Algorithms Who Art in Apps, Hallowed Be Thy Code

If you want to understand the status of algorithms in our collective imagination, Ian Bogost proposes the following exercise in his recent essay in the Atlantic: “The next time you see someone talking about algorithms, replace the term with ‘God’ and ask yourself if the sense changes any?”









Bogost is right to challenge the quasi-religious reverence sometimes exhibited toward technology. It is, as he fears, an impediment to clear thinking. Indeed, he is not the only one calling for the secularization of our technological endeavors. Jaron Lanier has spoken at length about the introduction of religious thinking into the field of AI. In a recent interview, Lanier expressed his concerns this way:

“There is a social and psychological phenomenon that has been going on for some decades now:  A core of technically proficient, digitally-minded people reject traditional religions and superstitions. They set out to come up with a better, more scientific framework. But then they re-create versions of those old religious superstitions! In the technical world these superstitions are just as confusing and just as damaging as before, and in similar ways.”

While Lanier’s concerns are similar to Bogost’s, it may be worth noting that Lanier’s use of religious categories is rather more concrete. As far as I can tell, Bogost deploys a religious frame as a rhetorical device, and rather effectively so. Lanier’s criticisms, however, have been aroused by religiously intoned expressions of a desire for transcendence voiced by denizens of the tech world themselves.

But such expressions are hardly new, nor are they relegated to the realm of AI. In The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, David Noble rightly insisted that “modern technology and modern faith are neither complements nor opposites, nor do they represent succeeding stages of human development. They are merged, and always have been, the technological enterprise being, at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor.”

So that no one would misunderstand his meaning, he added,


Along with chapters on the space program, atomic weapons, and biotechnology, Noble devoted a chapter to the history AI, titled “The Immortal Mind.” Noble found that AI research had often been inspired by a curious fixation on the achievement of god-like, disembodied intelligence as a step toward personal immortality. Many of the sentiments and aspirations that Noble identifies in figures as diverse as George Boole, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Edward Fredkin, Marvin Minsky, Daniel Crevier, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec–all of them influential theorists and practitioners in the development of AI–find their consummation in the Singularity movement. The movement envisions a time, 2045 is frequently suggested, when the distinction between machines and humans will blur and humanity as we know it will eclipsed. Before Ray Kurzweil, the chief prophet of the Singularity, wrote about “spiritual machines,” Noble had astutely anticipated how the trajectories of AI, Internet, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Life research were all converging on the age-old quest for the immortal life. Noble, who died in 2010, must have read the work of Kurzweil and company as a remarkable validation of his thesis in The Religion of Technology.

Interestingly, the sentiments that Noble documented alternated between the heady thrill of creating non-human Minds and non-human Life, on the one hand, and, on the other, the equally heady thrill of pursuing the possibility of radical life-extension and even immortality. Frankenstein meets Faust we might say. Humanity plays god in order to bestow god’s gifts on itself. Noble cites one Artificial Life researcher who explains, “I fee like God; in fact, I am God to the universes I create,” and another who declares, “Technology will soon enable human beings to change into something else altogether [and thereby] escape the human condition.” Ultimately, these two aspirations come together into a grand techno-eschatological vision, expressed here by Hans Moravec:


Little wonder that Pamela McCorduck, who has been chronicling the progress of AI since the early 1980s, can say, “The enterprise is a god-like one. The invention–the finding within–of gods represents our reach for the transcendent.” And, lest we forget where we began, a more earth-bound, but no less eschatological hope was expressed by Edward Fredkin in his MIT and Stanford courses on “saving the world.” He hoped for a “global algorithm” that “would lead to peace and harmony.” I would suggest that similar aspirations are expressed by those who believe that Big Data will yield a God’s-eye view of human society, providing wisdom and guidance that would be otherwise inaccessible to ordinary human forms of knowing and thinking.

