ASHFORD LEE - Plato and the nerd the creative partnership of humans and technology

Plato and the Nerd

2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Times Roman using . Printed and bound in the United States of America.

A note about the cover design: The cover takes its inspiration from M. C. Eschers 1948 lithograph Drawing Hands, which showed two hands in the act of drawing each other.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lee, Edward A., 1957- author.

Title: Plato and the nerd : the creative partnership of humans and technology / Edward Ashford Lee.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016056891 | ISBN 9780262036481 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: TechnologyPhilosophy. | Computer sciencePopular works. | Creative ability.

Classification: LCC T14 .L4254 2017 | DDC 601dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056891

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This book is dedicated to my muse, Rhonda Righter, with thanks for many dinnertime conversations that shaped my thinking.

What This Book Is About

When I was young, my father wanted me to become a lawyer or get an MBA and take over the family business. Engineers were the people who worked for him. The brightest young minds, at least those of white Anglo-Saxon stock in the United States, went to law school, business school, or medical school. Today, engineering schools are much harder to get into, but that was not true when I was going to college. Yes, my father was profoundly disappointed in me when I double majored in Computer Science and what Yale called Engineering and Applied Science. I made it worse when I went to MIT for graduate school in engineering and then went to work as an engineer at Bell Labs, and worse still when I went to Berkeley for a PhD and then became a professor. This book is perhaps my last-ditch attempt to justify those decisions.

When I started writing the book, I really didnt know who my target audience would be. As it has turned out, this book is targeted toward readers who are either literate technologists or numerate humanists. Im not sure how many such people there are, but Im convinced there must be a few. I hope you are one of them.

This book is my attempt to explain why the process of creating technology, a process that we call engineering, is a deeply creative process, and how this explains why it has become so hot and competitive, making geeks out of the brightest young minds. The book is about the culture of technology, about both its power and its limitations, and about how the real power of technology stems from its partnership with humans. I like to think of the book as a popular philosophy of technology, but I doubt it will be very popular, and I am not sure I have the qualifications to write about philosophy. So really, the only guarantee I can make is that it is about technology and the engineers who create technology. And even then, it is limited to the part of technology that I understand best, specifically, the digital and information technology revolutions.

This book is not about the artistry and creativity that is unleashed by using technology as a medium. For that topic, I recommend the wonderful book by Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss (Heffernan, 2016). Heffernan claims that the Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art, but she is referring to the content of the Internet. In my book, I claim that Internet technology itself, and all of digital technology that shores it up, is a massive and collaborative creative work, even if not an artistic work.

Digital technology as a medium for this latter sort of creativity has enormous potential, well beyond what has been accomplished to date. In the first part of this book, I explain exactly why this technology has been so transformative and liberating. I study how engineers use models and abstractions to build inventive artificial worlds and give us incredible capabilities, such as the ability to carry around in our pockets everything humans have ever published.

But this is not to say that digital technology has no limitations. Pursuing a yin and yang balance, in the second part of the book, I attempt to counter a runaway enthusiasm among some thought leaders about digital technology and computation. Driven by the immense potential of computers, this enthusiasm has led to unjustified beliefs that go as far as to assert that everything in the physical world is in fact a computation, in exactly the same sense as in modern computers. Everything, including such complex phenomena as human cognition and such unfamiliar objects as quasars, is software operating on digital data. I will argue that the evidence for such conclusions is weak and the likelihood is remote that nature has limited itself to only processes that conform with todays notion of digital computation. And I will show that this digital hypothesis cannot be tested empirically, and therefore can never be construed as a scientific theory. Because the likelihood is remote, the evidence is weak, and the hypothesis is untestable, these conclusions are an act of faith. My argument here will likely get me into trouble because Im swimming against a considerable current.

Also bucking much current thought, I argue that the goal of artificial intelligence to reproduce human cognitive functions in computers is misguided, is unlikely to succeed, and vastly underestimates the potential of computers. Instead, technology is coevolving with humans, augmenting our own cognitive and physical capabilities, all the while enabling us to nurture, evolve, and propagate the technology. We are seeing the emergence of symbiotic coevolution, where the complementarity between humans and machines dominates over their competition.

But most of the book is very much swimming with the current, upbeat about the enormous potential of technology to improve our lives. But more than just utilitarian, one of my main messages is that engineering is a deeply creative and intellectual discipline, every bit as interesting and rewarding as the arts and sciences. In areas where the technology is less mature, the creative contributions reflect the personalities, aesthetics, and idiosyncrasies of the creators. In areas that are more mature, the work can become deeply technical and opaque to outsiders. This happens in all disciplines, so this is hardly surprising.

Like the sciences, engineering is built around accepted paradigms that provide frameworks for thought. Also like the sciences, engineering is punctuated by paradigm shifts, to use the words of Thomas Kuhn (Kuhn, 1962). Unlike the sciences, however, the paradigm shifts are frequent, even relentless. I argue, in fact, that the pace of technological progress in our current culture is more limited by our human inability to assimilate new paradigms than by any physical limitations of the technology. I attempt in this book to explain why this is.

Like the arts, the evolution of the field of engineering is governed by culture, language, and cross-germination of ideas. Also like the arts, success or failure is often determined by intangible and inexplicable forces, such as fashion and culture. And in an observation that may take many readers by surprise, also like the arts, the creative media used to engineer new artifacts and systems today, particularly digital media, have become astonishingly versatile and expressive. In my opinion, this latter property, the versatility and expressiveness of digital media, accounts for the attractiveness of the field to bright young minds, more even than the lucrative job prospects.