The Rise of the Machines: A Contrarian View
By John LobellÂ
Many, including John Ebert, have been seeing movies like Terminator: Salvation as growing out of our unease, perhaps even fear of the intrusion of machines into our lives. And, as Ebert points out, the far out science fiction of these movies is fast becoming real. If you regularly follow Ray Kurzweil’s KurzweilAI.net, you keep up on breaking news of computers millions of times faster than those we use today, alterations to our DNA, and chips being built into our brains.
But I would like to suggest that these movies are not about that. For the most part, our technologies change the structure of our consciousness (see McLuhan), but they have yet to threaten our humanness. We do that. And as for Skynet going after us—well, I just don’t think our toasters, no matter how many chips we put in them, are going to be a threat any time soon. Nuclear weapons can destroy whole cities, but in WWII more people were killed by the firebombing of Tokyo with conventional weapons then were killed by the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. And when the Romans were done with Carthage, they salted over the earth. Hiroshima is a thriving city today. Carthage is still abandoned.
Remember, movies are not always what they seem to be about. Many saw The Truman Show as a warning about constant surveillance. Rather, I think it was about the courage to assert an identity independent of social definitions. Every day we play act being a husband, wife, parent. We behave as teachers, students, bosses, and clerks are expected to behave. Truman is good at that, but something is nagging him, the suspicion that there is the possibility of going outside that comfort zone and seeing who he is, how his independent self might fare outside of these social definitions.
In like manner these movies of humans fighting machines are not about the dangers of machines, but about our choices of what kinds of human beings we want to be.
At the opening of The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, Joseph Campbell writes of the global divide between systems that absorb the individual into a larger whole, and those that assert the independence of the individual, and the constant ebbs and flows of these values. “Within Christian Europe itself, furthermore, the absolute authority of the One Church was dissolved through the irresistible return to force of the native European principles of individual judgment and the work of rational man. The Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and present Age of Science followed, culminating, as of now, in the European spiritual conquest of the world—with, however, the next Levantine tide already of the rise.â€
From this point of view, the battles with the machines are a retelling of a story as ancient as that told by Zack Snyder in his adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, in which 300 Spartans stand against the Persian Borg.
There is, of course, something that we find pertinent to our condition in these movies. We are in debate as to what exactly that is.
There might be two ways to look at it:
On the one hand I feel like technology might be another life form, some strange phyla trying to burst forth into essence. We are the host to this parasite who will soon discard our lifeless shells if it already hasn’t done so, and in this sense we have been victimized by a high order of phenomenon, an entelechy, that through it’s shadow manipulations has been denying us some basic human qualities and replacing them with larger regimented organs of control, conscious or otherwise.
Or we can see the machine as a prosthetic extension of the Ego. It becomes the amygdalic enabler that serves our limbic system evermore novel forms of distraction. But like some tragic Greek king, we are never satiated, and demand ever more prosthetic parts to replace our otherwise healthy organs. Our real selves wither and atrophy while the diseased extensions hypertrophy into ever more Baroque scenarios of Faustian damnation. So the “Other” that the machine represents on the former view is really just a split in our OWN psyche. Promised the world we annihilated everything that we cared about.
This was the Century of the Self, after all. But Giants do Fall. Watch as the great MegaMachine that is General Motors trembles beneath the weight of its own corpulent putresence. The death knell of this great beast proves that the machine has not won, and that pastoral idylls might reward the survivor.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
Anyways its good that you guys are having this discussion.
Maybe it’s just a choice between two types of magic…and like all religious arguments I remain agnostic. Currently I’m rooting for the underdog, however, and we all know who that is.
Well, the images that our films have been showing us for many decades now are clear depictions of machines attempting to destroy, capture and hi-jack the lives of human beings. One would be hard put to see that the image represents anything else: armies of homicidal robots attempting to eliminate human beings from the planet does seem to suggest that we have a problem with our machines.
Machines do threaten our humanness, especially if there are too many of them making too many demands upon our bodies. The human body is not meant to endure the pressures and strains of a completely hyper-mechanized environment, and when the body perceives a threat it expresses its panic in anxious imagery. You can take note of this the next time you become sick or ill. Watch the images that your mind produces, especially when you dream, and you will often see portrayed images of being attacked or assaulted.
The body has a mind of its own and it is completely separate from the conscious ratiocinations of the waking ego, which can convince itself of all sorts of bad ideas that are completely at odds with what the body and its immune system want. When you leave the city and go out into a natural environment, notice that the body feels immediately relaxed, harmonious and at ease. Living in a hyper-stressed environment like one of modern cities makes us tense, anxious and fearful all the time, whether we know it or not. This is why we are addicted to fast-paced action movies because they provide an adrenalin rush that is part of an unconscious attempt on the part of the body to rid itself of its excess fight-or-flight panic energy. You get rid of an impulse by evoking it to its threshold limit so that it can be discharged.
