The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray

Author:John Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781429953191
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

HUMAN REDUNDANCY AND THE CYBORG ECONOMY

The pioneers of modern robotics, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, were both involved in the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb. Wiener is recognized as having originated cybernetics, while Neumann is acknowledged to be the principal progenitor of the mathematical theory of games. They were fully aware that the sciences they were developing opened up possibilities that stretched far beyond the struggle against Nazism. Writing in 1954, Wiener mused on the power that humans were acquiring with this new knowledge:

[Humans are] playing a game against the arch enemy, disorganization. Is this devil Manichaean or Augustinian? Is it a contrary force opposed to order or is it the very absence of order itself? The difference between these two sorts of demons will make itself apparent in the tactics to be used against them. The Manichaean devil is an opponent, like any other opponent, who is determined on victory and will use any trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory. In particular, he will keep his policy of confusion secret, and if we show any signs of beginning to discover his policy, he will change it in order to keep us in the dark. On the other hand, the Augustinian devil, which is not a power in itself, but the measure of our own weakness, may require our full resources to uncover, but when we have uncovered it, we have in a certain sense exorcised it …

For Wiener science was a game played against nature. Whether nature was a malign demiurge or a mere absence of order was left open. Even in the latter case nature exhibits a kind of intelligence, and there is no reason to rule out the possibility that machines will do so too. If nature in the form of the human species could bring forth intelligent machines, the process of evolution would continue among the machines.

In 1964, Wiener envisioned such a process:

Man makes man in his own image. This seems to be the echo or the prototype of the act of creation, by which God is supposed to have made man … What is the image of a machine? Can this image, as embodied in one machine, bring a machine of a general sort, not yet committed to a particular specific identity, to reproduce the original machine, either absolutely or under some change that may be construed as a variation?

Could a game be played between humans and machines, the effect of which would be to leave machines beyond the comprehension of their human inventors? Might the process whereby new types of machines developed come to be as much of a mystery as the act of creation in religion? Wiener thought the answer to these questions was ‘Yes’, and just such a prospect was also envisioned by Neumann:

It is not unlikely that if you had to build an automaton now you would plan the automaton, not directly, but on some general principles which concern it, plus a machine which could

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