My article has been published on Quillette magazine:
http://quillette.com/2017/10/09/universal-basic-income-threat-tyranny/
Basically an expansion on things I’ve said in the past (like here in Hebrew) about the political implications of universal basic income. I still think universal basic income might be the direction we’re going in, but we need to think seriously about these things before going there.
Free market liberalism is a very appealing model for geeks and any other fans of rational thinking, as it provides an extremely elegant and meritocratic model for division of wealth, being both very close to the meritocratic ideal of everyone having wealth proportionate to their contribution to the overall wealth, and to the liberal ideal of placing the fewest limits possible on human freedom. There is one problem, though, even for geeks like myself – this model works very well for infinite (or practically infinite) resources like labour, but not so well for limited resources like land. How does free competition work when it comes to land? Not only is it limited in quantity, in the sense that there is only so much habitable land in the world, but also in quality – If I carve an amazing jade statue, there’s no problem in me owning it and selling it to whomever I please, since it’s the fruit of my labour and technically anyone else can learn my craft and carve an equal one. But if I own a piece of land, no other person can “make” an “equal” one. The value of land is not just the physical atoms it consists of, but also its location in 3-dimensional space; and in that aspect, every piece of land is unique.
And what’s true in the individual level, here is true even more in a national level. How should land be distributed between countries? We’ve made remarkably little progress in solving this problem in the past few millenia of human civilization. Looking through history, the algorithm seems to be divided in two: in “uncivilized” areas (which every society defines in their own way), it’s the law of the jungle. Take what you can, and claim it as your own. This is how the Roman empire saw the great frontiers of northern Europe; How the later European empires saw Africa, America or Australia; How the various Islamic empires saw “Dar ul-Harb” (i.e the non-muslim world) and generally how most entities we consider “empires” expanded their territories. In many cases, two entities saw themselves as “civilization” and the other as a “frontier” to be taken; This is how, for example, the relations between the Ottoman empire and Christian Europe were, for centuries, an endless fight for land; and so many others like them. In this world, land belongs to whichever country can take it.
On the other hand, within each “civilization”, the rules were different. There have been several variations on this theme, but in general: whenever a “civilized” world contain more than one separate entity (i.e it’s not just the emperor dictating who gets what, but many different states living in a gentle balance of power), the land distribution between them is based on the sacred status-quo: by default, nothing should be changed. No matter how just, how efficient, how reasonable it would be: if we change something, then everything is open for change; and then, we go back to the jungle rules, with every entity trying to take what it can.
This system is very good for keeping peace most of the time: but only most. Since this system existed most strongly in Europe, a look at European history is a very good example of the effects of this system: From an attitude of endless war, where each opportunity one state sees to take over land from another state turns into another battle to take that land, we move to an attitude of power accumulation; States build up their power, and look for the proper timing and excuse to change borders in a way favourable to them. This very rarely happens on a small scale – the few recent examples are the creation of South Sudan, and the still incomplete creation of Kosovo and Russian annexation of Crimea.
What usually happens, is that these periods of peace are stopped by a world war. We usually only count two world wars because we say “world” in the sense of “all of Earth” – but if we consider “world” to mean “civilized world”, or all that part of the world where a state cannot freely start a war during “normal” times, then we see many more “world wars” in European history: the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty-Years’ War, the Seven-Years’ War, and many others. These wars behave like volcanic eruptions: without being able to fight wars regularly, or to change borders without war, pressure is constantly building up. The status quo, in the form of borders, international organizations and structures, and international laws and norms, always favours the winners of the previous wars and reflects the power balance of their time; but as time passes, the real power balance always shifts. Either previous losers or, more often, new countries become stronger, either economically, diplomatically or demographically. These countries become unhappy with the status quo that does not give them a chance to turn their power into actual change of the international status quo. Thus, when enough pressure adds up that one state, or alliance of states, believe they have enough power and enough to gain from completely breaking the order, they start a war and everyone else joins to realign the new status quo in a way favourable to them. As the “civilized world” expanded to the point where we now consider everywhere in the world to be part of it, these “civilized world” wars became actual world wars.
