On one hand, I agree with Lanier about almost everything. On the other hand, I do not see that the problems are as drastic as he sees them. While Lanier and I both agree than humanism is more important than the bit, I see most of the problems he raises as temporary and self-correcting. To jump right into my conclusions: (1) Even if computers can be programmed for Artificial Intelligence, they will never be more intelligent than humans. (2) If there ever is a “singularity,” it will be an exponential increase in human intelligence, not artificial intelligence. (3) The problems that Lanier discusses can be divided into (a) those that can be solved by re-programming computers, and (b) those that can be solved without computers altogether.
I’ll start with Lanier’s examples of music. He mentioned that MIDI was designed from the viewpoint of a keyboard player, and it uses discrete notes rather than sliding scales, like the voice or a violin. But since computers are digital anyway, I am not sure how that can be avoided. I still have some of my vinyl albums of the same music that I also have on CD. The vinyl ones, being analog, sound better, because the digital recordings leave out things in the spaces between the discrete states. I think Lanier is a genius, but I also think that he has succumbed to the very problems that he is trying to warn us about. He is so immersed in the computer programming culture that he thinks it is more important than it really is. He really wants us all to be Humanists, but he is still seeing Humanism from the point of view of a Reductionist. I think this ironically very funny, but sad too. I am not criticizing what he is doing because he had to immerse himself in it to learn as much as he knows about digital technology. All reductionist scientists have to think that way to be any good at what they do. I respect that. I should also give him credit for having the intelligence to eventually figure it out for himself.
I agree with him that the online culture sucks, but there is no law that forces us to spend all our time online. Some of us have a life, and having a life means putting all the great things that computers and the internet are good for in perspective. Also, I am not quite sure that the reason the online culture sucks is solely due to the lock-in of the software. I can see his point about social templates, and reducing human personality to the level of programs, but that is also the fault of the people who do it to themselves by buying into that culture. Without critical thinking computers are no better than any other medium, and with critical thinking, computers can be very useful and harmless.
I am not sure why Lanier expected “open culture” to produce more creative people, but because he has, I do understand why he feels disappointed that it did not. So the mashup of retro culture on social networks and YouTube is stupid. That is not all the computer’s fault. Most of the people that enjoy “reality tv,” “stupid pet tricks,” and “America’s funniest videos” are just average people who would never be creative in any medium, pre-web or post-web. The reason they make silly videos or do and say silly things is because they are entertaining themselves and this is the only level of creativity that they can do. Real creative people can work in any medium. It is not that there are no creative people online, it is that the silly ones are in the vast majority and you have to search very hard to find the creative ones. If computers were really creative, i.e. had emotional and value-judgement capabilities, then search engines could easily weed out the non-creative online postings and favor the creative ones. But they can’t, so they won’t. And there is not enough space here for me to explain all of what that implies, but I briefly hinted at it in my previous essay on Turing and Watson.
I am mostly in agreement with Lanier when he discusses the economic problems, but I do not agree that the internet caused the problems. I think they were inherent in our economic system and when we change our economic system, some of them will go away. To me, the economic problem is the most important problem that Lanier discusses. He uses the phrase “we are facing a situation where the culture is eating its own seed stock.” I agree. So how do we fix that?
I am a process philosopher, so I am always skeptical of Eith/Or fallacies and discrete-state thinking. I am a humanist, not a reductionist, but I think I may have mentioned in a previous essay, that reductionists have a valuable place in the evolution of the human mind. Lanier is thinking like a reductionist because he is thinking digitally, even while he is trying to criticize digital thinking, but that is a good thing, not a bad thing. I do not think digitally, but it is educational for me to read someone who does, so that I can get a better understanding of it. And I also think that reductionists who read the works of the holistic scientists and the Gestalt/Existential psychologists, can learn something to factor into their own inductive data. To me, all reality is a continuum, a spectrum of differing data, so I find it very enlightening to observe and examine how other human beings arbitrarily divide up the spectrum into their personal and social constructs of discrete states. Of course, some things fall more easily into natural categories, but most do not. As a process philosopher, for instance, I do not believe that inductive and deductive reasoning are as different from one another as some other philosophers may believe. I also do not believe that metaphysics and epistemology can be separated. I am not going to argue those points in this paper, I only mentioned them to point out that there is a whole spectrum of ways of thinking about reality that range from extreme reductionism to extreme holism, and further, that the whole spectrum can be divided up into any number of arbitrary digits. (The process of human intelligence evolution is partly driven by a synthesis of all the various discrete points on the spectrum between those two extremes.)
My computer programming knowledge is pretty limited, but I am sure that today’s computers are so much more powerful than those of twenty and thirty years ago, that someone could easily engineer 64 bit, 128 bit, and much higher architecture, if they haven’t already. And if they have, already, then they should be able to design better fake-analog replications of things. It is so easy to tell the difference between a true analog clock or watch and a digitally faked analog clock, because you can see the hands jumping between the seconds instead of moving smoothly around the face of the clock or watch. But if each byte in the chip had, say, 128,000 bits, you wouldn’t be able to notice the discrete jumps of the second hand on the face of the clock.
High definition of anything just means more pixels. A line can be divided up into an infinite number of discrete points, but the number of those points is limited by the number of pixels in the technology. As Lanier pointed out, this is less of a problem with hip-hop music based on discrete, even beats and notes.
But all of that only covers videos and music. The plastic arts, painting and sculpture, as Lanier pointed out so well, can never be represented digitally, (and I must add that it is a waste of time to even try). Lanier says “What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.” So, even given an infinite number of pixels (resolution) …”an oil painting (or any other plastic art) changes with time…” I think he almost gests it here, but thinking as a reductionist, he seems to be saying that the problem arises because, as programmers, we can never remember to add all the dimensions of changes that a real object will go through… “but it will always turn out that you forgot something like the weight or the tautness of the canvas.” But, a process philosopher would point out that all of reality is a work-in-progress. When the sculpture or painting or whatever, decays it gradually turns into something else so that over time, it reaches another discrete point on the continuum of reality, and even human programmers do not (yet) have enough inductive evidence in their wetware (to borrow a sci. fi. term from William Gibson) databases to run a statistical probability calculus to determine what the real object may turn into at any given time in any given space. The reason I modified that sentence with the word “yet” is to make my point that if there ever is a singularity, it is because humans will expand their intelligences exponentially as they are trying to make computers smarter. But the computers can never catch up!
My problem, because it concerns me economically and personally, is writing. And this is where the economic system, not the digital system that it supports, is the real problem. When Lanier says the culture is “eating its own seed stock” he is talking about all the non-creative, non-artists who are using old media to create retro mashups in the new, digital media. But I take it as a reference to all the bad business decisions of the print media to go along with the digital fad of “open culture.” They are cutting their own throats; making themselves obsolete. Writers should get paid for what they write, and it is up to the publishers to enforce that. When I said, earlier, that there is no law that says we have to stay online 24/7, I meant no “legal” law. But by putting all their energy eggs into this digital culture basket, and abandoning all the other cultural outlets, the media barons have created an economic law that forces us to stay online by default. I do not have a political/economic solution to this yet, but my point is only that the digital culture is only partly to blame.
Since this essay represents only one discrete point on the continuum of philosophic thought, I must arbitrarily cut it off here to avoid continuing ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
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