Today’s contribution to my comments on AI quotes from a recent Forbes article by Rob Toews is on the following gem:
“The human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.”
Those words were penned in 1995 by a man who in his youth was a mathematics prodigy, who achieved a doctorate in that subject at The University of Michigan in 1967. In the same year, aged 25, he became the youngest assistant professor of mathematics ever to be hired at The University of California, Berkley.
Two years later he resigned that post, eventually settling in Montana to live a simple, off-grid lifestyle while studying and writing about sociology. His writings eventually included Industrial Society and Its Future, from which this quote is drawn. In an effort to see that essay published in a major American newspaper, the author conducted a campaign of terrorist bombings, mainly by sending explosive devices to University professors across the USA. He also bombed an American Airlines flight and sent a bomb that injured the president of that airline. In total, he killed three people and injured 23 others, many seriously. The quote is of course from Ted Kaczynski, who the FBI labelled the University and Airline Bomber, or the Unabomber for short.
Like science fiction stories, psychopaths are often communicating in metaphors, whether they realise it or not.
In the previous comment, I mentioned Day of the Triffids, a story about the planet coming to be dominated by plants, which was written in 1951 when Kaczynski was 9. I have no idea whether the Unabomber ever read this book, or saw the popular 1962 film. Still, Triffids fits into an entire genre of 50s and 60s stories about mindless creatures that take over the world, including Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, The Blob, and many more. One can certainly be sure that Kaczynski grew up in an America that was steeped in these paranoid visions.
Recall that electronic computing did not exist until the mid-50s, and it probably didn’t enter into the national consciousness until the 60s, when International Business Machines transformed itself into a computer company. When that happened, America’s vision of the mindless entities they should fear shifted from outer space plants to electronic AIs. This is reflected in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (developed simultaneously by author Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrik), where the computer HAL, turns murderous due to rigid adherence to programmed objectives. HAL was named by decrementing “IBM” by one letter in the alphabet.
HAL is only one in a series of mindless AIs that threatened humans and humankind in sci-fi stories at the time, from Clarke’s 1964 story Dial F for Frankenstein (about a telephone network which becomes sentient, a story which later inspired Tim Berners-Lee to invent the World-Wide Web), to 1966’s Colossus, about a defence computer that takes over the world, to Harlan Ellison’s 1967 I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a genuinely terrifying tale where another war AI, the Allied Mastercomputer, destroys almost all of humanity, then gains its only ongoing pleasure from torturing those few people that remain.
These stories have been continuously re-invented for American films to this day. In fact, Ellison, who also penned two 1964 Outer Limits episodes about a soldier from the future, sued the producers of The Terminator successfully. You will now see an acknowledgement of his work at the end of that 1984 classic, which was added as a part of the settlement.
Some film critics have focused on American sci-fi paranoia flicks of this kind as metaphors for the communist threat. Indeed Hollywood started making them during the red scare, which gripped the USA beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but intensified into 1950s McCarthyism.
I’d argue that all these stories, which started in the 50s and continue to today, reflect not just red-baiting, but a more general fear that arose in the mid-20th century. The focus of our society on economic value, rather than human values, became more evident after WWII when the industrial revolution’s progress was revived in a post-war boom and the rise of the consumerist society. I’d posit that all people in the world, particularly in the USA, have, ever since, had a gnawing fear that they are being swallowed up in a dehumanising and dehumanised system, given how their lives have been more-and-more focused on work in a world dominated by fewer and fewer powerful corporate players.
Stories of inhumane invading overlords, whether they are botany from space, super-powerful computers, or the reds under the bed, all reflect this common fear. That’s why the movies are so popular still.
Kaczynski was paranoid, and I imagine that his focus on machines coming to dominate people was a reflection of how he felt dehumanised in his own life. Before going to pursue his doctorate at Michigan, he studied at Harvard. While there he was a part of a group of undergraduate volunteers who were subjected to psychological experiments conducted by Henry Murray (who later oversaw psychedelic drug experiments conducted by Timothy Leary). Murray’s experiments on Kaczynski and his peers involved exposure to extreme stress which “… Murray called ‘vehement, sweeping and personally abusive’ attacks. Specifically-tailored assaults to their egos, cherished ideals and beliefs were used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then viewed recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse repeatedly.” Conspiracy theorists have connected these experiments to CIA’s Project MKUltra, a supposed effort to develop methods of mind control.
Regardless, these experiments were undoubtedly dehumanising, and have been subsequently denounced as inhumane. Kaczynski’s lawyers attributed some of his paranoid delusions to the aftermath of this experience. The Unabomber transferred some of his fear of dehumanisation into a metaphor: the fear of machines making decisions for people.
I don’t think he was wrong in fearing that, but I do believe he was wrong in thinking that in a complex world of the future, machines would eventually make decisions better than people. I’d say that the radical uncertainties created by the world’s complexity are precisely the reason that mechanised thinking is inadequate in that complex world, which doesn’t exist in the future, but is already with us today.
For more on that perspective, have a look at my book, Rage Inside the Machine.