What Technology Wants (45 page)

As John Conway writes,

The tiny specks of quantum choice inherent in particles were leveraged by the vast increases in organization whipped up by life. A spontaneous “volitional” decay of a cosmic particle might pass through a cell and on its way trigger a mutation in the highly ordered structure of its DNA molecule. Let's say it knocks a hydrogen atom off a cytosine base; then that indirect volition (what biologists used to call a random mutation) could give birth to an innovative protein sequence. Of course, most particle choices only bring death to the cell sooner, but with luck a mutation will confer a survival advantage to the whole organism. Since beneficial traits are retained and built upon by the DNA system, the positive effects of free will can accumulate. Volitional cosmic rays also trigger synapse firings in neurons, which introduce novelty signals (ideas) into nerves and brain cells, some of which indirectly nudge an organism to do this or that. By the complex machinery of evolution, these remotely induced “choices” are captured, retained, and amplified as well. Mutations triggered by the free will of particles, in the aggregate and over billions of years, evolve organisms with more senses, more limbs, more degrees of freedom. As usual, this is a virtuous self-amplifying circle.

As evolution rises, “choicefulness” increases. A bacterium has a few choices—perhaps to slide toward food or to divide. A plankton, with more complexity, more cellular machinery, has more options. A starfish can wiggle its arms, flee (fast or slow?) or fight a rival, choose a meal or a mate. A mouse has a million choices to make in its life. It has a longer list of things it can move (whiskers, eyeballs, eyelids, tail, toes) and a wider range of environments to exert its will upon, as well as a longer duration of life to decide in. More complexity expands the number of possible choices.

A mind, of course, is a choice factory, constantly inventing new ways to choose. “With more choices, we have more opportunities,” declared Emmanuel Mesthene, a technology philosopher at Harvard. “With more opportunities, we can have more freedom, and with more freedom we can be more human.”

A major consequence of creating cheap and ubiquitous artificial minds is to infuse higher levels of free will into our built environment. Of course we'll put minds into robots, but we'll also implant cars, chairs, doors, shoes, and books with slivers of choice-making intelligence, and all these expand the realm of those making free choices, even if those choices are only particle sized.

Where there are free wills there are mistakes. When we unleash inanimate objects from their shackles of hereditary inertness and give them particles of choice, we give them freedom to make mistakes. We can think of each new crumb of artificial sentience as a new way to make mistakes. To do stupid things. To make errors. In other words, technology teaches us how to make innovative kinds of mistakes we could not make before. In fact, asking ourselves how humanity might make entirely new kinds of mistakes is probably the best metric we have for discovering new possibilities of choice and freedom. Engineering our genome is primed to create a new kind of mistake and therefore indicates a new level of free will. Geoengineering the planet's climate might also indicate a new arena of mistakes and therefore choice. Connecting every person to every other person alive in real time via cell phone or wires also unleashes new powers of choice and incredible potential for mistakes.

All inventions widen the space of what is possible and thereby stretch the parameters in which choices can be made. But just as important, the technium creates new mechanisms that can exercise unconscious free will. Whenever you send an e-mail, invisible fancy algorithms on data servers decide the path your message will hop along in the global network in order to arrive with minimal congestion and maximum speed. Quantum choice probably does not play a role in these choices. Rather, a billion interacting deterministic factors influence it. Because unraveling these factors is an intractable problem, these choices are in practice free-will decisions of the network, and the internet is making billions of them every day.

Fuzzy-logic appliances make real choices. Their tiny chip brains weigh competing factors, and in a nondeterministic way the fuzzy-logic circuits make a decision about when to turn off the dryer or to what temperature to heat the rice. Many kinds of complex, adaptive contraptions—for example, the sophisticated computerized autopilot that flew the 747 jet you rode on the other day—expand the range of free will by generating new kinds of behaviors out of reach of either humans or other living creatures. An experimental robot at MIT can catch a tennis ball using a brain and arm that is thousands of times faster than a human brain/arm combo. This robot shifts so fast while deciding where to put its hand that our eyes can't even see it move. Here free will has expanded into a new realm of speed.

When you type a keyword into Google, it considers approximately a trillion documents before it chooses (and “choose” is the correct word) the page it guesses you want. No human can possibly encompass that planetary volume of material. In this way, a search engine gives free choice a scale way beyond the human. Once our machines unleashed possibilities as fast as we could think them up; now they unleash possibilities without waiting for us.

In the world of tomorrow, high-tech automobiles that park themselves will make as many free-will choices as we do when we park. To varying degrees, technology will practice free will at greater levels than it does today.

First the technium expands the range of possible choices, and then it expands the range of agents that can make choices. The more powerful a new technology is, the greater the new freedoms it opens up. Multiplying options goes hand in hand with multiplying liberty. Nations of the world with plenty of economic choices, abundant communication options, and high education possibilities tend to rank highest in available liberty. But this expansion includes possible abuse as well. Present in every new technology is the potential to make new mistakes. The freedom to choose increases in many ways as the technium grows.

More than half of the living species on this planet are parasitic. That is, they depend upon another species for their survival in at least one phase of their life. At the same time, biologists believe that every organism alive (including parasites themselves) hosts at least one parasite. This makes the natural world a hotbed of shared existence.

