Artificial Intelligence as Religion

BOOK REVIEW: Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari (2017)

Will the great arc of human history tell us where AI will take us?  If so, Yuval Noah Harari should be a helpful guide.  He is a professor of history, and has received adulation from many quarters, including Barack Obama and Bill Gates, for his earlier sweeping history of mankind, Sapiens.  Harari is an unusual historian in not being abashed by the prospect of speculating on the future, and I think this commendable because, as James Baldwin said “History…does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”  Homo Deus is beautifully written, very informative, and entertaining.  Its speculations are thoughtful and original.  Harari’s forceful presentation will leave you wondering whether he is prophesying rather than speculating, but the very last few pages make it clear that he sees the possibilities he outlines as just that, possibilities.  And I see them in the spirit of science fiction, to wonder what might come from our technologies based on insight into human nature.  I question many of his ideas, as I will outline below, but applaud the spirit in which they are offered. 

The structure of the book is important.  It is in three parts.  The first part, including a long introduction and Part I: Homo Sapiens Conquers the World, is all history, and is impressive in invoking historical information to form a perspective on how quickly, really in “the past few decades,” humankind has almost overcome the three misfortunes that formerly dominated the entire human agenda: war, famine and plague.  Part II: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World, elaborates the implications of our history for the future.  And Part III: Homo Sapiens Loses Control, speculates and warns of what things may come. 

The conclusion of Part I is “Sapiens rules the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. “ Intersubjective is the key word here.  It is a concept developed by Harari, consisting of a “third level of reality” beyond objective and subjective entities.  “Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans.”  These are stories and myths that are socially reinforced by sharing, and held to be true because of this social reinforcement rather than corresponding to objective truths.  Religious beliefs, for example, are intersubjective realities.  So are money and corporations.  Humans are superior to other animals because they are “the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers.”.  Bees cooperate in large numbers, too, but “bees did not beat us to the nuclear bomb … because their cooperation lacks flexibility.”  Note that this idea of flexibility implies something like free will, or at least a degree of freedom more than bees have, although later in the book Harari denies the existence of fee will.  (Or appears to.  It’s hard to tell, because so much of the narrative seems to be in the voice of the common accepted truths, which Harari is conveying tongue-in-cheek, rather than Harari’s own conclusions.)   Intersubjective reality is so important to homo sapiens that the “lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.” The segue to Part II, Humans Give Meaning to the World, is that “In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough.  We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.”  So far, I’m with Harari 100%.  These are important concepts backed up by well-explained history and science.

In Part II, Harari says a religion is “defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities.  Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values.”  Communism is a religion, as well as Catholicism and Judaism.  So are liberalism, socialism, and Nazism.  There’s a lot of discussion of liberalism as a religion, throughout the remainder of the book.  Humanism is the current reigning religion.  It has replaced gods or God with humans as the originator of its laws, norms and values.  “Modern society believes in humanist dogmas, and uses science not in order to question these dogmas, but rather in order to implement them.” 

Humanism has three variations: communism (or socialism), liberalism, and Nazism.  According to Harari, for “orthodox” humanism, human experience is the ultimately most important reality. “Hence (according to humanism) we ought to give as much freedom as possible to every individual to experience the world, follow his or her inner voice and express his or her inner truth. Whether in politics, economics or art, individual free will should have far more weight than state interests or religious doctrines. … Due to this emphasis on liberty, the orthodox branch of humanism is known as ‘liberal humanism’ or simply as ‘liberalism.’”

