that information doesn’t deserve to be free.
+
+ Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its
+ own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it’s
+ even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans
+ are real, and information is not?
+
+ Of course, there is a technical use of the term “information” that refers to
+ something entirely real. This is the kind of information that’s related to
+ entropy. But that fundamental kind of information, which exists independently
+ of the culture of an observer, is not the same as the kind we can put in
+ computers, the kind that supposedly wants to be free.
+
+ Information is alienated experience.
+
+ You can think of culturally decodable information as a potential form of
+ experience, very much as you can think of a brick resting on a ledge as storing
+ potential energy. When the brick is prodded to fall, the energy is revealed.
+ That is only possible because it was lifted into place at some point in the
+ past.
+
+ In the same way, stored information might cause experience to be revealed if it
+ is prodded in the right way. A file on a hard disk does indeed contain
+ information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are
+ discernible instead of being scrambled into mush—the way heat scrambles
+ things—is what makes them bits.
+
+ But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so
+ if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted
+ between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only
+ process that can de-alienate information.
+
+ Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a
+ shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it
+ doesn’t get what it wants.
+
+ But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope
+ God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become
+ immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe
+ information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign
+ human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the
+ perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in
+ your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to
+ reinforce your faith.
+
+## The Apple Falls Again
+
+ It’s a mistake with a remarkable origin. Alan Turing articulated it, just
+ before his suicide.
+
+ Turing’s suicide is a touchy subject in computer science circles. There’s an
+ aversion to talking about it much, because we don’t want our founding father to
+ seem like a tabloid celebrity, and we don’t want his memory trivialized by the
+ sensational aspects of his death.
+
+ The legacy of Turing the mathematician rises above any possible sensationalism.
+ His contributions were supremely elegant and foundational. He gifted us with
+ wild leaps of invention, including much of the mathematical underpinnings of
+ digital computation. The highest award in computer science, our Nobel Prize, is
+ named in his honor.
+
+ Turing the cultural figure must be acknowledged, however. The first thing to
+ understand is that he was one of the great heroes of World War II. He was the
+ first “cracker,” a person who uses computers to defeat an enemy’s security
+ measures. He applied one of the first computers to break a Nazi secret code,
+ called Enigma, which Nazi mathematicians had believed was unbreakable. Enigma
+ was decoded by the Nazis in the field using a mechanical device about the size
+ of a cigar box. Turing reconceived it as a pattern of bits that could be
+ analyzed in a computer, and cracked it wide open. Who knows what world we would
+ be living in today if Turing had not succeeded?
+
+ The second thing to know about Turing is that he was gay at a time when it was
+ illegal to be gay. British authorities, thinking they were doing the most
+ compassionate thing, coerced him into a quack medical treatment that was
+ supposed to correct his homosexuality. It consisted, bizarrely, of massive
+ infusions of female hormones.
+
+ In order to understand how someone could have come up with that plan, you have
+ to remember that before computers came along, the steam engine was a preferred
+ metaphor for understanding human nature. All that sexual pressure was building
+ up and causing the machine to malfunction, so the opposite essence, the female
+ kind, ought to balance it out and reduce the pressure. This story should serve
+ as a cautionary tale. The common use of computers, as we understand them today,
+ as sources for models and metaphors of ourselves is probably about as reliable
+ as the use of the steam engine was back then.
+
+ Turing developed breasts and other female characteristics and became terribly
+ depressed. He committed suicide by lacing an apple with cyanide in his lab and
+ eating it. Shortly before his death, he presented the world with a spiritual
+ idea, which must be evaluated separately from his technical achievements. This
+ is the famous Turing test. It is extremely rare for a genuinely new spiritual
+ idea to appear, and it is yet another example of Turing’s genius that he came
+ up with one.
+
+ Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on
+ a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked
+ to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back
+ and forth.
+
+ Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man?
+ If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?
+
+ It’s impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the
+ time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of
+ the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the
+ war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of
+ strange creatures.
+
+ When Turing died, software was still in such an early state that no one knew
+ what a mess it would inevitably become as it grew. Turing imagined a pristine,
+ crystalline form of existence in the digital realm, and I can imagine it might
+ have been a comfort to imagine a form of life apart from the torments of the
+ body and the politics of sexuality. It’s notable that it is the woman who is
+ replaced by the computer, and that Turing’s suicide echoes Eve’s fall.
+
+ [...]
+
+ But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten
+ smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a
+ degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a
+ simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let
+ your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
+
+ People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
+ Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that
+ could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach
+ to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have
+ repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards
+ to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a
+ machine is ambiguous.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which
+ knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the
+ text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way
+ and present many of the same problems.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Or it might turn out that a distinction will forever be based on principles we
+ cannot manipulate. This might involve types of computation that are unique to
+ the physical brain, maybe relying on forms of causation that depend on
+ remarkable and nonreplicable physical conditions. Or it might involve software
+ that could only be created by the long-term work of evolution, which cannot be
+ reverse-engineered or mucked with in any accessible way. Or it might even
+ involve the prospect, dreaded by some, of dualism, a reality for consciousness
+ as apart from mechanism.