God and Golem, Inc.
Norbert Wiener remains an important figure for our age. A mathematician and engineer at MIT, Wiener developed the concept of feedback and part of the underlying math for automating systems - cybernetics. He might very well be considered the father of our present era of compute technology, most especially the hyper-search functions presently marketed as AI, which will prove themselves most valuable for automation.
Wiener was beautifully different from our present generation of technologists. He had a much more expansive education than just math and engineering. He lived most of his life in a pre-electric screen society, not spending years staring into the screen and perceiving it another living entity. Nonetheless, Wiener aptly described the dominant values of our present technologists,
“Once such a master becomes aware that some of the supposedly human functions of his slaves may be transferred to machines, he is delighted. At last he has found the new subordinate efficient, subservient, dependable in his action, never talking back, swift, and not demanding a single thought of personal consideration.”
Wiener understood the technology his thinking would help make possible was revolutionary for human society. A revolution at the time, or now for that matter, neither the technologists or anyone else well understood. Grappling with this ignorance and resulting problems, Wiener began developing a politics of technology, though he didn’t use those exact words. He rejected the notion any given technology was inevitable or in the words of so many technologists since, “It couldn’t be stopped.” A society exclusively determined by technology he concluded, would at some point come up short of being capable of innovating new technology made necessary ignoring the challenges created by older technologies.
In his 1964 book, God and Golem, Inc., Wiener contemplates technology, “the gadget,” and its dual nature. All technologies, no matter how seemingly helpful, also carry certain negative aspects. As technologies become ever more powerful, it becomes more necessary for society to understand the consequences, good and bad, of adopting any given technology. The book begins with Wiener sketching a too often overlooked understanding of how fundamentally different technological modernity is from the entire human past where a new idea, new thinking, was for most of history looked at with great suspicion or condemned. He gives the example,
“I have said that the reprobation attaching in former ages to the sin of sorcery attaches now in many minds to the speculations of modern cybernetics. For make no mistake, if but two hundred years ago a scholar had pretended to make machines that should learn to play games or that should propagate themselves, he would surely have been made to assume the sanbenito, the gown worn by the victims of the Inquisition, and have been handed over to the secular arm, with the injunction that there be no shedding of blood; surely, that is, unless he could convince some great patron that he could transmute the base metals into gold, as Rabbi Low of Prague, who claimed that his incantations blew breath of life into the Golem of clay, had persuaded the Emperor Rudolf. For even now, if an inventor could prove to a computing-machine company that his magic could be of service to them, he could cast black spells from now till doomsday, without the least personal risk.”
“Black spells from now till doomsday,” just a wonderful metaphor for Tech's cult of non-reflective innovation. However, not only today is there no personal risk, no sanbenito wearing shame, there’s infinite piles of gold created through transistor alchemy, not just for investor patrons, but the sorcerers too. While the past’s suspicious and negative view of new thinking was problematic, our present kowtowing to thoughtless innovation will prove worse.
Wiener writes, “I am most familiar with gadget worshipers in my own world, with its slogans of free enterprise and the profit-motive economy.” He continues with an essential recognition, long verboten by America’s political class—in many ways are own Inquisition, of the power reality of our technologically created corporate oligarchy. With an unvarnished view, free of economic dogma, Wiener notes the accumulation of wealth via technology is also very much a grab for power:
“Power and the search for power are unfortunately realities that can assume many garbs. Of the devoted priests of power, there are many who regard with impatience the limitations of mankind, and in particular the limitation consisting in man's undependability and unpredictability. You may know a mastermind of this type by the subordinates whom he chooses. They are meek, selfeffacing, and wholly at his disposal; and on account of this, are generally ineffective when they once cease to be limbs at the disposal of his brain. They are capable of great industry but of little independent initiative-the chamberlains of the harem of ideas to which their Sultan is wedded.”
Wiener missed inventors themselves would become Sultans defining the future, who look not simply at their employees as subservient but the whole of society. Presciently, he bursts the bubble of today’s AI god proselytizers,
“The gadget-minded people often have the illusion that a highly automatized world will make smaller claims on human ingenuity than does the present one and will take over from us our need for difficult thinking, as a Roman slave who was also a Greek philosopher might have done for his master. This is palpably false. A goal-seeking mechanism will not necessarily seek our goals unless we design it for that purpose, and in that designing we must foresee all steps of the process for which it is designed, instead of exercising a tentative foresight which goes up to a certain point, and can be continued from that point on as new difficulties arise. The penalties for errors of foresight, great as they are now, will be enormously increased as automatization comes into its full use.”
