You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Page 21
The raw brainpower of cephalopods seems to have more potential than the mammalian brain. Cephalopods can do all sorts of things, like think in 3-D and morph, which would be fabulous innate skills in a high-tech future. Tentacle-eye coordination ought to easily be a match for hand-eye coordination. From the point of view of body and brain, cephalopods are primed to evolve into the high-tech-tool-building overlords. By all rights, cephalopods should be running the show and we should be their pets.
What we have that they don’t have is neoteny. Our secret weapon is childhood.
Baby cephalopods must make their way on their own from the moment of birth. In fact, some of them have been observed reacting to the world seen through their transparent eggs before they are born, based only on instinct. If people are at one extreme in a spectrum of neoteny, cephalopods are at the other.
Cephalopod males often do not live long after mating. There is no concept of parenting. While individual cephalopods can learn a great deal within a lifetime, they pass on nothing to future generations. Each generation begins afresh, a blank slate, taking in the strange world without guidance other than instincts bred into their genes.
If cephalopods had childhood, surely they would be running the Earth. This can be expressed in an equation, the only one I’ll present in this book:
Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality
Morphing in cephalopods works somewhat similarly to how it does in computer graphics. Two components are involved: a change in the image or texture visible on a shape’s surface, and a change in the underlying shape itself. The “pixels” in the skin of a cephalopod are organs called chromatophores. These can expand and contract quickly, and each is filled with a pigment of a particular color. When a nerve signal causes a red chromatophore to expand, the “pixel” turns red. A pattern of nerve firings causes a shifting image—an animation—to appear on the cephalopod’s skin. As for shapes, an octopus can quickly arrange its arms to form a wide variety of forms, such as a fish or a piece of coral, and can even raise welts on its skin to add texture.
Why morph? One reason is camouflage. (The octopus in the video is presumably trying to hide from Roger.) Another is dinner. One of Roger’s video clips shows a giant cuttlefish pursuing a crab. The cuttlefish is mostly soft-bodied; the crab is all armor. As the cuttlefish approaches, the medieval-looking crab snaps into a macho posture, waving its sharp claws at its foe’s vulnerable body.
The cuttlefish responds with a bizarre and ingenious psychedelic performance. Weird images, luxuriant colors, and successive waves of what look like undulating lightning bolts and filigree swim across its skin. The sight is so unbelievable that even the crab seems disoriented; its menacing gesture is replaced for an instant by another that seems to say, “Huh?” In that moment the cuttlefish strikes between cracks in the armor. It uses art to hunt!
As a researcher who studies virtual reality, I can tell you exactly what emotion floods through me when I watch cephalopods morph: jealousy.
The problem is that in order to morph in virtual reality, humans must design morph-ready avatars in laborious detail in advance. Our software tools are not yet flexible enough to enable us, in virtual reality, to improvise ourselves into different forms.
In the world of sounds, we can be a little more spontaneous. We can make a wide variety of weird noises through our mouths, spontaneously and as fast as we think. That’s why we are able to use language.
But when it comes to visual communication, and other modalities such as smell and spontaneously enacted sculptural shapes that could be felt, we are hamstrung.
We can mime—and indeed when I give lectures on cephalopods I like to pretend to be the crab and the cuttlefish to illustrate the tale. (More than one student has pointed out that with my hair as it is, I am looking more and more like a cephalopod as time goes by.) We can learn to draw and paint, or use computer graphics design software, but we cannot generate images at the speed with which we can imagine them.
Suppose we had the ability to morph at will, as fast as we can think. What sort of language might that make possible? Would it be the same old conversation, or would we be able to “say” new things to one another?
For instance, instead of saying, “I’m hungry; let’s go crab hunting,” you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might turn into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt.
I call this possibility “post symbolic communication.” It can be a hard idea to think about, but I find it enormously exciting. It would not suggest an annihilation of language as we know it—symbolic communication would continue to exist—but it would give rise to a vivid expansion of meaning.
