Albert Borgmann is Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Montana. Professor Borgmann's work has been the
topic of conferences and books such as Technology and the Good Life? edited by
Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and David Strong (2000). His books include: Holding
On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (1999);
Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992); and Technology and the Character of
Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (1984).
It is difficult now to
recall the world of the nineties. At the time it seemed like the beginning of
boundless prosperity, inspired by the manifest destiny of exploring and
settling the new world of cyberspace, an era in which the iron laws of gravity
and economics had been abrogated, a time of challenges that called for boldness
and unconditional devotion.
But at the turn of the
millennium, diffidence and disappointment set in. We began to realize that the
second coming might not occur in our lifetime. Limitless affluence would take
longer, and more work was needed to construct hyperreal happiness. On September
11 of 2001, diffidence turned to despair and disappointment to sorrow. In
retrospect we could see that in the nineties we had been turning our private
spheres into cocoons of self-indulgence, and we had enveloped the public realm
in a virtual fog of cell phones, pagers, beepers, personal CD players, digital
cameras, and video displays.
September 11th
was in a terrifying way what Virginia Woolf has called a moment of being, a
situation that made us feel the shock of reality. 1 The
attacks themselves were conducted in a primitively real way, and the terrors in
turn shredded our cocoons and dispelled the virtual fog. Suddenly we became
aware again of one another and of the things about us. People emerged from
their seclusion and anonymity through their heroism, their selfless exertions,
through acts of kindness and sometimes simply through the acknowledgment of
tears and consolations. Suddenly the high-rises that had seemed so forbidding
and aloof looked frail and precious. We felt affection and sorrow for the twin
towers of the World Trade Center, which we had previously regarded as the
height of witless arrogance.
Calamity has a way of
restoring us to reality and kindness. When the big snow paralyzed Chicago in
1967, people learned again how to walk, how to be neighbors, and how to attend
to the simple tasks of getting milk and bread from the store on a sled and of
clearing a space from the garage to the street. When an ice storm paralyzed the
northern part of upstate New York early in 1996 and shut down electricity for
weeks, people shared their fuel and their kitchens and volunteered to minister
to the sick and the elderly in makeshift shelters. 2 When
wildfires ravaged Montana in the summer of 2000, people sheltered and consoled
one another, and the much detested "Feds" turned into heroic
guardians.
Yet, within weeks after
the terror attacks, normalcy returned. People went back to their enclaves of
entertainment. Irony and cynicism surfaced again. 3 And while
the prospects for the economy are generally clouded, the video game business is
confident of growth and profits. 4 The President urged us not
exactly to indulge ourselves and not directly to consume, but certainly to go
out and buy stuff; doing so usually comes to consumption and ends in
self-indulgence.
So should we hope for
another disaster to wake us from our consumptive slumber and our sleepwalking
pursuit of glamorous affluence? The blessings of calamity carry a forbidding
price. Surely we must do everything to prevent catastrophe and misery and take
up the burdens of good fortune that come with the progress of technology. Chief
among them is the task of comprehending more consciously and deeply the
benefits and liabilities of technology. For such purposes
"technology" is not just the name for certain machineries and
procedures that can be used for well or ill, although "technology"
can certainly be so understood. But if we want to take the measure of the human
condition in our time, "technology" is a suggestive and useful label
for what is distinctive of contemporary culture as a whole.
The characteristic
forms of recent technology are information technology and biotechnology, and
one way of locating both the crucial peril and the best hope of the moment is
to consider the threats to mind, body, and world that appear to issue from
these two technologies. The very identity of the human person and the very
substance of reality are presumably called into question by developments in
artificial intelligence, in genetics, and in virtual reality. Reactions to
these prospects are as divided as they are to carnival rides—they produce
exhilaration in some people and vertigo in others. 5
Each of these three
areas of development—artificial intelligence, genetics, and virtual reality—is
enormously complex and technically sophisticated, and laypeople are tempted to
throw up their hands in frustration and to surrender their destiny to the
experts. But "I give up" is not an acceptable reply to recent
technology. We must do our best to penetrate the thickets of technical terms
and scientific findings. In addition, I want to suggest, there is a method of
outlining the shape of our future through thought experiments that suggest
moral bounds that emerge and remain no matter how perfect the technologies.
