The Size Of The Problem, The Only Available Means To Solve It, The Rejection Of Those Means By The Very People Who Claim To Want To Solve It

As perceptions of these kinds began to reverberate in me, I thought, as perhaps Poloanyi did after his encounter with Bukharin, that the questions and misgivings that had so forcefully presented themselves to me could be disposed of quickly, perhaps in a short, serious article.  I did in fact write a paper touching on many points mentioned here.  But gradually I began to see that certain quite fundamental questions had infected me more chronically than I had first perceived.  I shall probably never be rid of them.

There are many ways to state these basic questions as there are starting points for coping with them.  At bottom they are about nothing less than man's place in the universe.  But I am professionally trained only in computer science, which is to say (in all seriousness) that I am extremely poorly educated;  I can mount neither the competence, nor the courage, not even the chutzpah, to write on the grand scale actually demanded.  I therefore grapple with questions that couple more directly to the concerns I have expressed, and hope that their larger implications will emerge spontaneously.  I shall have to concern myself with the following kinds of questions:

1. What is it about the computer that has brought the view of man as a machine to a new level of plausibility?  Clearly there have been other machines that imitated man in various ways, e.g., steam shovels.  But not until the invention of the digital computer have there been machines that could perform intellectual functions of even modest scope; i.e., machines that could in any sense be said to be intelligent.  Now "artificial intelligence" (AI) is a discipline of computer science.  This new field will have to be discussed.  Ultimately a line dividing human and machine intelligence must be drawn.  If there is no such line, then advocates of computerized psychotherapy may be merely heralds of an age in which man has finally been recognized as nothing but a clock-work.  Then the consequences of such a reality would need urgently to be divined and contemplated.  

I can tell you what made me originally take up this then already decades old book and re-read it and write about it here, it was a news report about the Pentagon program for giving attack drones the "independence" to "decide" to fire on a target "it had identified" as a legitimate target for attack without human decision making being involved and that there were already computer scientists here, in Britain and certainly elsewhere who were working on just such systems.  If it was their faith that such "artificial intelligence" would be more accurate in making that deadly calculation as it would be in deriving the square root of a number inconveniently large for a person to get it with paper and a pencil, that line that Joseph Weizenbaum had feared had already been crossed.  I had every reason to think that to the computer scientists who would contemplate working on that system and to the generals and colonels and contractors who were in on it with them a house or village that could be targeted by their "artificial intelligence" on our behalf were no more significant than a pallet of cheap watches or alarm clocks to a shipping company.  Less so since such a shipment was bound to have had insurance bought to cover its loss.  Of course, in modern warfare, in modern thought, in which people are considered material objects, the fact that people are routinely reduced to that by such cost-benefit analysis had always been treated in that way.  

But that view of human beings didn't originate on the day that the first person did what even Descartes didn't dare to do, consider human beings as soulless mechanisms of the kind Descartes had no qualms about reducing animals to, it had always been the way that men had treated women, slave-holders had treated slaves, kings had treated subjects and human beings habitually treat the other unless something like the Mosaic Law tells them it is the will of God that they treat them as they would like to be treated themselves.  

In pointing out someone as generally sympathetic to the substance of the expression of that principle, that you should do to others as you would like to be treated, yourself, as Jesus put it, or even the form that Hillel said encompassed the entire Law as it is found in the negative form in Leviticus as Kevin Drum was driven by his atheistic-materialistic ideology to advance the mindset that would allow for that degraded view of life and human minds, I was, in fact, choosing to show how the two points of view are not compatible.  You cannot believe in free will and material determinism, the actual ideology of virtually every modern atheists, including those who claim for themselves the status of "free thinkers."  You cannot both claim that human beings are soulless objects which are temporarily animate but and have a right to not only the concern but also the right to share in the material wealth hoarded by others - if there is anything that the secular left is supposed to be based in, it is such a sharing of resources on a more equal basis than has ever existed, excepting in a few religious communities in human history.  The entire program of the left, certainly that of religiously based liberals in the traditional American meaning of that word (NOT the general British or European liberalism which is saturated with expectations of gross inequality), and the claims of socialism as leading to the general commonwealth are entirely incompatible with the view that human beings are much more than mere material objects.

As Weizenbaum and Polanyi and others have pointed out the consequences of a materialistic view of human beings must lead to the general degredation of human minds and everything that human minds produce, in the fullness of time including all intellectual activity and its products.  I think in the denial of reality, the distinction of truth from lies that has ripened in the Trump and Boris Johnson regimes, in every dictatorship in all of time, is a mere variation on what is not uncommonly held by academic materialist ideologues, many scientists, many in philosophy, including Daniel Dennett - a younger Dennett being one of those thanked in the credits of the book by Weizenbaum, and most absurdly in the eliminative positivists and most disturbingly in the atheist replacement for morality such as the various utilitarians who seem to have above all else in common, their readiness to draw up lists of who among the totally innocent and undangerous it's OK to kill and when it's OK to kill them. 

It may have not been one of his intentions in sounding the alarm but for me one of the things I concluded by reading this book, among others, is that the decadence that was part of the modernism that had its start in the work of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes in which the entirety of human experience was seen in terms of its utility and the possibilities of an enhanced use of it by considering everything in terms of mathematical analysis, had reached a stage that that insane enthusiast for the resulting violent, decadence that leads to, Nietzsche, would see his predictions routinely fulfilled in everyday life.  

It is an ultimate rejection of the view of life that is set out in the Jewish doctrine of universal and equal justice and the Christian ethic of universal and equal love, the real alternative to oppression and inequality of which democracy is merely an imperfect attempt to secure, something which, itself, depends on the choice for justice and love above the stupid and self-defeating arrogance of choosing a mechanistic view of human beings and life, in general.  That is the choice, though it is certain that those ideas, that we are to do justice equally and to love are not exclusively found in the scriptures and traditions of the monotheistic religions that developed from the Mosaic Law - even Exodus, even the quite dreadful Joshua says that God has covenental relationships with other people.  

But any hope of making it dominant in an effective way will be through those larger repositories of it, the ones who hold that it is transcendentally true and modest enough to admit that their traditions of practicing or even understanding of it is highly imperfect and in need of a prophetic level of criticism have any prospect of making that happen on a sufficiently large scale.  It simply won't happen through any modern-day, rationalistic or scientific or materialistic idiocy which can't even navigate the incompatibility of material determinism and the consequent impossibility of free thought.  It won't happen through the discredited and fictitious sciences such as Marxism or certainly the allegedly scientific interpretations of socialism, of which some of the most murderous modernistic regimes have been the real life expression of and which the atheist-secular left in the Western democracies have championed even as they opted not to live in their various atheist paradises but in the "decadent" West.  Not that I would accuse those Western democracies of nearly intending to live up to their claimed ideals, as Jefferson, Madison and others in the United States showed, despite their claims, they had no intention of giving up treating human beings as objects of utility, pleasure and utter disposability.   If anything, the power of that ancient and yet modern opposition to the Mosaic tradition is powerful enough to distort the very religions that should have given them up thousands of years ago.