I demur on these descriptions of both humanism and liberalism, which form the basis for a lot of what follows in the book.  I’m no philosopher or historian, but my understanding of humanism is that it elevates human reason, as much as or more than individual experience, over religious dogma.  Harari says “It is liberal politics that believes the voter knows best. Liberal art holds that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Liberal economics maintains that the customer is always right.  Liberal ethics advises us that if it feels good, we should go ahead and do it.”   My understanding of the reason that the voter knows best is that we are “created equal,” and have equal rights deriving from this fundamental equality, which gives my vote as much importance as anyone else’s.  I find Matthew Stewart’s discussion of how Enlightenment philosophy influenced the liberal political movements of the eighteenth century in Nature’s God ¹ more convincing than Harari’s. Stewart’s contention is that it is belief in human reason vs. religious dogma that is the chief characteristic of these historical liberal movements, and specifically the founding concepts of American independence and law.  Harari says that “feelings,” not reasoning, are paramount for liberals. Curiously, Harari doesn’t discuss equality at all in describing humanism and liberalism in his chapter, The Humanist Revolution, except to mention that the socialist branch of humanism values equality above freedom.  He describes Nazism as “evolutionary humanism,” which celebrates the survival of the fittest but ultimately believes in human experience as paramount in accordance with its humanist origins.  The fundamental weakness of humanism due to its focus on subjective experience makes it vulnerable to displacement by the new data worshipping religion that Harari describes later in the book.

In part III we get to the future.  The central question posed at the beginning of Part III is “How do biotechnology and artificial intelligence threaten humanism?”   Harari says “Liberals value individual liberty so much because they believe that humans have free will.”  Then he goes to great lengths to show that science has established that free will cannot exist, so there is a contradiction with this foundation of humanism. He maintains that the concept of free will was tenable in the 18^th century before fMRI, but not with today’s understanding of brain mechanics.  He claims brain science undermines the concept of intention, and that science, especially the life sciences, “is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing” as a major conclusion.  This is presented as “the elephant in the laboratory,” creating a “contradiction between free will and contemporary science.”  He gives a brief mention of the potential for random events at the subatomic level, but says “when random accidents combine with deterministic processes, we get probabilistic outcomes, but this too doesn’t amount to freedom.”  He repeats this assertion that the life sciences in particular have determined that organisms are just algorithms many times.  It is not well supported.  It is a major theme of the final chapter, The Data Religion, but the references in this chapter do not include any from the biological sciences. They are almost all from economists.  The closest thing to life science references are a book by a publicist called Global Brain², and some criticisms of Lysenko. 

Harari introduces the idea that a “Cognitive Revolution transformed the sapiens mind, giving it access to the vast intersubjective realm,” which allowed it to “create gods and corporations, to build cities and empires, to invent writing and money, and eventually to split atoms and reach for the moon.” “As far as we know, this earth-shattering revolution resulted from a few small changes in the Sapiens DNA and a slight rewiring of the Sapiens brain.”  This has led to aspirations that further manipulations of the brain can lead to greater expansions of human consciousness. At the same time, the conflict between science, which purportedly shows that freedom is mythical, and humanism’s fundamental belief in freedom has led to “the great decoupling” between consciousness and intelligence.  The intelligence of algorithms overwhelms the experience of consciousness.  A new religion has arisen, the religion of Dataism, which Harari believes has replaced traditional religions.  “As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms.”  “Liberal habits such as democratic elections will become obsolete, because Google will be able to represent even my own political opinions better than I can.”

“Techno-humanism faces an impossible dilemma here.  It considers human will to be the most important thing in the universe, hence it pushes humankind to develop technologies that can control and redesign the will.”  But “We can never deal with such technologies as long as we believe that the human will and the human experience are the supreme source of authority and meaning.  Hence a bolder techno-religion seeks to sever the humanist umbilical cord altogether. “ This is Dataism: we, and all organisms, are all just algorithms and the machines we make will do and decide everything for us, making all but the elite redundant.  This is the resolution of the conflict in favor of modern science and at the expense of liberal freedom. Information processing has become superior to mind in our society.  Information itself demands to be free. The elites in control think this is all fine. Authority will shift from humans to algorithms (controlled by the elites). The world will become post-liberal, and “might be an Orwellian police state that constantly monitors and controls not only all our actions, but even what happens inside our bodies and our brains.”  The controlling elite will be augmented, “upgraded.”  This is the Homo Deus of the book’s title.  In the final few pages, Harari holds out some hope: “Maybe we’ll discover that organisms aren’t algorithms after all.” but it seems a thin, unsupported hope. 

