The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil loves intelligent machines. He has a vision beyond just intelligence, though, one of partnership that will take us to a new era of human gentleness, an era hallmarked by a positive and supportive integration with machines that are not only intelligent, but spiritual. 

In Kurzweil's vision, "life in the new millennium no longer seems daunting. Instead, Kurzweil’s twenty-

first century promises to be age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live." 

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicts that machine memory and computational ability will surpass that of human in 2020, ushering in an era hallmarked by "relationships with automated personalities," wherein humans will interact with machines as their "teachers, companions, and lovers." By 2030, he tells us, "information will be fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways; computers, for their part, will have read all the world's literature. The distinction between [humans] and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them."

Bill Joy, of Sun Microsystems, met Kurzweil at a conference in 1999 and Ray shared a pre-publication partial reprint of Age. Bill was so affected by the conversations with Ray and others at the conference that he described it as a subject "haunts me to this day." He ended up writing a longform article (the .pdf is 18 pages), published in Wired, about a much less idyllic future than the one Kurzweil envisions, a future that is essentially already upon us, one that––due  to the self-replicating nature of early 21st century technological innovations of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR)––have the capacity to end human life on the planet. 

Joy's conclusion is curious: “The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” It would be a head-scratcher on its own, given that Joy spends much of the article discussing his path from literate three-year-old to modern day guru of machine design, a path that is hallmarked at every turn by curiousity and the desire to answer questions and to seek solutions to problems. It is wholly unsurprising that Joy found Star Trek (the original series) to be inspiring: he came from a modest background was insatiably curious, and had a problem-solving mind; Joy spent a lot of time at the library and watching network television: this is exactly the audience for whom Rodenberry wrote his humanitarian tales. 

What makes Joy's conclusion even more baffling is that it is essentially Theodore Kaczynski's underlying argument in "Industrial Society and Its Future," the so-called manifesto printed by The Washington Post in 1995. Kaczynski believed that this particular knowledge and research was dangerous to the future of the human race, and he wrote many letters to those few academics and researchers who were propelling the science into new frontiers, pleading with them to stop.

Joy knew of Kaczynski, invokes him early on in his essay, and claims "I am no apologist for Kaczynski." One assumes that Joy is attempting to separate the man's violence from his ideas, here, and bully on Joy for that. But one wonders exactly what level of social and academic control is envisioned by someone who spent his whole life researching, exploring, and creating, all with only the goal of solving problems.

Yes, research is dangerous, and no, we don't know what we're doing ("that's why they call it research," as Einstein pointed out).  I don't agree with Kurzweil et al as to the utopian vision of intelligent machines, let alone this blissed-out harmonious interwoven reality granted to humans by blending with spiritual machines. I'm a Quaker; I like my machines few and far between, my reliance on them as light as possible, and (unlike the rest of my life)for them to be simple, long-lasting, and easily repaired. 

I also agree it would be the saddest state of human affairs to begin "limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." If we cannot dream of the stars, what is the point?

Even robots dream of electric sheep. 

Do we live in an information society?

One of the things that struck me as I read John Feather's introduction to The Information Society was that the difference the Information Age brought was that beforehand, in the Manufacturing Age, technological advances allowed us to do our jobs better; after the "revolution" that Feather describes, technology was the job itself. This is a huge shift in its own right, but still has tethers to the old way: spreadsheets could be (tediously) done by hand in ledgers; even space flight could be 'computed' by a single woman in a NASA office. Since then, the work that we do cannot be replicated outside the virtual technological space in which it takes place: mapping the genome, for instance, is simply not humanly possible.

But for the idea of an information society to be evaluated, I think the emphasis is on society more than information. Our social interactions, not just our vocations, are now built on foundations that assume a level of information availability. This presents as everything from googling answers at a table to feeling deeply connected to virtual friends while barely recognizing neighborhood residents. The socialization of information networks has also created a major ripple in the social fabric, leaving those who are not able to participate in the social stream as nonentities more often than not, without access to the basic framework of adult citizenship. I remember when we thought that the internet would be the great democratizer, and in many ways it still is. But with phones that cost over a thousand dollars, with platforms that eat huge amounts of data, the digital revolution has been leveraged into the land of the Haves v. the Have-nots once again. I'm increasingly experiencing news "articles" that are actually videos, and this change in format -- without the text component of the traditional written article -- means that many people simply cannot access that piece of information.
The idea of social currency is also being impacted, in that the idea of "followers" to a feed or "likes" to a post have real social meaning, at least in the moment, and fame seems to be shorter and shorter. Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" might well be only fifteen seconds these days, if that.

I think we absolutely live in an information society, and the fact that outside agents chose to target information social networks as a valuable asset for hacking speaks volumes. Our social interaction with digital information and the media continues to be as meaningful a piece of the infrastructure as the electricity grid or clean water delivery.