Humanity has entered a new age that is both challenging and exciting. It is the Age of Information Technology (AIT).
What makes this new age challenging is the fact that, those who are making it happen, and those who observe and comment on it, live in very different worlds with very different perspectives. For, those who are making it happen — the Dionysians, if I may — are focused on numerous, particular tasks, each seemingly distinct from the other, and each requiring a highly specialized technology that only they fully understand. Those who observe, comment, and decide on the larger social impact of these tasks — the Apollonians — often appear to understand very little of the actual implementation of this technology to the tasks at hand. In brief, the Apollonians are only poorly able to foresee the full ramification of the various new technologies and their applications. And, the Dionysians are so absorbed in their work and the accomplishment of their narrowly defined, particular task that the larger picture can only be of little interest. Accordingly, the rest of us are left with a feeling of helplessness and are demoralized by the thought that tomorrow will be so different from today, that all that we hold dear will be no more, and that we will just somehow have to adapt to whatever is thrown our way.
On the one hand, we do not wish to appear stupid while others pontificate as if they understood it all; on the other hand, we know instinctively that we cannot simply let go of all that we hold dear. We are experiencing still another major phase of technological transformation in the history of humankind. This is not the first transformation, but it is a major one.
What makes this new age exciting is our ability to communicate through a variety of new media that focus simultaneously on two important senses: our sense of hearing (audio) that is as primitive as our ability to touch and smell, and our sense of vision (video) that is our most advanced and intellectually stimulating sense. This bias toward these two senses is changing not only the way in which we interact, think and communicate, but also that about which we think. Never before has the medium become so important to the message.
There is another dynamic that is as debilitating as it is exciting — namely, the rate at which we process data. It is exciting because we can understand with far greater precision the relative size, intensity, and frequency of all kinds of phenomena. Not only this, but we can detect patterns and relationships that we never knew existed, and that are crucial to how we live. What is debilitating about the tools for this new understanding is their dependency on quantification. Please, do not misunderstand quantification is a very important part of human activity, but it tends to go against the way in which most of us think and interact. Nature is an intricate dynamic that, if understandable mathematically, requires a level of abstraction that few of us can manage for several hours at a time, and that most of us would prefer to avoid whenever possible.
Artificial intelligence has proven that with a little bit of probability theory, a good grasp of statistics, a thorough understanding of the grammar of a particular language, basic human logic, and a programming language, we can teach machines to think very similarly to the way we humans do.
The entire world of IT is built on just two numbers: 1 and 0 — namely, the presence or absence, respectively — of an electromagnetic field in a given space. It is a world of endless choice between two values: absence and presence, to be and not to be, liberty and death, and so forth and so on. This rigid construct of the universe that allows only two choices at every turn can only be broken through quantification. In other words, we must be able to count the number of times that a 1 or 0 appears at certain locations at a given time. This means that everything that is inputted has to be first reduced to a some combination of 1s and 0s, and then counted. Generally speaking, neither do we think this way, nor are most of our decisions made with such cold rigor — this, despite the fact that those of us, who elevate human thought above the instinctual behavior of other animals, do wish that more people would think before they act.
In effect, IT is making those of us who like to think think more, and is making it easier for those, who would prefer to think as little as possible, think less. Not only is the split between mind and body becoming more intense for the individual, but it is permeating all of society. There are those who view life, as if it transpired on a viewport or computing screen, and those who live in a world filled with nature and other people — what life has always been for as long as we have been around.
Alas, with this introduction to AIT I would like now to focus on what I believe to be the single greatest challenge that the Age of Information Technology poses to the future of humankind. In particular, I would like to focus on the notion of the free-will, technology, and science. Let us consider first the nature of technology and science.
Technology refers to the manipulation of ourselves and our physical, biological, and social environments. Technology is closely related to science insofar as science provides us with the knowledge that we need to better develop new technology. Technology and science differ fundamentally insofar as the latter is a process of discovery, and the former is a process of manipulation to achieve certain goals. Science relies on technology to better manipulate the aforementioned environments and ourselves in an effort to understand how these work. Science uses technology to create experiments for the purpose of discovery and understanding. Once something new has been discovered and sufficiently understood, the engineers (technologists) apply this new discovery and understanding in order to solve problems. Now, solving problems can mean many different things to different people. In every case, however, it means manipulating ourselves and the world around us in order to achieve specific outcomes — outcomes whose full ramifications we, all too often, only poorly understand. Whereupon more scientific investigation is required. In the end, science and technology — also known in industry as research and development — go hand-in-hand. Both science and technology are procedures. Whereas the latter assumes that we know something, the former assumes that we really cannot be sure about anything and should always be in search of the truth about everything.