I don’t believe there is a scientific consensus that organisms are just algorithms. Harari doesn’t quote any scientists who say that.  Many scientists are religious and believe there are things at work in the universe far beyond what can be described by a simple deterministic algorithm.  They do believe in physical laws that govern all matter and energy including matter and energy in living things, but there are still many mysteries in physical matter and energy, especially at the quantum level that governs the interactions of atoms, molecules and energy, including those in organisms. That’s not the same as reducing an organism to a simple algorithm like a computer program.    

It’s unclear whether Harari himself accepts that science has put the final nail in the concept of free will. He relates details of brain function experiments that show action potentials occurring before subjects declare their intentions, which have been interpreted as proving that intentions are illusory.  He presents these and other information such as fMRI studies showing mechanisms associated with conscious thought as demonstrating that free will is an illusion. Harari concludes that our actions are either pre-determined or random, but never free.  But it is unclear whether he is presenting this as the voice of the current consensus shaped by the Dataist religion, or whether he is buying into it himself.  In any case, I don’t believe that the possibility of free will has been disproven.  The studies cited by Harari and others are never quite clear regarding when an intention is formed vs when it is reported.  Studies of brain function by fMRI and other sensing technologies are very crude.  None of them have yet shown the precise mechanisms by which even straightforward actions such as visual image processing work, much less explain the neuronal mechanism for processing a specific thought.³  Merely showing that some actions, like reflexes, are unintentional doesn’t prove that others can’t be initiated by free will.  It only shows there are constraints on free will, and that some actions are reflexive or driven by unconscious processes, while others may be free.  

And randomness, even if constrained by probabilities, does imply freedom.  Statisticians refer to “degrees of freedom” in random processes. Randomness doesn’t just represent uncertainties caused by lack of knowledge.  Quantum mechanics has demonstrated that there is a fundamental uncertainty in physical interactions.⁴ Things don’t happen until they happen, and there is some freedom in how they will happen until they do.  Scientists and philosophers continue to debate the question of determinism in physical processes.⁵ Determinism and free will are not closed issues in science or philosophy.  

Is it possible that consciousness is closely related to free will?  That the conscious mind is necessarily a mind that freely chooses, rather than just reacting deterministically, and this is the essential quality of consciousness?  Could it be that the probabilities of quantum events override deterministic events in some cognitive brain functions? Roger Penrose speculated on the possibility of quantum state superposition playing a role in brain processes over twenty years ago.⁶  Harari points out that consciousness is not only poorly understood, but that we “don’t have a clue” how it is produced in the brain.  But there has been informed speculation on the subject.  Terrence Deacon’s fascinating book Incomplete Nature – How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012) goes into great detail regarding how organic substances may have assembled themselves into replicating organized cells encapsulating recursive information processes that enhanced their survival.  Could it be that these recursive processes at some point developed the ability to invoke quantum processes, getting a step ahead of determinism and thus stealing a march on more limited organisms?  Could it be that there are degrees of free will, and degrees of consciousness?  We don’t know, and that’s just the point.  We can’t say free will is dead, and it’s valid territory for speculation. 

I think Harari is overstating the case with regard to the forces lining up to worship a data god, with a priesthood that will use algorithms to make everyone redundant except the controlling elite.  There are real dangers of something like this happening, and Harari is right to warn of the trend, which is real.  We need to explore the social power of algorithms and other ways the trend can shake out, good and bad. But the trend is not as simple and clear cut as he makes it seem, and it doesn’t amount to a religion.

What’s most disappointing about Homo Deus is, because of Harari’s focus on proving that Dataism and its worship of soulless algorithms is the great threat today, he doesn’t consider the possibility of consciousness or free will arising in artificial intelligence, as it has in the brain. We really don’t know whether this can happen, and whether, if it does, it might produce a different kind of consciousness than we know. 

