You're not a gadget

books/sociedade/youre-not-a-gadget.mdwn

+[[!meta title="You're not a Gadget"]]
+
+## Information Doesn’t Deserve to Be Free
+
+    “Information wants to be free.” So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder
+    of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.
+    
+    I say that information doesn’t deserve to be free.
+    
+    Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its
+    own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it’s
+    even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans
+    are real, and information is not?
+    
+    Of course, there is a technical use of the term “information” that refers to
+    something entirely real. This is the kind of information that’s related to
+    entropy. But that fundamental kind of information, which exists independently
+    of the culture of an observer, is not the same as the kind we can put in
+    computers, the kind that supposedly wants to be free.
+    
+    Information is alienated experience.
+    
+    You can think of culturally decodable information as a potential form of
+    experience, very much as you can think of a brick resting on a ledge as storing
+    potential energy. When the brick is prodded to fall, the energy is revealed.
+    That is only possible because it was lifted into place at some point in the
+    past.
+    
+    In the same way, stored information might cause experience to be revealed if it
+    is prodded in the right way. A file on a hard disk does indeed contain
+    information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are
+    discernible instead of being scrambled into mush—the way heat scrambles
+    things—is what makes them bits.
+    
+    But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so
+    if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted
+    between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only
+    process that can de-alienate information.
+    
+    Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a
+    shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it
+    doesn’t get what it wants.
+    
+    But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope
+    God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become
+    immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe
+    information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign
+    human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the
+    perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in
+    your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to
+    reinforce your faith.
+
+## The Apple Falls Again
+
+    It’s a mistake with a remarkable origin. Alan Turing articulated it, just
+    before his suicide.
+    
+    Turing’s suicide is a touchy subject in computer science circles. There’s an
+    aversion to talking about it much, because we don’t want our founding father to
+    seem like a tabloid celebrity, and we don’t want his memory trivialized by the
+    sensational aspects of his death.
+    
+    The legacy of Turing the mathematician rises above any possible sensationalism.
+    His contributions were supremely elegant and foundational. He gifted us with
+    wild leaps of invention, including much of the mathematical underpinnings of
+    digital computation. The highest award in computer science, our Nobel Prize, is
+    named in his honor.
+    
+    Turing the cultural figure must be acknowledged, however. The first thing to
+    understand is that he was one of the great heroes of World War II. He was the
+    first “cracker,” a person who uses computers to defeat an enemy’s security
+    measures. He applied one of the first computers to break a Nazi secret code,
+    called Enigma, which Nazi mathematicians had believed was unbreakable. Enigma
+    was decoded by the Nazis in the field using a mechanical device about the size
+    of a cigar box. Turing reconceived it as a pattern of bits that could be
+    analyzed in a computer, and cracked it wide open. Who knows what world we would
+    be living in today if Turing had not succeeded?
+    
+    The second thing to know about Turing is that he was gay at a time when it was
+    illegal to be gay. British authorities, thinking they were doing the most
+    compassionate thing, coerced him into a quack medical treatment that was
+    supposed to correct his homosexuality. It consisted, bizarrely, of massive
+    infusions of female hormones.
+    
+    In order to understand how someone could have come up with that plan, you have
+    to remember that before computers came along, the steam engine was a preferred
+    metaphor for understanding human nature. All that sexual pressure was building
+    up and causing the machine to malfunction, so the opposite essence, the female
+    kind, ought to balance it out and reduce the pressure. This story should serve
+    as a cautionary tale. The common use of computers, as we understand them today,
+    as sources for models and metaphors of ourselves is probably about as reliable
+    as the use of the steam engine was back then.
+    
+    Turing developed breasts and other female characteristics and became terribly
+    depressed. He committed suicide by lacing an apple with cyanide in his lab and
+    eating it. Shortly before his death, he presented the world with a spiritual
+    idea, which must be evaluated separately from his technical achievements. This
+    is the famous Turing test. It is extremely rare for a genuinely new spiritual
+    idea to appear, and it is yet another example of Turing’s genius that he came
+    up with one.
+    
+    Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on
+    a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked
+    to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back
+    and forth.
+    
+    Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man?
+    If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?
+    
+    It’s impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the
+    time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of
+    the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the
+    war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of
+    strange creatures.
+    
+    When Turing died, software was still in such an early state that no one knew
+    what a mess it would inevitably become as it grew. Turing imagined a pristine,
+    crystalline form of existence in the digital realm, and I can imagine it might
+    have been a comfort to imagine a form of life apart from the torments of the
+    body and the politics of sexuality. It’s notable that it is the woman who is
+    replaced by the computer, and that Turing’s suicide echoes Eve’s fall.
+
+    [...]
+
+    But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten
+    smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a
+    degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a
+    simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let
+    your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
+
+    People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
+    Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that
+    could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach
+    to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have
+    repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards
+    to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a
+    machine is ambiguous.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which
+    knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the
+    text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way
+    and present many of the same problems.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Or it might turn out that a distinction will forever be based on principles we
+    cannot manipulate. This might involve types of computation that are unique to
+    the physical brain, maybe relying on forms of causation that depend on
+    remarkable and nonreplicable physical conditions. Or it might involve software
+    that could only be created by the long-term work of evolution, which cannot be
+    reverse-engineered or mucked with in any accessible way. Or it might even
+    involve the prospect, dreaded by some, of dualism, a reality for consciousness
+    as apart from mechanism.