To Be a Machine

by Mark O'Connell

  Perhaps the reason for our being insane animals is precisely our inability to accept ourselves as animals, to accept the fact that we will die animal deaths. And why should we accept it? It’s a fact not to be borne, an inadmissible reality. You would think that we’d be beyond this; you would think that, by now, we’d do better than just succumbing to nature’s final dumb imperative. Our existence, and its attendant neurosis, is defined by a seemingly irresolvable contradiction: that we are outside of nature, beyond it and above it like minor deities, and yet always helplessly within it, forever defined and circumscribed by its blind and implacable authority.

  I felt that I was catching a glimpse of the absurdity that lay beneath everything we thought of as the world—beneath reason, and science, and the idea of human progress. Everything seemed suddenly, giddyingly revealed as bizarre and self-evidently preposterous: the scientist talking about liberating men and women from the captivity of flesh, the malfunctioning mechanism of the homeless man in a heap on a San Francisco sidewalk muttering his madness and misery into a void, the writer deluding himself with thoughts of seeing into the heart of things, and making a note to write something about the tittering derelict, the smell of weed, Nietzsche’s mad animals.

  —

  In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation. I would be taking a break from work and walking to a coffee shop, and a car would drive past me a little too fast, and I would have an image of that car mounting the footpath at speed and plowing into me; I would imagine what the impact might do to my body, and I would find myself thinking of Randal and his project of separating the self from the substrate. If I felt tired or physically vulnerable, I (or my mind, or my brain) was especially likely to return to Randal, or to the worm neurons I’d seen shimmering on Ed Boyden’s laptop in Lausanne, or to the slices of preserved mouse brain I’d seen at 3Scan’s laboratory in Mission Bay.

  One morning, some months after I returned from that trip to San Francisco, I was at home in Dublin, suffering from both a head cold and a hangover—the severity of which latter condition seemed to me out of all reasonable proportion to the moderate amount I’d drunk the previous night. I lay there, idly considering hauling myself out of bed to join my wife and my son, who were in his bedroom next door enjoying a raucous game of Buckaroo. I realized that these conditions (head cold, hangover) had imposed upon me a regime of mild bodily estrangement. As often happens when I’m feeling under the weather, I had a sense of myself as an irreducibly biological thing, an assemblage of flesh and blood and gristle. I felt myself to be an organism with blocked nasal passages, a bacteria-ravaged throat, a sorrowful ache deep within its skull, its cephalon. I was aware of my substrate, in short, because my substrate felt like shit.

  And I was gripped by a sudden curiosity as to what, precisely, that substrate consisted of—as to what I myself happened, technically speaking, to be. I reached across for the phone on my nightstand, and entered into Google the words “What is the human…” The first three autocomplete suggestions offered “What is The Human Centipede about”; and then: “What is the human body made of”; and then: “What is the human condition.” It was the second question I wanted answered at this particular time, as perhaps a back door into the third.

  It turned out that I was 65 percent oxygen—which is to say that I was mostly air, mostly nothing. After that, I was composed of diminishing quantities of carbon and hydrogen, of calcium and sulfur and chlorine and so on down the elemental table. I was also mildly surprised to learn that, like the iPhone I was extracting this information from, I also contained trace elements of copper and iron and silicon.

  What a piece of work is a man, I thought; what a quintessence of dust.

  Some minutes later, my wife entered the bedroom on her hands and knees, our son on her back, gripping the collar of her shirt tight in his little fists. She was making clip-clop noises as she crawled forward, and he was laughing giddily, and shouting “Don’t buck! Don’t buck!”

  With a loud neighing sound, she arched her back and sent him tumbling gently into a row of shoes by the wall, and he screamed in delighted outrage, before climbing up again.

  None of this, I felt, could be rendered in code. None of this, I felt, could be run on any other substrate. Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense.

  I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realized, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.

  A Short Note on the Singularity

  THERE IS NO one accepted version of the Technological Singularity. It is a light gleaming above Silicon Valley’s horizon, appearing now as religious prophecy, now as technological fate. There is no end to the riches the faithful claim it will generate, no end to what can be said of them. In the broadest sense, the term refers to a time to come in which machine intelligence greatly surpasses that of its human originators, and biological life is subsumed by technology. It is, in its way, an extreme expression of techno-progressivism, the belief that the universal application of technology will solve the world’s most intractable problems.