Perhaps this should not be altogether surprising. As the old saying has it, the Grand Canyon wasn’t formed by someone dragging a stick. This is just a way of saying that causes must be commensurate to the effects they produce. Grand technological projects such as space flight, the harnessing of atomic energy, and the pursuit of artificial intelligence are massive undertakings requiring stupendous investments of time, labor, and resources. What kind of motives are sufficient to generate those sorts of expenditures? You’ll need something more than whim, to put it mildly. You may need something akin to religious devotion. Would we have attempted to put a man on the moon apart from the ideological frame provided Cold War, which cast space exploration as a field of civilizational battle for survival? Consider, as a more recent example, what drives Elon Musk’s pursuit of interplanetary space travel.


Without diminishing the criticisms offered by either Bogost or Lanier, Noble’s historical investigation into the roots of divinized or theologized technology reminds us that the roots of the disorder run much deeper than we might initially imagine. Noble’s own genealogy traces the origin of the religion of technology to the turn of the first millennium. It emerges out of a volatile mix of millenarian dreams, apocalyptic fervor, mechanical innovation, and monastic piety. It’s evolution proceeds apace through the Renaissance, finding one of its most ardent prophets in the Elizabethan statesman, Francis Bacon. Even through the Enlightenment, the religion of technology flourished. In fact, the Enlightenment may have been a decisive moment in the history of the religion of technology.

In the essay with which we began, Ian Bogost framed the emergence of techno-religious thinking as a departure from the ideals of reason and science associated with the Enlightenment. This is not altogether incidental to Bogost’s argument. When he talks about the “theological” thinking that plagues our understanding of algorithms, Bogost is not working with a neutral, value-free, all-purpose definition of what constitutes the religious or the theological; there’s almost certainly no such definition available. It wouldn’t be too far from the mark, I think, to say that Bogost is working with what we might classify as an Enlightenment understanding of Religion, one that characterizes it as Reason’s Other, i.e. as a-rational if not altogether irrational, superstitious, authoritarian, and pernicious. For his part, Lanier appears to be working with similar assumptions.

Noble’s work complicates this picture, to say the least. The Enlightenment did not, as it turns out, vanquish Religion, driving it far from the pure realms of Science and Technology. In fact, to the degree that the radical Enlightenment’s assault on religious faith was successful, it empowered the religion of technology. To put this another way, the Enlightenment–and, yes, we are painting with broad strokes here–did not do away with the notions of Providence, Heaven, and Grace. Rather, the Enlightenment re-named these Progress, Utopia, and Technology respectively. To borrow a phrase, the Enlightenment immanentized the eschaton. If heaven had been understood as a transcendent goal achieved with the aid of divine grace within the context of the providentially ordered unfolding of human history, it became a Utopian vision, a heaven on earth, achieved by the ministrations Science and Technology within the context of Progress, an inexorable force driving history toward its Utopian consummation.


When the prophets of the Singularity preach the gospel of transhumanism, they are not abandoning the Enlightenment heritage; they are simply embracing it’s fullest expression. As Bruno Latour has argued, modernity has never perfectly sustained the purity of the distinctions that were the self-declared hallmarks of its own superiority. Modernity characterized itself as a movement of secularization and differentiation, what Latour, with not a little irony, labels processes of purification. Science, politics, law, religion, ethics–these are all sharply distinguished and segregated from one another in the modern world, distinguishing it from the primitive pre-modern world. But it turns out that these spheres of human experience stubbornly resist the neat distinctions modernity sought to impose. Hybridization unfolds alongside purification, and Noble’s work has demonstrated how the lines between technology, sometimes reckoned the most coldly rational of human projects, is deeply contaminated by religion, often regarded by the same people as the most irrational of human projects.


