Machines of Loving Grace
Posted by Jeriaska on October 12th, 2007
Paul Saffo is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He teaches at Stanford University and is on a research sabbatical from Institute for the Future, where he has worked since 1985. He was the founding Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation, the Singapore National Research Foundation Science Advisory Board and is an Advisor to Red Planet Capital, and 3i Venture Capital.
At the 2007 Singularity Summit hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he took a moment to look back from our present vantage point at visions of AI from previous decades. Just as William Gibson imagined cyberspace in a way that shaped the 1990s Internet revolution, a poet named Richard Brautigan writing in San Francisco almost exactly 40 years ago penned his model for what a world of advanced AI should be.
The following transcript of Paul Saffo’s Singularity Summit presentation “Machines of Loving Grace: Envisioning Advanced AI” has not been approved by the author. An audio version of the talk is available at the Singularity Institute website.
Machines of Loving Grace
I’m going to talk a little less about the future and a little bit more about the present and something I think that must be done. Now, some context. Quite obviously, we can hear the Doppler whistle of approaching AGI. It has the smell of inevitability, but it also has a high level of uncertainty. I’ve been a forecaster for a couple of decades and I know there are two kinds of uncertainty that happen. One is uncertainty because of bad forecasting. However, there is a second type of uncertainty and that is intrinsic uncertainty, where things are arriving, but they are still very plastic and still very protean, and you ask yourself, are the factors that are going to cause this thing to eventually arrive, is the weight of them mostly behind us or mostly in front of us? While I think there is lots behind and there’s lots of history in this field, this is a moment where the uncertainty is coming because of the stuff that has yet to happen.
What’s interesting about that is I think we’re at the moment here of a hand-off. It happens with all technology evolution. Neil and I have known each other for many years. Our first encounter was when I was playing a very small role in the engine room of the infant AI industry, trying to commercialize it. There’s a famous quote by Don Rickles. He said he’d been in TV so long, he’d been in it since it was radio. Well, this room is full of people like that who have been in this business. There’s lots going on. But it ends up being a very obscure area, only professionals touch it, and then as it succeeds, it seeps into popular culture, until we reach a point at which there’s a hand-off. The inventors and the scientists and the innovators hand-off the field to popular culture. From that point onwards, it’s an interaction between popular culture and invention that makes things happen.
We of course we know that inventors swim in a sea of culture, no matter how reclusive they are. For the last hundred years or so, there are plenty of examples. A wildly disproportionate number of scientists on the Manhattan project were influenced in their youth by H.G. Wells writing about superbombs. And not just the original Mercury astronauts, but most of the scientists working on the space program were raised being steeped in space opera and Buck Rogers, and the like. And then famously, the last decade was really, if you had to think of something that organized the whole dot com thingy, it was the publication of a book in 1984 called Neuromancer by Bill Gibson. And that’s an especially important example, which I’ll come back to, because of course the important thing about Bill is that he had many talents, but “computer scientist” was not one of them. He typed that on an old fashioned typewriter. He had that instinct of novelists and poets who swim in a space, they hear all the same things we hear, but they interpret it differently. Of Bill’s many talents, his was to look at these words like “interface,” all these computer geek terms that were either utilitarian to the professionals or obscure to outsiders, and he said, “That’s a really beautiful word, ‘interface.’ What does that mean?” That’s how we got Neuromancer.
Well, this is the point where the public is about to join in in this whole discussion. And the press coverage of this conference is proof. You should prepare yourselves, because you are going to get a lot more questions from people after you go home and you go back to work. So, that’s the good news. The public is joining in. The bad news is, the public’s joining in at a moment when pessimism is the new black. End-ism is in. It’s the end of the world. One of the best selling-books this summer, the summer read on the beach, is The World Without Us. It’s actually a marvelous book. The SETI program that’s been going on for decades, I’m part of a small group that, I admit we’re paranoid, are actually saying, and it’s ironic, “You know, it might not be a really good idea to start sending radio messages out into space. Because maybe they’re not friendly.” Or as my mother would say when I was a child, “There are some times when children should be very small and very quiet.”
What we have had so far with the discussions surrounding the Singularity, we’ve had novels and things written, but it’s mostly by computer scientists. It tends toward the lurid or the really pessimistic. I mean, The Matrix is not a happy description of a future. I’ll admit I also in this area of AGI am partly responsible for spreading trouble when I passed around the observation that, well, when AGI finally arrives, the optimistic scenario is that they’ll treat us like pets, and the pessimistic scenario is that they’ll treat us like food. What’s missing from all of this is a positive, compelling vision out of popular culture that ordinary people can buy into. I actually went back and I tried to find one that wasn’t written by a computer scientist, and I was astounded because I had to look back 40 years. In fact, it will be exactly 40 years in just a month. October 1967. And it was a little collection of poems written by a poet named Richard Brautigan. It’s interesting. Just for a moment, put yourself into October 1967. What had just happened? The Summer of Love. The Vietnam War was in full swing. It was also a period of pessimism. If you had said “computer” to most of the people in San Francisco at the time, they would have instantly shot back with, “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” It was a very negative view of computers. Yet Richard Brautigan wrote a very, very positive poem.
One other detail before I show you the poem, he also anticipated a lot about today. If you read the permission sheet, it looks like creative commons to me. “Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines, books, and newspapers if they are given away free.” He didn’t include computers or powerpoint, but I inferred that he probably included them. And what I particularly love about my copy – there are 1500 copies of this printed and handed out for free. It was done on a mimeograph machine, and the copy that happened to end up in my possession had the quintessential 1967 inscription:
Happy birthday, Tinkerbell!
- Peter Pan
Pure, pure, pure 1960′s stuff. But I think you’ll see here, I want to show you the poem and I want to read it. Close your eyes and listen as I read this.
I like to think (and the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossomsI like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
I think that’s a wonderful thought. Now, it is a shame that Brautigan passed away in 1972. He would have been 72 years-old today. But I think we can take a lesson from this. On your to-do list that you are writing down during this conference, of course talk to the engineers and the software programmers and the venture capitalists, and worry about the social issues and the like. But here’s what we need. We need more poets, we need more novelists, to explore this field. And by “novelists” I don’t mean moonlighting computer scientists. I mean non-professionals, people like Bill Gibson, who are unconstrained by preoccupations about what this stuff is, and can think freely about what it could be.
So, if you want advanced AGI and the Singularity to arrive sooner, and more importantly, in the shape that you think it should be, rather than the shape that you hope it will not be, my advice is when you go home, find some poets and novelists and whisper in their ears about this stuff. Thank you.
