Darwin Among the Machines (43 page)

Von Neumann believed that the fundamental language of the brain is encoded by higher-order statistical relationships between trains of frequency-modulated pulses—just as the elements of music are encoded by the difference between two notes at the same time, or between one note and the next. In the evolution of mind, something like music came first, emerging from a primordial jungle of patterns vying to be exchanged and reproduced. Only later was this wilderness mapped by language into our ordered system of symbols and ideas. Mendelssohn can speak for all of us without words.

Hillis's metaphor of songs and apes can be extended by analogy to the digital universe without implying an artificial music that will sound like music to us. The song of the machine may be inaudible to our ears, invisible to our eyes, and unthinkable to our minds. Nonetheless, a more transparent language may grow in ways impossible to languages that have to be translated many times over in passing between the world of bits and the world of brains. Most evolutionary breakthroughs are the result of adapting abilities developed for something else. One means to bridge the communications disparity between computers and human beings may be to appeal directly to the pulse-frequency coding used within our brains. Instead of adding new layers of language in the attempt to facilitate communication, the breakthrough may come by peeling away the barriers of language to reveal what lies underneath. Music is the layer through which these foundations might be exposed. “A man may frame a Language, consisting only of Tunes and such inarticulate sounds, as no Letters can expresse,” wrote John Wilkins in 1641. “If these inarticulate
sounds be contrived for the expression, not of words and letters, but of things and notions, (as was before explained, concerning the Universall Character) then might there bee such a generall Language, as should be equally speakable, by all peoples and Nations; and so we might be restored from the second generall curse, which is yet manifested, not only in the confusion of writing, but also of speech.”
²⁹

Children, not adults, bring new languages to life. Children learn to speak, read, and write before they learn to type, after which they are able to communicate, at the speed of a nineteenth-century teletypewriter, with one-hundred-megahertz machines. The speed with which young children learn to recognize new language or communicate in sign language shows how artificial a barrier this is. A dangerous imbalance exists, tempting an evolutionary jump that might be too far or too fast for our own good. Human–computer communication made its greatest advance in recent history via the mouse—allowing the user to do nothing more than point and click. By means of one constricted channel of communication, the mouse opened windows by which the entire computational ecology was transformed. For good or evil, natural selection now favors machines better able to communicate with children, and children better able to communicate with machines. The desktop light-guns from which today's mice descended first appeared in large numbers among the SAGE system users forty years ago. The pace has quickened ever since.

If all goes well, our children will be linked ever more closely to the myriad ganglia embedded in their lives, while remaining members of the human race. In the distant future, they may look back on us as children and wonder how, before symbiosis with telepathic machines, it was possible for us to communicate, or even think. But things could just as easily go the other way. “Evolution will take its course. And that course has generally been downwards,” J. B. S. Haldane warned in 1928. “The majority of species have degenerated and become extinct, or, what is perhaps worse, gradually lost many of their functions. The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence.”
³⁰
The choice is up to us. Erewhon is Nowhere, Samuel Butler warned. There is no turning back the clock.

Garet Garrett (1878–1954) published his pocket-sized but deeply cautionary book,
Ouroboros; or, the Mechanical Extension of Mankind
, in 1926. In the second chapter, titled “The Machine as If,” he noted that “Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of
life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow.”
³¹
Garrett found it ominous that only half the world's population was still concerned with producing food: “The new, non-agricultural half is the industrial part; it is the part that serves machines.”
³²
Ouroboros was a mythical serpent that swallowed its own tail, an embodied contradiction that must, according to logic, either grow ever larger on its miraculous diet or, just as miraculously, consume itself and cease to exist.

Garrett saw machines as creations of the human mind, mindlessly unleashed. “The machine was not. He reached his mind into emptiness and seized it. Even yet he cannot realize what he has done. Out of the free elemental stuff of the universe, visible and invisible, some of it imponderable, such as lightning, he has invented a class of typhonic, mindless organisms, exempt from the will of nature.”
³³
Is the diffusion of intelligence among machines any more or less frightening? Would we rather share our world with mindless or minded machines? Garrett saw the growth of technology as an irredeemably selfish process, with “no hope of its being reformed ideally by mass intelligence.” The only hope, in his analysis, lay in “a very curious suggestion that organisms now existing together in a state of permanent symbiotic union were once parasitic and learned better.”
³⁴
He concluded with a warning that deserves to guide us today: “In any light, man's further task is Jovian. That is to learn how best to live with these powerful creatures of his mind, how to give their fecundity a law and their functions a rhythm, how not to employ them in error against himself.”
³⁵

Leviathan and Ouroboros were fellow mythological creatures: one whose power encompassed everything, the other that succeeded in swallowing itself. Technology has brought both Ouroboros and Leviathan to life. Is the diffuse mentality taking shape around us something new, or is it an ancient intelligence now awakened by speeding things up? Nature has always operated intelligently, but this intelligence has been perceived as either large and slow, as in evolution, or small and fast, as in quantum mechanics, leaving us alone on middle ground. “Does it not appear from Phaenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent,” asked Isaac Newton at the conclusion of his
Opticks
, “who in infinite Space, as it were by his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and throughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself?”
³⁶
Newton's God was incorporeal, as Hobbes's God was corporeal, and perhaps both these Gods are necessary, mirroring in their symbiosis the symbiosis between the songs and the apes.