Let me begin with
artificial intelligence. Its threat or its promise rests on the claim that the
most distinctive human capacity, intelligence, is independent of the stuff that
it is realized in and that computers consist of stuff that allows for the
construction of intelligence that is at least as powerful as human
intelligence. A related claim says that a person's particular intelligence can
some day be transferred from the person's brain to a computer so that the
essence of that person can exist alongside or beyond the person in question.
Thus there could be duplicates of you, immortal versions of you, nonhuman
superiors of you, but also vastly enhanced editions of you—prospects that
surely can provoke excitement or vertigo.
But how exactly could
we tell whether an artificially intelligent computer had reached a stage of
perfection that would at least equal human intelligence? The great British
logician and mathematician Alan Turing proposed that we call a machine
intelligent when in conversation it would be indistinguishable from a human
being. For the purposes of our thought experiment we assume that the machine
would easily pass the Turing test. There is at the moment no such computer,
and, as far as I can tell, there would have to be presently inconceivable
breakthroughs in our understanding of the syntax and semantics of natural
language for such artificial intelligence to be possible. 6
But in a thought experiment we can set these problems aside.
Now the revealing
question is under what circumstances and to what extent we would find it
worthwhile to converse with such a computer. To answer the question we have to
distinguish domains of discourse, and for our purposes three are enough:
scientific discourse, factual discourse, and moral discourse. These domains
shade over into one another but are distinct in their more central regions.
We would certainly find
it useful to query the computer about scientific matters, for example, the law
of gravity, the number of the solar planets, the effect of the gravitational
force on the orbits of the planets, the state of the search for a theory of
everything, etc. Propositions in reply to such queries are made from nowhere since
they are true everywhere. The same is true of brute historical facts, the fact,
for example, that the terror attacks on the World Trade Center took place on
September 11, 2001, that the Pentagon was attacked the same day, that a total
of four planes had been hijacked, etc.
Search engines are
beginning to resemble artificially intelligent sources of scientific and
factual information. They are both more versatile and quicker than their
printed forebears. They are less focused and trustworthy than a human expert,
but then we rarely have the privilege to ask such an expert in person and on
the spot. In well-bounded and formal areas such as chess, moreover, computers
already surpass humans.
As soon, however, as
you ask the computer for a fuller account of an event like the attacks of
September 11th, namely, for the background, the context, and the
consequences of these events, the computer would have to assume a standpoint
from which to tell the story. And at this point, moral matters come into play.
From Osama bin Laden's point of view, this was a jihad; from our standpoint, it
was terrorism. But so far, truth is still a guide for the computer. It was in
truth terrorism, and not an act of holy war. Yet there are different
standpoints that are morally valid and compatible with one another. A New
Yorker's story of the terrors will differ from that of a Montanan; a
sociologist will give an account that differs from a political scientist's. The
point is that a selection from millions of facts and facets must be made, and
any intelligible and consistent account betrays a point of view.
But we would not find
this unnatural or jarring in a computer. Even now we attribute a loose kind of
standpoint and certain intentions to our personal computers, and as Daniel
Dennett has pointed out, we would find it difficult to talk about the behavior
of computers without ascribing states of mind to them. 7 We
do this when we say of our PC: "It's looking for a file," or "It
thinks it's connected to the local area network," etc. It is also true
that an intelligent computer would be unpredictable without being bizarre, just
as the best chess computers surprise their designers with their inventiveness
(another mental property). And finally, it is certain that some people would respond
to an intelligent computer the way they answer a person. After all, Eliza, an
unintelligent program mimicking a psychoanalyst, was so treated. 8
Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the program, concealed its limitations by
having Eliza turn statements to which no precooked reply was available into
questions and by having it reply to unaswerable questions with "Tell me
more about this" and the like. And yet people began to confide in Eliza as
though it were a she or he.
Though it is practical
to act as though a computer were a person, there are limits to a computer's
personality and to the scope of its discourse. It fails to meet the principles
of equality and dignity that are crucial to moral conduct and discourse. Both
principles are rooted in our bodily being, and it follows, trivially in one
sense, that computers cannot be equal to those principles since they are not
embodied in the human way.