In contrast, free-will is a philosophical concept that acknowledges that each of us is endowed with his own mind and body that together constitute a unique system that is similar, but different from that of every other. What we share in common with one another, but no other living form, is what makes us a unique specie that we call human. How we behave, think, and speak is determined, in part, by our physical, biological, and social environments. Important in this context is that each of us experiences these different environments differently, and that our experience, although largely similar at first, gradually diverges as each of us develops his own world view. Some might call it karma.
Our desire to be together opens the door to other world views that we incorporate within our own. Our culture is a distillation of what we incorporate as individuals and of what we incorporate and is shared by every one. The more of each of us that is shared by everyone, the less distinguishable each of us becomes from those around us. This does not change the fact, however, that each has his own world view and his own system to which he caters. Each of us occupies a different space and each occupies this space with a different way of looking at the world. The individual and society only truly converge, but in fleeting moments.
Now, there are those of us who have identified this free-will as the soul — a being that lives beyond our physical existence. The soul removes the need to think of life and death as little more than points along an infinite timeline. Without this notion it is much easier to conclude that one’s own life is little different from that of an ordinary animal — a cog in a wheel of a vast system over which none of us has any control beyond his own ephemeral existence and material survival. Indeed, some would even argue that, what little control we do have is no control at all, and that our ability to conceptualize, reflect, and see ourselves as independent actors of a much larger whole is little more than an illusion — a shadow cast by a flickering fire that lands wherever that it might.
No matter how one conceives of the free-will the concept is essential to a productive society, for it allows us to place blame, on the one hand, and reward, on the other hand. To this notion of free-will society can assign responsibility and merit and thereby integrate better each of its members into a productive, harmonious whole that is best able, with its physical and biological environment and the universe at large, to adapt. This productive, harmonious whole is achieved through the creation of rules and shared values toward which every member of the society is expected to strive. The punishments and rewards assigned to each individual are based on this shared set of constraints on speech and behavior and ultimately thought itself.
We, in the West, have traditionally placed a great deal of importance on this free-will in the belief that it maximizes individual responsibility, creativity, and productivity and leads to a more prosperous society.
So long as there was a healthy balance between the rights and responsibilities of the individual citizen, our emphasis on the free-will achieved its desired end.
During the past century and a half our ever increasing dependence on government has diminished both our rights and responsibilities as individuals, and we have become increasingly socialized. Rather than holding each other responsible for his actions we now turn to the state to achieve what the state was never designed to do.
Rather than demanding our rights before the state, we now complain about the state to each other, while the state assumes an ever-increasing number of our rights so that it might better provide for the individual what the individual should be providing for himself. This is our current dilemma as a nation. Unfortunately, the state and those who would depend on the state, rather than their own industry, to provide for themselves, are winning in the tug-of-war for rights and responsibilities.
What makes this tug-of-war particularly difficult to deal with is the rights that the individual is seeking to maintain, and the responsibilities that he is seemingly eager to surrender. Rather than freedom from state control, he is seeking freedom from moral authority. Rather than demanding responsibility for the self, he is demanding that the state be the provider of his livelihood. To put it crudely, the individual is surrendering himself to the state so that he can masturbate in the street.
If we are to survive as a nation we must change our course.
The state relishes IT, because it embellishes its ability to control, but its interest in discovery is not one of understanding the world in which we live. Rather, it is in its ability to monitor, control, and manipulate. It sees the individual as an object and itself as the commanding subject of its object. Alas, those who seek more state participation in the every day affairs of society see themselves as the potential heads of this surveillance, control, and manipulation!
We must not be duped by the fear mongering of those who perceive others as objects and themselves as pretending objects aspiring to the role of commanding subjects. Their calls for submission to the state and sexual freedom are duplicitous. They care not about us, but to advance their own ambition. Their ladder is that of the state in the name of humanity. It is a ladder that few of us can climb — a ladder propped up by our own subjection.
There are many who are turning to the church, the temple, the mosque, and the synagogue for salvation, the rest of us must turn to our nation’s founding and salvage what is left of that which once made us great — the free-will. Responsibility of the self and freedom from the state.
In liberty,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
Author of Mount Cambitas: The Story of Real Money