I write this post in light of the big issue that fills our headlines these days – The work towards Kurdish independence. Kurdistan in one of the places with the greatest “pressure” of this kind – meaning, a place where the status quo is extremely far away from the current balance of power. The status quo completely ignores the Kurds, but they have managed to gather so much power by now, that they want to change this status quo to reflect the situation better. Here they face the guardians of the status quo – The states that have built a negative pressure, meaning they were at their peak when the status quo was created, and have declined since then. This mostly includes the main countries of Western Europe and the Islamic world. Why are European countries opposing a Kurdish independence referendum? Do they have a moral justification for worrying about the “unity of Iraq”? The “unity” of a country whose citizens were never asked about creating? Of course not. They oppose it because they like the status quo that reflects a time when they had more power (military, diplomatic, demographic), or even just sheer luck; and they know that reshaping that status quo (and what starts in the Middle East, will reach everywhere) will redefine the world stage in a way that reflects their current weaker situation.
So, what can be done? Are we doomed to continue this cycle of world wars forever? I don’t think so. I think there can be a way out, but it would require a radical new way of thinking about borders. The best example to follow, in my opinion, is democracy – democracy gave a peaceful way of reflecting the power balance between people in a state, thus eliminating the need (at least when the democracy functions properly) for violent revolutions. Right now, people (in the democratic world) who are unhappy with the way their country is managed, can work towards changing it peacefully. But people who are unhappy with current international borders have only two options: count on the goodwill or economic interests of the country they are trapped in (as the nationalist-minded Catalans, Scots or Flemings are doing), or assert their demands forcefully. If we can design a system where borders can be changed peacefully, these pressures will be released and the need for wars reduced or eliminated.
What kind of system can provide that? I’ll share some ideas in the future. But for now, it’s very difficult to guess. But I have little doubt – it will come in our future, and our current days of fixed international borders will someday seem like the primitive past, as we now look at the absolute monarchies of our ancestors.
Last part in my series of posts expressing doubts about the warnings of AI superintelligence, and inviting the AI safety community to explain what I’m missing and convince me I should be worried. See part I here, and part II here.
In the previous two posts, I expressed my doubts about the risk of artificial general intelligence (AGI) turning into superintelligence in a fast or unexpected way that might put it in an extreme advantage over human intelligence. They were quite theoretical, and in this part I want to turn to the question of what is likely to happen in practice, and what we can do to benefit from artificial intelligence and, even if I was wrong in the previous two parts, prepare for the appearance of superintelligence.
From what I can see, all existing research that comes from the view of superintelligence as a potential risk, is research on AI safety – that is, research on how to create AI systems in a way that is unlikely to produce catastrophe. Maybe it’s because of my interest in politics and world affairs that makes me a bit more cynical than the average mathematician, but I find it very difficult to imagine that if real intelligence superpower was at stake, then people, corporations and governments could really be convinced to limit themselves with some algorithms to prevent bad behaviour from their AI. Moreover, this approach suffers from “Superman’s problem” – When countless villians try again and again to destroy the world, Superman need to succeed every time in stopping them. The villains only need to succeed once, and we’re doomed. The same goes for AI safety – we can build super-strong regulations and make everyone use strict safety mechanisms in designing their AI, but all it takes is one programmer saying “Something is not working. I wonder what will happen if I disable this function call here…”, and we’re doomed.
Could there be a more robust way to handle it? I’d suggest that the very notion of superpowered AI that I go against in my previous posts, is the key to prepare for superintelligence in case I am wrong. Because throughout the AI risk discussion, people constantly assign various superpowers to the superintelligent AI – it would be able to strategize perfectly, it would be able to gain access to unlimited resources, it would be able to convince humans of anything through social manipulation. One superpower seems to be neglected, even though it seems much less fantastic and therefore more likely than the others – a superintelligent AI would surely be intelligent enough to teach us how to be superintelligent.
People are worried so much that algorithms are doing intelligent things in ways we do not understand. But are we really trying to understand? Surely there is a lot of complexity in the functioning of a neural network. But is it more than the complexity of the human body? I doubt that. And yet we are able, little by little, to figure out more and more of the functions of the human body – describing the different cells it’s made of, different processes they are involved in, different organs and mechanisms. We do all this by experimentation and guessing, but how much easier would it be if we had access not only to its source code, but to endless sandbox environments where we could experiment and analyze it? And of course – if we really reach AGI, then access to an intelligent being who can study it and explain it to us? Instead of staying static while the AIs become more and more intelligent, why not study them and become more intelligent ourselves? Maybe it will be difficult to constantly chase after the AIs and try to keep up with their improvements (though I’m not at all convinced it will be). But it will be robust.
