Book Review - "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" by Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, is a criticism of many emerging technologies and beliefs which Lanier finds dehumanizing. In this long, rambling critique, Lanier’s targets include open-source projects, crowd-sourcing mechanisms such as wikis and prediction markets, and “cybernetic totalism.” If Lanier was not one of the founding fathers of virtual reality, it would be easy to label him a luddite, but he insists that he merely wants to help steer the course of technological development rather than inhibit it. But compared to the vast majority of third culture futurists, Lanier comes across as extremely conservative and reactionary. While I knew before I picked up the book that I would disagree with almost everything Lanier had to say, I think it is important to give a fair hearing to contrary ideas from intelligent people to avoid the echo chamber effect. The world always needs gadflies.

Lanier believes that crowd-sourcing tools are causing people to rely too much on the hive mind. He rejects the notion of the “wisdom of the crowds,” viewing wikis as error-prone and bias-prone compared to more scholarly texts. This may or may not be true (the empirical evidence is mixed), but ultimately it is irrelevant. While Lanier laments the fact that Wikipedia has become the central repository for human knowledge, he offers no convincing solution. “Stop relying on Wikipedia” is a poor excuse for a solution. If it were that simple, Wikipedia would never have become so popular in the first place. It’s no accident that people prefer Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Brittanica.

He criticizes “cybernetic totalism,” which he defines as the belief that human brains are nothing more than complex computer programs, and will one day merge with computer technology. This seems like a thinly veiled swipe at transhumanism in general, and specifically the Singularity (the belief that one day soon we will create a computer smarter than we are, which will create an even smarter computer, which will endow us all with godlike powers), which is the dominant mindset among most computer scientists. I have my own criticisms of the Singularity, so I really wanted to root for Lanier in this section of the book. But ultimately, I think that Lanier’s conclusions are just as irrational as some of the more wild claims of Singularity enthusiasts. Rather than question the plausibility of this worldview, Lanier attacks the desirability of a man-machine merger. I think he is barking up the wrong tree here. If this is plausible and most people view it as beneficial, it will almost certainly occur eventually regardless of whether Lanier thinks it dehumanizes us or not. Once again, Lanier offers no solution as to how to avert this technological outcome, or suggestions on how we could steer technological progress toward a goal he views as more desirable.

On the rare occasions when Lanier does suggest an alternative solution, his recommendations are so laughably impractical that they are difficult to take seriously. For example, he considers the evolution of music from a physical product (e.g. a record, tape, or CD) to a digital file as a small tragedy. He believes that this encourages piracy and destroys the incentive to create songs, and that as a consequence we have entered a musical dark age. That’s a perfectly valid opinion, but what is his solution? For us all to go back to physical music products! He suggests “songles” – little trinkets like bracelets, necklaces, or coffee mugs that could unlock our music when they are physically near a computer. Aside from the sheer ridiculousness of this, Lanier seems oblivious to the fact that we moved away from physical music products because people didn’t WANT physical music products. They simply want to be able to listen to their music whenever they want to, with as little hassle as possible.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with this book is Lanier’s presumption that we can simply choose to not walk down a certain path of technological development if most of us agree it is detrimental. He is clearly a technological determinist, whereas I’m more of a technological fatalist. In my view, anything that CAN be developed WILL be developed, provided that enough people view it as beneficial, the technology is diffused enough to make it impossible to ban, and the economic incentives exist for its development. Ultimately, Lanier falls victim to what my good friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “the illusion of control.” While it may be comforting to Lanier to believe that we can guide technological development so directly, this seems to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Don’t get me wrong; we absolutely need to have ethical debates about technological progress. But ultimately the naysayers will need to propose actual solutions instead of merely lamenting about the undesirable consequences of technology.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto is only 192 pages but feels much longer, given the disjointed, rambling nature of the chapters. It’s worth a read for anyone interested in futurism, for the simple reason that Lanier is one of the few contrarian voices in the third culture. But don’t expect to be convinced by many of his arguments.

3/5 stars

Inception and the Ethics of Virtual Reality

***SPOILER ALERT***

I watched Inception last weekend - the first movie I've seen in the theater all year. It’s a great movie, and is a great illustration of the simulation hypothesis. Along with movies like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky, it explores the concept of whether our reality may be a simulation, and if there’s any way to tell the difference.

