On his book The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines
Cover Interview of May 20, 2020
A close-up
Many books you buy these days give a story that could have
been presented in three pages, but since nobody buys a three-page book, had to
be expanded to 200. Not this one. There are many angles, and I expect any
readers will resonate with some and not with others.
If you are worried about how technology affects humans, and
about how, in the coronavirus era, we are each becoming a digital persona, you may
want to start with chapter 13 (Pathologies). Science fiction dystopias
routinely portray humans who have succumbed to a War of the Worlds, a takeover
by machines. I present a different view, one that is no less scary, of a more
gradual coevolution, where the humans change along with the machines. In this
view, undesirable outcomes need to be treated as illnesses, not invasions. The
coronavirus is not an invasion, and our struggle against it is not a war. It is
a scientific, medical, and cultural challenge. Our evolution at the hands of
technology is similarly transformative.
If you are hoping for “the singularity” to enable you to
upload your soul to a computer and become immortal, then please skip chapters 8
(Am I Digital?) and 9 (Intelligences). These chapters will pop your balloon.
If you are the sort of person who loves an argument, and you
want to disagree vehemently with my arguments, then please read chapters 2 and
7. They disagree with each other, so you’re sure to find plenty of ammunition
here. Chapter 2 (The Meaning of “Life”) finds ways in which digital
technologies resemble living things. Chapter 7 says that they will never
resemble us because they are made of the wrong stuff. The former borrows
heavily from biology, while the latter borrows from psychology.
If you like a serious intellectual challenge, try chapters
11 (Causes) and 12 (Interaction). These two chapters take a deep dive (too
deep, probably, for this sort of book) into the fundamental question of what it
means to be a first-person self. My goal is to try to understand whether
digital machines can ever achieve that individual reflective identity that we
humans all have. These chapters offer some weighty arguments that if the
machines ever do achieve this, we can never know for sure that they have done
so. Even if the machines fall short of that goal, however, their increasing
interactions with their physical environment (as opposed to just an information
environment) will lead to enormously enhanced capabilities.
Last but not least, Chapter 14 (Coevolution) gathers the
forces of the (sometimes conflicting) prior interpretations into a forceful
argument that humans and technology are coevolving. I point out that recent
developments in the theory of biological evolution show that the sources of biological
mutation are much more complex than Darwin envisioned. The sources of mutation
in technology look more like these newer theories than the random accidents
that Darwin posited. Most important, I argue human culture and technology are
evolving symbiotically and may be nearing a point of obligate symbiosis, where
one cannot live without the other.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
Many books you buy these days give a story that could have been presented in three pages, but since nobody buys a three-page book, had to be expanded to 200. Not this one. There are many angles, and I expect any readers will resonate with some and not with others.
If you are worried about how technology affects humans, and about how, in the coronavirus era, we are each becoming a digital persona, you may want to start with chapter 13 (Pathologies). Science fiction dystopias routinely portray humans who have succumbed to a War of the Worlds, a takeover by machines. I present a different view, one that is no less scary, of a more gradual coevolution, where the humans change along with the machines. In this view, undesirable outcomes need to be treated as illnesses, not invasions. The coronavirus is not an invasion, and our struggle against it is not a war. It is a scientific, medical, and cultural challenge. Our evolution at the hands of technology is similarly transformative.
If you are hoping for “the singularity” to enable you to upload your soul to a computer and become immortal, then please skip chapters 8 (Am I Digital?) and 9 (Intelligences). These chapters will pop your balloon.
If you are the sort of person who loves an argument, and you want to disagree vehemently with my arguments, then please read chapters 2 and 7. They disagree with each other, so you’re sure to find plenty of ammunition here. Chapter 2 (The Meaning of “Life”) finds ways in which digital technologies resemble living things. Chapter 7 says that they will never resemble us because they are made of the wrong stuff. The former borrows heavily from biology, while the latter borrows from psychology.
If you like a serious intellectual challenge, try chapters 11 (Causes) and 12 (Interaction). These two chapters take a deep dive (too deep, probably, for this sort of book) into the fundamental question of what it means to be a first-person self. My goal is to try to understand whether digital machines can ever achieve that individual reflective identity that we humans all have. These chapters offer some weighty arguments that if the machines ever do achieve this, we can never know for sure that they have done so. Even if the machines fall short of that goal, however, their increasing interactions with their physical environment (as opposed to just an information environment) will lead to enormously enhanced capabilities.
Last but not least, Chapter 14 (Coevolution) gathers the forces of the (sometimes conflicting) prior interpretations into a forceful argument that humans and technology are coevolving. I point out that recent developments in the theory of biological evolution show that the sources of biological mutation are much more complex than Darwin envisioned. The sources of mutation in technology look more like these newer theories than the random accidents that Darwin posited. Most important, I argue human culture and technology are evolving symbiotically and may be nearing a point of obligate symbiosis, where one cannot live without the other.