The current preoccupation with health and fitness, jogging, exercising and the like is furthermore yet another strategy unconsciously designed by our culture to provide a means of escape from high pressure fight-or-flight urban living. It is an artificial means of escaping the prison-like all confinement of our life in cities, these cold “machines for living” to use Le Corbusier’s term.
For me, there is little doubt that we have taken technology too far. Our bodies are telling us this not only in the imagery of our movies and comicbooks but in strange phenomena, too, like alien abduction episodes, addictions to drugs and alcohol, sports stadium events, all designed to evoke and discharge excess nervous energy that results from being constantly pressured, no matter which way you turn, to think and make continual mechanical decisions, decisions on whether to push this button or that, get in and out of the car, take an elevator, use a cell phone and so forth. We are constantly having to rationalize our way through a hyper-technologized labyrinth and most of us don’t realize what we are putting our bodies through by doing this. But our bodies react to all this through trying to seek outlets of release through alcohol addiction, sex addiction, drugs, etc. We live in an addiction-based society and our bodies are constantly having to reset their sense ratios by invoking in us these cravings. This is why we’re always hungry, even though well fed, crave alcohol or drugs or tobacco, etc. The body’s ratios in this mode of civilization are off balance, but the conscious mind has no awareness of this and thinks it knows perfectly well that everything is ok. The left hand truly does not know what the right hand is doing.
So technology is definitely a problem whether we realize it or not. Most of us just don’t realize how strangely artificial this way of life is because we’re like McLuhan’s proverbial fish who do not know of the waters in which they swim.
Well, it’s a full blown religion for many people.
I like your idea of technology being a prosthetic extension of the limbic system.
The different periods of history are famous for different reasons: the Renaissance is the great age of the explosion of painting and sculpture; fifth century Athens is the time of the Greek Miracle, of democracy and beautiful sculpture; the Classic Period of Mesoamerica is the great age of the temple cities; Old Kingdom Egypt is the time of the pyramids. Our age, likewise, will be remembered by the future as the Great Age of Machines, and people will look back on it with a sort wistful yearning wondering what it must have been like to be living surrounded by beeping, humming, purring electronic gadgets. But just as all these other historical epochs attained their peaks and then vanished, so too, I am convinced, our current age of technological proficiency is just an historical moment, one which the resources of the planet cannot sustain indefinitely, and which will eventually disappear until we are surrounded by rusting hulks and ancient cities made of concrete and steel that are covered by deserts and forests. This is just the way history works, it is the way it has always worked and it is the way it will continue to work. No human civilization is permanent, they are transitory, all. I am certain that the people who lived in these other great epochs thought that their ages, too, would continue forever. But Time doesn’t work that way. Everything has a limit point, and soon, within a century or two, we will be reaching ours.
I do admit that this is all fun while it lasts: I enjoy my laptop and my DVD player, although I keep them at a distance and use them only when necessary and am acutely conscious that while using my cell phone I am microwaving my brain and increasing the chances of one day coming down with brain cancer.
I attended a Lindisfarne Conference not too long ago, and I remember the essayist and novelist Wendell Berry saying that every time a new gadget comes along, everybody runs over to it like a crew all going over to one side of a ship, causing it to tilt in the water.
That’s a wonderful image that perfectly captures, I think, just where we’re at: completely off balance in our gung-ho overestimation of the miraculous possibilities of technology.
More from a contrarian positing, by John Lobell
Lao Tzu in “The Tao Te Ching†writes (Feng and English):
“Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.
The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.â€
We no longer need accept that modesty. We are making quantum computers that will be more powerful than if every particle in the universe were a supercomputer and they were all linked together. We can now write in DNA code creating new life and eventually designer humans who do not age as easily as we can write in English or C++. Nanotechnology promises to eventually make just about anything, often out of diamond, as cheaply as we grow potatoes. Communications technologies promise that everything will be connected to everything all the time. And cosmologists place us in ever expanding infinities of multiple universes that we will eventually be able to access.
We will indeed take over the universe and improve it. We will soon turn off the genetic causes of aging. We will download ourselves onto backup drives. We will surround our sun with a Dyson sphere, and eventually move to the center of our galaxy to create a controlled chain reaction of supernovas to generate the energy for serious computational activity.
