path: root/books/sociology/youre-not-a-gadget.md

[[!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.