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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.
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