But how is that change of power actually working out, and will it be as benign as we thought? Will a new generation of IT leaders, trained in a culture which is highly intelligent, cooperative and powerful, nevertheless build a world which assumes that humans do not have souls, and more or less by accident oppresses and eliminates them (and, "OOps, ma, I accidentally demolished the entire human species?").
Now that I think of it, Jiang Zemin of China had a similar flavor. Xi Jinping is in many ways the Donald Trump of China, the result of the powerful nonverbal minds of China reacting against the power, clarity purity but dangerous narrowness of what came before. In that way, more Trump than Trump!
What happens when we build an entire world for someone, and discover we could not fit as that someone?
For centuries, the highest Western culture has tried to promote
freedom (as in the famous book by Eric Fromm), individual self-awareness, and the idea that we can make rational choices as individuals even if society manipulates the rules to change what is rational for us. Can local police remember that they are humans first, before they are whatever job they identify with?
But what if the new world is designed by people who assume none of us have souls, and that there is no need to protect, preserve or serve them?
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All of that reminds me of two of the many real stories I come back to in my life.
Some people come back to verses in the Bible. There is a joke about two Bible people having a conversation, saying things like "Matthew 7:12" and "Job 3:3" to each other, filling in from memory and connecting smoothly to their present experience. that book is too limited, but I have often thought that it would be nice to have a list of the first person experiences which so deeply shaped my own life and understandings. So here are just two of those many stories.
Some people come back to verses in the Bible. There is a joke about two Bible people having a conversation, saying things like "Matthew 7:12" and "Job 3:3" to each other, filling in from memory and connecting smoothly to their present experience. that book is too limited, but I have often thought that it would be nice to have a list of the first person experiences which so deeply shaped my own life and understandings. So here are just two of those many stories.
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Ugly duckling redux:
Once I was a PhD student at Harvard,finally on a path to really surviving and graduating, thanks to my thesis advisor, Professor Karl Deutsch, whose highest cited book happens to be:
Karl chose to work often in a simple desk in the corner of the library of Litauer Hall, the same building where Henry Kissinger had his office, which I visited very often that year.
Karl did not believe in PSI (which I define as that aspect of the human mind which cannot be explained by QED, the aspect which includes SOME FORM of what may be called paranormal, psychic or spiritual life). A few years before that, I was as definite as he was that PSI does not exist, based on exactly the same arguments that D.O. Hebb used in his introduction to The Organization of Behavior, one of the two great sources of the entire neural network field. But by that time, inescapable personal experiences had forced me to "open my eyes" so to speak. Deutsch had held on to the no-PSI view very fiercely. He was deeply committed to the scientific approach in all his work.
Deutsch was also one of the real founders of the European Union (EU), then the EEC (European Economic Community). He worked tirelessly and effectively, not to attain power, but to bring peace to Europe. He was in constant communication with the people who did move power in western Europe, helping them to see the way forward.
One day, when I visited him in his corner of the library (a strong visual memory!), I had an idea for how to make further progress in the EEC, a new policy tactic to advance the goals which Karl and I shared there. As I presented it to him, I looked carefully at his face, which became very thoughtful (not positive or negative but thoughtful, of the "I wonder" type). He then said: "Hmm. I wonder what the french would think about that." And then, I swear, I saw him look up and forwards, with a glowing ray of thought emanating from his forehead, moving up and connecting far away... and then, when something came back to him, him then turning and telling me what he saw.
My thought: "This man does not even believe in psychic powers, but what i just saw with my own eyes was incredibly real, visible and powerful." I drew the obvious global conclusion, which TODAY I express as: "How many people out there think they are ugly ducklings, living their lives accordingly, when really they are swans? But conversely, how many people believe deeply that THEY are swans, when they are actually just ugly ducklings living their lives in formalistic or devout darkness?" (Suddenly I also remember epistles of paul, about opening of the eyes..and ears and heart and mind.)
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Who do we think we are, worms creating a world where only worms can live?
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The other story from my personal life which came back to me is a bit less vivid.
When I ran the neural network area at NSF (one of my many strong front line jobs there), I often gave talks to the neural network community. (In fact, they told me that the following web site will soon be updated to link to my 13 minute talk on the grand challenges in research and government funding ahead of us in that field:
One day, as I prepared a larger, longer and more technical talk I mused: "This preparation feels so weird. Here I am pretending to give a big public talk, pretending to be a great communicator when really I am just a humble mathematician/thinker, planning to put on the clothes of a great communicator pretending to be a mathematician when at that time I will be just a communicator." That was such a vivid and powerful thought, a powerful experience.
In fact... another powerful memory emerges: final exam time, senior year at Harvard, taking crossdisciplinary courses, like an independent study with Marvin Minsky on AI, courses in economics, and another.
Memory: "TODAY, I must wipe my mind and become an economist. Yesterday I was a neural network person. Each day I have to make a sweeping change, and totally BECOME yet another role, some other viewpoint. " That felt VERY weird and unnatural, but I was glad to get used to it, to learn how to make such shifts. It reminded me of an important paper by Bitterman in Scientific American, about how SOME species of vertebrate learn to make pattern reversals more and more easily, even as others collapse. "I am a mammal," I told myself. (That was BEFORE I believed in PSI connections, but did the exercise help? Did deep listening to music, welcoming it into my deepest feelings, help? Perhaps they were part of the CAUSE of my later having experiences which forced me to change my mind about psi.)
Some stories need to be engraved so deeply in our minds, to preserve our sense of reality, and keep us from making very dumb and dangerous mistakes.
On this list... Deepak Chopra's fiction about Merlin is just a fictional story, but I found it more authentic than a lot of the later theory. In fact, some of my technical papers describe how human symbolic reasoning is basically just an outgrowth of a more fundamental part of the design of the human brain, the part which enabled people returning from the hunt to tell stories in a way which transferred the value of experience. This is part of the very core of mundane human brain intelligence and yes, there are specific circuits in the brain which support it.
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