Homo Deus is a worthwhile and rewarding book to read, and Harari’s warning of a potential dystopia of a small elite armed with powerful algorithms is valid.  But he seems to have closed off some other possibilities prematurely, and some of them may be just as dangerous, and some may be beautiful and exciting. 

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[1] Stewart, Matthew, Nature’s God – The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014)

[2]Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21^st Century (2001).  Bloom was trained in biology but spent his career as a publicist for rock bands.

[3] September 2018’s Scientific American carried an article describing a breakthrough in which modified rabies viruses, which defeat the blood-brain barrier by creeping along single neurons and their connecting axons, were used to trace neurons from the retina to their targets in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the brain.  The grand result is that scientists have been able to now determine, based on the distribution of targets in the brain, that some sorting of input from left and right eyes seems to occur in the LGN.  This is a great improvement from a 30-year old text on visual processing I recently perused which said that it was clear that the LGN seemed to be the distribution center for retinal signals, but what happened inside it was a mystery.  This is the typical state of the art of our knowledge of information processing in the brain.

[4] Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg summarizes the current thinking on quantum uncertainty as of 2018 in his recent book “Third Thoughts.”

[5] See Prigogine, Ilya, The End of Uncertainty (1996) for a prominent (Nobel prize winning) scientist’s perspective, and Popper, Karl, The Open Universe, An Argument for Indeterminsm, (1988) for a prominent philosopher’s.

[6] Penrose, Roger, The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), p. 400 and ff.

Forget Space Travel

I’m surprised how much space travel there is in current science fiction.  In the time of Jules Verne and as late as Hugo Gernsback, space travel was a wild idea.  Just thinking about it required unusual imagination.  Today’s space ship stories are not astounding or amazing.  They’re products of aficionados demonstrating the fine points of what’s possible within an elaborate set of constraints.  That’s not to say these stories aren’t entertaining and original. Freedom from terrestrial challenges expands the boundaries of literature.  Unusual human dilemmas are explored, often revealing beauty. The imaginative parts of modern science fiction stories are more likely to be in the bots, clones, reality simulations and plot twists while the space ships, alien planets and hair-raising interstellar car chases are just the assumed background.  But the original thrill of space travel was the stunning wonders of distant worlds that were simply incredible at the time they were written.  That is gone.  We know too much now about those distant worlds. 

A lot of what we know now tells us how barren and hostile to life space and other planets are.  This raises some huge problems, so huge that I believe that the biggest lesson to be learned is that we should forget about space travel.  We are inseparable from earth.

The first problem is living in space, whether in spacecraft or on alien planets. Human experience in space after fifty-odd years is limited to encapsulating a few persons in vessels filled with things brought along or hoisted up from earth, at enormous expense.¹  A sustainable presence on other planets would require huge efforts to either supply them from earth or find ways to create and maintain a human-friendly environment using indigenous materials.  No, we can’t assume the atmosphere will be breathable on any planet within reach – I still see that in recent stories.  Earth is turning out to be a very unusual planet.  A recent article by John Gribbin² shows just how unusual.  There’s only a small band within the galaxy where conditions are just right to allow life as we know it to start.  Either it’s too hot with radiation from huge and exploding stars toward the center, or it’s unlikely that rocky planets could form because of the low density of necessary materials beyond our goldilocks belt.   And the particular size and orbital distance of our single big moon is very unusual, having resulted from the collision of early earth with another early planet that blew the moon out of the resulting kinetic blob.  It stabilizes earth, and the way the separation occurred affected both the earth and the moon’s composition, which has been important to the formation of life on earth.  Those unique conditions eventually led to extensive photosynthesis that produced an oxygen atmosphere.  Maybe the reason for Fermi’s paradox isn’t so paradoxical after all: the calculations of how many life-supporting planets are out there are based on wrong assumptions. 

