It’s an old, old story, with many well-known chapters in evolutionary history. Most mammals can synthesize their own vitamin C, but primates, having opted for a diet composed largely of fruit, lost the innate ability. We are now obligate ingesters of vitamin C, but not obligate frugivores like our primate cousins, since we have opted for technology that allows us to make, and take, vitamins as needed. The self-perpetuating patterns that we call human beings are now dependent on clothes, cooked food, vitamins, vaccinations, .. . credit cards, smartphones, and the Internet. And—tomorrow if not already today—AI.
Wiener foresaw the problems that Turing and the other optimists have largely overlooked. The real danger, he said, is
that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the race or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically. (p. 181)
The power, he recognized, lay primarily in the algorithms, not the hardware they run on, although the hardware of today makes practically possible algorithms that would have seemed preposterously cumbersome in Wiener’s day. What can we say about these “techniques” that are “narrow and indifferent to human possibility”? They have been introduced again and again, some obviously benign, some obviously dangerous, and many in the omnipresent middle ground of controversy.
Consider a few of the skirmishes. My late friend Joe Weizenbaum, Wiener’s successor as MIT’s Jeremiah of hi-tech, loved to observe that credit cards, whatever their virtues, also provided an inexpensive and almost foolproof way for the government, or corporations, to track the travels and habits and desires of individuals. The anonymity of cash has been largely underappreciated, except by drug dealers and other criminals, and now it may be going extinct. This may make money laundering a more difficult technical challenge in the future, but the AI pattern finders arrayed against it have the side effect of making us all more transparent to any “block of human beings” that may “attempt to control” us.
Looking to the arts, the innovation of digital audio and video recording lets us pay a small price (in the eyes of all but the most ardent audiophiles and film lovers) when we abandon analog formats, and in return provides easy—all too easy?—reproduction of artworks with almost perfect fidelity. But there is a huge hidden cost. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is now a practical possibility. AI techniques for creating all-but-undetectable forgeries of “recordings” of encounters are now becoming available which will render obsolete the tools of investigation we have come to take for granted in the last hundred and fifty years. Will we simply abandon the brief Age of Photographic Evidence and return to the earlier world in which human memory and trust provided the gold standard, or will we develop new techniques of defense and offense in the arms race of truth? (We can imagine a return to analog film-exposed-to-light, kept in “tamper-proof” systems until shown to juries, etc., but how long would it be before somebody figured out a way to infect such systems with doubt? One of the disturbing lessons of recent experience 1s that the task of destroying a reputation for credibility is much less expensive than the task of protecting such a reputation.) Wiener saw the phenomenon at its most general: “...1n
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