But in another respect,
the difference in physical structure of humans and computers, when made vivid
and concrete, reveals the distance that separates humans from machines. As
regards equality, I shape my conduct in emulation, competition, or
companionship with others who are like me. My complaint about a surly colleague
evaporates when I hear of my friend's losing his mother. When my mother dies, I
take consolation from my friend because he has suffered the same sorrow. I look
toward my declining years with confidence because my spouse of forty years will
be with me. I learn who I am and what I ought to do in conversation with others
who have a standpoint like mine and experience reality the way I do—as children
of venerable parents, as parents of vulnerable children, as helpful friends, as
mature persons, as wise elders.
A computer has none of
these properties, relations, or experiences. A computer has designers rather
than parents. It has breakdowns rather than illnesses. It becomes obsolete
rather than old. It can be replaced and, as Kant already observed, has a price
rather than dignity:
Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its
equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore
admits of no equivalent, has dignity. 9 Each of us is a unique and inexhaustible
locus of convergence and transmission through our ancestry, both evolutionary
and historical, through our descendants, through the sensibility of each of our
organs, through our pleasures and pains, through our wounds and our scars,
through our attacks and our embraces.
In moral matters we may
turn to an intelligent computer the way we now turn to the Psalms or to Chicken Soup for the Soul. 10
But in both cases it is the writers' experiences of pain and their fortitude in
the face of it that give us a sense of trust and solace. No doubt artificial
intelligence will become still more expert in cognitive and formal tasks. What
it will always lack, however, is the human standpoint—the moral authenticity
and authority of a good woman or a good man.
Yet even if the human
mind in its moral dimensions is beyond simulation, the realization of this
distinctively human power, the body, seems itself to be cut loose from
traditional norms and constraints due to the impending transformative power of
genetics. Here too exciting or vertiginous prospects seem to open up—the
possibility, for example, to customize one's children as to their height, their
looks, their health, and their character.
Our professed hopes are
more modest. As Nicholas Wade has reported, "Dr. Richard Lifton of Yale
predicted that in 20 years researchers would be 'able to identify the genes and
pathways predisposing to every human disease.'" 11
Another of the problems scientists would like to see solved is "the
biological basis of intelligence and cognition." 12 Here
we obviously approach a different level of shaping and improving humans.
Finding and utilizing the genetics of diseases will make humans, such as they
are, healthier and live longer. But understanding the genetic organization of
intelligence and cognition will allow us to build better humans—more insightful
and resourceful persons, people of greatly superior quality to put it
summarily.
Or will it? Here again
a thought experiment suggests limits to what looks like limitless power and
fearful possibility. Imagine the oral culture of ancient Greece, say 1000 bce,
when the Homeric epics were presented at the manors of the chieftains. Such an
epic was the possession of a singer of songs and would be realized as a great
event, rising powerfully, commanding attention, and finally receding into
memory. Imagine how strange and unsettling it would have been for a singer or
listener to be told that the entire epic could be fixed on papyrus from a store
of no more than 24 letters, that such letters would compose words, that all the
words of a language could be assembled in a dictionary, that there would be
rules for the formation of words and for the formation of sentences from words.