  The idea has been around in some form for at least half a century. In his 1958 obituary for the physicist John von Neumann, with whom he had worked on the Manhattan Project, Stanislaw Ulam wrote about a conversation they once had about “the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

  The first substantial statement of the concept of a Technological Singularity is usually attributed to the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. In an essay called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-human Era,” first delivered as a paper at a 1993 conference organized by NASA, Vinge claimed that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended.” Vinge is ambivalent about the consequences of this great transcendence: it could mean the end of all our problems, or the annihilation of our species, but that it is coming is not seriously in doubt. As with much of this style of techno-millenarian thinking, Vinge’s prophesying is characterized by a strange sort of historical determinism: there can be no preventing the Singularity, he writes, because its coming is an inevitable consequence of our natural competitiveness, and the inherent possibilities of technology. “And yet,” he writes, “we are the initiators.”

  The closest thing to a canonical Singularity is the version that appears in the popular writings of Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is an inventor of many ingenious devices—the flatbed scanner, the print-to-speech reading machine for the blind—and the cofounder, with Stevie Wonder, of Kurzweil Music Systems, whose synthesizers are used by such diverse acts as Scott Walker and New Order and “Weird Al” Yankovic. As a writer, he is a controversial figure, a business-casual mystic whose arcane projections chart the furthest reaches of techno-utopian speculation. But he is by no means a marginal presence in the tech world; he is, rather, a tutelary spirit of Silicon Valley—a status that was more or less formalized in 2012, when he was brought in as director of engineering at Google, to act as thought-leader-in-chief for the company’s pursuit of machine learning.

  Kurzweil’s Singularity is a wildly multifarious vision of technological abundance, a feverishly detailed teleology in which all of history converges toward an apotheosis of pure mind. “How do we contemplate the Singularity?” he asks in the early pages of his 2005 bestseller, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. “As with the Sun, it’s hard to look at directly; it’s better to squint at it out of the corners of our eyes.” He is, however, obligingly forthcoming with certain details: the Singularity, for one thing, is informally penciled in for the year 2045 or thereabouts. (Kurzweil, who famousl
y consumes a prodigious daily banquet of dietary supplements and vitamin pills—and who, for that matter, markets his own personal brand of death-forestalling elixirs and capsules—is confident that, at age ninety-seven, he’ll still be around.)

  As a diviner of the technological future, Kurzweil’s principal tool is what he calls “the law of accelerating returns.” Technology progresses, in this view, along the same lines as a financial investment with compound interest, which is to say exponentially. Our current technology is the foundation from which we develop future technology, and so the more sophisticated technology becomes, the greater the rate at which it improves. (The best-known example of this phenomenon is an observation, first made in the 1950s by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore and which came to be known as Moore’s Law, stating that the number of transistors that can be fit on a single microchip doubles roughly once every eighteen months.) The process of Darwinian evolution is, for Kurzweil, itself a process of exponential growth, and one that is explicitly represented as growing toward a desirable end. Evolution is not a blind and chaotic fumbling, a random generation of horrors and wonders, but rather a system, “a process of creating patterns of increasing order.” Evolution, in other words, is an advancement toward the perfect order and regulation of the machine. And it is this evolution of patterns—a logical progression in which “each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next”—that constitutes, for Kurzweil, “the ultimate story of our world.”

  The picture Kurzweil paints of the future is one in which technology continues to get smaller and more powerful, until such time as its accelerating evolution becomes the primary agent of our own evolution as a species. We will no longer carry computers around with us, he reveals, but rather take them into our bodies—into our brains and our bloodstreams—changing thereby the nature of the human experience. In the very near future (i.e., hopefully within the lifetime of Kurzweil himself), this will be not merely possible but necessary, given the unsatisfactory computing power of even the most efficient human brain.

  Kurzweil’s vision of the future might be an attractive one if you already accept the mechanistic view of the human being—if you agree with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky that the brain “happens to be a meat machine.” Why would we, or our meat machines, not choose to upgrade to some higher degree of functionality? If we understand a machine to be an apparatus constructed for the performance of a particular task, then our task as machines is, surely, to think, to compute, at the highest level possible. In this instrumentalist view of human life, it is more or less our duty—or at least pretty much the whole point of our existing in the first place—to increase our computational firepower, and to ensure that, as machines, we run as efficiently as possible for as long as possible.

  “Our version 1.0 biological bodies,” writes Kurzweil, are “frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals they require. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed.” This, we are assured, will no longer be the case once the Singularity kicks in: we will no longer be helpless and primitive creatures, meat machines restricted in our thoughts and actions by the flesh that is our current substrate. “The Singularity,” he writes, “will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.”