But there are over 100 billion stars in our galaxy³, and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe⁴, you say, and even if improbable for any given star, a few of them must have conditions similar to ours or favorable to some kind of life.  OK, but the nearest star is over four light years away.  We should call these distances radio years, because that’s how long it would take for any communications signal to get there, not to mention actually going there.  And that’s one-way.  So let’s draw a circle around the area where we could have sent a signal and then gotten an answer since, say Plato’s time.  That would be a distance of about 1,200 light years.  That’s about one percent of the distance across our own little galaxy.  A sphere with this radius is about one-tenth of one percent of the galactic volume.  Even if we did receive a red-shifted peep from a civilization over the infrared rainbow in the next galaxy over, we couldn’t communicate with it.  Even if we learn how to govern ourselves, given genetic drift our species will likely be gone before our galactic neighbors’ smart phones could even ring with our call back.  This really goes beyond the problem of finding a planet we can colonize.  It means that the part of the universe that is effectively available for communication or even to see what is happening right now is very, very small. 

 

Some efforts have been made to build a closed system in which a few “terranauts” could live without a welcoming atmosphere.  It was a huge effort and no matter what they tried it didn’t work.⁵ It’s one thing to do it where you can just call things off and open the doors, or go on bottled oxygen until you can de-orbit, and another in a place where you can’t breathe, and are bombarded by radiation outside your shelter.⁶

  

Some authors celebrate the prospect of “terraforming” on Mars and other planets, to make them habitable.  We hear this hubris as it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we can’t even reliably prevent earth from becoming uninhabitable.  We can’t even terraform earth!  Can we really manage the stable transformation of a whole other, very distant, planet, which has hard physical reasons for being like it already is?

A related problem is cost, in energy and effort. In writing about space travel, we don’t appreciate the enormous distances to other planets, other stars, other galaxies, and the difficulties in getting there and back, and even communicating. Even Mars, the second closest planet to earth, is really far away.  It takes months to get from Mars to Earth using any foreseeable technology⁷, and a lot of energy.  Maybe we could find ways of building expendable boosters on Mars and harvesting solar energy to escape Martian gravity. Of course it would take a bit longer during the times when Mars is on the other side of the sun.  By the time you figure out the costs of getting everything you need there, and then getting what you want from Mars or even the much closer moon, and down to earth through the atmosphere to where you need it, and cleaning up after yourself, you will have to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to go somewhere else.  O. Glenn Smith, former manager of shuttle systems engineering at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, estimates that pioneering for establishment of a small Mars colony would cost over $2 trillion.⁸ This doesn’t include maintaining the colony once established. NASA has yet to produce a cost estimate for the first human launch to Mars. Maybe then we go to Venus, the closest planet.  No, there’s a bit too much atmosphere there.  Well, how about the other planets? Well, they are even farther, son, much farther.  Setting sail into the emptiness of space to colonize a planet is not the same as crossing an ocean propelled by the wind to a place where you’ll find arable land, game and native peoples ready to exploit.

But let’s say, in the spirit of supreme imagination, that the practicalities of cost and energy cited above can someday be overcome by new technologies. Why do we have to actually send our frail human bodies out there?  Is it to extract precious metals or some other rare substance?  Is there anything we need that much, that we don’t have or can’t make?  Maybe, despite the costs and harsh conditions, we need to go out there just because it’s there, to explore, to understand the universe, satisfy the deep fundamental drive of curiosity that gives basic science its true value.⁹ But it’s increasingly clear that exploration can be done robotically, and better, with extensions of ourselves, long-distance tools.  It doesn’t require our bodies to go there.  Not only are robotic space probes doing things science fiction never imagined, but earth and orbital observatories are discovering things about the very origins of the universe that no “boots on the ground” of a cold dead or molten metal planet could ever beat. You can’t travel to the big bang, but through ingenuity we’ve been able to examine the sudden release of photons shortly after it banged (the cosmic microwave background) and learn an awful lot about how our whole universe is happening. 