A quick and bright
member of such an oral culture would realize that writing and grammar promise
to provide incredible power over an epic. The entire poem could be inspected at
leisure and to the smallest detail, and surely knowledge of the vocabulary and
grammar would allow one to make vast improvements in the quality of an epic and
to fix them for all time. Well, we do have such power over language now. Do we
have the power to improve the quality of a novel such as The Firm? 13
John Grisham's book is
well-constructed and peopled with interesting and engaging characters. It tells
the tale of a young man who finds his way and identity in an unreal world. Is
it one of the great novels of the last century? As regards literary quality it
is like you and me—alright, nothing special, but certainly estimable and thoroughly
decent. Can we make it into a masterpiece in the same genre, something like
Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, also a
story of a young man searching for his identity under unreal circumstances? 14
The analogy between the
structure and quality of a novel and the organization and character of a person
is loose, but it may be tight enough to suggest a limit of genetics when it
comes to improving the quality of a person. We can hope to find a genetic cure
for an obvious illness such as diabetes. Similarly we can do much by way of a
spell check program to cure a poorly spelled novel. We may be able to determine
genetically the color of a person's skin, eyes, or hair. We can change a
novel's spelling from American to British English; we can replace adverbs and
phrases such as "namely," "that is," "for
example," "and so on," with their Latin abbreviations. More
ambitious changes would, however, cause more damage than improvement. We could
try to make the language more nuanced by replacing "said" alternately
with "replied," "suggested," and "observed." We
could replace basic color terms with their variants, replacing "blue"
alternately with "indigo" and "cobalt." As often as not
this would result in nonsense. Similarly, certain well-intentioned genetic
changes may introduce as much debility as improvement. 15
But could not a good
writer introduce into The Firm the
leitmotifs, philosophical discussions, subtle portraits, and artful syntax of The Magic Mountain? And could not an
accomplished geneticist of the future analogously reshape the genetic material
of an embryo? There are two problems here. The first is that the rewriter is
not the analog of a geneticist but of a tutor, a personal trainer, or a cosmetic
surgeon. The analog to the geneticist would be a programmer. But we cannot even
conceive of a program that could perform the subtle and complex changes a
competent editor can accomplish. Accordingly it seems unlikely that we will
discover a theory of genetics that would allow us to grasp and control the
complex and subtle ways in which all the human genes interact, not to mention
the often unpredictable or uncontrollable forces of the environment that
cooperate with the genes.
The second problem is a
corollary of the first. Since we do not understand fully or even thoroughly how
exactly Thomas Mann wrote his novels, any emulation of Mann's style and
constructions will look like a parody at best and a disaster at worst. There
are surely ways of improving The Firm
and the ordinary Joe and Josephine. But the result, via editing in one case and
education in the other, would not be a creature of a higher order. Rather, The Firm would be more fully what it
could have been, and Josephine and Joe would more fully come into their own.
Even if mind and body
retain the core of their primal integrity, the reality of the world that
contains human beings has come into question through recent technology and vis à
vis the new and different reality that has emerged from technology, namely,
cyberspace. Moreover, while once reality was the last court of appeal and truth
the supreme justice of knowledge, reality is a construction, we are now told,
and truth an honorific term we bestow on the stories that are told by the
powerful or that we all have consented to.
The debates over these
issues are mostly confined to English departments and to the social sciences.
But these airy struggles have concrete counterparts in the foods, shelters, and
entertainments of everyday life. What looks like old-fashioned ice cream is an
engineered food drawn from genetically modified cows and corn. A building that
seems to have the classic gravity of blocks of stone is a steel construction
that has thin slices of limestone hung on it. In a film, the Colosseum seems to
have been restored and filled with seething Romans, but the construction was
done electronically rather than through stones, mortar, and living persons.
The gravest challenge
to the traditional world comes, however, from cyberspace because it is not
merely a modification of old-fashioned reality but a separate reality.
Especially in the nineties, there were confident predictions that the digital
realm of bits and electrons would displace the world of bricks and atoms. 16
If cyberspace is the new realm, virtual reality is its capital. It is a city
still under construction, and visitors are only shown some roughly finished
buildings. Once completed, however, virtual reality is supposed to provide
experiences that would be indistinguishable from "real" ones were it
not for the greater glamour of hyperreality and the superior powers we will be
able to exercise in it.
Virtual reality still
has an exotic aura about it that makes us overlook the slice of hyperreality we
have learned to take for granted—music on compact discs. We have pretty well
come to accept the acoustic realization of the information on CDs as real
music, or more precisely as hyperreal music, that is, as music that is so
flawlessly resonant as to surpass easily any actual performance. It is,
nonetheless, a mere slice of hyperreality since the visual part of the
performance is unavailable, and it is a poor example of interactivity, by its
nature, so to say—we do little in a concert hall beside listening, coughing,
and applauding. We are not authorized to do to a live performance what we often
do with a CD that is playing—interrupt it, start it over again, skip a portion
of it, or stop it.