Ray Kurzweil writes (“The Singularity is Nearâ€):
“The explosive nature of exponential growth means it may only take a quarter of a millennium to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes. The ongoing expansion of our future superintelligence will then require moving out into the rest of the universe, where we may engineer new universes.â€
Kurzweil is not speaking metaphorically. He is predicting the continued acceleration of technological growth to the point where intelligence, human and machine combined, encompasses the earth, then the solar system, and then the galaxy. He does not stop there, envisioning this projection of intelligence outward into the universe, grappling with the limitations of the speed of light. But Kurzweil envisions even overcoming that (“The Singularity is Nearâ€):
“Whether our civilization infuses the rest of the universe with its creativity and intelligence quickly or slowly depends on its [the speed of light] immutability. In any event the “dumb†matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence, which will constitute the sixth epoch in the evolution of patterns of information.â€
Goethe’s Faust says, “Two souls, alas! Reside within my breast…†but he could have said three, the Christian and classical, and then his true soul, the native European soul as identified by Spengler, that manifest around the twelfth century in the Arthurian romances and the Romanesque and Gothic cathedras. Spengler says that a culture begins by laying down its epic poem and its temple form. The mythologist Joseph Campbell liked to quote one of his favorite passages from a version of The Quest for the Holy Grail by an unknown Cistercian monk in which the knights set out on a quest to view the Holy Grail, but “thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group, so each entered the forest at a point he, himself, chose where it was darkest and there was no path or way.â€
So first is the centrality of the individual. Next is the Western sense of space and time that we see in the Gothic cathedral. Standing in the nave looking up at the soaring vaults, you realize that it will be the descendants of these builders who will circumnavigate the planet and eventually go out into space.
And then there is Adelard of Bath who, in his twelfth century Natural Questions, lays down the elementary principles of what we now regard as modern science: we must use natural causes to explain natural phenomena, we must avoid supernatural causes, nature is a closed system–matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and we should rely on experiment rather than authority.
So I take our plunge into technology as not new. The individual with his inner voice, infinite space and time, and a material universe comprehendible and controllable by scientific method, already defined the West in the twelfth century. The movies we are discussing predict our fulfilling of that potential.
John wrote:
“We will indeed take over the universe and improve it. We will soon turn off the genetic causes of aging. We will download ourselves onto backup drives. We will surround our sun with a Dyson sphere, and eventually move to the center of our galaxy to create a controlled chain reaction of supernovas to generate the energy for serious computational activity.”
This seems like one of the most hubristic things that I have ever read on the blogosphere. I can’t believe that people still harbor such delusions, but the religion of progress is a strong elixir. I would guess as the inevitable decoupling of the industrial age begins to make itself manifest your faith in the God-like powers of the Machinenmensch will be just a little bit rattled.
It’s amazing how delusional beliefs can even infect the most intelligent and sensitive of thinkers. Just because you wan’t something to be true doesn’t mean it is.
But John, you seem to be forgetting that Spengler’s book was written specifically to show how the mythology of the individual that built Faustian civilization is falling apart at the seams and is in process of disappearing. Spengler’s myth of the Faustian individual as Lord of the Machine is indeed the central myth of Euro-American civilization, but it is a myth that has long since passed the apogee of its arc toward the sun and is now pointed back down at the earth, pulled by the rainbow of gravity that draws all hubristic ascents back down to the ground where they belong.
The entire history of postmodern philosophy, for example, is one long sustained assault upon this very myth of the Cartesian-Kantian self as monadic lord of the cosmos. Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze have all pulled this myth apart and shown the consequences of the cultural authoritarianism to which it inevitably leads. In his masterpiece, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze shows how the myth of the self, with its Freudian single ego repressing the Id, is a construction. The self is multiple, crowded and filled with schizophrenic cracks.
The visions of Modern Art showed the beginnings of this schizophrenic crack up of the self, which can no longer be relied upon as a Faustian center of gravity around which the cosmos revolves.
The self, with its vertically aligned axis and its hierarchically arranged and culturally systematized power structures, has given way to the tribe and the network as the new social models of our society. And with this shift, I predict, a gradual increase in technological incompetence will slowly begin to spread.
These fanciful ideas of altering the genome and building Dyson spheres around the sun actually represent technology’s sunset effect: the most spectacular fantasies come in at the end of a development, when it is just about to sign off.
I wouldn’t put too much faith in Kurzweil’s trendy little pronouncements. They’ll be as irrelevant in twenty years as the books of Alvin Toffler are now (or as Thomas Friedman’s, for that matter).
Hmm, agree.
The largest Moai built by the Eater Islanders was the very last one.
I just read a transcript of a brilliant talk by Dimtry Orlov that addresses the long slow descent into cultural schizophrenia that is now occuring as the limits of our finite world become more real and less abstract. I think you both would enjoy it:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html