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Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology; founding partner, Persuasive Games LLC; author, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing
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The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) names the globally distributed projects, people, and institutions searching the cosmos for signs of intelligent life. SETI’s methods mostly entail scanning for the emission of electromagnetic radiation, an exhaust that’s assumed to emanate from civilizations with advanced technologies.
Like the quest to build intelligent machines, the search for intelligent aliens makes assumptions about what intelligence is and what aliens are. SETI assumes that alien life is intelligent if it matches humans’ science-fictional expectations for intelligence: animalian creatures with communication devices and spaceships and the like.
Critics of SETI sometimes invoke what are called uniformitarian objections. Uniformitarianism names the assumption that the same conditions and laws apply everywhere throughout time and space. SETI is uniformitarian in its assumption that all alien intelligence would be the same—namely, like human intelligence (but smarter, of course). But it’s just as compelling to think otherwise. The philosopher Nicholas Rescher, for example, has observed that if there’s intelligence in the universe, we might not be able to identify it as intelligence. True alien intelligence would differ from ours not only in its cosmic location but also in its very nature. As Doris and David Jonas put it some forty years ago, different sensory capacities produce different “slits” for perceiving, explaining, and interacting with reality.12
This means that alienness is not just “out there” but all around us. You might find your cat to be intelligent in a certain way, or your smartphone, or your car, or a hypothetical future robot, or, given the right perspective, even your houseplant or your toaster.
The dream of thinking machines is really no different than the dream of intelligent aliens. It just replaces the biological, cosmic, entropy-fashioned alien of afar with the mechanico-electronic, human-fashioned machine in our midst. And if SETI and its kin make a uniformitarian mistake in the cosmos, efforts to theorize and create artificial intelligence and thinking machines make the same mistake here on Earth.
Perhaps the best evidence for thinking machines’ reliance on the particular mode of intelligence that humans experience can be found in our fictional doomsday worst-case scenarios for AI. The fear of a robot or computer apocalypse of the Terminator or Berserker or Matrix varieties depends on machine intelligence besting humans to the point where it realizes that the best option is to destroy and replace humans (or, in the Kurzweilian Singularity version of AI fantasy, humans willingly submit to their computer overlords in order to achieve immortality). Closer to home than to doomsday, our fear of machine intelligence also expresses itself in a concern over the role of human thought and labor in an economy increasingly run by mechanical and electronic machines.
This is one vision of thinking machines, but it needn’t be the only one. Thinking about thinking machines turns out to be so narrow and anthropocentric it’s surprising we haven’t given up on it out of boredom rather than on contra-uniformitarian grounds. Instead of asking if machines can think, or what we need to do to cause them to think, or how we’d know if they were thinking, what if we just assumed that all “machines” did something akin to thinking and then we attempted to characterize what “thinking” might mean?
In philosophy, there are already directions toward such an approach. Contrary to the emergentist position that most AI advocates hold—that mind emerges from specific material conditions, whether in biological or computational entities—panpsychists claim that “minds” are everywhere, in some sense. Panpsychism bears some relationship to certain Buddhist doctrines that encourage awareness of the animism in nature. But panpsychism risks the same erroneous uniformitarianism as SETI or AI—namely, that a mind akin to that of a human (or at least of an animal) is the model for all other minds. A more promising philosophical position is that of panexperientialism, the position that everything has something like experience, even if it might be very different from that of a human being.
When we think about thinking machines, we usually think of a particular sort of machine and a particular sort of thinking—electronic and (super)human, respectively. But what if instead we allowed for the possibility that we’ve been missing out on all the “thinking” being done by all the other kinds of machines surrounding us—toasters, garage doors, automobiles? This may seem like a ludicrous waste of time, but it doesn’t take long to prove useful. If the purpose of thinking about machines like AIs and robots and computers is in part to struggle with the question of what living with them as neighbors and companions and even citizens might look like, then we ought to start by taking more seriously all the machines already around us that could be said to have taken on those roles and which we nevertheless ignore.