 

In the hubris of the terraforming and colonizing ideas is a clue to the underlying drive for moving out to other planets. It is the drive for conquest, expansion of our territory, the allure of the frontier. Space is said to be the high frontier.  For years, Captain Kirk and his successors told us it was the final frontier. I’m amazed at how glibly terraforming and space colonization are presented in serious future speculation.  It reminds me of the smart-alecky veterans of Alamagordo, looking up from their slide rules to pronounce that soon nuclear energy would be too cheap to meter.  Colonization of other worlds has come to seem an inevitable goal of humanity. Expansion of the human intellect throughout the universe is seen as an ultimate goal of our species, whether by human beings or human-invested artificial intelligence.¹⁰ Sorry folks, but colonization is not a fundamental human desire.  It’s cultural, not uncommon in humans, but by no means universal.  The particular strain of this cultural malignancy at work here is the western tradition of endless manifest destiny, always subduing new lands and whatever natives happen to be in the way, for the right, white, and good.  

And there’s a more fundamental reason why space travel doesn’t make sense. The only good reason to escape the earth is that we’re making a mess of it.  Maybe it would be better to clean up the mess.  Because we are inseparable from the earth. Everything in our bodies moves in cycles from the earth into our bodies and out again.  We are part of it.  It is part of us, inevitably and forever.  If it dies, we die, and as much as we’ve learned that’s screaming this at us, we can’t seem to wrap our little heads around it.  

Building our future stories on fantasies of conquest and escape smacks of futility.  Good science fiction was never escapism. It is expansive imagination. It is the wrong time for fantasies of conquest and escape.  Space travel was expansively imaginative in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Forget it.  Whenever I see yet another story about space travel and space colonization, I imagine Jules Verne yawning.  No, we don’t need to confine ourselves to pristine, eco-friendly little comfort zones or exploring the ocean instead of space.  Plenty of the best science fiction has been focused on technological marvels, and horrors, other than space ships and planetary conquest.  The fertile unknown is all around us, waiting to be explored.  

We are threatening this earth, our milk and our breath, and the more we turn away, the worse it will get.  There aren’t fertile planets and alien civilizations within reach ready for us to conquer and colonize. Space does not beckon us. Fleeing into space will kill us. If we turn our imaginations away from our earth to fantasies of escape and conquest now, when the earth beneath our feet is eroding, acidifying, melting and burning because of our errors, we betray our history and our progeny. There may be no one left to learn the lessons of our errors from their history.

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[1] Costs for cargo and crew transportation to and from the International Space Station are about 50% of its annual budget, which varies from $3 to $4 billion per year.  The crew varies from 3 to 6 persons (AUDIT OF COMMERCIAL RESUPPLY SERVICES TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION, NASA Office of Inspector General, April 26, 2018).     

[2] Scientific American, October 2018.  See also Gribbin’s book Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique (2011).

[3] http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/78-the-universe/stars-and-star-clusters/general-questions/343-how-many-stars-are-there-in-our-galaxy-milky-way-intermediate

[4] https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/universe-2-trillion-galaxies/

[5] See Wired Magazine’s October 2016 article on the Biosphere projects and T.C. Boyle’s 2016 novel The Terranauts exploring what went wrong (https://www.wired.com/2016/10/terranauts-tc-boyle-novel/).  

[6] See https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html. “Prolonged exposure to the kinds of (radiation)levels detected on Mars could lead to all kinds of health problems – like acute radiation sickness, increased risk of cancer, genetic damage, and even death.”  Most planets, including Mars, will not have strong magnetic fields that shield its surface from radiation from its star. 

[7] https://www.space.com/24701-how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars.html. This article discusses current propulsion technologies.  It also mentions possible advanced technologies which can move small space probes, not bulk material carriers, much faster, but with complex technology and huge energy inputs. 

[8] (https://spacenews.com/op-ed-mars-for-only-1-5-trillion/

[9] In 1969, when asked by a congressional committee what value for national defense would accrue from basic science funding, Robert Wilson, director of Fermilab, answered that “it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.” (https://history.fnal.gov/testimony.html)

[10] See Bostrom, N., Superintelligence – Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), p. 101 and ff. and Kurzweil, R, The Singularity is Near (2005).