Marvin Minsky as Marduk
Posted on December 11, 2006
Filed Under Language, Science |
The Stanford computer scientist & artificial intelligence maven Marvin Minsky is interviewed (along with Daniel Dennet) by Wired Magazine about the nature of human consciousness & the prospects for machine intelligence. Asked why we need machine intelligence, Minsky opines:
I think there is a worldwide survival problem. As the population grows and people live longer, there won’t be anybody to do the work. So there is an urgent need to make inexpensive mechanical people that are able to do all the things that moderately unskilled people do now.
Minsky, last I heard, was a Stanford professor. Is there some kind of bubble over Palo Alto that prevents reality from seeping through to the populace? All I could think of was the Babylonian god Marduk, who created human beings because the gods were working too hard & needed a bit of kip. He doesn’t say so, but presumably these AIs would be implanted into something like chimp hybrids & presto a new race of slaves would be ready to serve humanity as it declines into senescence.
I’ve had a visceral reaction over the years against the reductionism of guys like Minsky & Dennet, but I am, as a student of American Pragmatism, attracted to the notion, advanced especially by Dennet in the interview, that mind is a sort of political amalgamation. There does not have to be one center of consciousness. The self is a polity, more or less coherent depending on the circumstances. After minsky talks about emotion as a “turning off” of other mental functions, as if the brain had a control center, Dennet replies:
Computer programmers have the luxury to create hierarchies of control. The systems, the subsystems, the sub-sub-subsystems are complete slaves. They never rebel. This gives you a model of the mind with the highest echelons of logic at the top. But if you think about a brain as a community of individually semiautonomous, even independently evolved agencies, as Marvin has, you realize that the agencies have to be browbeaten and they have to form alliances. Emotions aren’t an add-on but rather the politics of the whole system.
That is both witty & apt. Minsky’s metaphors reveal his attraction to slavery as a psychological & social paradigm. That is, they reveal him to be a kind of hyper-intellectual creep.
Comments
2 Responses to “Marvin Minsky as Marduk”
Stumble it!
Some years ago (couple of decades, actually), I met Daniel Dennet when he gave a talk at the Canadian university I attended. He was witty, charming, of course, but reasonably intolerant of what passed for reductionism back then. Your quote of his response to Minsky is classic Dennet. And, yes, there is a bubble over Stanford. Unfortunately, it’s not airtight….
Maria, I’ve seen Dennet interviewed & comes across as witty & acute. I’ve also read a fair amount of what he’s written & would describe my relationship to his work as love / hate. I admire his spirited defense of secularism & even materialism while at the same time finding myself suspicious of what feels like a tendency toward scientism.