The Strange History of Human Surplus
Reclaiming the Future of Surplus Humanity, Part 1
Let us begin with the premise that the public conversation forging our collective future is composed almost exclusively of silence, like the vacuum that fills 99.99% of our bodies. Though we appear solid and the arena vibrant, the voices traditionally omitted from history are also being excised from posterity. A comprehensive social project genuinely inflecting our current course has yet to be formulated by those of us whose expendability to society, programmed into the DNA of the Digital Age seventy years ago, is reaching consummation with the advent of AI automation.¹
Who are we, the suddenly nonessential personnel in a social contract we signed with an X because illiterate in its terms? In the words of the engineers of the informational turn, we are “defective human animals whose brains would shame a chimpanzee,” “slaves,” “savages” and “primitive peoples” with “a too closely knit family” that “must adapt to [an] impersonal system of human relations,” “emerging African nations,” “the American Indian[…]who formerly regarded cutting hay as a ruthless shearing of the tresses of his mother [before coming] to understand the new mysteries of the[…]modern combine,” “feminists,” women with “meaningless” lives, “the genie in the bottle bent on destruction,” “unhappy and maladjusted people more likely to turn to violence and even war.”
The above foundational discourse of our technological present is excerpted from documents by the core participants in the Macy Conferences,² whose collective oeuvre instituted our global information culture as the norm. Their stand on the historically oppressed organizing for their rights in the power vacuum left by the Second World War provides much-needed illumination for our own societal juncture, whose creation myths cast prevailing technologies in the role of salvator mundi,³ isolating repercussions from them as a deviation from their innate humanitarian potential.
In the space of this manifesto I will argue, based on documentary evidence by the cybernetic founders themselves, that the informational turn was a project of methodical social engineering intended to address the problem of escalating social demands on a global scale by programming the obsolescence of the Other through AI automation and reproductive technology. I will further argue that the violent exclusionary discourse underpinning this shift, far from being a simple product of its time, is the latent code of our own.
As such, I will be countering orthodoxies which posit technology as a tabula rasa there for the taking, and fallout from technology as a natural consequence of its evolution. Similarly, I will be reading our culture’s founding texts against the grain,⁴ from the perspective of those whose future hinges on decoding the rhetorical strategies deployed over the years to market information globally as the ultimate utopian commodity.
In the following pages we will embark on an archeological expedition to the historical groundwork on which technoculture rests as a way of unearthing the purposive designs that created our technologies’ affordances, and the consumer needs requisite for their adoption.⁵ Part Two, “The Case for Self-Sufficiency,” will delve into the specifics of AI automation from the double perspective of its history and the choices now confronting the surplus humans⁶ that it targets. With these explorations in mind, “How to Survive Democracy” will take us on reconnaissance to the forefront of contemporary futurist discourse to map out an alternative social contract, with a new technological revolution at its core, from the standpoint of those the cybernetic turn has marked for deletion.
The Ghost in the Machine
The first ranks of surplus humanity now beginning to crystallize with advances in machine learning and biotechnology have been the focus of human engineering and “mental hygiene” since the postwar period. While always overlapping, these categories dovetail with historical fault lines of exclusion by class, race and ethnicity, gender, and geography, as their prominence in the cybernetic archive reveals.
Since the Other in this archive is constituted through differences that exceed the purely economic, we must also reexamine our culture’s tendency to attribute dystopian uses of technology to simple expressions of greed gone awry within the framework of a free-market economy. Cybernetics forces us, on the contrary, to recognize the distinctions it has drawn between engineer and engineered as ones of kind, rather than of degree, a dichotomy that lies at the very heart of totalitarian ideologies with their trope of a master race destined for transcending an inferior, expendable Other.⁷ Human engineering is the method used to prepare populations earmarked for obviation to merge with the technologies designed to take their place.
Of Devils and Men
One far-reaching consequence of the Second World War was its profound shake-up not only of international, but also of domestic power relations. Writing from inside the crucible of the Cold War, with socialism’s promise held out — in Fanon’s famous words — to all the “wretched of the earth,” the avatars of information betray a palpable anxiety vis à vis Europe’s rapidly decolonizing empires, people of color, women, and the unskilled working class who, having been instrumental in the Allied victory while historically excluded from democracy, were now voicing their demands for an equitable social order.
Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics⁸ and self-proclaimed originator of industrial AI automation, was a key figure in the Macy Conferences and one of the primary architects of our own cultural moment. In the afterword to Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, Walter A. Rosenblith sums up the socio-economic role Wiener assigns to information as follows:
information[…]belongs among the great concepts of science such as matter, energy, and electric charge[….] Our culture depends upon the relevant use of the vast stores of information that we have accumulated, and in a real sense access to specialized information is a form of feedback that may be equivalent to the advantages of economic, political, or military power.⁹
While on an elementary level Wiener defines communication as “a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion,” (125) his extrapolations to the circulation of information in the social sphere transform a simple technical problem, noise in the channel of communication (the “forces of confusion”), into a metaphysical confrontation between good and evil. “The arch enemy, disorganization” is depicted as a two-headed demon — a Manichaean one, who is “a being of refined malice[…]determined on victory and [who] will use any trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory,” and the other, Augustinian, who “is stupid” and “may be defeated by our intelligence as thoroughly as by a sprinkle of holy water.” (50)
He then goes on to identify the Manichaean devil as a political opponent: “There is a subtle emotional Manichaeanism [sic] implicit in all crusades, all jihads, and all wars of communism against the devil of capitalism,” (260) and the Augustinian devil as nature: “The view that nature reveals an entropic tendency is Augustinian, not Manichaean. Its inability to undertake an aggressive policy, deliberately to defeat the scientist, means that its evil doing is the result of a weakness in his nature rather than of a specifically evil power it may have.” (259)
In the following sections I will document the methods developed by the avatars of information to transmute their perceived political opponents from Manichaean devils with autonomous human agency into simple Augustinian forces of nature “to be defeated by [their] intelligence as thoroughly as by a sprinkle of holy water.”
The Nature of the Beast
In The Human Use of Human Beings Wiener foregrounds speech as “the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man,” (112) while simultaneously delimiting a class of humans lacking this ability: “there are defective human animals whose brains would shame a chimpanzee. It just does not belong to the nature of the beast to speak or to want to speak.” (116)
If, as aforementioned, effective (noise-free) communication “may be equivalent to the advantages of economic, political, or military power,” and if “Language may strive simply against nature’s tendency to confuse it or against willful human attempts to subvert its meaning,” (278, 126) then to dehumanize a Manichaean opponent by depriving them of the ability to speak downgrades the noise they generate to an Augustinian threat to be defused by science.
Wiener devotes his essay God & Golem, Inc. to pondering biblical and classical creation myths for the light they shed on the social role of the scientist, which he encapsulates in the surprising declaration “Man makes man in his own image. This seems to be an echo or the prototype of the act of creation, by which God is supposed to have made man in His image.”¹⁰
Given that a decade separates this work from The Human Use of Human Beings and the last Macy Conference in 1953, by what means did the cybernetic Pygmalions go from their desired “pictorial image” of the Other as Augustinian to an operative one?
The answer lies in “Technical Assistance,” the United Nations’ euphemism for human engineering, or the exportation and application of the cybernetic principles issued from the Macy Conferences to the “Third World” by western teams of experts. Under the editorship of anthropologist Margaret Mead, the panel assembled a survey “directed toward the implications [of technology] for the mental health of the peoples of the world, who are involved in purposive [note the absence of agency] introduction of technical change.”¹¹
This UNESCO-sponsored text, which Wiener himself calls for when he speaks of the “need for the anthropologist and the philosopher [since] we must know as scientists what man’s[…]built-in purposes are, even when we must wield this knowledge as soldiers and as statesmen,” (1954: 250) is a locus classicus on preparing populations for their abrogation through automation.
