On man-machine co-evolution

My friend Francis Jutand was the first to introduce me to the idea of man-machine co-evolution. It’s something that I had already tumbled on during the last few years, most notably through the documentary of Adam Curtis, “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”, but he was the first to put a name on it.

Contrary to what most tech pundits would love to thing, the digital transformation is not a darwinian thing. We can’t be sure the world we create will be better, or better adapted than the one we leave.

From the beginning — from the first article of Vannevar Bush on “How we may think”, the goal of digital technologies has been the transformation of human beings, not the creation of new technologies. The bond between a man and its machines is much closer to the bond between a patient and a doctor than between a driver and his car.

The new cognitive habits brought by Facebook, Snapchat or Google bring new spiritual experiences. The new UX/UI experience transforms our perception and our reflexes. Augmented reality and virtual territories superimpose with our normal, physical environment. The former concepts of presence, distance and inclusion take different meanings.

It creates a new combination bringing together men, machines and a new entity, the monad — meaning, in the sense of Leibniz, the indefinitely many substances individually ‘programmed’ to act in a predetermined way, each substance being coordinated with all the others. In that sense, the rest of the world is not technically real. Men and machines are only consequences of other entities that do not, strictly speaking, exist physically.

The legacy of the industrial revolution led us to over-consume resources, and to change the balance of nature and human relations. The new man-machine co-evolution should lead to new equilibriums, centered around the rejuvenation of ideas such as public services, the commons, collective action and new abilities.

Humans and computers not only exist together, but they become more and more co-dependant. As humans begin to use computers to treat cancer or to interact over great distances, they create more and more machines, and work to their reproduction and diversification. What’s drawing us forward is the lure of solutions to previously intractable problems, the prospect of advantageous enhancements to our inborn abilities, and the promise of improvements to the human condition.

All the way back in 1960 — in accordance with the vision of Vannevar Bush, the visionary psychologist and computer pioneer JCR Licklider wrote with remarkable prescience of his hope:

“that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

The results of this co-evolution are already there and create many complex things we don’t fully understand today: how algorithms work together and how do they provoke market crashes or orientate student towards one school or another — as in the failed example of the French APB algorithm? What factors lead people in different parts of the world to develop a shared identity or sense of community, and to fight for it online despite distance and the absence of physical interactions? And what influences are most likely to break those bonds and fuel chaos, mass migration or revolution? Also what will happen with the emergence of wetware, and the progress being made in the field of neurotechnology?

These questions are not new, and they are not limited to philosophers or technologists.

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” a famous tale from the nineteenth century, reflects both the scientific concern with automata and the Romantic revulsion towards the mechanical Newtonian world view.

In Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, two traditions converges. On one side, the Hermetic traditions of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus are all mentioned as the hero’s inspirations and are indeed mentioned in “Lives of the Necromancers”, a book of her rationalist father, William Godwin. And on another side, chemistry and electricity-came into play in Mary Shelley’s mind through her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley — and are especially made clear by Adam Curtis documentaries.

In the books of “Oz” by L. Frank Baum, Automata are domesticated creatures, different from hens and other animals, but no less under human-in fact, a child’s-domination.

Most people forgot about R.U.R by Karl Capek — written in 1921 with one eye on the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It introduced introduced the word “robot” to the English language, chosen as having been in Slavic language as “robota” (forced laborer), a term which classified those peasants obligated to compulsory service under the feudal system widespread in 19th century Europe — a view that seems prescient in regards with the recent article on digital feudalism by Sebastien Soriano, the President of the French telecom regulator.

With the birth of the three Laws of Robotics, Isaac Asimov’s robots are the firsts to translate the rules of co-evolution in a way that could be understandable to humans — and it should not be forgotten that Asimov was an avid commentator of the Bible.

The idea of artificial intelligence in itself first appeared at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956 where it is supposed to have been coined by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. It lived as a research field for a while, but it became better known to the public thanks to the work of cyberpunk writers from the 80’s and the 90’s, giving finally birth to the concept of singularity.

Then, the concept of singularity got picked up by transhumanists.

And here we are.