The consequences of technology
In 1960, in a speech on the question of technology, the philosopher Martin Heidegger stated: "The consequences of technology are anything but technological." At first it looked like one of his signature dark self-wrapping expressions like an Escher etching. It was actually a prophecy. A prophecy that today we verify in all its farsighted scope. Technology, according to the German philosopher, is part of the destiny of being, something that pertains to its ontology. And that's right.
The consequences of technology are enormous and general. Artificial intelligence is the supreme technology today, albeit still in its infancy. Therefore its consequences will be supreme. The technologists themselves, that is, those who push it as a Panzerdivision, are very, very alarmed. Elon Musk, the commander-in-chief of that division, declared that "artificial intelligence can unleash the third world war," which will be a war fought in cyberspace.
The same protagonists of the technological revolution, even the most Jacobin ones, begin to question what they have never cared about, the consequences of their actions. Americans now know - it is written in an official report of over 500 pages - that a president is where he is because there is Facebook and there are social media. There is a space, that is, without roof or law. Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote something definitive about this space:
“Have we reached the point of no return? Yes. It was when we realized that a critical mass of our lives and work had slipped away from the terraqueous world into the realm of cyberspace. Or rather, a critical mass of our relationships have moved into a territory where everyone is connected but no one is in charge.
After all there are no searchlights in cyberspace, there are no policemen patrolling the streets, there are no judges, there is no God to punish the wicked and reward the good and certainly no helpline to call if Putin robs the elections. If someone is swearing on Twitter or Facebook, unless there's a mortal threat, good luck if you want the snub punished, especially if it's anonymous, which often happens in cyberspace.
And cyberspace is the territory in which we now spend hours and hours of our day, where we do most of our shopping, most of our meetings, where we cultivate our friendships, where we learn, where we do most of our business, where we teach , where we inform ourselves and where we try to sell our goods, our services and our ideas.
It is where the President of the United States as well as the leader of ISIS can communicate equally easily with millions of followers via Twitter, without the need for editors, verifiers, law firms and other filters.”
Will artificial intelligence be a poisoned apple?
No, at least it was not so in the intentions of the founders of this extreme technology, who saw in it a new chapter of human development, but a chapter written collectively by mankind as a whole
To clarify this aspect well there is a book that has just been released which goes right into the genesis of the thought, elaborations and actions of the scientists and visionary inventors who are the conceptual and instrumental source of AI. The book is The poisoned apple. At the origins of artificial intelligence (goWare, available in paper and ebook versions) by Mario Ricciardi, professor emeritus at the Turin Polytechnic, and Sara Sacco, a young editor. The book clearly clarifies the goals and intents of the first ideas of the cognitive machine as early as the XNUMXs.
Precisely in the chapter dedicated to Heidegger, Ricciardi clearly expresses, shall we say, the dialectic of the cognitive machine. He expresses it in these terms:
“Information technologies and Turing's theory of computability carry a terrible risk. Therefore, two profound visions confront each other:
a) ideal machine, because it is universal (abstract thought starting from Turing's computational theory);
b) diabolical, infernal machine, starting from the concept of enslavement to technology.”
Science fiction literature itself has polarized between these two extremes, perhaps preferring the second for its greater narrative vein.
The book, with extensive introductions and with the support of visual material, offers the fundamental writings on the genesis of AI. It begins with Alan Turing's essay on Machines and Intelligence. The reflections follow from Norbert Wiener who, through cybernetics, transformed the idea of the computer as a calculating tool into a communication machine and therefore into a universal medium. He also founded the science of Cybernetics, the underlying science of AI.
Then there is the visionary writing by Vannevar Bush on the Memex (the famous As we think – now impossible to find in an accurate Italian translation), the instrumental means through which the society of knowledge and the dissemination of science should have passed, in short, the information society .
There are the considerations of Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse and of many other things that we use today such as the refrigerator, on the concept of augmenting and Ted Nelson's ideas for developing the language of personal creativity through machines and also increasing the liberal arts .
We asked Mario Ricciardi for a contribution on these topics which we gladly publish below.
Tim's vision
In a recent interview with the "Guardian" Tim Berners-Lee reaffirms his firm belief that the web must be based on an "open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical borders". The neutrality and freedom of the Internet has been severely tested by increasingly powerful “digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponized by master manipulators. People are being twisted by very well trained AIs that figure out how to distract them
"Gas is a utility, clean water too and connectivity too," said Berners-Lee, "is part of life." So artificial intelligence can be a common good; but is it really so and economic financial political and cultural forces agree with Berners-Lee?
A common intelligence is not the basis of "platform capitalism". Value is extracted from connections and smartphones are the most dynamic agents of development.
The platform economy
Numerous authors speak of "platform capitalism" (Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017.), a new booming economy, which grows by double digits every year and allows a few large corporations to drain increasing shares of wealth. Its power is not based on the products they sell. A platform does not own the means of production but provides and controls the means of connection. According to a widely accepted definition, a platform is a business model that creates value by facilitating exchanges between groups of people or companies: mostly between producers and consumers.