“Mental hygiene,” a term with historical ties to eugenics and forced sterilization, was used in an attempt to refashion every aspect of personal and cultural identity in target groups. Thus, the manual prescribes “new methods of education which will leave the child’s mind open longer, leave his muscular adjustments freer[…], methods which teach him that safety lies not in knowledge but in knowing what could be but is not known.” (Mead 303)
It proposes to minimize “the hazards of a too closely knit family for the mental health of individuals who, later in life, must adapt to the impersonal system of human relations which will come with the introduction of modern industry,” (282) for “No programme of technological development can hope to succeed in the long run if it leaves people unhappy and maladjusted. In the long run also, such unhappy and maladjusted people are the ones who are more likely to turn to violence and even war.” (319)
In the aim of a complete overhaul of the Other according to specifications that guarantee a felicitous outcome for the cybernetician, the manual recommends that “culture” as a concept cover “not only the arts and sciences, religions and philosophies[…], but also the system of technology, the political practices, the small intimate habits of daily life, such as the way of preparing or eating food, or of hushing a child to sleep, as well as the method of electing a prime minister or changing the constitution.” (9)
It is the careful application of this Augustinian switch¹² to every aspect of “Manichaean” otherness that has allowed information technologies to be marketed worldwide as the democratic standard, even as their totalitarian DNA was being spliced into humanity through the clauses in small print of the new social contract. We turn to these clauses next to glean from them how human surplus is made.
Beasts of Burden
The most visible Others of the informational turn are AI automation’s first economic targets — the global precariat performing unskilled work. To understand how this category of otherness coalesced, we need briefly to touch on the history of automation, starting with the self-reported invention of the concept of industrial AI by Norbert Wiener:
I was[…]convinced as far back as 1940 that the automatic factory was on the horizon, and I so informed Vannevar Bush. The consequent development of automatization, both before and after the publication of the first edition of this book, has convinced me that I was right in my judgment and that this development would be one of the great factors in conditioning the social and technical life of the age to come, the keynote of the second industrial revolution. (Wiener 1954: 204)
As described by Wiener, the idea was born of a combination of his research on weapons automation and concurrent advances in computing capability¹³ that he thought could be applied to automating the scientific management techniques developed for the factory by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.¹⁴ While the axiomatic argument for factory automation has been, from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, to drive efficiency, its other unmistakable function has been to disempower workers through the progressive stripping away of skills that were the backbone of the powerful guild system displaced by factories, and which employers saw as “craft monopolies.”¹⁵
Taylor’s statements on the advantages of fragmenting the work process into specialized tasks that don’t necessitate prior skills are suffused with a brutality that transcends simple prescriptions for productivity:
It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.¹⁶
The agent conspicuously absent from this process, of which it is now solely the object, is the worker whom Taylor has transformed from a Manichaean nemesis intentionally monopolizing know-how and hindering production (“soldiering”) to an impersonal Augustinian force:
one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. (59)
Wiener, who himself cast the “stupid” Augustinian devil as a leading character of his opus, remarks that in a fully automated factory “the over-all system will correspond to the complete animal with sense organs, effectors and proprioceptors.” (1954: 213) Taylor’s shoveling “pig iron ox” recurs in Wiener’s work more mutedly as “a pick-and-shovel worker” whose best hope “to make a living[…]is to act as a sort of gleaner after the bulldozer. In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone’s money to buy.” (209)
As we have seen, this unskilled work force has, to a large extent, been engineered through the deliberate fragmentation of the labor process, one of the aims of which, as Taylor makes clear, is to confer absolute power on employers. It is in this sense that he could proclaim before Congress “there has never been a single strike of employees working under scientific management.”
More recently, Taylorism’s enduring influence was demonstrated at a Foxconn factory in China, several of whose employees chose in 2012 to forgo striking in favor of suicide. Their CEO Terry Gou’s reaction was squarely within the affordances of scientific management and the cybernetic casting out of devils when he declared he would replace his one million workers with robots “’because to manage one million animals gives [him] a headache[…], adding that he wants to learn from Chin Shih-Chien, director of Taipei Zoo, regarding how animals should be managed.” He promptly invited the zoo director to speak to the company’s top executives.¹⁷
Wiener’s recounting of how he invented AI automation leads him to make the following observation:
Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feeling it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. (1954: 220)
He then closes on this optimistic note about the future:
I have participated in two big meetings with representatives of business management, and I have been delighted to see[…]awareness[…of] the social obligations of those responsible for management[….] There are many dangers still ahead, but the roots of good will are there. (220)
“The Mere Absence of White”
Wiener identifying automation with slavery signals the engineering of another historically charged category of human surplus — that of race. Although the construction of the concept by western science is itself well documented, technology’s role in enabling racial taxonomies to operate in the world has been occulted by the sector’s self-promotion as a social leveler. Wiener’s description of Augustinianism as a system of thought where “the black of the world is negative, and the mere absence of white” (1954: 260) condenses this erasure.