Still, an enlargement
of the CD's sonic segment to its full hyperreality will disclose the crucial
limits of hyperreality. A hyperreal concert is in fact quite conceivable now. A
supercompact DVD and a wall-sized digital screen of fine resolution together
with an advanced stereo system will for all practical purposes provide you,
sitting in a comfortable chair in front of the screen, with the same sensory
input as you would receive front and center in a venerable concert hall with a
top orchestra performing perfectly. 17
Presented with a
scenario like that, thoughtful people are stumped when challenged to tell what
difference there could possibly be between the virtual and the actual concert,
and often such people turn away whatever scruples come to mind as romantic
sentiments or Luddite resentments. Is there a difference? To simplify and focus
the issue, let us stipulate the experience, defined as the sum of sights and
sounds, to be exactly the same in the two cases, in virtuality and actuality.
The contexts and
background experiences are different, of course, and as in the case of
artificial intelligence, this difference is obvious and trivial at first sight,
but pivotal and illuminating when considered closely. The virtual concert is
disposable and discontinuous with reality where the actual performance reveals
and is continuous with our world. To gain access to virtual reality, one has to
cross a threshold and enter a hyperreal world. Such a crossing may be entering
a flight simulator; donning a helmet with earphones and screens; putting on a
body suit; or powering up an amplifier, inserting a DVD, and turning on the
screen.
In all cases, the
threshold is clearly marked and easily traversed. Because it is clearly marked,
we never forget, when immersed in virtual reality, the distinctiveness and ease
of the threshold, and this background knowledge subtly infects our central
experiences—it is entirely at our disposal; we can at any time withdraw from
it, and return to it, or replace it. Virtual reality is disposable because it
is discontinuous, unlike an actual concert that is anchored in commitments to a
certain time and place by the respect we owe to actual humans who give their
best in performing for us, by our acknowledgment of the audience and the mutual
expectations that govern a concert hall.
Because of its discontinuity
with actuality, a virtual concert reveals little about what matters in the
world. It will continue to exist whether the hall has burned down or not, the
conductor has died or not, the orchestra has disbanded or not. A CD or DVD is,
of course, a record of the past, but it is not even that, strictly speaking,
since the information it contains has been carefully tweaked and assembled from
many takes. It is certainly not the record of one continuous, actual
performance.
A real concert, to the
contrary, tells you much about the world you live in. It reflects what kind of
music is supported here and to what extent. It shows what kind of artistry one
can expect at the level of this particular orchestra and community. And here
once more the moral authority and aesthetic authenticity that an actual
performance possesses and a virtual one lacks are undiminished by advances in
information and entertainment technology.
What is the cumulative
force of these reflections on technology and its effects on mind, body, and
world? One result is surely that the common alarm about technology is
misplaced. But why this fascination with the supposedly radical and
revolutionary effects of technology? Social theorists and commentators realize,
I suppose, that the house of American culture is not in order. But think of
your reaction when last you contemplated cleaning up your garage, your closets,
or just your post-holiday kitchen. It is one thing to recognize but quite
another to remedy disorder, and it is harder still to determine why and how
things got that way and how they could be put on a better footing. There seems
to be a similar disinclination among most social theorists to acknowledge the
common intuition that there is something wrong with the daily, inconspicuous,
ordinary American household and to instigate a significant and sustained
conversation about the quality of contemporary life. Given this apparently
distasteful and intractable situation, it is convenient to be told: There is no
need to put this house in order. It is obsolete, condemned, and will soon be
torn down; we have to move out anyway, and we may as well begin to envision a
radically new and revolutionary kind of life.
We are alert to damage to the infrastructure, to the security or healthfulness
of our lives, and willing, if not eager, to undertake judicial or environmental
repairs. Hence you find most social critics and reformers in the utility room
of the republic, worrying about the circuit breakers, the water lines, and the
sewage pipes. But no one worries about the music room and the fact that the
violin is out of tune, the flute is tarnished, and dust has settled on the
piano. And worse, few are exercised by the transformation of the music room
into a TV den. To be clear on a contentious point, I am not invoking a romantic
view of the musical culture as a lost tradition, though there is some truth to
seeing things that way. Something like the music room—a place of skilled and
leisurely engagement—is at any rate the tacit ideal and promise that is
supposed to warrant our obsessive concern with the means to the good life. Are
we to conclude then that there is an enduring cultural ideal and that putting
our house in order comes to sweeping technological junk into the corners to
make room for Haydn's piano trios? Something like this scheme is needed, but
the content need not be borrowed from the high culture of the past.