It is Christian insofar as its aspirations that are like those nurtured by the Christian faith, such as the conscious persistence of a soul after the death of the body. Noble cites Daniel Crevier, who referencing the “Judeo-Christian tradition” suggested that “religious beliefs, and particularly the belief in survival after death, are not incompatible with the idea that the mind emerges from physical phenomena.” This is noted on the way to explaining that a machine-based material support could be found for the mind, which leads Noble to quip. “Christ was resurrected in a new body; why not a machine?” Reporting on his study of the famed Santa Fe Institute in Los Alamos, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich observed, “Judeo-Christian stories of the creation and maintenance of the world haunted my informants’ discussions of why computers might be ‘worlds’ or ‘universes,’ …. a tradition that includes stories from the Old and New Testaments (stories of creation and salvation).”

It is a heresy insofar as it departs from traditional Christian teaching regarding the givenness of human nature, the moral dimensions of humanity’s brokenness, the gracious agency of God in the salvation of humanity, and the resurrection of the body, to name a few. Having said as much, it would seem that one could perhaps conceive of the religion of technology as an imaginative account of how God might fulfill purposes that were initially revealed in incidental, pre-scientific garb. In other words, we might frame the religion of technology not so much as a Christian heresy, but rather as (post-)Christian fan-fiction, an elaborate imagining of how the hopes articulated by the Christian faith will materialize as a consequence of human ingenuity in the absence of divine action.


Near the end of The Religion of Technology, David Noble forcefully articulated the dangers posed by a blind faith in technology. “Lost in their essentially religious reveries,” Noble warned, “the technologists themselves have been blind to, or at least have displayed blithe disregard for, the harmful ends toward which their work has been directed.” Citing another historian of technology, Noble added, “The religion of technology, in the end, ‘rests on extravagant hopes which are only meaningful in the context of transcendent belief in a religious God, hopes for a total salvation which technology cannot fulfill …. By striving for the impossible, [we] run the risk of destroying the good life that is possible.’ Put simply, the technological pursuit of salvation has become a threat to our survival.” I suspect that neither Bogost nor Lanier would disagree with Noble on this score.

There is another significant point at which the religion of technology departs from its antecedent: “The millenarian promise of restoring mankind to its original Godlike perfection–the underlying premise of the religion of technology–was never meant to be universal.” Instead, the salvation it promises is limited finally to the very few will be able to afford it; it is for neither the poor nor the weak. Nor, would it seem, is it for those who have found a measure of joy or peace or beauty within the bounds of the human condition as we now experience it, frail as it may be.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the religion of technology appears to have no doctrine of final judgment. This is not altogether surprising given that, as Bogost warned, the divinizing of technology carries the curious effect of absolving us of responsibility for the tools that we fashion and the uses to which they are put.

I have no neat series of solutions to tie all of this up; rather I will give the last word to Wendell Berry:


Jaron Lanier Wants to Secularize AI

In 2010, one of the earliest posts on this blog noted an op-ed in the NY Times by Jaron Lanier titled “The First Church of Robotic.” In it, Lanier lamented the rise quasi-religious aspirations animating many among the Silicon Valley elite. Describing the tangle of ideas and hopes usually associated with the Singularity and/or Transhumanism, Lanier concluded, “What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.” The piece wraps up rather straightforwardly: “We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work.”

In fact, the new religion Lanier has in view has a considerably older pedigree than what he imagines. Historian David Noble traced the roots of what he called the religion of technology back to the start of the last millennium. What Lanier identified was only the latest iteration of that venerable techno-religious tradition.

A couple of days ago, Edge posted a video (and transcript) of an extended discussion by Lanier, which was sparked by recent comments made by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk about the existential threat to humanity AI may pose in the not-to-distant future. Lanier’s talk ranges impressively over a variety of related issues and registers a number of valuable insights. Consider, for instance, this passing critique of Big Data:




To which he adds a few moments later, “It’s not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense. It’s a mass incompetence, as opposed to Skynet from the Terminator movies. That’s what this type of AI turns into.” Big Data as banal evil, perhaps.

Lanier is certainly not the only one pointing out that Big Data doesn’t magically render pure or objective sociological data. A host of voices have made some variation of this point in their critique of the ideology surrounding Big Data experiments conducted by the likes of Facebook and OkCupid. The point is simple enough: observation/measurement alters the observed/measured phenomena. It’s a paradox that haunts most forms of human knowledge, perhaps especially our knowledge of ourselves, and it seems to me that we are better off abiding the paradox rather than seeking to transcend it.

