Jaron Lanier: the End of Human Specialness
Lanier's latest eye-roller is up at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Decay in the belief in self is driven not by technology, but by the culture of technologists, especially the recent designs of antihuman software like Facebook, which almost everyone is suddenly living their lives through. Such designs suggest that information is a free-standing substance, independent of human experience or perspective. As a result, the role of each human shifts from being a "special" entity to being a component of an emerging global computer.
Um, OK. I agree in some sense... on Facebook, I've said in response to David Pearce that the site "makes us more trivial people than ever" and shortens our attention spans. I often find myself agreeing with "Luddite" Andrew Keen, who is unfairly put down by open-everything fanatic and geek darling Larry Lessig. Even from this natural "Luddite" perspective that I hold (the word "Luddite" is stupid, people, stop using it), Lanier's article still seems odd.
Facebook does have the potential to enrich lives and humanness rather than turn everything into information, when it is used in moderation. If you know any teenagers, you can see how they easily and seamlessly integrate online messaging with real world mutual interest and even obsession. If anything, technology enables a kind of hyper-sociality for them that makes most people over 35 uncomfortable. (I don't necessarily blame them -- I block hundreds of people in my Facebook news feed, and try to spend less than half an hour on the site per day.)
Also, it's different when you're part of the club versus outside it. I have noticed a syndrome whereby famous people tend to shy away from Facebook, as if it is too plebian for their tastes. They never even really try it. As far as I can tell from simple searches, Lanier is too cool to have a Facebook at all.
Even Andrew Keen has a Facebook page, with the humorous tagline "the anti-christ of Silicon Valley".
Lanier writes:
This shift has palpable consequences. For one thing, power accrues to the proprietors of the central nodes on the global computer. There are various types of central nodes, including the servers of Silicon Valley companies devoted to searching or social-networking, computers that empower impenetrable high finance (like hedge funds and high-frequency trading), and state-security computers. Those who are not themselves close to a central node find their own cognition gradually turning into a commodity. Someone who used to be able to sell commercial illustrations now must give them away, for instance, so that a third party can make money from advertising. Students turn to Wikipedia, and often don't notice that the acceptance of a single, collective version of reality has the effect of eroding their personhood.
Wikipedia has some problems, but by and large, it massively increases knowledge. If I smashed every Americans' television and made them read Wikipedia in the time they spent watching TV or movies, people in bars and on the street would be a lot less boring to talk to. Not everyone is as wealthy as Mr. Lanier and can buy as many books as they like. Still, there definitely and most obviously is a place for knowledge outside of Wikipedia. Wikipedia, when used as a starting point and not the final word, is a fantastic tool. Just because some people lazily use it as the final word does not mean that it is universally bad. The same people would use dead tree encyclopedias as the final word, anyway.
This shift in human culture is borne by software designs, and is driven by a new sort of "nerd" religion based around a core belief that a global brain is not only emerging but will replace humanity. It is often claimed, in the vicinity of institutions like Silicon Valley's Singularity University, that the giant global computer will upload the contents of human brains to grant them everlasting life in the computing cloud.
Interestingly, I may be part of the "nerd religion" Lanier is describing, if the religion consists of feeling that human-friendly Artificial General Intelligence could do a tremendous amount of good in the world and is worth pursuing vigorously. However, I consider talk of global brains to essentially be nonsense. A choir is only as good as its worst member, and human cognition and organizations are constrained by similar rules. No single unit of contribution to any project can be greater or better than the brilliance of the smartest human, and the only reason we're so oblivious to this is because humans are the only general intelligences that we are evolved to model and think about. We also don't like to think any thoughts that make ourselves and our society seem any less than awesome.
The problem is, social feelings create such positive affect, it makes us want to ignore the simple truth that a group of humans is just that -- a group of humans -- and not a superintelligence as defined by Bostrom or Vinge.
Still, I do think it would be cool to be an upload in some kind of computing cloud, so maybe there is a connection here.
There is right now a lot of talk about whether to believe in God or not, but I suspect that religious arguments are gradually incorporating coded debates about whether to even believe in people anymore.
Maybe this signifies movement towards non-anthropocentric theories of personhood and ethics? If so, sounds swell to me.
September 7th, 2010 - 14:40
I think the exact opposite of Lanier’s point is true. Social networking and knowledge aggregation sites like Facebook and Wikipedia actually make it easier to move beyond the superficial. Compare the effort of thoroughly researching a topic using an encyclopedia as the start point with the ease of scrolling to the bottom of a wikipedia article and clicking through the citations. Compare the effort of keeping track of all the ephemera that makes up another person’s life with the ease of instant messaging and the social context that publicly shared interests provide.