The reason I often blog about the simulation hypothesis is not merely because it’s an interesting philosophical question, although it certainly is. As Inception illustrates, there are some profound ethical dilemmas we will need to face in the future, when we have both the raw computing power and the understanding of our own neurology to escape to convincing, fictitious worlds.

In Inception, Cobb and Mal dream for decades (in dream-time) in a world of their own creation. Mal goes so far as to hide any evidence that she is dreaming, preferring to forget that their world is not real. When we have the technology to create simulated realities, there will almost certainly be people who want to do this. Even today, many people choose to spend a huge portion of their lives escaping into the crude virtual worlds that our technology allows, such as World of Warcraft. As long as this lifestyle is limited to computer geeks, most people will view it as an unhealthy activity. But when simulated worlds become truly convincing, it is probable that many others will want to join in.

How will society view people who want to spend years or decades in a simulation, living a better life than they have in this world? Will people scorn them like drug addicts? Will organized religions extol simulations as a way to have profound spiritual experiences, or will they be fearful of the threat that simulations pose to their monopoly on heaven? Might there be a mass exodus of people from this world, if nearly everyone prefers to live in a simulation? What would be the economic impact if a large portion of the population suddenly decided to stop working and live in a simulation? Will governments simply accept their choice and allow people to sleep the years away, or will they wake them up? Will those who remain behind envy those who have escaped to a better, simulated life? Perhaps we will empathize with them and respect their decision. (EDIT: I realized I used the pronouns “we” and “them” here to describe, respectively, those who remain behind and those who choose to live in a simulations…but honestly I have no idea which camp I would be in.) After all, how would we feel if we suddenly “woke up” to a higher plane of reality today, only to find that our “real” life was much worse than the one we experience in this world? I imagine that many of us would feel cheated out of our lives like Mal did, and be unable to accept the sudden decline in our standard of living. It seems very human to want to live the best life we possibly can. Since most of us wouldn’t want to wake up to a worse world, I think that eventually society will empathize with the dreamers and accept those who wish to remain lost in their subconscious.

This is but one of many new ethical questions we may have to confront by the middle of this century. Near the end of Inception Mal tells Cobb (who knows full well that he is dreaming), “You no longer believe in a single reality. So choose. Choose to be here with me.” Cobb rejects her offer, choosing to live in “actual reality” instead. While I’m pretty sure that the audience of 2010 is expected to applaud his decision, ultimately Mal is right. In a world where convincing simulations are possible, there is really no way to know if one is in a simulation or not. So why not just accept this and let people live in whatever world makes them happy? Could we really pass judgment on those who want to live permanently in a simulation, when we have no idea if we have chosen to do the same? Waking them up could be tantamount to destroying their lives. The audience of 2060 may react very differently to the ending of this movie.

What are your thoughts on the ethics of simulated reality? Do you think it would be more ethical (or practical) to let the dreamers dream, or to wake them up to "reality?"

Rebuttal to the Simulation Hypothesis

According to Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, every universe’s inhabitants would be equally likely to be living in a simulation, even if they were running simulations of their own. This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that our universe is much more likely to be one of a huge number of simulations, rather than the one parent universe.

From a logical standpoint, this argument makes sense to me. But I’m always eager to poke holes in philosophical arguments, so here’s my best rebuttal as devil’s advocate. It doesn’t directly attack the logic of Bostrom’s philosophy; rather, it creates a probabilistic argument that we are NOT a simulation.

Let’s assume that simulations can be “turned off” by the parent universe at any time. Perhaps the inhabitants decide that the simulation is no longer needed for whatever reason, or perhaps the simulation is accidentally destroyed, or perhaps they are in a simulation themselves which is turned off by their parent universe. If this is the case, it would break the simulation chain. If Simulation A was the parent of Simulation B, which was the parent of the Simulation C, which was the parent of Simulation D, the inhabitants of Simulation A would be able to break this chain and destroy all of the simulations in this chain by turning off Simulation B.

The simulation hypothesis concludes that we are in a simulation in all probability, and that every universe is equally likely to be a simulation. This means that the universe that begat ours is also probably a simulation, as is the universe that begat our parent universe. If this is the case, it would be very likely that our own universe is merely one node in a huge chain of parent universes.

But this creates an interesting question. If any of those universes could break the chain at any time by turning off their simulation, the probability that not a single one of them would do so must be extraordinarily low. This strongly suggests that we are not in a simulation.

