When the science of AI takes on a paranormal feel
In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself writing columns that touch on the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, the mystery of unidentified flying objects haunting American skies and the enthusiasm in certain circles for taking mind-altering substances that yield a feeling, illusory or not, of contact with supernatural see ming entities.
These are very different stories, in a way. The AI revolution belongs to the realm of serious and lavishly funded science. The UFO phenomenon hovers on the paranormal and pseudoscientific fringe. The spiritual dimensions explored by users of drugs like DMT belong primarily to the terrain of psychology and religion — either as manifestations of some sort of Jungian unconscious or else, well, as actual spiritual dimensions.
But there is a shared spirit in these stories, a common impulse to the quests: the desire to encounter or invent some sort of nonhuman consciousness that might help us toward leaps that we can’t make on our own.
This impulse is an ancient one: The idea that one might bind a djinn, create a golem or manipulate a god or fairy to do your bidding is inscribed deep in the human imagination.
Once upon a time this magician’s art seemed like a plausible rival to scientific technique, or a complementary means of mastery over nature; indeed, the scientist and the magician were often overlapping figures in the early modern imagination, blurring together in vocations like alchemy and characters like Dr. Faustus.
They separated primarily because the scientific method simply worked in a way that magical conjuring did not. Or as C.S. Lewis put it 80 years ago, in “The Abolition of Man,” “The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: One was sickly and died, the other strong and throve.”
But now we are in an era when people talk increasingly about the limits of the scientific endeavor — the increasing impediments to discovering new ideas, the absence of lowhanging scientific fruit, the near impossibility, given the laws of physics as we understand them, of ever spreading human civilization beyond our lonely planet or beyond our isolated solar system.
Meanwhile, the speculations of scientific theorists and philosophers are reaching beyond the very confines of our universe — to an ever-multiplying multiverse whose branches never touch, or an infiniteseeming hall of simulations run by some civilization with godlike capacities relative to ours.
So it’s not surprising, in this age of frustration and re-mystification, that our thoughts and efforts might turn back to the magician’s art, in search of powers that might help us escape the limits of our island planet, our paltry life span, the crooked timber of our nature.
But not simply back to the old magic of spells and incantations (though there is a lot of that these days as well).
Instead, in the UFO fascination and the AI enthusiasm and the drug-enabled “psychonaut” explorations, we see attempts to link magic to science, or to deploy science to do magic, using telescopes or chemicals or vast computing powers to discover or create what the old magicians tried to conjure — namely, beings that can enlighten us, elevate us, serve us and usher in the Age of Aquarius, the Singularity or both.
The hardheaded reader will object that one of these examples isn’t like the others.
Simple common sense tells us that the UFO speculators are probably not about to get in touch with extraplanetary aliens. The materialist premises of modern science reassure us that our hallucinogen-ingesting psychonauts are not actually in touch with the originals of Titania and Oberon, Jupiter or Odin.
Whereas the AI project seems to be advancing rapidly, with no speculative leaps required to see its promise.
So why lump it in with the dubious and paranormal?
Stipulate for the sake of argument that AI is more likely to have immediate practical effects than the search for extraterrestrial life or any drugaided communion with the spirit realm.
There are still good reasons to analyze its efforts in terms of djinns, golems and the like.
First, because this is how its own enthusiasts talk. Here’s Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, on his own reaction to the new chatbots:
“An alien has awoken — admittedly, an alien of our own fashioning, a golem, more the embodied spirit of all the words on the internet than a coherent self with independent goals. How could our eyes not pop with eagerness to learn everything this alien has to teach? If the alien sometimes struggles with arithmetic or logic puzzles, if its eerie flashes of brilliance are intermixed with stupidity, hallucinations, and misplaced confidence … well then, all the more interesting!
“Could the alien ever cross the line into sentience, to feeling anger and jealousy and infatuation and the rest rather than just convincingly playacting them? Who knows? And suppose not: is a zombie, shambling out of the philosophy seminar room into actual existence, any less fascinating?”
Or consider a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed essay by Henry Kissinger, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which effectively repurposes Arthur C. Clarke’s admonition that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as a kind of boast.
Their description of the emergent form of AI suggests an intelligence that yields its answers the way an oracle might, or a Magic 8-Ball: Through processes that are invisible to us, beyond our understanding, so complex as to be indistinguishable from action in a supernatural mind.
And this kind of magical language mostly describes AI as an answer machine, Aaronson’s “embodied spirit of all the words on the internet.”
It doesn’t even get into the question of whether an AI can actually attain consciousness, where the sorcerous aspect of this project is even more explicit. After all, we don’t really understand our own consciousness; we haven’t even begun to solve the so-called hard problem of the mind and its relationship to matter.
Such a summoning is most feared by AI alarmists, at present, because the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination.
But the old stories of the magicians and their bargains, of Faust and his Mephistopheles, suggest that we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well.