Darwin Among the Machines (40 page)

Most of the time, despite the perception of being inundated with information, we will remain out of the loop. Human beings have only limited time and ability to communicate: you can watch television, check your E-mail, and talk on your cellular phone at the same time, but that's the limit. We are now the bottleneck—able to absorb a limited amount of information while producing even less, from the point of view of machines. While a person types full speed, the average microprocessor goes through millions of cycles between one keystroke and the next. This difference is what keeps humans human, and machines machines. “If we were ever to put all our brains together in fact, to make a common mind the way the ants do,” warned Lewis Thomas, “it would be an unthinkable thought, way above our heads.”
³¹

Distributed intelligence, or composite mind, is a nebulous idea. On the other hand, we do not know of any intelligence that is
not
distributed, or any mind that is
not
composite. Carrying these concepts back toward the dawn of time, Olaf Stapledon left an unpublished, early draft of
Star Maker
, in which he speculated on the development of mind among the first, nebulous pregalactic structures in the universe, an exercise in imagination that might help us in understanding the nebulous predicament of any ultraintelligent machines—wired or wireless—that might be developing here on earth.

“To understand the mentality of the nebulae,” wrote Stapledon, “one must bear in mind three facts which make them differ through and through from human beings. They do not succeed one another in generations; they are not constrained by economic necessity; the great majority of them have reached maturity in ignorance of other minds. . . . With the nebulae there is no distinction between the growth of individuals and the evolution of the race. The life and memory of each nebula reaches back to the racial dawn. . . . The nebulae are in a sense ‘nearer to God' than any man can ever be.”
³²

Microprocessors, like neurons—quiet in death, or coma, but not in sleep—stay constantly on the alert. Unlike us, they have unlimited memory, and unlimited time, to fill. Hard-disk storage now costs less than ten cents a megabyte, and as fast as things are being stored, at the risk of being buried forever, more efficient methods are being evolved, so that they can be retrieved. Does this herald, as H. G. Wells predicted, a global consciousness? Maybe, or maybe not, but one thing is certain—global unconsciousness comes first.

“So perfectly organized was the life of the minded swarm that all routine activities of industry and agriculture had become, from the point of view of the swarm's mind, unconscious, like the digestive processes of a human being,” wrote Olaf Stapledon, describing the minute, electromagnetically linked creatures inhabiting one of
Star Maker
's plurality of worlds: a massive planet where extreme gravity—and the absence of oceans—prevented the development of creatures able to support large brains. “The little insectoid units themselves carried on these operations consciously, though without understanding their significance; but the mind of the swarm had lost the power of attending to them. Its concern was almost wholly with such activities as called for unified conscious control.”
³³

Until we understand our own consciousness, there is no way to agree on what, if anything, constitutes consciousness among machines. The subject leads us into nonfalsifiable hypotheses, where the scientific method comes to an end. Three results are possible, given any supposedly conscious machine. Either the machine says, “Yes, I am conscious,” or it says, “No, I am not conscious,” or it says nothing at all. Which are we to believe? All we can do at this point is use our imaginations. And in this Olaf Stapledon was sixty years ahead. “Within the minded group, the insectoid units were forever dying off and giving place to fresh units,” Stapledon explained, “but the mind of the group was potentially immortal.”
³⁴
This is true of all large, enduring communications networks—whether the nodes are as inscrutable as neurons, as intelligent as human beings, or as dumb as microprocessors that sit on lampposts bouncing messages around and not doing much of anything else.

S
ince the dawn of technology humans have endowed artifacts with mind. In our collective imagination, inhabited by objects, animals, and now machines, mind has rarely been held as an exclusively human preserve. Mind has prevailed until recently as a quality distributed among all things, captured one lifetime at a time and then returned. Human language and memory have extended our possession of this instant so that most of us now live deeply embedded within the extended moment that our consciousness and culture represent. Only our designated prophets bring back something from the edge. “About ourselves there always lingers a penumbral rainbow . . . which can be dissected from no single brain,” wrote Loren Eiseley in 1970. “Something, the rainbow dancing before his eyes, the word uttered by the cave fire at evening, eludes us and runs onward. It is gone when we come with our spades upon the cold ashes of the campfire four hundred thousand years removed.”
²

In our various mythologies we have toyed with the prospect of mechanical intelligence, as childhood playthings anticipate the use of tools. In medieval times an Arabic fable, drifting through the centuries, became attached to the pope Silvester II, a man of great
mathematical and mechanical abilities who died in the year 1003. Silvester, or Gerbert as he was known before being elevated to pope in the year 999, helped to introduce Arabic numerals and arithmetic into Europe, and, as reported by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, “he gave rules which are scarcely understood even by laborious computers.”
³
He led the famous school at Reims, helped to secure tenure for research among the universities, and constructed mathematical instruments, a steam-driven organ, and mechanical clocks. He was rumored, sometimes darkly, to have invoked intelligence among things not born but built. According to William of Malmesbury, Silvester constructed a speaking head, which “spake not unless spoken to, but then pronounced the truth, either in the affirmative or the negative.”
⁴
Delivering but one bit of information at a time, this oracle communicated with utmost economy and was always right.

