Deepthought 42: Life, the Universe, and Everything
Throwback Thursday
This is the third of a trilogy of posts I wrote over a decade ago about technology and humanity. Last week’s post on the economic effects of technology was Deep Thought 7: When the Machines Rule. The first post was Deep Thought 6: The Mind in the Machine.
The first post looked at the economic effects of technology. The second post looks at the broader social and political effects. This last post bends philosophical.
I’ll put footnotes on specific points where items I cited did not really hold up. At the end I’ll post a coda revisiting the main themes.
Finally, I’ll explain the origin of the title (if you haven’t already guessed).
Also, there are no vice presidents in this post, but tomorrow you’ll get your Veeply Roundup!
Deep Thought 42: Life, the Universe and Everything
Last year around this time, I wrote about how computers are getting smarter and how that would lead to enormous prosperity, but it would also reduce the need for people. If computers can drive and perform a huge number of tasks usually done by people, what would be left for people to do?
Compared to scrabbling around for bare necessities – which was the lot of nearly all people for most of human history – this doesn’t seem like a problem. But without a purpose, people would lead idle lives. I envisioned a dystopia much like a huge welfare colony, where everyone has just enough to get by, but no one has much to do so they pursue hobbies like hooliganism. (Alternately, we’d all become professional hobbyists, working at what we loved.)
I expect the conclusion is somewhere in the middle, life overall will get more comfortable. Perhaps something will be lost as life becomes softer and smoother. Too quote Woody Allen, “The heart wants what the heart wants.”1 The stakes may become lower, but people will still be caught in difficult, painful situations and must muddle through. Passions will trump reason at awkward times and tussle, as they have since humanity arose.
The scale of changes being made in the human condition is awesome and unparalleled in our history. Something huge is afoot.2
A few years ago (while going through some pretty serious personal stuff – a subject for another time), I read Martin Amis’ Night Train. I like British novelists, with their crisp use of the language and social backdrop that is intelligible – but just alien enough to give me pause. Night Train turned out to be a police procedural set in the United States – not what I wanted. But it grabbed me. Jennifer Rockwell, a beautiful and brilliant young astronomer had committed suicide. Her police brass father could not accept this and had one of his best detectives investigate. She interviewed the dead woman’s boss, a world renowned astronomer. Describing their work, trying understand the scale and nature of the universe, he admitted:
The truth is, Detective, the truth is that human beings are not sufficiently evolved to understand the place they’re living in. We’re all r*****s. Einstein’s a r*****. I’m a r*****.
We live on a planet of r*****s.3
Amis’ book was written in 1998. In the relatively modest span of time since
then we have seen astounding leaps in computational capabilities – capabilities that are only increasing. Predictions are that relatively soon all the computational power in the world will match that of a single human brain, but it is not so far in the future after this that computing power will exceed the computing power of all the human brains in existence.4
I don’t want to argue that we are close to all the answers. But we are building powerful tools to ask and at least attempt to answer these questions. But will we understand the answers? What will be our place in this vast computing architecture?
Amis’ astronomer says:
Jennifer asked me: Why was it Hawking who cracked black holes? I mean, in the Sixties everybody was going at black holes hammer and tongs. But it was Stephen who gave us some answers. She said, “Why him?” And I gave the physicist’s answer: Because he’s the smartest guy around. But Jennifer wanted me to consider an explanation that was more--romantic. She said: Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.
Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul is often referred to by its Latin title, De Anima, meaning that which animates. If we are building some sort of massive hive mind that can contemplate to the edges of the universe, we are what moves it. The same wonder and awe that led us to build Stonehenge and the pyramids has led us to this as well. If we are building this massive hive mind, we may not understand it (does a cell in our body understand the enormous, marvelous thing of which it is part?)
But we will remain essential, we are what sets it into motion – we will be the soul.
Coda
What I have written here has a Fukuyama “end of history” vibe that has not proven true. We seem to be creating more history than we can use. That could be presentism, and as Fukuyama recognized and I wrote, people are messy and will always make some kinds of trouble. It will hopefully be at a lower volume than our current time of mass upheaval and major wars.
Still, I think there is something to what I have written here. We are developing powerful new tools. That is what AI and robots are, they are tools. But they are essential ones. Great musicians require high-quality instruments, which are uniquely crafted. The instrument may be created for a specific musician, but it has its own personality and shapes the musician. The instrument may live on past its initial player and form future musicians (and indirectly their partners.) Painters get obsessive about their brushes and other tools of the trade. As a writing, I mostly just need a laptop, but I get excited about notebooks and pens.
AI isn’t just one thing, as the computer scientist Arvind Naraynan has observed. It is an array of computational capabilities that do all kinds of things. Some of those things might advance progress—enabling scientific advancement and better application of resources. Hopefully, they will free us to be more human.
But freedom for what? To be the best people we can be. Here I return to Aristotle, who describes pleasure as those things which we do as an end in and of themselves—not for any further purpose. For Aristotle, the highest form of pleasure was in contemplation, wisdom, and I would add, awe and wonder.
Marrying our emerging technological capabilities with our increased leisure, we can better study and contemplate the universe and our place within it. For some this will be religious, but the science and religion will meet. We may solve some mysteries, but there will be more, many, many more.
It’s turtles all the way down…
I began this series with a picture of the Giorgio de Chirico painting, The Jewish Angel, in which the presence of a sort of eye gives a pile of stuff a sort of life. De Chirico believed the eye was central to our being (perhaps a conception of the soul). The quote from the Amis novel mentions Hawking being able to “see,” stare into the black hole. I personally don’t see our computers becoming an independent thinking mind. We are the ones that see the mystery and seek to explore it. Will we find the answers? Some, but new questions will reveal themselves. Here I quote Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, from the Meno:
But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know;-that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.
And the titles…
The titles came from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’ BBC science fiction comedy radio show that became a novel. Adams wrote a series of sequels, all funny. In the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we learn that the Earth was a supercomputer called “Deep Thought” built by an alien species that wanted to know the answer to “life, the universe, and everything.” After eons of calculating, the Deep Thought’s answer is, “42.”
Oof. Sorry this is here at all. It is both a non-sequitur and a statement made in a very creepy context. No idea what I was thinking when I included it in the original.
I got caught up in the hyperbole. Is what we’re going through now bigger than developing spoken or written language, mastering fire, the printing press, establishing currency? But yes, humanity is going through some big stuff now, and it’s all happening very fast.
Just quoting Martin Amis here, from a novel written almost 30 years ago. Pretty sure he’d use different words today.
This is an overstatement. Advances in compute are amazing, no question. But, just as we should be humbled in our efforts to grasp the universe, the same goes for brains. Human brains are unbelievably complex with 86 billion neurons. Neuroscientists study worms with brains of 188 neurons, and struggle with their complexity.