Parasitism is just a single degree along a wide continuum of mutualism. At one end there is the fact that any living creature depends on others (its parents directly and others indirectly) for its life; at the other end is the symbiotic embrace of two distinct species, algae and fungi, which together present as one species of lichen. In between are multiple varieties of parasitism, some of which do the host no harm at all and others (such as ants on an acacia bush) where the parasite aids its host.

Three strands of increasing mutualism weave through evolution, or what is properly called coevolution.

1. As life evolves, it becomes increasingly dependent on other life. The oldest bacteria eke out their livelihood from lifeless rock, water, and volcanic fumes. They touch only inert matter. Later, more complex microbes, such as
E. coli,
will spend their entire life inside our guts, surrounded by our living cells, eating our food. They touch only other living things. Over time, the home environment for a creature is more likely to be living rather than inert. The entire animal kingdom is a fine example of this trend. Why bother to produce food from the elements yourself when you can just steal it from other living organisms? Animals are more mutualistic than plants in this way.

2. As life evolves, nature creates more opportunities for dependencies
between species
. Every organism that creates a successful niche for itself also creates potential niches for other species (all those potential parasites!). Let's say an alpine meadow enriches its mix over time with an additional new species of bee to pollinate the crocus. That addition increases the numbers of possible relationships between all the meadow creatures.

3. As life evolves, possibilities for cooperation between members of the
same species
increase. The superorganism of an ant colony or beehive is an extreme case of intraspecies cooperation and mutualism. Greater sociality among organisms is a stabilizing ratchet in evolution. Once socialization is acquired, it is rarely let go.

Human life is immersed in all three mutualisms. First, we are remarkably dependent on other life for survival. We eat plants and other animals. Second, there is no other species on this planet that uses the variety and number of other living species that we do to stay healthy and prosperous. And third, we are famously a social animal, requiring others of our species to raise us, teach us how to survive, and keep us sane. In this way our life is deeply symbiotic; we live inside of other life. The technium pushes these three varieties of mutualism even further.

Most machines today never touch the Earth, or water, or even the air. The tiny heart of a microcircuit beating in the core of the PC scripting these words I am writing is sealed from the elements and is completely surrounded by other manufactured artifacts. This microscopic artifact feeds off energy generated by a huge turbine (or on a sunnier day by the solar panels on my roof), sends its output to another machine (my cinema display monitor), and if it is lucky will be digested for precious elements by other machines when it is dead.

There are plenty of machine parts that never touch human hands. They are made by robots and inserted inside devices (such as the bearings in an automobile water pump) that are then placed within larger technological contraptions. A little while ago my son and I disassembled the innards of an old CD player. I am certain that when we opened the laser housing, we were the first nonmechanical beings to see that intricate inner piece. Until then it had only been touched by machines.

The technium is moving toward increased symbiosis between humans and machines. This is the subject of thrilling Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, but it also plays out in a million small ways in real life. It is very clear that we are creating a symbiotic memory with the web and Google-like technologies. When Google (or one of its descendants) is able to understand ordinary spoken questions and is living in a layer of our clothing, we will quickly absorb this tool into our minds. We will depend on it, and it will depend on us—both to continue to exist and to continue getting smarter, because the more people use it the smarter it gets.

Some people find this technological symbiosis scary, or even horrifying, but it is not much different from our use of paper and pencil in long division. For most ordinary humans, dividing long numbers without technology is impossible. Our brains are simply not wired to accomplish this naturally. We use the technologies of writing and tricks of arithmetic to divide, multiply, or manipulate large or multiple numbers. We can do it in our heads in a fashion, but only by watching ourselves virtually write the problem out on virtual paper in our mind. My wife grew up using an abacus to do arithmetic. An abacus is a 4,000-year-old analog calculator, a technological aid for doing calculations faster than with a pencil. When there is no abacus around, she does the same thing, virtually moving the virtual beads with her fingers in order to arrive at an answer. Somehow, being totally dependent on technology to add and subtract doesn't spook us, but being dependent on the web to remember facts sometimes does.

The technium is also pushing the increased mutualism among machines. The majority of telecommunications traffic in the world is not messages flowing between humans but messages between machines. Nearly 75 percent of the world's total nonsolar energy—in other words, the energy created through technological means and flowing through the pipes and wires of the technium—is used for the benefit of moving, housing, and maintaining our machines. Most trucks, trains, and planes are not moving people but freight. Most heating and cooling is not conditioning humans but other stuff. The technium spends only one quarter of its energy on human comfort, food, and travel needs; the rest of the energy is made by technology for technology.

We are just starting our journey of increasing mutualism between the technium and ourselves. Mastering this commensalism, like adding with pen and paper, will take some education. The most visible aspect of the exotropic trend toward mutualism is the way in which the technium increases the sociability between humans. I'd like to sketch out this trajectory because it is most immediate. For the next 10 to 20 years, the socializing aspects of the technium will be one of its major traits and a major event for our culture.

There is a natural progression of increased connectivity among humans. Groups of people start off simply sharing ideas, tools, creations, and then progress to cooperation, collaboration, and finally collectivism. At each step the amount of coordination increases.

Today, online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical. It's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of photos taken with a digital camera are shared in some fashion. Wikipedia is another remarkable example of symbiotic technology in operation—and not just Wikipedia, but wikiness at large. There are 145 other wiki engines today, each one powering myriad sites that allow users to collaboratively write and edit material. Then there are status updates, map locations, half thoughts posted online. Add to this the six billion videos delivered by YouTube each month in the United States alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fan-fiction sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for locations, Delicious for bookmarks.