September 7th, 2010 - 15:08
“No single unit of contribution to any project can be greater or better than the brilliance of the smartest human…”
I think your arguments ignore the recurrent process of idea building that is typical in human groups. I see this as a process of search within the idea space.
I agree that a single superintelligence may be much more efficient than a large group of humans on a problem, but it isn’t obvious that the group of humans couldn’t eventually reach the same conclusions.
September 7th, 2010 - 15:16
“If I smashed every Americans’ television and made them read Wikipedia in the time they spent watching TV or movies, people in bars and on the street would be a lot less boring to talk to.”
I completely agree. Please do!
As far as the rest, I see it as enhancing, not eliminating, relationships.
September 7th, 2010 - 16:43
Micah:
I agree with you. I’d add that we can share deep ideas on blogs like this even though we may be separated by hundreds of miles and would never have encountered each other by chance. In my everyday life, many interactions with people consist of just small talk, gossip and trivialities.
David:
Great point about collaborative intelligence. It seems that Lanier strondly disagrees with the concept of the collective intelligence of networked humans with computers. If that positions is true, then Lanier should be a radical Yudkowsky singulitarian deeply concerned about friendly AI, since the first intelligence even slightly greater than human equivalent (and HE is an arbitrary anthromorphism) would be capable taking over the world. Yet this is opposite to the position that Lanier takes.
Michael:
When my daughter is old enough to read, I plan on setting the computer filter to allow only Wikipedia; LOL.
September 7th, 2010 - 20:41
Have you read The Technological Society? I do not agree with everything he says, but I support Lanier in that he draws attention to the subject — namely, that the modern world is increasingly driven by technique rather than human motives. The “decay in the belief in self” is just one example. (The interesting idea here, though, is that the push of the technologists is itself largely a result of technique’s influence rather than their own innate desire.)
September 7th, 2010 - 23:29
I wish I’d never started using Facebook – but now it’s impossible to stop. I still don’t quite understand how Facebook manages so effectively to hijack one’s reward circuitry and lure one into a walled garden. It’s no exaggeration to say Facebook can kill the ability to do serious work. By analogy, smoking is so addictive, not because it delivers a wonderful high or improves the overall quality of one’s life, but because of the speed of the “hit”. Is Facebook similar? All those instantaneous micro-hits of reward – the “notifications” feature is especially insidious I find – tap into something very basic in the social primate psyche. Help!
September 7th, 2010 - 23:52
David: If you feel like Facebook is reducing your ability to do work, I recommend LeechBlock.
I don’t share your wish that you’d never have started using Facebook, though – the links you post there tend to be rather interesting. :)
September 8th, 2010 - 10:40
Thank you very much for that advice, Kaj Sotala! This may help me structure my work day better – I’ll add a password for access control and bury it in my garden. :D
September 8th, 2010 - 04:50
–I’ve said in response to David Pearce that the –site “makes us more trivial people than ever†—and shortens our attention spans.
Isn’t this a bit like complaining that you don’t like cars because “they get you places faster than walking”? Maybe that’s a bad analogy, but here’s my point: We don’t have the luxury of having long attention spans anymore. If we’re living in (and in most cases, as Transhumanists, embracing) an accelerating change environment, then shouldn’t we also be embracing the technologies that increase our cognitive capabilities? How is FB or other social media more cognitively destructive than television, for instance, which is a completely passive technology?
And isn’t it relative? Define “short attention span”. The phrase assumes that time is some constant, and that it should take X amount of time to do Y amount of thinking, but tell that to a server array.
September 9th, 2010 - 07:14
“No single unit of contribution to any project can be greater or better than the brilliance of the smartest human…â€
Maybe so. But there is a limit to how far any group of people can move ahead before the rest starts complaining about inequality and injustice. Once intelligence becomes a commodity constrained by the scarcity of resources, people will demand equal acess to these resources. A super-intelligent god or machine will not be accepted for cultural reasons. That’s my opinion.
September 9th, 2010 - 14:24
Maybe so! It will eventually come to exist, nonetheless.
September 9th, 2010 - 07:29
And to reconnect this statement with the issue at hand, let me add that what we are currently witnessing is a revolution in which the access to information is being equalized. Intelligence, of course, is still largely determined by genes.
September 9th, 2010 - 13:22
“No single unit of contribution to any project can be greater or better than the brilliance of the smartest human…â€
So social psychology operates exactly like psychology? Not so. Groups operate differently than individuals, and when grouped, individuals can make advances based on other’s work. For example, Einstein seeked out general relativity, others figured out M theory based on his research. Or, figuratively, someone talks about orchids, someone else cross-pollinates those biological ideas to product design. Social systems work very differently than individual systems. Social creativity, too.