There are a couple of responses to this argument which I can foresee, so allow me to preemptively address them. Some might invoke the Anthropic Principle. It doesn’t make sense to marvel at the unlikelihood of our own existence, they will reason, because if our universe had been turned off we wouldn’t be here to speculate about it. In my opinion, this is a flawed application of the Anthropic Principle because there is another plausible explanation for our existence: Our simulated universe hasn’t been “turned off” by any of its parents because they don’t exist. We are the original universe.

So we have two possible explanations for our own universe. Either we are in a simulation, and are here due to the infinitesimally unlikely whims of an unimaginably vast chain of parent universes…or we are simply not a simulation. If these are the two possibilities, the latter seems much more likely from this probabilistic standpoint. It also has the advantage of surviving Ockham’s Razor.

What do you think? Is my probabilistic argument for our actual reality as strong as Bostrom’s argument for our simulated reality? What flaws do you see in my logic?

Are we living in a simulation?

Are we living in a simulated reality? Transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom thinks so. He puts forth the following argument. One of the following three statements must logically be true: 1) Advanced civilizations can never develop simulated realities; 2) No advanced civilization would ever choose to develop simulated realities; or 3) Our own reality is almost certainly simulated.

There are a few circumstances in which Statement #1 could theoretically be true. Perhaps there are no other advanced civilizations in the universe. Perhaps advanced civilizations exist, but simulations are simply impossible. Or perhaps they are possible, but beyond the technological capacity of any species. I think Statement #1 is the least plausible of the three. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, even extremely pessimistic interpretations of the Drake Equation should have yielded at least one other advanced civilization somewhere in our universe. The technological barriers to creating a simulation seem very small. We already have rudimentary virtual reality technology, and there is no fundamental reason why we shouldn’t be able to create all-encompassing simulations within a few decades. Since we’re nearly able to create them already, it seems unlikely that there are no other civilizations in the entire universe that are a few mere decades ahead of us.

Statement #2 involves speculation into the motives of other civilizations, of which we can’t possibly know anything. However, we do know about our own civilization and what motivates us. If humans develop this technology within a few decades, we will almost certainly make use of it, creating thousands upon thousands of simulations for entertainment or research. Therefore it seems very likely to me that Statement #2 is false.

This leaves Statement #3. If we have concluded that Statements #1 and #2 are false, Bostrom reasons that Statement #3 must be true. Why? Because there will be an enormous number of simulated realities. The probability that we find ourselves in the one parent universe, as opposed to one of the many simulations, must be vanishingly small.

The Simulation Hypothesis fascinates me, because it is one of the few rationales for the existence of some form of a god which I, an agnostic, do not think is easily refutable. Let’s examine the common rebuttals of the simulation hypothesis to see how much merit they hold.

Some have questioned the assumption that there is one parent universe and many simulations. If there are many parent universes and many simulated universes, critics reason, then the probability that we are in a simulation would not necessarily be quite so high. But I disagree. What are the implications of many parent universes capable of sustaining life and technology? Presumably EACH of them would be running many simulations, and thus it would not affect the probability of our being in a simulation much at all.

The most serious problem I see with the Simulation Hypothesis is that it has no empirical basis, and falls apart under the scrutiny of Ockham’s Razor. There is absolutely no conclusive evidence that we are living in a simulation. There may be a few teasing clues (e.g. the quantum world behaves suspiciously differently when we aren’t watching), but nothing substantive. However, I can see no obvious flaw in the logic of the Simulation Hypothesis. This leads back to an old philosophical debate between empiricists and rationalists: Can we determine reality through sound logic, without empirical evidence? I tentatively plant my flag on the side of the rationalists. Scientists frequently adopt a rationalist mindset when interpreting the Drake Equation or formulating string theory (despite absolutely no evidence for extraterrestrials or strings), but switch over to empiricist mode for topics like philosophy or theology. This seems to be a product of cultural bias. In my view, while we should always seek out evidence wherever possible, sound logic is often a sufficient (if inferior) substitute.

At the end of the day, I tend to lean toward the conclusion that Bostrom is correct: We are probably in a simulation. What do you think? Let me know if/where you think the logic of the Simulation Hypothesis is flawed, or any other examples of clues that would suggest a simulated reality.

50 Years of Questions

This is a video I made a couple months ago, entitled "50 Years of Questions." It's my vision for what the world might look like in the future, as well as a look back at how far we've come in the last decade.

Note that I just think these are QUESTIONS people might be asking themselves around this time. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we'll know the answers to all of them by the dates I listed.