One of the remarkable
features of contemporary culture is that the distinctive creations of our time
fail to be actually and tangibly central to our culture. Haydn's music was one
of the characteristic achievements of late 18th century Europe, and
so were the violins and pianos built at the time. All of this occupied a
central position in the culture of the day. Information technology is likely
the crucial human achievement at the turn of the millennium. In outward
appearance there have been few changes in kind within the last forty years.
There have been massive quantitative changes—more highways, more high-rises,
more cars, and more planes. What has qualitatively changed has taken place
under the skin of buildings, planes, and cars; and it has surfaced
inconspicuously in the boxes and keyboards we call computers. However,
information technology is not just the distinctive marker of our time, it is
also astounding and admirable in itself. Computer chips are by far the most
densely complex creations of the human mind. They represent, moreover, the
convergence of incredible ingenuity and strenuous diligence in logic, mathematics,
computer science, material science, electrical engineering, industrial
production, and marketing.
But none of these
amazing disciplines and structures are at the surface and center of
contemporary culture. Of course, all of us use information technology for
communication and information, and everybody employs it in entertainment. So
what does a word-processing English professor learn about Boolean algebra and
logic gates? Where does a video-game-playing teenager run into the properties
of semiconductors and the behavior of electrons? Answer: Nothing and nowhere.
Information technology has imploded into the subterranean machinery of our
devices. What we enjoy at the surface is some commodity, some consumer good
that, resting on a sophisticated machinery, is preternaturally instantaneous,
ubiquitous, safe, and easy.
The development of
personal computers over the past quarter century is a paradigm of the culture
of technology—the divergence between the surfaces and the substructure, between
the commodity and the machinery of the devices that inform the course of daily
life. The increase in the speed, capacity, and sophistication of computer
technology in the last twenty-five years is mind-boggling and defies all
attempts at making it palpable through analogies and illustrations. Those of us
who in the mid-seventies used computers to write articles, search for
information, retrieve information, or communicate with colleagues will realize
immediately where that tremendous increase in computer power went—not into
teaching us more about the nature of information and the structure of
technology, but into concealing all this more tightly and, most important, to
make the use and scope of computers easier, quicker, more extensive, and more
stable. Information technology has furnished powerful tools for the sciences,
and these tools have been engaged in the discovery of phenomena and
relationships that would have remained hidden without those tools. But for most
of us the progress of technology has been a transition from the engagement with
things in their contexts to the consumption of commodities that are available
anywhere and anytime.
At the center of
contemporary culture is consumption. This is a truism we are deeply conflicted
about. We hang on to consumption because it still contains a measure of promise
and plausibility. Yet we cannot bring ourselves to celebrate it anymore because
we sense the vacuity at its center. We still are drawn to consumption because
it promises uniquely pure enjoyment, pleasure unmixed with labor and
unconstrained by challenges. But being so easy and undemanding, consumption has
nothing ennobling or elevating about it.
Looking back in light
of this pattern at recent developments in artificial intelligence, genetics,
and virtual reality, we can see that they fail to be truly revolutionary and
only push along a tendency that has been emerging for over two hundred years.
The future of artificial intelligence is unlikely to equal the procurement of
knowledge that the Internet has already accomplished. Virtual reality will
transform our sense of the actual world less than the telephone and television
have done. And genetics is unlikely to produce the bursts of health and
longevity that public health measures, vaccinations, and antibiotics have
produced. But surely all three endeavors will make the realm of consumption and
commodities still more instantly and ubiquitously available and more safely and
easily enjoyable.
To see the
characteristic pattern of technology, that is, the pairing and perfection of
easy commodities with intricate machineries, is to recognize why the
characteristic achievements of our time have left the centers of our lives
barren. Most of the enormous ingenuity and application that the best and the
brightest of today are capable of flows into the creation or perfection of
concealed machineries, never to be seen again. Most of the most difficult
endeavors today serve consumption, and thus incisiveness begets superficiality,
exertion begets passivity, and expertise begets ignorance. The disparity
between the producers and recipients of culture was not always so stark.