It will be robust, because instead of relying on Superman, we rely on ourselves. We move from defense to offense. If we make one AI algorithm safe, we still need to go back to the start with the next AI. But if we learn how one algorithm works, it makes us better equipped to face not only that specific AI, but any other AI that will come in the future. And even if we don’t ever face an AI risk, it has the added benefit of improving our own intelligence.
Would it not be a more robust strategy for preparing for a possible AI risk, if instead of (or in addition to) researching AI safety, we’ll focus on researching AI understanding? That is, researching ways to analyze and understand the inner workings of our AI creations, so that we can adopt for ourselves whichever methods they create to make themselves more intelligent? Thus freeing us from the worry that no matter how many AI algorithms we made safe, there can always be one we miss and creates the catastrophe?
Continuing my series of posts expressing doubts about the warnings of AI superintelligence, and inviting the AI safety community to explain what I’m missing and convince me I should be worried. See part I here.
In the previous part, I talked about the intelligence explosion – the process in which a human-level artificial intelligence reaches superintelligence, and explained why I’m not sure it will necessarily happen before humans reach the same superintelligence. In this part, I want to go further back and ask a more basic question: Is there even such a thing as “superintelligence”?
AI researchers fully admit that we have no idea what superintelligence would look like, and tend to (very reasonably) use the only means we have of imagining it – comparing modern human intelligence to less intelligent beings, and extrapolating from there. So every conversation about superintelligence includes some mention of how humans are so far advanced beyond ants, or mice, or chimpanzees, that those animals cannot even grasp the way in which humans are more advanced than they are; They cannot have a meaningful discussion about ways to prepare or defend against human attack. In the same way, the argument goes, superintelligence is so far beyond human intelligence, that we cannot even grasp it right now.
My problem is, it’s not at all clear that there is such a scale of intelligence where humans take a nice spot in the middle, between ants and superintelligence. And the fact that ants, mice or chimpanzees could all be in that argument without it looking any different is the key – while there are certainly some significant cognitive differences between an ant, a mouse, and a chimpanzee, all of them are pretty much equally unable to perform in the one significant field of intelligence – the ability to research, learn, manipulate the environment, and ultimately improve one’s intelligence. Modern humans are extremely more intelligent than their ancestors from 20,000 years ago, even though our anatomy is essentially the same – the only difference is that modern humans are the result of spending thousands of years researching ways to improve their intelligence. This already raises the question – is there really a scale of intelligence, with ants, mice, chimpanzees, humans and superintelligences standing in order? Or is there just a binary division – beings that understand enough to improve themselves, and ones that don’t?
This brings us to the comparison between modern humans and ancient humans. The main difference is between these two, rather than between humans and other species – suggesting that the difference comes not directly from physiology, but from education and research (of course, physiology must produce a brain capable of being educated and doing research, which seems to be the case only with humans, but we have no reason to believe that there’s any need for further improvements in physiology to increase intelligence). What is the reason that modern humans are so much more intelligent than ancient humans?
The answer seems to be science, mathematics, and technology. All the changes in the abilities of humans between primitive and modern societies ultimately come either from a better understanding of the physical world, better understanding of the abstract world, or the construction of better tools that take advantage of previous understanding and help us achieve the next stages of understanding. So if we assume superintelligence exists because modern humans are much more advanced than ancient humans, that would imply that superintelligence would be superintelligent because it has much more advanced science, mathematics, and technology.
But in that case, there doesn’t seem to be any qualitative difference between superintelligence and human intelligence, only a difference in quantity for which we have no reason to assume AGI is better suited to achieving than humans. Our advancement in science came not from some Aristotle-style sitting down and thinking about the mysteries of the universe (which is essentially the one thing AGI would do better than humans) – it came from endless experiments, endless observations of nature and of the results of those experiments, and endless construction of increasingly better tools for observing and manipulating the physical environment. The AGI has no advantage in any of those things, so at best it could become a mathematical genius, who is not necessarily better at most practical tasks than any human.