As a logical heir to centuries of dehumanizing racial others to justify slavery, the methods advanced by Technical Assistance for reprogramming identity to western specifications were targeted primarily at groups already or potentially in the process of decolonizing — hence Wiener’s caveats about “emerging African nations” and Mead’s remarks about “the American Indian.” Tellingly, Wiener borrows a trope from Europe’s orientalist archive to intimate his fears about emancipation:
The more intelligent the slave is, the more he will insist on his own way of doing things in opposition to the way of doing things imposed on him by his owner[….] The genie in the bottle, once it had been released by the fisherman, has a will of its own which is bent on destruction.¹⁸
As such, human engineering, the “sprinkle of holy water” Wiener defines as scientific thought, was first directed at reducing nonwestern subjectivities to the passive object status of an Augustinian absence. From the apex of the emergent information pyramid, Mead’s admonitions to the world about “safety” residing “not in knowledge but in knowing what could be but is not known” (1953: 303) can best be understood as the mystification of the techniques deployed by the social sciences to crush autochthonous cultures as platforms for resisting their own erasure through automation.
It is no small historical irony that information technologies trace their lineage to Renaissance calculating machines invented in the aim of processing Europe’s immense financial surplus from imperialism, including the African slave trade and the enslavement of Native Americans to service the trade in precious metals.¹⁹ The clash of this genealogy with demands for racial justice both globally and within the U.S. following the latter’s postwar ascendance as a superpower permeates every facet of our digital democracy, from semiconductors to programming languages to employment practices, down to the algorithms shaping commercial and government software.
It is from this cultural vantage that Joseph Engelberger, the father of robotics, waxed utopian about an age where
A robot is patently a racial inferior, and no one need hide his feeling of superiority. Clyde the Claw will take the place of Stepin Fetchit, Kingfish, Aunt Jemima, Rochester and the minstrel end man[….] A robot is anybody’s whipping boy.²⁰
What is most striking about the intended political largesse tagged onto the birth of robotics is the accompanying naturalization of a racially constituted master-slave relationship carried intact from the plantation, in which the slave’s identity, emptied of content, can be substituted at will. Wiener’s assertions on automation and slavery are the palpable bedrock on which this technology rests.
Another information milestone, William Shockley’s Semiconductor Laboratory — which literally put the “silicon” in Silicon Valley with the production of the first silicon transistor prototypes — was recently inducted as the tech hub’s birthplace “to commemorate this legendary[…]landmark” with “newly commissioned public sculptures and historical plaques.” The founder of Silicon Valley was a well-known eugenicist who pronounced African Americans unfit for the future his own technologies were creating:
This Augustinian deletion, carved in silicon, finds its software counterpart with the computer scientist John Kemeny (no relation to the author), co-developer of the programming language Basic. In an anecdote recounting an early experiment by the city of Los Angeles to use computer-aided design in the construction of a freeway, Kemeny berates the software engineers for not recognizing as a parameter the suffering occasioned for white suburbanites by the program routing the freeway
right through the midst of a part of the city heavily populated by blacks [which] would destroy the spirit of community that they had slowly and painfully built up[…;] if we omit consideration of human suffering, then we are equating its cost to zero, which is certainly the worst of all procedures!²¹
Kemeny’s identification of “human” with “white” suffering, while glossing over black residents’ needs in urban enclaves, speaks volumes about how western history’s efforts to dehumanize and erase racial others of its own imagining informs programming itself.
Beyond the immense lack of equity in tech education and employment today, which is both its symptom and its cause, systemic algorithmic bias includes
— racial profiling by software used in policing and the justice system, especially so-called “risk assessment tools” for predicting crime
— the generalization of electronic shackles (with some politicians already proposing to microchip pretrial detainees like “pets,”) pointing, down the line, to an explosion in the prison population of which African Americans make up a massively disproportionate number²²
— selection toward whiteness in facial recognition software being developed for the consumer market
— “filter bubbles” routing news and advertising in alignment with negative racial stereotypes.
