[[!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.