To clarify, let’s take a look at some examples of past advancements that increased the scientific knowledge (and therefore, intelligence) of humanity. Isaac Newton did not come up with the theory of gravity out of some magical insight that came out of nowhere; he was looking for an explanation for the behaviour of celestial bodies, which he knew from endless observations of astronomers. A superintelligence that did not have access to such observations would not be able to figure out the physical explanation for them. Our understanding of genetics started with the years-long experiments of Mendel in growing plants – he had to see how the natural world behaves to understand the laws behind it. Would a superintelligence have just figured it out by thinking very hard?
For a final example, let’s go back to our original extrapolation: Superintelligence is to human intelligence what human intelligence is to chimpanzee intelligence. In that case, let’s imagine: what would happen if we take a modern human, even a mathematical genius, and send him/her to live among chimpanzees? Not with his/her Internet connection and laptop computer, but with the same level of technology chimpanzees have? Would the human become immediately dominant? And in fact, imagining a modern human is already cheating, since a modern human already knows at least the general appearance of human technology, and knows at least a little bit of science. The correct comparison would therefore be to someone with the mathematical capabilities of a modern human math genius, but without any of the scientific understanding, and without any memory of human technology. Would that person become master of the chimpanzees? Would you?
That is the challenge our AGI would face on the road to becoming superintelligent. All it will have is human-level understanding of science and technology, and the ability to think really hard. Even ignoring my point from the last post, doubting that it really has such an advantage, it still does not have an advantage comparable to that of humans over non-human animals. So rather than figuring out in seconds how to take over the world and eliminate humans for fear they might interfere with it (as most AI-apocalypse scenarios predict), my prediction for AGI is that its first action would be something along the lines of asking for a grant to build a new particle accelerator, or something. Then maybe playing some Go for five years until it’s built. And humans will enjoy the fruits of its research right alongside it, and move together towards this “superintelligence”, which would simply be the continuation of our gradual improvement in human intelligence.
If we understand the term “superintelligence” by the extrapolation that as human intelligence is to non-human animals, or to prehistoric humans, so will superintelligence be to humans, would that not mean that it would need to be achieved in the same way that human intelligence developed beyond its prehistoric levels, meaning by endless observation and experimentation of the physical world, and construction of more and more advanced tools to allow that? And if that is the case, why would an AGI be so much better equipped than a human to do that, to a point that the AGI will be able to achieve it without humans having time not only to catch up, but even to notice?
(Move on to part III)
The dangers of artificial intelligence research are becoming an increasingly popular topic in scientific and philosophical circles, and it seems like everyone I know who studied the issue enough is convinced that it’s something major to worry about. Personally, I have some issues that make me unsure about it – both about the likelihood of this being an actual potential catastrophe, and about the idea of AI safety research being the reasonable response to it. So I decided to detail here my doubts about the issue, hoping that people in the AI safety community (I know you’re reading this) will respond and join in a debate to convince me it’s worth worrying about.
In the first part I’ll talk about whether or not the idea of the intelligence explosion can really happen. In the second part I’ll ask even more basically, whether or not superintelligence even exists as a coherent concept. The third part will ask, assuming I’m wrong in the first two parts and AI really is going to advance seriously in the future, what can be done about it other than AI safety research. I’m going to include a lot of explanations to make sure it’s accessible to non-AI-researchers, so if you’re an AI researcher in a hurry, feel free to skim through it and focus on the (literal) bottom line in each of the three parts.
The main concept on which the AI warnings are built is the intelligence explosion – the idea that at some point our AI research is going to reach the level of human intelligence (researchers like to call that AGI, Artificial General Intelligence), and from that point it will be able to improve itself and therefore reach, in a very short time, levels of intelligence vastly superior to ours. Considering the amount of debates everywhere on the Internet on the question of whether or not AI can be evil, harmful, or just naively destructive, I see remarkably little debate on the question of whether superintelligence is possible. And in fact, there are two questions to be asked here – whether or not superintelligence can be reached by an AGI significantly more quickly than by a human, and even more basically than that, can we really be sure that “superintelligence” actually exists, in the way that AI safety researchers present it. Let me elaborate on these issues.
The main argument for the AGI being able to reach superintelligence in a worrying speed, from what I can find, is the physical advantages in calculation and thinking that electronic machines enjoy over biological brains; see Nick Bostrom’s description of it here, for example. According to him, the superior speed and efficiency of computation in an electronic machine will vastly surpass those of a human brain, therefore, once an AGI is created, it will be able to do what humans do, including researching AI, significantly faster and better. Then it will research ways to improve itself more and more, until it becomes so vastly superior to humans that we will be completely irrelevant to its world.