  We will, in other words, finally escape the fallen condition of our humanity, finally become unfleshed; we will be restored to a prelapsarian state of wholeness, a final union in which technology will take the place of the Abrahamic God. “The Singularity,” writes Kurzweil, “will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.” To the charge that such a merger would obliterate our humanity, Kurzweil counters that the Singularity is in fact a final achievement of the human project, an ultimate vindication of the very quality that has always defined and distinguished us as a species—our constant yearning for a transcendence of our physical and mental limitations.

  In The City of God, Saint Augustine conjures a state of “universal knowledge” far beyond anything we can now imagine, which will be the preserve of those blessed by God’s grace. “Think how great, how beautiful,” he writes, “how certain, how unerring, how easily acquired this knowledge will be. And what a body, too, we shall have, a body utterly subject to our spirit and one so kept alive by spirit that there will be no need of any other food.”

  In Kurzweil’s prophecy, the messianic role is occupied by intelligence. Although he ascribes mystical significance to the term, his definition is straightforward enough: he takes intelligence essentially to mean computation—the algorithmic machinery that is brought to bear on the raw informational stuff of creation. And in this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity.

  He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time. In the last of what he calls the “Six Epochs of Evolution,” after the great fusion of humanity and AI, intelligence “will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst.” This will be achieved, writes Kurzweil, “by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation…to spread out from its origins on Earth.” Through careful husbandry, the infinite emptiness of the universe—after some fourteen billion years of just sitting around uselessly succumbing to the inexorable force of entropy—will finally be turned to account as a vast data-processing mechanism.

  In one of the stranger scenes in Transcendent Man, a 2009 documentary about Kurzweil’s life and work, we encounter the film’s subject standing on a beach at sunset, his inscrutable gaze fixed upon the serene expanse of the Pacific. In the scene directly preceding, we have just heard him speak movingly about the last conversation he had with his father before his death, and so when we hear the voice of the director asking Kurzweil what it is he is thinking about as he stares out to sea, we might reasonably expect him to say that he is thinking of mortality—if not of his own, at least the mortality of those not fortunate enough to live long enough to live forever. Kurzweil pauses a long moment, and the camera begins to move about him in slow ceremonial circles.

  “Well,” he says, “I was thinking about how much computation is represented by the ocean. I mean, it’s all these water molecules interacting with each other. That’s computation. It’s quite beautiful. I’ve always found it very soothing. And that’s really what computation is all about. To capture these transcendent moments of our consciousness.”

  Facing out onto the terminal vastness of the Pacific, his hair slightly ruffled by the breeze, Kurzweil appears an oracular figure, a conduit for the mysteries of technology, a prophet of a world to come, in which an infinite and instrumental intelligence will finally release us from the burden of our humanity.

  He looks at the ocean, and sees a vast and intricate device which is nothing but information, nothing but the raw material for intelligence. The water, its fluctuations in temperature, its swarming profusion of organisms, its rhythmic advances and retreats: all of it an immense calculus, a code. The sea, like a certain way of thinking about thought itself, is a patterned manipulation of propositions. And in this moment a kind of computational pantheism reveals itself, a reverence for nature a
s an expression of a universal machine, an algorithmic immanence.

  Talkin’ AI Existential Risk Blues

  EVEN IF IT were possible to put aside for a moment the considerable issues of plausibility, and the obviously religious foundations of the whole edifice, the Singularity was not a concept I could ever see myself getting behind. I will admit, that is, that I never succeeded in grasping the attraction of the thing, that I never quite came to understand how what it offered—the prospect of a bodiless existence as pure information, or run on some third-party human hardware—could ever be seen as salvation rather than perdition. If life had any meaning at all, my instinctive belief was that its meaning was animal, that it was inseparably bound up with birth, and reproduction, and death.

  But more than any of this, the idea that technology would redeem us, that artificial intelligence would offer a solution to the suboptimal aspects of human existence, was incompatible with my basic outlook on life, with what little I happened to understand about the exceptionally destructive category of primates to which I belonged. Temperamentally and philosophically, I was and am a pessimist, and so it seemed to me that we were a great deal less likely to be redeemed than destroyed by the results of our own ingenuity. The planet, at this time, was on the verge of the sixth mass extinction since the first appearance of life on its surface, the first such extinction to be caused by the environmental impact of one of its native species.

  Which is why when I began to read about the growing fear, in certain quarters, that a superhuman-level artificial intelligence might wipe humanity from the face of the earth, I felt that here, at least, was a vision of our technological future that appealed to my fatalistic disposition.