Adding,
“As engineering technique becomes more and more able to achieve human purposes, it must become more and more accustomed to formulate human purposes. In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purpose has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations that made it difficult for us to perform operations involving a careful evaluation of human purpose. This is only one of the many places where human impotence has hitherto shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly.”
“No, the future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
“Demands upon our honesty and our intelligence” – Phew! What could be in shorter supply in the bullshit piled infinitely high by our Tech-Lords, or in the ceaseless, baseless yammering, distortions, and complete falsehoods flooding the wires of their present gadgets?
Humanity must be kept in the middle of the technology, not just thought a mindless consumer becoming products themselves. “What we now need is an independent study of systems involving both human and mechanical elements. This system should not be prejudiced either by a mechanical or antimechanical bias.” A politics of technology requires,
“Operationally, we must consider an invention not only with regard to what we can invent but also as to how the invention can be used and will be used in a human context. The second part of the problem is often more difficult than the first and has a less closed methodology. Thus we are confronted with the problem of development which is essentially a learning problem, not purely in the mechanical system but in the mechanical system conjoined with society. This is definitely a case requiring a consideration of the problem of the best joint use of machine and man.”
Wiener wrote this all over a half-century ago, today we have even less recognition of any of it. Technology remains separate from politics. We hold tightly a juvenile belief technology doesn’t shape us. Our ancient institutions of governance and our dysfunctional politics are completely incapable of deliberating and deciding healthy technological development. This is not a fault of the United States or of the modern era alone, but a universal political deficiency.
Wiener writes of freeing ourselves of this dilemma,
“The growing state of the arts and sciences means that we cannot be content to assume the all-wisdom of any single epoch. This is perhaps most clearly true in social controls and the organization of the learning systems of politics.
Imperatively, Wiener notes the rigidity of our thinking, our beliefs, as the greatest shackles keeping us incapable of evolving our politics:
“Nevertheless, in the course of time we must reconsider our old optimization, and a new and revised one will need to take these phenomena into account. Homeostasis, whether for the individual or the race, is something of which the very basis must sooner or later be reconsidered. ...although science is an important contribution to the homeostasis of the community, it is a contribution the basis of which must be assessed anew every generation or so. Here let me remark that both the Eastern and Western homeostasis of the present day is being made with the intention of fixing permanently the concepts of a period now long past. Marx lived in the middle of the first industrial revolution, and we are now well into the second one. Adam Smith belongs to a still earlier and more obsolete phase of the first industrial revolution. Permanent homeostasis of society cannot be made on a rigid assumption of a complete permanence of Marxism, nor can it be made on a similar assumption concerning a standardized concept of free enterprise and the profit motive. It is not the form of rigidity that is particularly deadly so much as rigidity itself, whatever the form.”
Just a wonderful paragraph, that should be reread. As Wiener wrote of knowledge and technology, "it is a contribution the basis of which must be assessed anew every generation or so," Jefferson wrote a century and half before, "every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years."
Today, our politics doesn't have a “form of rigidity,” it’s in a state of rigor mortis, while society as a whole, due to technology, has zero homeostasis, no state or even any sense of stability. In fact, just the opposite, we have ever deeper societal anxiety fostered by an overwhelming sense of instability. Contemporary homo sapiens feel as helpless to the forces of technology as our ancient ancestors felt to the brutal capriciousness of nature.
To exemplify our political atrophy, Wiener uses Marx and Smith, noting how the two thinkers were very much products of their respective technological eras. Yet, today with any talk about political economy, if you scratch the surface, underneath still rot the intellectual corpses of Smith and Marx. This rigidity of thinking has ancient roots. We still wish to believe our social systems, our political economy, our laws are conferred from above, written in stone, instead of changing, necessarily evolving systems defined by new knowledge and resulting technology. Our body politic, just like every living system, is only a construct of the greater environment it is part, whether established natural systems or systems we create.
Weiner concludes, “The moral I have wished to stress is that the difficulties of establishing a really homeostatic regulation of society are not to be overcome by replacing one set pattern which is not subject to continual reconsideration by an equal and opposed set pattern of the same sort.”
Key to this thinking is understanding life is not deterministic, it is contingent. There is no masterplan, there are no deterministic technologies we can thoughtlessly implement. The societal adoption of any given technology sets us on one path, closing others that might just as easily and maybe better taken. It is essential to gain a catholic feedback from the implementation of any technology, how it impacts the whole society and the ecologies it interacts. We need processes and organization to continually incorporate this feedback into both how we utilize the technology and help provide direction on technologies we might adopt in the future, an adamant refusal to accept the hucksterism of technological determinism and instead engaging a robust politics of technology.