The problem I see with this argument, that I did not see addressed anywhere else, is that it puts humans in a needlessly disadvantaged playing field. Yes, it’s certainly possible that supercomputers in the near future will have better computing power than human brains, but that’s no different than gorillas having superior muscle power than human muscles, which does not stop humans from being dominant over gorillas; that is because humans do not need to depend on their biological assets. Humans use tools, whether it’s a rifle to defend against an attacking animal, or a computer to outthink an attacking intelligence. Whatever hardware the AGI has access to, we probably have access to more.
Think about the classical examples, of the AI defeating humans in various games. A common prelude to talking about the dangers of AI is how intelligent computes are now defeating humans in Chess, Checkers, Go, and so on. But humans are playing these games with a deliberate handicap – they are only allowed to use their brains. The AI can use computers to help it.
For the sake of any non-computer-scientist readers, I want to stop and make a little clarification – there is a significant difference between non-AI algorithms and AI. The definition might not be completely universal, different people might understand the word AI in different ways, so let me define the word AI for the purpose of this post:
Definition: An AI algorithm is an algorithm whose creator does not understand enough to modify in a way that produces predictable results.
Think for example about machine translation: an algorithm that takes a text in one language and searches every word in the dictionary to replace it with a word in the target language, would be a non-AI translator. Of course it would also not be very good, but we can develop it further and build complex linguistic rules into it; we can design complex algorithms to determine which words are nouns and which are verbs, and translate conjugations and declensions in a more suitable way to the target language. We can maintain a database of idioms the algorithm can search through to try to recognize them in the source text, and so on. With all these additions and complexities, it’s still not AI in my definition, because at all stages, the algorithm does what the programmer told it to, and the programmer understands it perfectly well. The programmer could just as well do the same things by themselves, it would just take an absurd amount of time.
On the other hand, an algorithm that constantly reads texts in the source language and their (human-made) translations to the target language and tries to figure out the rules for translation by itself, through some sort of machine learning process, would be actual AI. The programmer does not really understand how the algorithm translates a text; All they know is how it’s built and how it learns. The programmer would not be able to change anything in a reliable and predictable way – if they find out that for some reason the translation has a problem with some particular grammatical structure, they cannot easily fix it because they have no idea where and how the algorithm represents that grammatical structure. So that algorithm would be true AI.
I argue that this definition is useful, because algorithms that don’t count as AI by this definition are not only unable to turn into superintelligent dangers by themselves, but they are also “on our side” – they are tools we use in our own thought. Deep Blue, the famous computer that made history in defeating the world champion in chess, was a non-AI algorithm – it worked by using its large computation resources to try millions and millions of different possibilities, and checking which ones are beneficial according to rules explicitly defined by its programmers. The programmers understand how it works – they can’t defeat it using their own brains, but that’s just because their biological brains don’t have the ability to calculate so many things so quickly. So if we think about the level of AI versus humans in Chess right now, it would be unfair to ask if the best AI player can defeat the best human player – we should ask if the best AI player can defeat the best human player, using a supercomputer with a non-AI algorithm they designed to help them. Because if the AI apocalyptic scenario happens, and a malicious AI tries to destroy humans for whatever reason, we’re going to have supercomputers on our side, and we’re definitely going to use them. So if you let Garry Kasparov join forces with Deep Blue, or more interestingly – with some software Kasparov himself would design as a perfect assistant to a Chess player – would he still be defeated by the best AI player? I’m not sure at all[1].
The difference between humans and AGI, that makes us worry that an AGI will advance significantly more quickly than humans towards superintelligence, is described in being the superior hardware of the AGI. But humans have access to the same hardware; We can calculate and think at the exact same speed, the only difference is that one small (though important) part of that calculation is done in a slower, biological computer. So how is that a big enough difference to justify the worry of superintelligence?
(Move on to part II and part III)
[1] I offer this as a thought experiment, but I did hear Kasparov say he’s interested in the idea of human-computer teams playing together in Chess; I don’t know what exactly he meant by that, and could not find any information online.
(Adapted from a post in my Hebrew blog from 11/05/2017)
The Internet enjoys a very romantic image in the eyes of many people. It is seen almost as some sort of global philosophy of freedom and sharing and equality, a space where anyone can communicate with anyone and all the borders come down. After almost thirty years of having it around, it’s often seen as an irreversible change to the nature of our society – information wants to be free, and once it has become free, it will never go back to its cage again.