Just as today’s unskilled labor has emerged as a socially manufactured category, what unites each instance of racial bias cited above is a decades-long program of human engineering that deploys information as a weapon. The targeting of women through the complete recoding of reproduction constitutes the focus of our next archeological stop.
The Female Machine
The informational turn, though we tend to define it primarily as the revolution in computing, had its corollary in the discoveries of the structure of DNA and the genetic code, and the ensuing rise of bioengineering. A long-standing debate exists among feminist thinkers about whether cybernetic reproductive technologies like cloning and artificial wombs — the organic siblings of self-replicating general AI — should be considered as potential tools for the emancipation of women from the biological and social burdens associated with procreation, or rather as instruments of their disempowerment.²³
Based on the archival evidence explored above, especially in light of economic theories that posit the womb as a contested site of production on a par with other forms of labor,²⁴ I will argue that the human engineering of gender resides in 1/ the transformation of reproduction into a technocratic ideology, 2/ the subjection of women’s bodies to its norms, and 3/ the supplanting of the former as a source of value creation by the female machine.
As with constructions of racial and economic otherness, the Manichaean demonization of female agency, omnipresent in such cultural archetypes as Pandora and Eve, finds its dénouement in the Augustinian reduction of women to natural forces subject to patriarchal control, culminating in the cybernetic takeover of reproduction.
As we have seen, the manual for Technical Assistance urges intervention most specifically into child-rearing practices from “the small intimate habits of daily life, such as[…]hushing a child to sleep” to “new methods of education which will leave the child’s mind open longer, leave his muscular adjustments freer” to preempting “the hazards of a too closely knit family.” (op. cit.)
The implications of these interventions for women are perhaps nowhere clearer than in the discourse held by James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, when he reflects that a totalitarian state need not exist to coerce women into becoming surrogate mothers for clones, since “the boring meaninglessness of the lives of many women would be sufficient cause of their willingness to participate.”²⁵
Historically, the subjection of the female body to reproductive R&D did indeed occur under totalitarian conditions, such as the notorious experimentation by the “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, on enslaved black women without the use of anesthesia for perfecting the speculum, the Nazi Lebensborn (“fountain of life”) program coercing women in occupied territories to become breeders for the SS to create the master race, and the birth control pill being trialed on 1500 women in Puerto Rico housing projects by biologist Gregory Pincus, whose justification of the venue betrays Malthusian concerns about “Third World” population growth: “The control of the population explosion now upon us by the limitations of births is particularly demanding in countries where the birth-rate pressure curtails already limited economic development.”
All the examples invoked above echo an elemental creationist trope pervading the cybernetic archive — that of the scientist investing himself with divine agency while simultaneously short-circuiting female reproductive autonomy. It is in this vein that we can read Wiener’s declaration in God & Golem, Inc., cited earlier, that “Man makes man in his own image” as “an echo or the prototype of the act of creation, by which God is supposed to have made man in His image,” or his consecrating the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea as the central metaphor for computer engineering.
