When I was a freshman in college studying computer science, the most influential book I read was called The Mind’s I. It was a series of essays and stories about artificial intelligence and the notion of the soul. I came up with my own story called ‘The Running of the Monitor’, of course I never finished it but I was delighted by the ideas.
The first thing I had presaged was the idea of an MRI. I presumed some machine that was capable of counting every neuron in one’s head and assessing the extent to which their connections were deterministic. In short, it was a kind of IQ test made by physical examination of the human brain’s compute capability which was determined by the effective number of connections any individual pattern of neurons were capable of making. Imagine looking at sunlight dappled through the leaves of an oak tree as compared to that filtering through palm leaves. The oak tree in a light breeze would make much more complex and intricate patterns whereas the palm branches would be large clumsy things, leaving shadows easily identified.
The special property of a low pattern density of neural mapping was called the Loop Number. Essentially if there were many circular patterns of neural connections, these would generate circular reasoning, and repetitive behaviors. The more an individual was ‘looped’ the less capable they would be of grasping subtle concepts.
I was reminded of this memory after listening to brief quotes this morning of Ibram X Kendi and Sam Altman.
Mine was the story of graduate students who, in their final test in robotics, had come to the Serengeti to run their thesis projects which were synthetic antelope. The protagonist was the second least looped student in his class, and of course he was completely infatuated by the brilliant female student who had the lowest Loop Number. Each student had secretly studied which aspect of antelope behavior their robot would mimic the ends of which would be towards the development of a perfect monitor. These monitors would look like, smell like and behave like animals in nature. Their purpose would be to monitor the activities of their ‘fellow’ animals and report back on their migration patterns, populations, etc, for the benefit of zoology. In previous generations of monitor development bird behavior had been worked out, but for complex creatures like herding mammals, no on had been able to crack the code of more than two behaviors.
As the students meet on a gorgeous day in view of Mount Kilimanjaro, seeing each other for the first time after months of directed study, the competition would begin. They released their robot monitors not far from a herd heading out for a morning drink at the watering hole.
Insert montage of various robotic failures.
The short story comes to its climax as the female object of the protagonist’s desire and envy releases her monitor into the wild. The man studies the female robot animal as he sneaks glances at its creator. He is entranced and fixated by their movements and dumbstruck by their intelligence and form. He immediately recognizes her in it and it in her and begins himself to fall into a loop of lusty desire. He can no longer see the algorithms and programming. He can no longer make sense of the articulation of the motorized limbs. It all makes his head swim and his legs tremble. In a moment of robotic behavioral triumph the woman’s doe is mounted by the dominant buck of the herd to the roar of the collected students as they witness the act recorded in high definition video. The boy creams himself.
I told you I was a college freshman. Plus, you know, I’m reading Nabokov.
What this has to do with artificial intelligence is where I’m coming from. You see, from a higher elevation than the current discourse on ‘bias’ originates, there is something entirely looped and predictable in this moment about what our expectations of AI and what we think AGI is going to be. I daresay few of us would suggest that the most righteous use of these technologies be used to eyeball the mating behavior of ungulates, but that seemed to be an entirely valid course of study in my 1980s view of the future. No, today we want it to:
Make us rich.
Make our lives easy.
Not get us sued.
And most likely in that order of importance. The irony of my story which some of you have perceptively seen is that boy has invested all of his intelligence in hopes of impressing that girl. She showed him up and he was devastated by the act of a wild animal that he himself could not perform. There was no ‘Chad’ in the graduate class, no rival whose mere physicality would shame our protagonist. It was his own shortcoming that did him in, his falling in love and finally admitting, relenting, she’s tidied up and he can’t find anything. All of his tubes and wires, careful notes and antiquated notions. The adolescent axis of money for sex remains at the top of the list of today for ineffable reasons but there it is.
I still haven’t read Language and Silence by George Steiner but I think it’s high time I did. I guess there’s a question in my mind as to whether or not Sam Altman has been invited to his generation’s version of Epstein’s Island. Who’s humping Kendi these days I wonder. Altman’s Loop Number is certainly lower than Kendi’s but they’re human and they’re looped. In particular both are looped into language and both, I think, bow down to the language gods of sophistry. Why should we heed the work of wonks and wankers?
You and I both know we needn’t, because we have looked into the crystal clear eyes of our babies held in our arms. We have been irresistibly comforted by our ability to comfort them, not so much with words but with closeness and movements and song. All of the verbiage on the planet, organized by a gigacenter of 2 nanometer superchips have not and will not produce a human monitor. We only need to turn away from our CRTs to find purpose. Human purpose. And yet we will still be looped and humiliated by our loops and failures. So we will come back and try again, because we are looped and failing. I’ll be able to see it on your face, your actual face if I can afford actual proximity.
Every man’s death diminishes me, but like gravity it diminishes by the square of the distance. The distance between me and thee as moderated by computerized AI is greater than we can measure. So what is our purpose?