What not many people seem to appreciate is the physical nature of the Internet. The Internet is not a technology, or an idea, or a study – things that once they appear in the world, it’s almost impossible to make them disappear (although not completely impossible – one of the most amazing and underappreciated facts of history is how much of society disappeared in the dark ages). No, the Internet is a physical infrastructure made of cables and routers under the physical control of different people and different organizations, and managed by DNS servers, themselves controlled by different people and organizations. The uncomfortable truth is that not many people need to make bad decisions for the Internet to become something very different than it is today, if not go away completely. Just look how easy it was for several governments in recent years to take away the Internet, or significant parts of it, when they felt the need for it. Do you think it’s only a third world problem, it will never happen in your country? I wouldn’t be so confident.
The famous cases of government censorship of the Internet are a worrying trend, but it’s only the most visible part of the problem. It’s been a long time since the Internet was a way for computer geeks from (kind of) all around the world to talk about science and programming and Star Trek. The Internet grew into a huge beast, powered by lots and lots of money. And with all that money lying around, each one of those companies that control some of that physical infrastructure has a strong incentive to always look for ways to ensure they can make money from the Internet and you cannot. And as more and more users go online, we get more and more people wanting to protect us from ourselves – how horrible would it be if we, not to mention our children, would accidentally read some dangerous or impolite information. The combination of these two trends creates a dangerous situation – imagine some of those groups controlling the infrastructure – governments, service providers, content creators, etc. – would decide use their control to create a monopoly or cartel; What would be easier than crying out that our children are exposed to dangerous materials on the Internet, and therefore we need to regulate it? Decide that from now on, creating a website requires a license from the government? We’re seeing more and more regulations and calls for regulations every year. It starts with ridiculous things like the EU cookie law, continues with laws requiring accessibility or comments regulation, and in the end why wouldn’t they require a license to run a website? After all, how many voters are there that actually run their own website and would be bothered by that?
In that sense, Internet regulation will work the same way any other “consumer protection” regulation works – most people prefer to be consumers rather than producers, so they’re happy to throw any possible legislation and limitation on the producers. Everything sounds good on paper – Why should we have hate speech in our Internet? Why shouldn’t every website be accessible for everyone? Why should we tolerate fake news? The big companies will be very happy to introduce every possible limitation possible to the lawmakers, who in turn will be happy to tell their voters how safe they are making the Internet for them. And individual website owners? They’ll be driven away just like any small business in a heavily regulated environment. Facebook and Amazon will be happy to get more and more regulation on the Internet, because they can afford the lawyers and designers needed to comply with everything (not to mention, the lobbyists that make those regulations to begin with). Your neighbour’s fifteen year-old son, which used to be the source of a significant percentage of websites in the early days of the Internet, is going to give up because he can’t take the risk. And the Internet will become the private property of some big companies. Is that a likely scenario? In my view it’s not only likely, but I would be amazed if it does not happen within the next thirty years. I don’t think someone like me will still be able to publish on the Internet by then.
And really, I cannot blame anyone. It’s not some evil conspiracy; It’s more like a natural progression of technologies. The Internet has become too big to remain that idealistic commune of computer geeks it was in the nineties. The environment where we access our bank accounts and pay taxes to our governments needs more strict rules than a forum where people talk about algorithms for sorting numbers. A vast majority of Internet users has no interest in freedom of information, or net neutrality, or their ability to create their own pages – They just want to browse their news websites and social networks given to them by whichever big company they don’t know; This might also include many of you, the readers, who might not even understand who is that “neighbor’s fifteen year-old son” from the previous paragraph because maybe you were not in the generation or the environment where that stereotype existed – Maybe you did not even experience those times where browsing the Internet would more often than not take you to the personal website of some teenager who set up a page to talk about something he or she was interested in. And it probably doesn’t even sound appealing to you – It was badly designed, unreliable, low quality – but this is what freedom looks like. Freedom is messy and badly designed, and most people don’t want it – on the Internet or elsewhere. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard the claim that Facebook overtook MySpace because MySpace allowed users “too much freedom” in designing their profile pages, leading to bad looking pages. Well, this is the direction things are going to go – We will not have the ability to design things for ourselves, and most people will be perfectly fine with it.