Things have a way of surprising us. At the beginning of the twentieth century David Hilbert sought to establish the completeness of mathematics and instead precipitated the realization that the extent of mathematical truth can never be systematically confined. Evolutionists, who appeared to have dislodged mind and intelligence, are discovering that evolution is an intelligent process and intelligence an evolutionary process, rendering the separation less distinct. Technology, hailed as the means of bringing nature under the control of our intelligence, is enabling nature to exercise intelligence over us.

We have mapped, tamed, and dismembered the physical wilderness of our earth. But, at the same time, we have created a digital wilderness whose evolution may embody a collective wisdom greater than our own. No digital universe can ever be completely mapped. We have traded one jungle for another, and in this direction lies not fear but hope. For our destiny and our sanity as human beings depend on our ability to serve a nature whose intelligence we can glimpse all around us, but never quite comprehend.

Not in wilderness, but “in Wildness,” wrote an often misquoted Henry David Thoreau, “is the preservation of the world.”
³⁷

Epigraph: Philip Morrison, “Interstellar Communication,” in A. G. W. Cameron, ed.,
Interstellar Communication: A Collection of Reprints and Original Contributions
(New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1963), 253.

1
.
Freeman J. Dyson,
Origins of Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

2
.
Verena Huber-Dyson,
Gödel's Theorems: A Workbook on Formalization
(Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1991).

1
.
Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill
(London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), 1.

2
.
Ibid., 1.

3
.
Alexander Ross, epistle dedicatory to
Leviathan drawn out with a hook; or. Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbs, his Leviathan
(London: Richard Royston, 1653).

4
.
“The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford Past in their Convocation,” 1683; in Samuel Mintz,
The Hunting of Leviathan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 61–62.

5
.
Hobbes,
Leviathan
, 1.

6
.
Ibid., 3.

7
.
Ibid., 371.

8
.
Ibid., 371–373.

9
.
Thomas Hobbes, in René Descartes,
Six Metaphysical Meditations; Wherein it is Proved that there is a God. And that Mans Mind is really distinct from his Body
(London: Benjamin Tooke, 1680), 119–120.

10
.
Ibid., 126–127.

11
.
Ross, epistle dedicatory to
Leviathan drawn out with a hook
.

12
.
Thomas Hobbes, as quoted in Isaac Disraeli,
Quarrels of Authors
(London: John Murray, 1814), 37.

13
.
Disraeli,
Quarrels of Authors
, 42.

14
.
Thomas Hobbes, 1662,
Considerations upon the Reputation, loyalty, Manners, & Religion, of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury, written by himself, by way of Letter to a Learned Person
(London: William Crooke, 1680), 32.

15
.
Thomas Hobbes to Cosimo de' Medici, 6 August 1669, in Noel Malcolm, ed.,
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes
, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 711.

16
.
Samuel Pepys, 3 September 1668,
Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys
, F.R.S.,
Deciphered by Rev. J. Smith, A.M. from the original shorthand MS
, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: John D. Morris, 1890), 16.

17
.
John Aubrey, in
Aubrey's Brief Lives: Edited from the Original Manuscripts and with a Life of John Aubrey by Oliver Lawson Dick
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949), 151.

18
.
Ibid., 156.

19
.
Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer,
Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 344.

20
.
André-Marie Ampère,
Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, ou Exposition analytique d'une classification naturelle de toutes les connaissances humaines
, 2 vols. (Paris: Bachelier, 1834–1843).

21
.
Ibid., vol. 2, 141. (Author's translation).

22
.
Norbert Wiener,
Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(New York: John Wiley, 1948), 19.

23
.
Thomas Hobbes,
Elements of Philosophy: The first section, Concerning Body
(London: Andrew Crooke, 1656), 2–3.

24
.
Marvin Minsky, “Why People Think Computers Can't,”
Technology Review
(November–December 1983): 64–70.

25
.
“Worldwide Semiconductor Unit Shipments,” graph attributed to Integrated Circuit Engineering Corp., in
Standard & Poor's Industry Surveys: Electronics
(New York: Standard & Poor's Corp.), 3 August 1995, E25.

26
.
“Worldwide Demand for Silicon,” graph attributed to Dataquest, Inc., in
Electronic Business Today
22, no. 5 (May 1996): 39.