In the thirteenth century this fable descended to Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1292), an English scholar whose encyclopedic tastes reached beyond astrology and alchemy to embrace sciences far ahead of his time. Said to have been imprisoned for fifteen years by his own Franciscan brothers for the novelty of his ideas, he became known as Doctor Mirabilis, though without a shred of evidence that he ever had anything to do with a speaking mechanical head. But the legend stuck, imprinted first by the anonymous
Famous History of Frier Bacon
and deepened in the sixteenth century by
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
(1594), a play by Robert Greene. As the story goes, Bacon undertook to preserve England against conquest, and provide himself with everlasting fame, by constructing a wall of brass about the entire country, which, his studies indicated, could be achieved by enlisting the intelligence of a brazen head.

“To this purpose he got one Frier Bungey to assist him,” it is explained, “who was a great scholar and a Magician, (but not to compare to Frier Bacon) these two with great study and pains so framed a head of Brass, that in the inward parts thereof there was all things like as in a natural man's head: this being done, they were as far from perfection of the work as they were before, for they knew not how to give those parts that they had made, motion, without which it was impossible that it should speak: many books they read, but yet could not find out any hope of what they sought, that at the last they concluded to raise a spirit, and to know of him that which they could not attain to by their own studies.”
⁵

Repairing to a nearby wood, they raised a reluctant, uncooperative “Devil” who, under pain of certain unpleasantries, disclosed the
required formula, but refused to specify the length of time it would take for the process to take effect. “If they heard it not before it had done speaking,” they were warned, “all their labour should be lost.” Bacon and Bungey followed the devil's instructions exactly and waited three weeks, with no results. Then Bacon assigned his servant Miles to keep a close watch on the brass head so the two magicians could take a nap.

Miles amused himself with a pipe, song, and drum while his master slept, and then “at last, after some noise the head spake these two words, T
IME
I
S
. Miles hearing it to speak no more, thought his Master would be angry if he waked him for that, and therefore he let them both sleep, and began to mock the head in this manner: Thou Brazen-faced head, hath my Master took all this pains about thee, and now dost thou requite him with two words, T
IME
I
S
: had he watched with a lawyer as long as he hath watched with thee, he would have given him more, and better words then thou hast yet, if thou canst speak no wiser, they shall sleep till dooms day for me.”
⁶

Miles kept mocking the brass head: “Do you tell us Copper-nose, when T
IME
I
S
? I hope we Scholars know our times, when to drink, when to kiss our hostess, when to go on her score, and when to pay it, that time comes seldom,” and so on. After half an hour of this “the head did speak again, two words, which were these: T
IME
W
AS
.” Miles still would not wake his master, saying, “if you speak no wiser no Master shall be waked of me,” and acted like a fool for another half hour. Then, without warning, all hell broke loose: “This Brazen Head spake again these words; T
IME IS
P
AST
: and therewith fell down, and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that Miles was half dead with fear: at this noise the two Friers awaked, and wondered to see the whole room so full of smoke, but that being vanished they might perceive the brazen head broken and lying on the ground.”
⁷
Thus Bacon's great project came to an end.

The story of Friar Bacon and the brazen head, however apocryphal, remains a fable for our time. Since the dawn of computers scientists have raised one species of spirit after another, seeking to have the mystery of intelligence revealed. When hopes are up, our Bacons and Bungeys have gathered openly, performed their incantations, and then retired, leaving their attendants to keep watch (and bear the costs). Thirty-five years ago neurologist Warren S. McCulloch, the architect with Walter Pitts of the first rigorous theory of neural nets, delivered ten pronouncements derived from twenty years of searching for “Where Is Fancy Bred.” McCulloch's tenth commandment: “We will be there when the brass head speaks.”
⁸

Cloaked in symbols as arcane as those of the alchemists, Bacon and Bungey's successors continue to decipher their forefathers' instructions, keeping the foundries running day and night. Crystals are drawn from the crucible by workers masked and gowned against the risk of bringing the imperfection of our world to the kingdom of machines; diamond saw blades slice these crystals into wafers on which spells are cast by ultraviolet light. Some of the sorcerers work in silicon and some work purely in code, but when the two halves of this magic are brought together, still the brass head refuses to speak.

The skeptics have it that we are no closer than Bacon and Bungey to achieving the transmutation of metal into mind. Optimists believe it is just a matter of enough time, enough logic, the right coding, or some contagious spark of wisdom we haven't put our finger on yet. Others believe that we are playing the role of Miles, mocking the long-awaited signs while our master remains asleep.

In the 1950s computers demonstrated their dexterity at manipulating very large numbers over minute increments of time. “Time is!” they seemed to say—but after giving the matter some thought, we decided not to awake our master for mere arithmetic, just yet. Twenty years passed. In the 1970s computers began to reproduce themselves in automated factories in accordance with von Neumann's principles of how automata can grow more complicated from one generation to the next. “Time was!” their advancing numbers proclaimed—but we decided that mere spreadsheets and word processors did not merit raising the alarm. Another twenty years passed. Computers, now teeming like herring in early spring, began pooling their intelligence, exchanging states of mind in the blink of an eye, half a dozen languages removed from those that we can comprehend. Only an esoteric fraternity, uttering one line of code at a time, still holds congress with the machines. “Time is past!” can be read between the lines. But the warning goes unheeded as we stand transfixed, like monkeys given a mirror, by the novelty of our own image reflected in the surface of the web. When the smoke clears and the master wakes, the computer as disembodied head will have disappeared, replaced by a diffuse tissue enveloping us in nebulous bits of meaning, as neurons are enveloped in electrolyte by the brain.