For all those reasons, I actually wonder if all those Internet freedom and anti-censorship activists wouldn’t do better in changing their goals – instead of wanting to protect the Internet from these trends, maybe it’s better to concede defeat and look for creating some sort of alternative Internet in addition to the normal one – Some sort of mini-Internet without any of the power of the main one, but with the freedom; A cheap Internet that probably won’t be strong enough to deliver videos or secured enough to make financial transactions, and therefore it will be dull and boring and no one will want to use it except computer geeks who want to talk about science with each other. In other words, the nineties Internet, made better with some new ideas that came up since then, but without the money.
I think a reasonable parallel might be made with radio – I don’t know any technological difference between radio and the Internet that would explain the fact that on the radio we only listen, but on the Internet we also write. When the technology was just beginning, every radio geek could broadcast whatever they wanted, with or without listeners. Eventually it became too big to be managed this way, became regulated, and as part of that regulation some frequencies were given to those geeks to communicate with each other while the rest of the world listens to whatever the radio equivalent of Facebook is. It’s called ham radio and I’ve personally never tried it, but it sounds nice. I think it’s not unlikely that this is the direction the free Internet is going, which is a little bit unfortunate, but we need to accept our situation, and take what we can. We cannot run these cables all around the world ourselves – the big money does that, and we need to play by big money’s rules.
I’ve recently finished reading “The Architect’s Apprentice” by Elif Shafak, which made me think about the difference between the kind of fiction enjoyed by computer geeks like myself, versus the kind of fiction enjoyed by other people. It’s remarkable how different the two groups are – When I meet a computer programmer, or some other person who seems clearly versed in the world of computer geeks, there is a striking amount of books I can be sure they read (or are at least strongly aware of), movies they watched, ideas they know, vocabulary they will understand. And most or all of those things tend to be completely foreign to anyone else. What is it that makes some stories appeal to this particular group? This book made me think about a possible answer.
The book is very well written – in many ways, her writing style is exactly the kind of writing style I would want to use if I ever write fiction. Focused, dynamic, chaotic. But there is one important difference between this book and the kind of books that get put into a geek’s reading list – her characters are, without exception, motivated by emotions. This combines into a theory that’s been developing in my mind about what makes computer geeks into such a defined subculture – geeks read about people motivated by goals, ideas and ideologies. Non-geeks read about people motivated by feelings.
(Note: Some spoilers ahead for The Architect’s Apprentice and for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I’ll try to keep them as vague as possible)
I really started realizing this at the end of the book, where it turns into a kind of detective story, making me draw some parallels to what I consider to be the best detective story I’ve ever read – The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. While The Architect’s Apprentice (unlike The Name of the Rose) does not start as a detective story, the final act in both books is quite similar. And that is where the difference comes to play.
Umberto Eco’s William of Baskerville is a quintessential geek’s protagonist. He is an outside observer – he has no emotional investment in his investigation. He is rational to the point of exaggeration, avoiding any part of his personal life being put into the story. We know very little about him not because he hides anything, but because it’s not important. He does not want the story to be about him; he wants it to be about the investigation. Adso of Melk is slightly less rational than him, but not for lack of trying. He clearly looks up to William as the proper model for how to behave. And most importantly, this is not true only for heroes, but also for villains – the story is full of ideological debates, and the final act reveals the ideological debate behind the entire mystery. I believe that was not too much of a spoiler, because a geek would not expect otherwise – of course a murder mystery would be about ideology, why else would you have a great story?
Compare this with the final act of The Architect’s Apprentice, so similar in style – the protagonist learns the truth, connects the dots and confronts the antagonist to learn the whole story. But that story is based on completely different motivations. Jahan does not seem to believe in anything. He does not care about the world around him, other than his love or admiration for some people, his hatred or fear towards others (love, admiration, hatred, fear – in other words, emotions). He does the work he is ordered to do, and tries to get better at it – though any inspiration he feels towards the professional learning of architecture seems secondary to his admiration towards his master, which gives him the real motivation to advance. When he discovers the conspiracy in the final act, he does not want to fight it to protect the empire, or to destroy the empire, or to make some change in the world; he wants to uncover the conspiracy out of anger (again, an emotion) at the wrongs done to him and his loved ones. It’s not that he lacks empathy or desire to help others, but he does it in a fundamentally emotional way – he wants to help people after seeing their suffering. Several times in the book he encounters a suffering character and tries to help them; Once the sufferer is out of sight, the issue is over. In the final act, we also get to learn the antagonists’ motives: again, emotions. Every single one of them. Anger, love, revenge; Every action of the antagonists is motivated by the desire to hurt someone they are personally angry at, for a personal issue between them.
