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+[[!meta title="You're not a Gadget"]]
+
+* Author: Jaron Lanier
+
+## Concepts
+
+* Technological lock-ins.
+* Cybernetic totalists versus humanistic technologies.
+* Circle of empaty.
+* Computationalism.
+* Value of personhood contrasted to "the hive".
+* Neoteny and it's contradictory qualities in culture.
+* Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality.
+* There's an underlying discussion between individual versus collective. Does creativity is just individual? He seems to view the polarization as a obligation to choose sides.
+
+## 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.
+
+## Wikified Biology
+
+    Dyson equates the beginnings of life on Earth with the Eden of Linux. Back when
+    life first took hold, genes flowed around freely; genetic sequences skipped
+    from organism to organism in much the way they may soon be able to on the
+    internet. In his article, Freeman derides the first organism that hoarded its
+    genes behind a protective membrane as “evil,” just like the nemesis of the
+    open-software movement, Bill Gates.
+
+    Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct
+    species, trading genes only with others of their kind. Freeman suggests that
+    the coming era of synthetic biology will be a return to Eden.
+
+    I suppose amateurs, robots, and an aggregation of amateurs and robots might
+    someday hack genes in the global garage and tweet DNA sequences around the
+    globe at light speed. Or there might be a slightly more sober process that
+    takes place between institutions like high schools and start-up companies.
+
+    However it happens, species boundaries will become defunct, and genes will fly
+    about, resulting in an orgy of creativity. Untraceable multitudes of new
+    biological organisms will appear as frequently as new videos do on YouTube
+    today.
+
+    One common response to suggestions that this might happen is fear. After all,
+    it might take only one doomsday virus produced in one garage to bring the
+    entire human story to a close. I will not focus directly on that concern, but,
+    instead, on whether the proposed style of openness would even bring about the
+    creation of innovative creatures.
+
+    The alternative to wide-open development is not necessarily evil. My guess is
+    that a poorly encapsulated communal gloop of organisms lost out to closely
+    guarded species on the primordial Earth for the same reason that the Linux
+    community didn’t come up with the iPhone: encapsulation serves a purpose.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Wikipedia has already been elevated into what might be a permanent niche. It
+    might become stuck as a fixture, like MIDI or the Google ad exchange services.
+    That makes it important to be aware of what you might be missing. Even in a
+    case in which there is an objective truth that is already known, such as a
+    mathematical proof, Wikipedia distracts the potential for learning how to bring
+    it into the conversation in new ways. Individual voice—the opposite of
+    wikiness—might not matter to mathematical truth, but it is the core of
+    mathematical communication.
+
+## The Culture of Computationalism
+
+    For lack of a better word, I call it computationalism. This term is usually
+    used more narrowly to describe a philosophy of mind, but I’ll extend it to
+    include something like a culture. A first pass at a summary of the underlying
+    philosophy is that the world can be understood as a computational process, with
+    people as subprocesses.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In a scientific role, I don’t recoil from the idea that the brain is a kind of
+    computer, but there is more than one way to use computation as a source of
+    models for human beings. I’ll discuss three common flavors of computationalism
+    and then describe a fourth flavor, the one that I prefer. Each flavor can be
+    distinguished by a different idea about what would be needed to make software
+    as we generally know it become more like a person.
+
+    One flavor is based on the idea that a sufficiently voluminous computation will
+    take on the qualities we associate with people—such as, perhaps, consciousness.
+    One might claim Moore’s law is inexorably leading to superbrains, superbeings,
+    and, perhaps, ultimately, some kind of global or even cosmic consciousness. If
+    this language sounds extreme, be aware that this is the sort of rhetoric you
+    can find in the world of Singularity enthusiasts and extropians.
+
+    [...]
+
+    A second flavor of computationalism holds that a computer program with specific
+    design features—usually related to self-representation and circular
+    references—is similar to a person. Some of the figures associated with this
+    approach are Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter, though each has his own
+    ideas about what the special features should be.
+
+    Hofstadter suggests that software that includes a “strange loop” bears a
+    resemblance to consciousness. In a strange loop, things are nested within
+    things in such a way that an inner thing is the same as an outer thing.
+
+    [...]
+
+    A third flavor of computationalism is found in web 2.0 circles. In this case,
+    any information structure that can be perceived by some real human to also be a
+    person is a person. This idea is essentially a revival of the Turing test. If
+    you can perceive the hive mind to be recommending music to you, for instance,
+    then the hive is effectively a person.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The approach to thinking about people computationally that I prefer, on those
+    occasions when such thinking seems appropriate to me, is what I’ll call
+    “realism.” The idea is that humans, considered as information systems, weren’t
+    designed yesterday, and are not the abstract playthings of some higher being,
+    such as a web 2.0 programmer in the sky or a cosmic Spore player. Instead, I
+    believe humans are the result of billions of years of implicit, evolutionary
+    study in the school of hard knocks. The cybernetic structure of a person has
+    been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical
+    reality.
+
+### From Images to Odors
+
+    For twenty years or so I gave a lecture introducing the fundamentals of virtual
+    reality. I’d review the basics of vision and hearing as well as of touch and
+    taste. At the end, the questions would begin, and one of the first ones was
+    usually about smell: Will we have smells in virtual reality machines anytime
+    soon?