It is also thus that we can understand his sexualizing the intellect when he asserts that “There is a great fertilizing and revivifying value in the contact of two scientists with each other,” and that “the simple coexistence of two items of information is of relatively small value, unless [they] can be effectively combined in some mind or organ [!] which is able to fertilize one by means of the other.” (1954: 172) After all, it is in the scientist’s mind that the “mother idea of [the…] first computing machines” (202) sees the light. Similarly, another key figure of cybernetics, Warren McCulloch, known for his work on neural network modeling, reports being “seduced by mathematics” and a “fertile calculus.”²⁶
As we have argued, this technocratic procreation eventually culminates in jettisoning female agency from reproduction altogether in favor of processes cleansed of the “forces of confusion.” MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle’s interviews with AI programmers about their motivations for fashioning the intelligent machine bear out all that the grounding of AI in the cybernetic archive implies, from the sexualization of noesis to the coopting of maternity. As one programmer puts it,
A lot of the drives that cause hacking and sex are the same[….] But hacking is safe in that you are in complete control of your computer world, and sex and relationships are risky in that the rest of the world has control.²⁷
This redirecting of sexual desire onto the machine is completed by the desire to procreate through it:
Men can’t have babies,[…]they go have them on the machine[….] Why do you think people call ideas brainchildren? (Turkle 235)
The next step for the AI brainchild in this transcendentalist narrative is to self-propagate, a concept whose feasibility was demonstrated by computer scientist and game theorist John von Neumann when he furnished mathematical proof in the 60s for the viability of “self-reproducing automata.” Programming pioneer John McCarthy (who coined the term “artificial intelligence”) also described a schema in which “The new system would[…]move away from its mother, and the process would start over.”²⁸
Given that Artificial Intelligence and reproductive technologies are two sides of the same information coin, and that the AI automation of labor is in progress, what is the current status of the human engineering of gender? While the technologies capable of rendering women dispensable to procreation — cloning and ectogenesis — are being experimented literally and figuratively for the ethical and legal boundaries they push, techno-social surveillance of, prescriptions for and interventions into women’s bodies by corporations, media, the scientific and medical establishment, legislators, the criminal justice system, etc., is all-pervasive.²⁹
A few salient examples of this colossal enterprise as regards reproductive practices include Nestlé’s campaign in Africa to make women abandon breast feeding in favor of formula, even in regions where the availability of clean water is not assured, the routinization of invasive IVF protocols in industrialized nations, with embellishment of success rates through extensive use of the procedure on fertile couples a common practice,³⁰ and the growing criminalization of mothers whose fetuses or newborns die with traces of drugs in their systems.³¹
More generally, the transformation of women’s bodies into cybernetic organisms as a prelude to their displacement by machine simulacra or virtual reality takes on diverse forms. Among these is a phenomenon being labeled “Snapchat dysmorphia,” whereby (mostly) young women resort to plastic surgery to resemble their social media avatars more closely. James Watson’s quips about the future of genetic engineering ring strangely true: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”
A step further in the process of engineering gender is the consumer public’s broad adoption of feminized chatbots such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or the Russian Alice, which, by simulating the presence of a female assistant, serve both to reinforce women’s identity exclusively as caretakers and naturalize the displacement of women by a virtual counterpart.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the best-publicized androids being developed worldwide are gynoids modeled on real women or the “average female”: Hong-Kong based Hanson Robotics’ Sophia on Audrey Hepburn and BINA48 on the wife of transhumanist Martine Rothblatt, the Singaporean personal assistant Nadine on its creator Prof. Nadia Thalmann, and the Japanese Actroid series and South Korean KITECH’s EveR-2, on “average” Japanese and Korean women, respectively.
Conclusion
As our journey through the annals of technoscience has shown, the violently classist, racist, sexist and ethnocentric discourse at its heart is not comprised of unrepresentative grievances by random social commentators, but of the thoughts, distilled for the public as their future legacy, of the most influential architects of our time. As such, we owe it to ourselves to receive this discourse as a foundation no less essential to the functioning of our information society than the science that underwrites it.
In The Net Delusion, cyber-critic Evgeny Morozov cites a 1966 article — “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?” — by former Manhattan Project physicist Alvin Weinberg, who rejects human engineering as “too expensive and risky” in favor of “quick technological fixes” “to provide the social engineer broader options, to make intractable problems less intractable…and [to] buy time — that precious commodity that converts social revolution into acceptable social evolution.”³² Despite echoes of Margaret Mead, Weinberg is already fast-forwarding to our own historical moment, where technologies long in the making are on the cusp of rendering any further human engineering to ensure their adoption entirely superfluous.
Leading-edge tech firms invited to pitch their products at Singularity University’s 2017 Global Summit included ones developing body sensors that both transmit data in real time and “shock” “abnormal” physiological parameters back into range, FMRI machines capable of reproducing images generated by the brain with startling accuracy, drugs successful in erasing memories by chemically inhibiting their recoding in the brain, and “swarm drones” costing only cents.