Lanier also scores an excellent point when he asks us to imagine two scenarios involving the possibility of 3-D printed killer drones that can be used to target individuals. In the first scenario, they are developed and deployed by terrorists; in the second they are developed and deployed by some sort of rogue AI along the lines that Musk and others have worried about. Lanier’s question is this: what difference does it make whether terrorists or rogue AI is to blame? The problem remains the same.

“The truth is that the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It’s the interface to physicality. It’s the fact that there’s this little killer drone thing that’s coming around. It’s not so much whether it’s a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI, or even, for that matter, if there’s enough of them, it could just be an utterly random process. The whole AI thing, in a sense, distracts us from what the real problem would be. The AI component would be only ambiguously there and of little importance.

This notion of attacking the problem on the level of some sort of autonomy algorithm, instead of on the actuator level is totally misdirected. This is where it becomes a policy issue. The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate. And maybe that problem will never take place anyway. What we don’t have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that’s speculative. There isn’t an AI algorithm that’s good enough to do that for the time being. An equivalent problem can come about, whether or not the AI algorithm happens. In a sense, it’s a massive misdirection.”

It is a misdirection that entails an evasion of responsibility and a failure of political imagination.

All of this is well put, and there’s more along the same lines. Lanier’s chief concern, however, is to frame this as a problem of religious thinking infecting the work of technology. Early on, for instance, he says, “what I’m proposing is that if AI was a real thing, then it probably would be less of a threat to us than it is as a fake thing. What do I mean by AI being a fake thing? That it adds a layer of religious thinking to what otherwise should be a technical field.”

And toward the conclusion of his talk, Lanier elaborates:


What Lanier proposes in response to this state of affairs is something like a wall of separation, not between the church and the state, but between religion and technology:

“To me, what would be ridiculous is for somebody to say, ‘Oh, you mustn’t study deep learning networks,’ or ‘you mustn’t study theorem provers,’ or whatever technique you’re interested in. Those things are incredibly interesting and incredibly useful. It’s the mythology that we have to become more self-aware of. This is analogous to saying that in traditional religion there was a lot of extremely interesting thinking, and a lot of great art. And you have to be able to kind of tease that apart and say this is the part that’s great, and this is the part that’s self-defeating. We have to do it exactly the same thing with AI now.”

I’m sure Lanier would admit that this is easier said than done. In fact, he suggests as much himself a few lines later. But it’s worth asking whether the kind of sorting out that Lanier proposes is not merely challenging, but, perhaps, unworkable. Just as mid-twentieth century theories of secularization have come on hard times owing to a certain recalcitrant religiosity (or spirituality, if you prefer), we might also find that the religion of technology cannot simply be wished away or bracketed.

Paradoxically, we might also say that something like the religion of technology emerges precisely to the (incomplete) degree that the process of secularization unfolded in the West. To put this another way, imagine that there is within Western consciousness a particular yearning for transcendence. Suppose, as well, that this yearning is so ingrained that it cannot be easily eradicated. Consequently, you end up having something like a whack-a-mole effect. Suppress one expression of this yearning, and it surfaces elsewhere. The yearning for transcendence never quite dissipates, it only transfigures itself. So the progress of secularization, to the degree that it successfully suppresses traditional expressions of the quest for transcendence, manages only to channel it into other cultural projects, namely techno-science. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that the entire techno-scientific project is an unmitigated expression of the religion of technology. That’s certainly not the case. But, as Noble made clear, particularly in his chapter on AI, the techno-religious impulse is hardly negligible.

One last thought, for now, arising out of my recent blogging through Frankenstein. Mary Shelley seemed to understand that one cannot easily disentangle the noble from the corrupt in human affairs: both are rooted in the same faculties and desires. Attempt to eradicate the baser elements altogether, and you may very well eliminate all that is admirable too. The heroic tendency is not safe, but neither is the attempt to tame it. I don’t think we’ve been well-served by our discarding of this essentially tragic vision in favor of a more cheery techno-utopianism.