This is an extraordinary transformation that people might someday experience. We’d then have the option of cutting out the “middleman” of symbols and directly creating shared experience. A fluid kind of concreteness might turn out to be more expressive than abstraction.
In the domain of symbols, you might be able to express a quality like “redness.” In postsymbolic communication, you might come across a red bucket. Pull it over your head, and you discover that it is cavernous on the inside. Floating in there is every red thing: there are umbrellas, apples, rubies, and droplets of blood. The red within the bucket is not Plato’s eternal red. It is concrete. You can see for yourself what the objects have in common. It’s a new kind of concreteness that is as expressive as an abstract category.
This is perhaps a dry and academic-sounding example. I also don’t want to pretend I understand it completely. Fluid concreteness would be an entirely new expressive domain. It would require new tools, or instruments, so that people could achieve it.
I imagine a virtual saxophone-like instrument in virtual reality with which I can improvise both golden tarantulas and a bucket with all the red things. If I knew how to build it now, I would, but I don’t.
I consider it a fundamental unknown whether it is even possible to build such a tool in a way that would actually lift the improviser out of the world of symbols. Even if you used the concept of red in the course of creating the bucket of all red things, you wouldn’t have accomplished this goal.
I spend a lot of time on this problem. I am trying to create a new way to make software that escapes the boundaries of preexisting symbol systems. This is my phenotropic project.
The point of the project is to find a way of making software that rejects the idea of the protocol. Instead, each software module must use emergent generic pattern-recognition techniques—similar to the ones I described earlier, which can recognize faces—to connect with other modules. Phenotropic computing could potentially result in a kind of software that is less tangled and unpredictable, since there wouldn’t be protocol errors if there weren’t any protocols. It would also suggest a path to escaping the prison of predefined, locked-in ontologies like MIDI in human affairs.
The most important thing about postsymbolic communication is that I hope it demonstrates that a humanist softie like me can be as radical and ambitious as any cybernetic totalist in both science and technology, while still believing that people should be considered differently, embodying a special category.
For me, the prospect of an entirely different notion of communication is more thrilling than a construction like the Singularity. Any gadget, even a big one like the Singularity, gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us.
Acknowledgments
Some passages in this book are adapted from “Jaron’s World,” the author’s column in Discover magazine, and others are adapted from the author’s contributions to edge.org, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Think Magazine, assorted open letters, and comments submitted to various hearings. They are used here by permission.
Superspecial thanks to early readers of the manuscript: Lee Smolin, Dina Graser, Neal Stephenson, Georg
e Dyson, Roger Brent, and Yelena the Porcupine; editors: Jeff Alexander, Marty Asher, and Dan Frank; agents: John Brockman, Katinka Matson, and Max Brockman; at Discover: Corey Powell and Bob Guccione Jr.; and various people who tried to help me finish a book over the last few decades: Scott Kim, Kevin Kelly, Bob Prior, Jamie James, my students at UCSF, and untold others.
A note About the Author
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. His current appointments include Scholar at Large for Microsoft Corporation and Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, University of California at Berkeley.
Lanier’s name is also often associated with research into “virtual reality,” a term he coined. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multiperson virtual worlds using head-mounted displays, for both local and wide-area networks, as well as the first “avatars,” or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL Research, Inc., he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas. He led the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications. In 2009, he received a Lifetime Career Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to the field.
Lanier received an honorary doctorate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2006, was the recipient of Carnegie Mellon University’s Watson Award in 2001, and was a finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Jaron Lanier
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon
are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Imprint Academic for permission to reprint material by Jaron Lanier that was originally published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Portions of this work also originally appeared in Discover, Think Magazine, and on www.edge.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lanier, Jaron.
You are not a gadget / by Jaron Lanier.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59314-6
1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Technological innovations—Social aspects. 3. Technology—Social aspects. I. Title.
HM851.L358 2010
303.48′33—dc22 2009020298
v3.0