MACHINES DON’T THINK, BUT NEITHER DO PEOPLE

CESAR HIDALGO

Associate professor, MIT Media Lab; author, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

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Machines that think? That’s as fallacious as people who think! Thinking involves processing information, begetting new physical order from incoming streams of physical order. Thinking is a precious ability, which unfortunately is not the privilege of single units such as machines or people but a property of the systems in which these units come to “life.”

Of course I’m being provocative here, since at the individual level we do process information. We do think—sometimes—or at least we feel like we do. But “our” ability to think is not entirely “ours”—it’s borrowed, since the hardware and software we use to think weren’t begot by us. You and I did not evolve the genes that helped organize our brains or the language we use to structure our thoughts. Our ability to think is dependent on events that happened prior to our mundane existence: the past chapters of biological and cultural evolution. So we can only understand our ability to think, and the ability of machines to mimic thought, by considering how the ability of a unit to process information relates to its context.

Think of a human born in the dark solitude of empty space. She’d have nothing to think about. The same would be true of an isolated and inputless computing machine. In this context, we can call our borrowed ability to process information “little” thinking—since it’s a context-dependent ability that happens at the individual level. “Large” thinking, by contrast, is the ability to process information embodied in systems, where units like machines or us are mere pawns.

Separating the little thinking of humans from the larger thinking of systems (which involves the process that begets the hardware and software that allow units to “little think”) helps us understand the role of thinking machines in this larger context. Our ability to think isn’t only borrowed; it also hinges on the use and abuse of mediated interactions. For human/machine systems to think, humans need to eat and regurgitate one another’s mental vomit, which sometimes takes the form of words. But since words vanish in the wind, our species’ enormous ability to think hinges on more sophisticated techniques to communicate and preserve the information we generate: our ability to encode information in matter.

For 100,000 years, our species has been busy transforming our planet into a giant tape player. The planet Earth is the medium wherein we print our ideas: sometimes in symbolic form, such as text and paintings, but, more important, in objects—like hair dryers, vacuum cleaners, buildings, and cars—built from the mineral loins of planet Earth. Our society has a great collective ability to process information because our communication involves more than words: It involves the creation of objects, which transmit not something as flimsy as an idea but something as concrete as know-how and the uses of knowledge. Objects augment us; they allow us to do things without knowing how. We all get to enjoy the teeth-preserving powers of toothpaste without knowing how to synthesize sodium fluoride, or the benefits of long-distance travel without knowing how to build a plane. By the same token, we all enjoy the benefits of sending texts throughout the world in seconds through social media or of performing complex mathematical operations by pressing a few keys on a laptop computer.

But our ability to create the trinkets augmenting us has also evolved, of course, as a result of our collective willingness to eat one another’s mental vomit. This evolution is the one that brings us now to the point where we have “media” that are beginning to rival our ability to process information, or “little think.”

For most of our history, our trinkets were static objects. Even our tools were solidified chunks of order, such as stone axes, knives, and knitting needles. A few centuries ago, we developed the ability to outsource muscle and motion to machines, causing one of the greatest economic expansions in history. Now we’ve evolved our collective ability to process information by creating objects endowed with the ability to beget and recombine physical order. These are machines that can process information—engines that produce numbers, like the engines Charles Babbage dreamed about.

So we’ve evolved our ability to think collectively by first gaining dominion over matter, then over energy, and now over physical order, or information. Yet this shouldn’t fool us into believing that we think or that machines do. The large evolution of human thought requires mediated interactions, and the future of thinking machines will also happen at the interface where humans connect with humans through objects.

As we speak, nerds in the best universities of the world are mapping out the brain, building robotic limbs, and developing primitive versions of technologies that will open up the future when your great-grandchild will get high by plugging his brain directly into the Web. The augmentation these kids will get is unimaginable to us—and so bizarre by our modern ethical standards that we’re not even in a position to properly judge it; it would be like a sixteenth-century Puritan judging present-day San Francisco. Yet in the grand scheme of the universe, these new human/machine networks will be nothing other than the next natural step in the evolution of our species’ ability to beget information. Together, humans and our extensions—machines—will continue to evolve networks that are enslaved to the universe’s main glorious purpose: the creation of pockets where information does not dwindle but grows.