Writers, composers, and builders used to create works that invited deep and
knowledgeable engagement. But Shakespeare's plays, Mozart's symphonies, and
Jefferson's buildings attracted even the untutored ear or eye, and persistent
attention often made amateurs into connoisseurs.
These observations seem
to leave us with the melancholy conclusion that when it comes to leisure we
have to choose between contemporary distractions and obsolete engagements.
Superficially it does seem that the activities and celebrations we take
pleasure and pride in are old-fashioned and inherited from pretechnological
activities and practices—reading books, running races, playing music, etc. But
the fact is that traditional things assume new significance against the
backdrop of the technological culture. That is true of mind, body, and world
when seen within the horizons of artificial intelligence, genetics, and virtual
reality.
Vis à vis artificial
intelligence the dignity of the mind's embodiment comes into focus. The human
mind does not happen to be housed in wetware from which it could be extracted
and transferred to the crystalline and metallic stuff of a computer. Rather the
human mind is the uniquely unified sensibility, the precious vulnerability, and
the generational connectedness of the body (though it is not merely that). The
body in turn, when examined in light of genetics, emerges as the inexhaustible
richness of evolution and the unsurpassable harmony of trillions of
distinguishable parts. The world, finally, when contrasted with virtual
reality, comes to the fore in its commanding presence and the unsearchable
depth of its connectedness.
When the culture of
technology prospers, that is, when research is revolutionary, industry
productive, commerce flourishing, and consumers confident, we feel blessed with
good fortune as well we might. But blessings come with burdens. The clearest is
the requirement that we share our prosperity with the poor, the hungry, and the
sick here and around the globe. The hardest is to see the emptiness at the
center of consumption and to search for those focal things and practices that
deserve and reward our whole-hearted engagement.
1 Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind
(New York: Harcourt, 1976) 70-3. 2 Stephen Doheny-Farina, The Grid and the Village (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001). 3 Rick Lyman, "In Little
Time, Pop Culture is Almost Back to Normal," New York Times on the Web, 4 October 2001
<www.nytimes.com/2001/10/04/arts/04POP.html>; Michiko Kakutani, "The
Age of Irony Isn't Over After All," The
New York Times, section 4 (9 October 2001): 1. 4 Chris
Gaither, "Video Game Field Becomes Crowded and Highly Profitable," New York Times on the Web, 19 December
2001 <www.nytimes.com/2001/12/17/technology/17GAME.html>. 5
Bill Joy and Francis Fukuyama are alarmed by the potentially catastrophic abuse
of biotechnology. Joy is also worried about information technology and
nanotechnology. My sense is that utopians will be foiled and Cassandras
disproven by the enormous, if intelligible, complexity of the brain. See Joy,
"Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Wired
(April 2000) 3 April 2002 <www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html>;
Fukuyama, "Biotechnology and the Threat of a Posthuman Future," The Chronicle of Higher Education (22
March 2002): B7-10. 6 If we are to believe MIT's Technology Review, artificial
intelligence researchers have turned their back on the project of simulating or
equaling human intelligence. See Michael Hiltzik, "A.I. Reboots," Technology Review (March 2002): 46-55. 7
Daniel Dennett, "Intentional Systems," Brainstorms (Montgomery: Bradford, 1978) 3-22. 8
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and
Human Reason (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976) 188-91. 9
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1959) 53 (434 in the Prussian Academy edition). 10
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, eds., Chicken
Soup for the Soul (Deerfield Beach: Health Communications, 1993). 11
Nicolas Wade, "With Genome, a Radical Shift for Biology," The New York Times (25 December 2001):
F7. 12 Wade F7. 13 John Grisham, The Firm (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 14
Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924;
Berlin: Fischer, 1954). 15 Howard Gardner, Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good
Work (New York: Basic, 2001) 41-2, 117-21. Colin Tudge, "The Future of
Humanity," New Statesman on the web, 8 April 2002. <www.newstatesman.co.uk/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=2>.
16 William Mitchell, City
of Bits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996).
17 Cf. Katie Hafner, "Drawn to the Hearth's Electronic
Glow," New York Times on the Web,
24 January 2002
<www.nytimes.com/2002/01/24/technology/circuits/24SCRE!.html?homepageinsidebox...>.