+
+    Maybe, but probably just a few. Odors are fundamentally different from images
+    or sounds. The latter can be broken down into primary components that are
+    relatively straightforward for computers—and the brain—to process. The visible
+    colors are merely words for different wavelengths of light. Every sound wave is
+    actually composed of numerous sine waves, each of which can be easily described
+    mathematically.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Odors are completely different, as is the brain’s method of sensing them. Deep
+    in the nasal passage, shrouded by a mucous membrane, sits a patch of tissue—the
+    olfactory epithelium—studded with neurons that detect chemicals. Each of these
+    neurons has cup-shaped proteins called olfactory receptors. When a particular
+    molecule happens to fall into a matching receptor, a neural signal is triggered
+    that is transmitted to the brain as an odor. A molecule too large to fit into
+    one of the receptors has no odor. The number of distinct odors is limited only
+    by the number of olfactory receptors capable of interacting with them. Linda
+    Buck of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Richard Axel of Columbia
+    University, winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, have
+    found that the human nose contains about one thousand different types of
+    olfactory neurons, each type able to detect a particular set of chemicals.
+
+    This adds up to a profound difference in the underlying structure of the
+    senses—a difference that gives rise to compelling questions about the way we
+    think, and perhaps even about the origins of language. There is no way to
+    interpolate between two smell molecules. True, odors can be mixed together to
+    form millions of scents. But the world’s smells can’t be broken down into just
+    a few numbers on a gradient; there is no “smell pixel.” Think of it this way:
+    colors and sounds can be measured with rulers, but odors must be looked up in a
+    dictionary.
+
+    [...]
+
+    To solve the problem of olfaction—that is, to make the complex world of smells
+    quickly identifiable—brains had to have evolved a specific type of neural
+    circuitry, Jim believes. That circuitry, he hypothesizes, formed the basis for
+    the cerebral cortex—the largest part of our brain, and perhaps the most
+    critical in shaping the way we think. For this reason, Jim has proposed that
+    the way we think is fundamentally based in the olfactory.
+
+    [...]
+
+    He often refers to the olfactory parts of the brain as the “Old Factory,” as
+    they are remarkably similar across species, which suggests that the structure
+    has ancient origins.
+
+## Editing Is Sexy; Creativity Is Natural
+
+    These experiments in linguistic variety could also inspire a better
+    understanding of how language came about in the first place. One of Charles
+    Darwin’s most compelling evolutionary speculations was that music might have
+    preceded language. He was intrigued by the fact that many species use song for
+    sexual display and wondered if human vocalizations might have started out that
+    way too. It might follow, then, that vocalizations could have become varied and
+    complex only later, perhaps when song came to represent actions beyond mating
+    and such basics of survival.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Terry offered an unconventional solution to the mystery of Bengalese finch
+    musicality. What if there are certain traits, including song style, that
+    naturally tend to become less constrained from generation to generation but are
+    normally held in check by selection pressures? If the pressures go away,
+    variation should increase rapidly. Terry suggested that the finches developed a
+    wider song variety not because it provided an advantage but merely because in
+    captivity it became possible.
+
+    In the wild, songs probably had to be rigid in order for mates to find each
+    other. Birds born with a genetic predilection for musical innovation most
+    likely would have had trouble mating. Once finches experienced the luxury of
+    assured mating (provided they were visually attractive), their song variety
+    exploded.
+
+    Brian Ritchie and Simon Kirby of the University of Edinburgh worked with Terry
+    to simulate bird evolution in a computer model, and the idea worked well, at
+    least in a virtual world. Here is yet another example of how science becomes
+    more like storytelling as engineering becomes able to represent some of the
+    machinery of formerly subjective human activities.
+
+## Metaphors
+
+    One reason the metaphor of the sun fascinates me is that it bears on a conflict
+    that has been at the heart of information science since its inception: Can
+    meaning be described compactly and precisely, or is it something that can
+    emerge only in approximate form based on statistical associations between large
+    numbers of components?
+
+    Mathematical expressions are compact and precise, and most early computer
+    scientists assumed that at least part of language ought to display those
+    qualities too.
+
+## Future Humors
+
+    Unfortunately, we don’t have access at this time to a single philosophy that
+    makes sense for all purposes, and we might never find one. Treating people as
+    nothing other than parts of nature is an uninspired basis for designing
+    technologies that embody human aspirations. The inverse error is just as
+    misguided: it’s a mistake to treat nature as a person. That is the error that
+    yields confusions like intelligent design.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Those who enter into the theater of computationalism are given all the mental
+    solace that is usually associated with traditional religions. These include
+    consolations for metaphysical yearnings, in the form of the race to climb to
+    ever more “meta” or higher-level states of digital representation, and even a
+    colorful eschatology, in the form of the Singularity. And, indeed, through the
+    Singularity a hope of an afterlife is available to the most fervent believers.
+
+## My Brush with Bachelardian Neoteny in the Most Interesting Room in the World
+
+    But actually, because of homuncular flexibility, any part of reality might just
+    as well be a part of your body if you happen to hook up the software elements
+    so that your brain can control it easily. Maybe if you wiggle your toes, the
+    clouds in the sky will wiggle too. Then the clouds would start to feel like
+    part of your body. All the items of experience become more fungible than in the
+    physical world. And this leads to the revelatory experience.
+
+## Final Words
+
+    For me, the prospect of an entirely different notion of communication is more
+    thrilling than a construction like the Singularity. Any gadget, even a big one
+    like the Singularity, gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is
+    the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us.