Drowning in the Shallow End

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson pointed out in Metaphors We Live By, we do a lot of our thinking and understanding through metaphors that structure our thoughts and concepts.  So pervasive are these metaphors, that in most cases we don’t even realize we are using metaphors at all.  Recently, metaphors related to shallowness and depth have caught my attention.

Many of the fears expressed by critics of the Internet and the digital world revolve around a loss of depth.  We are, in their view, gaining an immense amount of breadth or surface area, but it is coming at the expense of depth and by extension rendering us rather shallow.  For example, consider this passage from a brief statement playwright Richard Foreman contributed to Edge:


The notion of “pancake people” is a variation on the shallow/deep metaphor — a good deal of surface area, not much depth.  I first came across Foreman’s analogy in the conclusion of Nicholas Carr’s much discussed piece in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” Carr’s piece generated not only a lot of discussion, but also a book published this year exploring the effects of the Internet on the brain.  Carr’s book explored a variety of recent studies suggesting that significant Internet use was inhibiting our capacity for sustained attention and our ability to think deeply.  The title of Carr’s book?  The Shallows.

What is interesting about metaphors such as deep/shallow is that we do appear to have a rather intuitive sense of what they are communicating.  I suspect we all have some notion of what it means to say that someone or some idea is not very deep, or what is meant when some one says that they are just skimming the surface of a topic.  But the nature of metaphors is such that they both hide and reveal.  They help us understand a concept by comparing it to some other, perhaps more familiar idea, but the two things are never identical and so while something is illuminated, something may be hidden.  Also, the taken for granted status of some metaphors, shallowness/depth for instance, may also lull us into thinking that we understand something when we really don’t, in the same way, for example, that St. Augustine remarked that he knew what “time” was until he was asked to define it.

What exactly is it to say that an idea is shallow or deep?  Can we describe what we mean without resorting to metaphor? It is not that I am against metaphors at all, one can’t really be against metaphorical language without losing language as we know it altogether.  It may be that we cannot get at some ideas at all without metaphor.  My point rather is to try to think … well, more deeply about the consequences of our digital world.  Having noticed that key criticisms frequently involve this idea of a loss of depth, it seems that we better be sure we know what is meant.  Very often discussions and debates don’t seem to get anywhere because the participants are using terms equivocally or without a precise sense of how they are being used by the other side.  A little sorting out of our terms, perhaps especially our metaphors, may go a long way toward advancing the conversation.  (Incidentally, that last phrase is also a metaphor.)

Here is one last instance of the metaphor that doesn’t arise out of the recent debates about the Internet, and yet appears to be quite applicable.  The following is taken from Hannah Arendt’s 1958 work, The Human Condition:


Arendt’s comments arise from a technical and complex discussion of what she identifies as the private, public, and social realms of human life.  And while she was rather prescient in certain areas, she could not have imagined the rise of the Internet and social media.  However, these comments seem to be very much in line with Jaron Lanier’s observation, that “you have to be somebody before you can share yourself.” In our rush to publicize our selves and our thoughts, we are losing the hidden and private space in which we cultivate depth and substance.

Although employing other metaphors to do so, Richard Foreman also offered a sense of what he understood to be the contrast to the “pancake people”:


This is not necessarily about the recovery of some Romantic notion of the essential self, but it is about a certain degree of complexity and solidity (metaphor’s again, I know).  In any case, it strikes me as an ideal worth preserving.  Foreman and Carr (and perhaps Arendt if she were around) seem uncertain that it is an ideal that can survive in the digital age.  At the very least, they are pointing to some of the challenges.  Given that the digital age is not going away, it is left to us, if we value the ideal, to think of how complexity, depth, and density can be preserved.  And the first thing we may have to do is bring some conceptual clarity to our metaphors.