You are Just a Gadget

I am being made to read You are not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier for my ‘Technology and Society’ humanities core requirement online class. Every week through the end of the semester, we will be assigned a report of whichever chapters the instructor tells us to focus on. The assignment is basic enough but I have found the book to be on the harder-to-read side. I have made the mistake of getting emotionally attached to this aspect of the class and, in oversight, have just submitted a rather loaded and badly reasoned post:

I am sorry to say that the first few chapters of this book do not sit very well with me. After having read chapters 2-4 I found myself utterly confused with respect to what message Mr. Lanier was trying to convey so I decided to reread just chapter 2 with a fine-toothed comb. To be honest I do not feel much more in agreement.

Mr. Lanier decides to start chapter 2 with a recollection of his encounters with radical Rapture believers throughout his upbringing as a segue into a discussion on the science fiction concept of the Singularity. After this he decides to explain to us relativism by using non-sequiter statements like. “A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it.”

He goes on to tell us a few stories about Alan Turing and Kasparov getting beat at chess by a computer system because of his poker face. Admittedly, I quite enjoyed both of these although I am still not sure what he is getting at.

Near the end of the chapter he graces us with two thought experiments, the second of which is a thinly veiled carbon copy of the infinite monkey theorem. ( Basically, if you’ve got a bunch of monkeys all typing random things on an infinite amount of typewriters, given enough time and resources they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. ) He argues that if we took a big mass of data and took an infinite amount of time interpreting it in different ways we will eventually end up with a copy of our brain. Ultimately I think this experiment falls apart right when he assumes that our brains are nothing more than advanced computers. Sure, the hive mind of the internet may be capable of dwarfing the development any single person is capable of but that is only because it is backed by tens of thousands of such people. If every human being was suddenly eradicated from the face of the earth, the internet and computers would not continue to invent and discover things, as Lanier seems to imply. Not once have we gotten a computer to reproduce creative thought. This argument is more or less similar to saying ‘research labs will soon overpower humans because they are doing things n so much more rapidly than a human can.’ Humans are the ones powering the research labs…

Up until now it appears that Mr. Lanier has just strung together an absurd grab-bag of neckbeardish arguments. I do not think I have devoted enough time to this book and look forward to examining it more carefully in the coming weeks. It seems that others understood Mr. Lanier’s message better than I did so I will try to respond to their interpretation of his opinion in my responses to their posts.

Cheers

We will see how the class responds to this.

EDIT: In standard Community College fashion, it was ignored and I got a 100.