British AI programmer and World War Two code breaker Donald Michie already referred to artificial intelligence as “the new bomb…the knowledge bomb,”³³ while John von Neumann, fellow alumnus with Weinberg of the Manhattan Project involved in the design of the A-bomb’s detonating device, stated that he was thinking about “something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.”³⁴ Apparently, for his own technological quick fix, Weinberg was still betting on the H-bomb. (Morozov 301)
As we embark — with the information payload overhead — on filling the vast space of silence in our narrative of possible futures, we must bring all the weight of our “expendable” experience to bear on discourses that would negate its reality. In the face of analyses framing the imminent technological endgame as just another stage in the evolution of work, heralding better opportunities for all, our survival hinges, on the contrary, on recognizing this moment as unprecedented.
For the first time, technology exists to render a great portion of humanity superfluous to the project of transcendence of a ruling elite. In parallel, technologies are able to inhibit our free will, the exercise of which in organized resistance has historically been our only bargaining chip for inflecting the future. It is not the advent of superhuman intelligence that poses the gravest threat for the oppressed. It is the obstruction of our capacity to react to the decisions made for us by other humans in power. In the words of the writer Imre Kertész,
if there is such a thing as fate, then freedom is not possible[….]if there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.³⁵
The choice is still ours to make.
_____________________
[1] For an in-depth discussion of automation and the history of cybernetics, see Annemarie Kemeny, S(t)imulating Subjects: The Mechanization of the Body in Postmodern Discourse (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1993) (doctoral dissertation).
[2] With the exception of the comments on gender by James Watson. For latter, see Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 264. For Macy Conferences, see especially Margaret Mead, ed., Cultural Patterns and Technical Change (Paris: UNESCO, 1953).
[3] Indeed, the utopian counterculture ethos nurtured by Silicon Valley has become so pervasive as to be self-sustaining, making it difficult for those working under its auspices to gain a critical perspective on the real effects across all social strata of the technologies they are creating. A quick perusal of the titles carried by the Computer History Museum gift shop in Mountain View, CA, reveals the magnitude of the hero worship characterizing IT’s discourse about itself: Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution; Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform; Fearless Genius: The Computer Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985–2000; Steve Jobs: Insanely Great; I, Steve: Steve Jobs in his Own Words; Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet; Giants of Enterprise; The Intel Trinity; Silicon Cowboys; What Technology Wants; Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration.
[4] French critic René Girard provides a powerful definition of a text’s doubles entendres as “a hesitation between two centers, the author’s official center of gravity, and the object of his fascination, of what he deliberately rejects” (“Origins: A View from Literature,” in Francisco J. Varela and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, eds., Understanding Origins: Contemporary Views on the Origin of Life, Mind and Society (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), p. 40). Perhaps because this “official center of gravity” — in which authors make themselves appear at their best — often dominates texts, the cybernetic archive has been (mis)read almost in its entirety as a vast “humanitarian” undertaking.
[5] The Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) held a screening of the documentary General Magic, a fascinating account of the invention of the smartphone by this now nonextant firm initially financed by Apple. The film was followed by a panel discussion with members of the original team who, in an emotional reminiscence — and with the benefit of hindsight, reexamine some of the motivations behind the project, the reasons why the company failed, and ultimately the social value of the smartphone itself, recognizing the importance for technologies to be need-driven, rather than the driver of need.
[6] For the origin of the term in the context of global periurban slums, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2008).
[7] Several thinkers have pointed to totalitarian strains within democracy, most famously Hannah Arendt, who traces the origins of totalitarianism to the birth of the nation state in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1968); Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964): “liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination[.…] Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves” (Chapter 1); Sheldon Wolin, who employs the term “inverted totalitarianism” for the symbiotic power sharing between government and monopolies (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)); and J. L. Talmon, who mounts a critique of the “public good” — Rousseau’s “general will” — via the concept of “totalitarian democracy” in Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970).
[8] Technically speaking, cybernetics can be defined as the science of control processes in organisms and machines; culturally, it is the permeation of nearly all disciplines by the engineering principles of information theory.
[9] Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society(New York: Avon Books, 1950, 1954), p. 278.
[10] Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1964), p. 29.
[11] Margaret Mead, ed., op. cit.
