Making the Best of Bits

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Part 4, Chapters 12-13: Making the Best of Bits

This seems a particularly poignant observation: "People can make themselves believe in all sorts of fictitious beings, but when those beings are perceived as inhabiting the software tools through which we live our lives, we have to change ourselves in unfortunate ways in order to support our fantasies. We make ourselves dull" (156-7).

Lanier proposes that we cannot escape the need for computationalism, but that we should consider adopting an alternative form of it, what he calls "realism" (157). This is based on the understanding that what makes us human is the result of a tremendous history of evolution, and that we have been "refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality" (157). In Lanier's "realism", "what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonasbstract continuation of reality" (157). I'm not sure I find this comforting. At least it does little to assuage my concerns that we are fiddling with things we cannot possibly imagine the consequences of, and that it may be negating what millions of years of evolution worked to create.

Lanier discusses at length how computers have gotten smart enough now to recognize human facial expressions (159). To do so, they had to perform a feat of abstraction (although Lanier did not couch it as such). In other words, they had to discover the commonalities between all smiles, for example, in order to be able to recognize a smile. What I think this example shows is that computers fundamentally rely on abstraction, and it is no wonder that the more we engage with these computers, the more we become comfortable with abstracting ourselves as a series of ticked boxes on a profile page.

I also couldn't help but notice that Lanier himself got entirely carried away with all of the exciting things that computers could do. Could they detect odors? Ooh! I think this precisely illustrates his previous complaint, that we are seeking to create echoes with our technology. Why are we working so hard to create technology that can simulate humans? Should we not imagine an entirely new entity, one that can do things that we never could do?