Against: Man Vs Machine
July 30th 2007 10:28
Ok so I mentioned in a few previous posts why I think it is misleading to look at the future through the paradigm of man vs machine but I didn't explain why, so here's an attempted explanation.
In biological evolution it is often very easy to see evolutionary relationships as competition, zero sum games, with opposing sides, one of which prevails at the cost of the other. There are many examples of this. But if you delve deeper into these relationships you find that it is really a symbiotic relationship, one of mutual dependence. Take the preditor/prey relationship for example, it seems one of competition at first glance but really, this is just the case when it comes to individuals when you look at the species over time, the preditor and the prey are working together in order to find a balance which will guarantee the survival of both, if the preditor kills too many, it will destroy its own food source, and eventually itself. There are other cases which are more straightforward cases of symbiosys, the variety of microorganisms which call our bodies their home for example, even mitochindria are though by many to be bacteria which joined up with our cells at some early point.
But in the evolution of ideas, relationships are even more characterised as working together rather than against each other, take the classic model of the dialectic, any two ideas which appear to be in opposition will eventually be combined to form a higher idea.
I think that technology is the tangible aspect of our ideas, technology is ideas reified. This is kind of hard to explain, but perhaps a metaphor will help. In Kinds of Minds Dennett talks about offloading mental work into the world. So if you had to look through 100 boxes to see which one you left your keys in, you wouldn't just go around checking them randomly simply trying to remember which ones you already checked. Instead you would outsource that remembering externally and put the checked boxes into a seperate pile, or make some kind of mark on the boxes you've checked. By doing this outsourcing of mental activities into the external world we can greatly increase our mental abilities. This is one way of looking at technology, of course the other aspect of technology is to enhance our physical capabilities. But in this way, technology is our ideas reified, made concrete.
Therefore technological evolution, which I said in a previous post can be seen as the evolution of an independent entity, can be thought of as memetic evolution.
Anyways, there is a really concrete and obvious way in which our evolutionary future is not a binary opposition with machines. That is because they are an extension of us. Furthermore, we will be integrating ourselves with our technology. So, when we talk about AI, we shouldn't think of it like in terminator as a whole bunch of smart robots doing their own thing, the AI will be in our own brain, it will be us. It kind of will be like coming full circle, because we initially externalised our ideas to help us do our thinking better, and we called it technology and evolved it/let it evolve and now it has become sophisticated enough to be re-integrated into our bodies. Many will fear this, many will choose not to be part of the next stage in evolution. But anyone who so chooses can come along for the ride!
In biological evolution it is often very easy to see evolutionary relationships as competition, zero sum games, with opposing sides, one of which prevails at the cost of the other. There are many examples of this. But if you delve deeper into these relationships you find that it is really a symbiotic relationship, one of mutual dependence. Take the preditor/prey relationship for example, it seems one of competition at first glance but really, this is just the case when it comes to individuals when you look at the species over time, the preditor and the prey are working together in order to find a balance which will guarantee the survival of both, if the preditor kills too many, it will destroy its own food source, and eventually itself. There are other cases which are more straightforward cases of symbiosys, the variety of microorganisms which call our bodies their home for example, even mitochindria are though by many to be bacteria which joined up with our cells at some early point.
But in the evolution of ideas, relationships are even more characterised as working together rather than against each other, take the classic model of the dialectic, any two ideas which appear to be in opposition will eventually be combined to form a higher idea.
I think that technology is the tangible aspect of our ideas, technology is ideas reified. This is kind of hard to explain, but perhaps a metaphor will help. In Kinds of Minds Dennett talks about offloading mental work into the world. So if you had to look through 100 boxes to see which one you left your keys in, you wouldn't just go around checking them randomly simply trying to remember which ones you already checked. Instead you would outsource that remembering externally and put the checked boxes into a seperate pile, or make some kind of mark on the boxes you've checked. By doing this outsourcing of mental activities into the external world we can greatly increase our mental abilities. This is one way of looking at technology, of course the other aspect of technology is to enhance our physical capabilities. But in this way, technology is our ideas reified, made concrete.
Therefore technological evolution, which I said in a previous post can be seen as the evolution of an independent entity, can be thought of as memetic evolution.
Anyways, there is a really concrete and obvious way in which our evolutionary future is not a binary opposition with machines. That is because they are an extension of us. Furthermore, we will be integrating ourselves with our technology. So, when we talk about AI, we shouldn't think of it like in terminator as a whole bunch of smart robots doing their own thing, the AI will be in our own brain, it will be us. It kind of will be like coming full circle, because we initially externalised our ideas to help us do our thinking better, and we called it technology and evolved it/let it evolve and now it has become sophisticated enough to be re-integrated into our bodies. Many will fear this, many will choose not to be part of the next stage in evolution. But anyone who so chooses can come along for the ride!
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Comment by Timothy Powell
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