[12] In a move to obscure the technocratic agency creating a globally stratified society, cybernetic discourse makes use of the concept of the self-organizing complex system to justify relegating the Other to the bottom of an immutable social pyramid. Thus, in Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1965), cybernetician Warren McCulloch establishes a computing hierarchy (according to the autonomy a program is capable of) comprised of virtuous, moral and ethical machines, which correspond, in order, to the “Noble Savage,” the “religious believer” and the scientist. (86) Similarly, neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela use the theory of autopoiesis (self-production) to assert that only communities capable of producing their own ethic can be considered societies, thus precluding the targets of human engineering from the definition of civilization (Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel, 1980)).
The personification first used by AI programming to describe computer architecture can itself be traced to anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ work on “symbolic elaboration” by the “primitive mind”: “the overall intelligence is explained by analyzing the system into smaller (less intelligent) components[….] Since the inner players manipulate tokens reasonably, they are homunculi [….that] get dimmer, stage by stage, until the last have no intelligence at all” (John Hagueland, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985), p. 117).
[13] the military project targeted the efficiency of anti-aircraft artillery; computing gained through the generalization of the vacuum tube.
[14] What has become known as “scientific management” is based on “time and motion studies” by Taylor and the Gilbreths, respectively.
[15] This is also one of the major factors behind the forecasted loss of many white-collar jobs to AI automation. Wiener himself foresaw this when he wrote “the machine plays no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor.” (1954: 216) In Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex(London: Pluto Press, 2015), cybernetics scholar Nick Dyer-Witheford extends the boundaries of the working class to include “the intermediate strata of professionals and technicians[….]undergoing or fearing re-prolerarianization.” (150, 159) From its inception, so-called narrow AI was focused not only on routine tasks, but the automation of knowledge itself in the form of “expert systems.”
[16] F. W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1911), p. 64.
[17] Foxconn is currently the biggest contract manufacturer in the world, and producer of the iPhone. Making good on his threat to robotize, Gou has launched the Silicon Valley-based Industrial AI System, signed a research agreement with the University of Cincinnati for developing industrial AI, has broken ground on a planned ten-billion-dollar manufacturing plant in Wisconsin (with four billion in public subsidies), and is making plans to invest in Silicon Valley startups.
[18] Norbert Wiener, “The Brain and the Machine,” in Sidney Hook, ed., Dimensions of Mind (New York: NYU Press, 1960), p. 116.
[19] One such machine was William Pratt’s “Arithmetical Jewell,” whose invention in 1616 “signified a mounting interest in all forms of calculation, [with] the practitioners[…]losing no chance to make ingenious devices that would satisfy the public demand.” Another example is the mathematician Blaise Pascal’s own version of a calculator from 1642, the “Pascaline,” to assist his father in keeping accounts in his tax office (Derek de Solla Price, “A History of Calculating Machines,” IEEE Micro 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 41, 43).
[20] Quoted in David Rorvik, As Man Becomes Machine: The Evolution of the Cyborgs (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1971), p. 14.
[21] John Kemeny, Man and the Computer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), p. 58.
[22] For more on the future of incarceration, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012).
[23] For a classic pro argument see Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism and Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990). For contra, see Gena Corea (op. cit.), or Valerie Hartouni, “Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s” in C. Penley and A. Ross, eds., Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
[24] Marxist feminism posits that the “possession of a tangible place of production in the womb situates the woman as an agent in any theory of production” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 79).
[25] quoted in Gena Corea op. cit.
[26] McCulloch op. cit. p. 53.
[27] Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 218, 235).
[28] John von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, A. W. Burks, ed. (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1966); John McCarthy, Formalizing Common Sense: Papers by John McCarthy, ed. Vladimir Lifschitz (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990), p. 106.
[29] The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu series based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, is a salient allegory of the dystopian politics of the cybernetic order aimed at women.
[30] A strong example of this is the artificial doubling of the IVF success rate by an aggressive policy of marketing infertility treatments to fertile couples by the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in Limoges, France.
[31] For examples, see the following articles: The Guardian, Huffington Post, ACLU
[32] Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom(New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), pp. 301–302.
[33] Quoted in Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983), p. 163.
[34] Quoted in George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Vintage, 2012), p. ix.
[35] Imre Kertész, Fatelessness, transl. Tim Wilkinson, (New York, London: Vintage, 2004), p. 259.