Intelligence is not determined purely by genes, or purely by environment. Intelligence is determined by millions of factors, all boiling down to “experience” (the synthesis of every biological and environmental factor). What I believe is that we’re all going through a major change in a social system, and it’s just very jarring. That’s the objective perspective.
For my personal opinion on whether it’s a good thing to go through this change…? Well, I think it’s important for society to go through a crucible — to be melted down to it’s most valuable parts.
You’re right, btw. If people read wikipedia instead of watching TV, most conversations would be a lot more interesting (and personalized). Though, at the same time, having personally not watched TV for yeears — and then watching the recent Battlestar Gallactica and Lost series (ok, I’m still watching Lost), I have to say, TV ain’t so bad. There’s a lot of philosophy embedded in the story lines that Wikipedia just doesn’t entertainingly cover.
(Anyway, sincerely enjoy your Blog — thanks for all the quality posts!!!!!)
September 9th, 2010 - 14:23
I’m not saying that people don’t make advances based on each other’s work. Still, building on past work is just another way of making a contribution, and the final product cannot be more brilliant than the human that created it. I’m practically making a tautological point to get people thinking that human intelligence is distinctly human, and better forms of intelligence would be qualitatively different and better.
Everyone always thinks we’re going through a major changes in social systems. People have been writing this for centuries.
Thanks for reading!
September 10th, 2010 - 10:27
“Still, building on past work is just another way of making a contribution, and the final product cannot be more brilliant than the human that created it.”
So if the last step of creating a product is to change the font, this sets a limit on the “brilliance” of the product?
Although each individual step of development might be very small, the final achievement can far exceed the brilliance of any single human contributor.
“I’m practically making a tautological point to get people thinking that human intelligence is distinctly human, and better forms of intelligence would be qualitatively different and better.”
You make an important point. As John Ringo puts it in his Legacy of the Alldenata series, “alien minds are alien”.
However, I interpret “different” as potentially hard to understand, and “better” as more efficient. Neither factor actually excludes humans from eventually reaching the same conclusions as a superintelligence. If all of these systems are Turing complete, they all have access to the same computation space.
I claim that the current mass of humanity and its artifacts is a superintelligence. This intelligence is not human in nature, it doesn’t appear to be entirely rational or cohesive, it probably doesn’t have a consciousness. But it can solve problems more efficiently than any single human, and it appears to be on a track of increasing capability.
September 9th, 2010 - 21:55
Hi Michael,
Long time lurker, first time commenter. I greatly appreciate this blog and your thoughts in general. Excellent job!
From my perspective, Lanier is simply self-anointing himself to be the leader of a movement opposite of Kurzweil and other progressive technologists, in order to get a big following to satisfy his ego and cash in by selling books. I can’t blame him for that, fame and fortune are good things I suppose.
The problem is that his views are limited to a reactionary role and don’t really offer many solutions to problems besides a mundane drone that:
“Technology is in fact not the ultimate and this singularity talk is kinda like a religion. Oh, and this can be a problem.”
As for his saying that technology diminishes humanity and all it’s valued characteristics, I’d like to opine that most humans are not especially intelligent, not especially creative, not especially knowledgeable, etc. Most people are average, by definition, and cannot do extraordinary things when.
Consider creativity as an example (but this could extend to intelligence too). I think there’s a “perception” that the creativity of any one individual is diminished, because technology amplifies any differences in creativity between people and is able to distribute creative work much more widely, efficiently, and with greater volume than before.
For example, the most creative person in a small village a few hundred years ago was seen as the most creative person, period. Nowadays, that same person, who could indeed be the most creative person in some limited geographical area, does not seem to be as creative when compared to the most creative people in the world. This is amplified even further if we consider that there is a greater number of ways to be creative, for example, computer game programming was inconceivable a few decades ago.
I was first aware of Lanier facade of enlightenment and holier-than-thou attitude when he didn’t really make a coherent argument to counter Eliezer Yudkowsky’s arguments, as seen in the following bloggingheads.tv clip. The attitude can be ignored since it is irrelevant, but the lack of a good argument is not.
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/15555
September 10th, 2010 - 21:10
singularityFan, your ad hominum attack on Lanier is just the usual human technique for trying to shut down and wipe out an opposing point of view. So you can cheerfully add yourself to the column of uncreative mundane average drones. (“Lanier just wants to be a big-shot and I don’t like him” is a pretty lame shot as these things go, after all.) But you can congratulate yourself that your huffy contribution has been distributed much more widely, efficiently and with greater volume than it would have been if you’d just mumbled it at the walls of your room, like we all did before facebook and blogs.
BTW, you TV smashers might recall that most of what’s on the social net (and a significant percentage of Wikipedia for that matter) is about TV, movies and celebs.