Compared to the past, the scheme is reversed because the services that these platforms provide us without asking for money in exchange (Google search and mailbox, Skype video connections, social networks…) or at low cost (Amazon, Uber… ) are linked to the information we provide to them.
We are, at the same time, consumers (we buy goods online) and collaborators for free, continuously generating content and publishing reviews on the goods. The real product is personal information (habits, choices, etc. etc.) transformed into data that is accumulated, processed and sold to optimize the process. We ourselves are the product that digital companies "sell" on the market.
Common intelligence
This panorama tells us that a shared program of common intelligence (common intelligence) is not on the agenda. Rather, the growth of a mass of users, active but not equipped consumers, is favoured. In this context it is very difficult for machines to allow - as Alan Turing says - to "transform intellectuals into ordinary people", that is, to distribute intelligence in a collaborative way to the largest and most aware audience of humans possible.
It all begins in the 30s: the protagonists are real heroes who act, first and foremost, in the academic and research world. from Turing to Vannevar Bush, the primacy of the mind is affirmed, and the intelligence produced in the 30s takes shape: for Turing, "building a brain"; for Vannevar Bush “as we may think”.
The promises and accomplishments of the 60s followed:
1962: Douglas Engelbart writes Augmenting Human Intellect. A Conceptual Framework.
1968: the mother of all introductions. The Mouse appears, connections in workplaces and the positive value of collaboration are discovered.
1965: Ted Nelson introduces the word hypertext in a paper at the ACM national conference.
In the following years still a global development but full of contradictions:
1990: Tim Berners-Lee launches the World Wide Web.
2015: the triumph of the absolute value of connections. Facebook reaches the record of 1 billion connected in one day (globalization of contacts).
The pioneers we are talking about imagined and predicted both a digital mind and a digital society. The comparison with widespread intelligence and the society in which we live is not difficult.
Digital mind
Building the artificial brain. In 1943, while working on secret military codes in the Bletchley Park laboratory, Alan Turing confessed to a collaborator his ambition to "build a brain." He had already designed a universal machine, what has commonly been called the Turing machine, breaking with the paradigm of Taylor's machine: one best way.
For Taylor there was a "single best way" (one best way) to carry out any operation in line with Heidegger's theoretical foundation: the essence of technique is nothing technical. Heidegger to express the inescapable destiny that technology imposes on man uses the word Gestell (shelf): technology forces man not only to put order but to place everything in an already pre-established order. (In a future post we will offer readers Ricciardi's considerations on Heidegger's thought on technology [Editor's note]).
There is therefore a "revolutionary" value, a paradigm shift that belongs to a more general domain. The theory gives rise to the so-called Turing machine: actually never made by Turing himself. With a little imagination and with a lot of "hindsight" we can think of the tape that stores data and keeps them immutable and available, like the hardware of the future computer, to mass memory. The inputs that are activated through programs are the software, the true fulcrum of the universal machine.
Digital society
Building a society that no longer allows the disasters of the twentieth century. For Wiener it is the society in which to live effectively means to live with an adequate amount of information.
In opposition to the inescapable fate imposed on us by the second law of thermodynamics: "we are shipwrecked on a now doomed planet", communication can be a hope by revealing the essence of the society in which machines are the protagonists.
The dramatic vision, i.e. that of fighting entropy but without hope, is opposed by the utopia according to which communication will save the world. The dissemination of information and therefore communication are fundamental elements, constitutive rights to ensure full citizenship. The new science, cybernetics, develops Wiener's "thesis" that society is made up of messages produced and disseminated within it.
Reflection on the scientific status of the concept of information and on the "intrinsic ways of communication" in society offers new indicators on what Wiener calls "the nature of social communities", open or closed, communicating or not. Cybernetics had unexpected luck for Wiener, but his influence declined rapidly.
Intelligence and dream
Nelson and Engelbart. Dream vs Intellect. In front of 1000 engineers, Engelbart speaks of the computer as a "processor of symbols and a tool to increase human intelligence". It presents for the first time the mouse, a hypermedia system and a videoconferencing system.
Great importance is given to the user and his interaction with the machine. Indeed, Engelbart argues that "user and computer are components that change dynamically, always in symbiosis, with the effect of enhancing the user's initial intelligence".
The answer is hypertext and collaborative work. It's a new way of thinking and communicating; a new way of working in environments with a strong technological and scientific content. Hypertext according to Ted Nelson is a cultural revolution: abandon the alphabetic code and the logical-sequential paradigm and create a new society made up of people and connections, networks and continuous inventions.
Nelson imagined being able to create, on the basis of this innovative system of document organization, a global network for the exchange and sharing of texts and information, a sort of World Wide Web ante litteram. But Nelson was radically opposed to the World Wide Web as it was created and then popularized by Berners Lee. Xanadu accepts no limits because it is the connections, the links, the relationships that make this environment alive and operational. The network system can only refer to a continuously changing and continuously active universe.
Curiously, these great innovators (with the exception of Engelbart) do not actually implement their projects.
The Turing machine is a later appropriation by computer scientists; Bush can't make Memex. He doesn't have the appropriate technologies. Nelson is still grappling today with an unfinished project: Xanadu is a program that doesn't end, because it can't get to the end.
