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Complex systems scientist; senior scholar, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; associate, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University; author, The Half-Life of Facts
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When I think about machines that think, while I’m interested in how they might become possible, I’m more interested in how, as a society, we might respond to them. For example, if they fail to exhibit anything we might take for self-awareness or sentience, then they’re certainly clever but humanity is still on the cognitive pedestal.
But what about when these thinking machines are as smart as we are, or even far more intelligent? What if they’re intelligent in ways foreign to our own patterns of thought? This isn’t so unlikely, as computers are already very good at things we’re not good at: They have better short- and long-term memories, they’re faster at calculations, and they’re not bound by the irrationalities that hamstring our minds. Extrapolate this out and we can see that thinking machines might be both smart and alien.
So how shall we respond? One response is to mark them as monsters—unspeakable horrors that can examine the unknown in ways we cannot. Many people might respond this way if we birth machines that think about the world in ways wildly foreign from ours.
But it needn’t be so. I prefer a more optimistic response, that of naches, a Yiddish term meaning joy and pride, often vicarious pride: You have naches—or, as in Yiddish, you shep naches—when your children graduate from college, or get married, or pass any similar milestone. These aren’t your own accomplishments but you still have a great deal of pride and joy in them.
The same can be true with our machines. We might not understand their thoughts or discoveries or technological advances, but they’re our machines, and their creators can shep naches from the accomplishments of such offspring—say, computer programs that generate sophisticated artworks or musical compositions. I imagine the programmers of this software are proud of the resulting piece of art or music even if they can’t generate it themselves.
We can broaden this sense of naches. Many of us are sports fans and take pride in our team’s wins even though we had nothing to do with them. Or we’re excited when a citizen of our country takes the gold in the Olympics, or makes a new discovery and is awarded a prestigious prize. So, too, should it be with our thinking machines for all of humanity: We can root for what humans have created even though it wasn’t our own personal achievement—and even if we can’t fully understand it. Many of us are grateful for technological advances, from the iPhone to the Internet, even though we don’t fully know how they work.
When our children do something amazing, something we can’t really understand, we don’t despair, or worry; we’re delighted and grateful for their success. In fact, gratitude is how many of us respond to technology currently. We can’t completely understand our machines, but they work in powerful and useful ways and we’re grateful for this. We can respond similarly to our future technological creations, these thinking machines we might not fully understand. Rather than fear or worry, we should have naches from them.