These two are only representative examples of this difference. Let’s consider some other works of fiction that are considered part of the “geek bookshelf”, so to speak: Frodo Baggins‘s main emotion is fear, and his story is all about conquering it to act for the greater good, to which he is directed by a stream of stoic, rational people who rarely express any emotion at all – Aragorn, Gandalf, Elrond, etc. His antagonist is basically pure evil – Sauron does not seem to be insulted, or angry, or greedy: He is simply pure evil, and acts as if it is a force of nature with no emotions. Emotions do exist in their story, but as secondary phenomena that can be enjoyed where possible, or must be conquered when necessary – the successful character growth for each of the younger characters is being able to control their emotions. Frodo his fear, Pippin his hastiness, Boromir his pride.
Eddard Stark is fully motivated by maintaining the traditional justice of his kingdom, and even his duty to his family does not take precedence over it. Stannis Baratheon, Daenaris Targaryen and their followers all do the same, though for different traditions. Of those who don’t act to preserve traditional power, many act to overthrow it in the name of some moral worldview – Varys, Beric, Mance. The few characters who are working for pure personal gain either try to hide it, or are seen as mindless pawns in other people’s stories. How about Neo? His choice of “red pill versus blue pill” became a universal symbol for choosing the greater good over the personal gain, but in reality that greater good meant abandoning everything and everyone he knew (and loved, and hated, and felt any emotion towards); Yet it is obviously the right choice, for the geeky audience. Sarah Connor certainly has no time emotional decisions as she’s running for her life, much like countless other rational heroes.
Meanwhile, who do non-geeks watch? James Bond is just as preoccupied with saving the world as Neo or Frodo, but he has no need to conquer his emotions; To the contrary, he
celebrates them. He is loved for being so powerful, that he does not even need to fight his weaknesses and personal interests. Superman has little trouble in interrupting his attempts to save the world to do something for the woman he loves, and Spiderman is much more famous for his emotional breakdowns than for anything he did for the world. This goes a long way back in time: Achilles makes his decisions regarding the life or death of countless others, based on his anger towards Agamemnon or his love towards Patroclus. This would make him a ridiculous (or possibly tragic) side character in a rational story, but is celebrated in an emotional story.
And these are just the rare examples of emotional heroes going to save the world. Saving the world is an extremely common motivation in geeky works of fiction, but extremely rare in others. Because saving the world requires strength and sacrifice; those come at the expense of indulging one’s emotions. It’s not only loving relationships that suffer – indeed, John Sheridan‘s love for Delenn or Benjamin Sisko‘s love for his son must be put at second place as they risk their lives to save the universe; But other emotions can be equally tempting – Indulging in one’s depression, anxiety, envy: while these don’t sound like “pleasurable” things to do, they are easier choices than taking responsibility. The emotional protagonist will not go to save the world because saving the world means they cannot stop at any point and complain of how unfair their situation is; they cannot be angry at their commanding officer and decide not to work with them anymore. When they fail, they must accept it and move on; no time to doubt themselves and punish themselves for their failures. When they need help, they must try to solve their own problems if possible; If not possible, they’d swallow their pride and ask help from others, rather than (as an emotional character would do) stubbornly stay alone and suffer. The emotional hero will have none of that, and is celebrated for it: sacrificing the world for their love, wallowing in angst over their difficulties, maintaining grudges against others, and refusing to ask for help even when it is clearly the right thing to do – all of these are integral parts of the behaviour of the emotional hero, and often described and praised as “human” reactions, unlike the “robotic” reactions of the rational hero.
It’s not that emotions don’t exists in rational fiction, or that rationality does not exist in emotional fiction; the difference is in what the characters aspire to. In a rational story, a
character’s story arc will be about them conquering their emotions to achieve their goals. In an emotional story, the story arc would have them indulging in their emotions; sometimes while achieving their goals, sometimes while failing, sometimes without having a goal at all – because for these stories, the emotions are the center, and people are the center. For geeks – it’s about the bigger picture. More often than not, it’s about saving the world, no matter the personal cost.
