Bill Marvel: Mechanical Darwinism – Conway Daily Sun

In a world of more than 7 billion people, one might expect it to be difficult for the individual to feel terribly important, but that isn't a problem here in the United States. Our five percent of the world's human population seems to consider itself the most valuable of all the planet's creatures, human or otherwise. More than most countries, ours evinces an epidemic of national, factional, and personal narcissism. From kindergarten to the White House, tantrums are the common response to any parents, peers, public, or politicians who refuse the demands of those who deem themselves deserving by the sheer virtue of their existence.

The relative worth of the individual human life nevertheless strikes me as a matter of legitimate debate a proposition that horrifies the evangelists of what religious fundamentalists call secular humanism. The notion that humans are capable of moral behavior without the imagined surveillance of a supreme being soon spawned the belief that Homo sapiens actually is that supreme being, and merits unquestioning worship. That philosophical distortion generally betrays itself in the "if-it-saves-one-life" argument so popular at the more pedestrian levels of public debate. In hilarious irony, that simplistic appeal to the sanctity of human life is always deployed against any resort to the very capacity for reason that supposedly differentiates humans from what they consider lesser beings.

In light of such self-contradiction even among the more reflexive advocates of human exceptionalism, it hardly seems unreasonable to wonder what, if anything, really does distinguish us. For a species faced with the prescient predictions of Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" and the realized pipedreams of Samuel Butler's "Erewhon," the evident answer is that humankind is no longer really so special at all. The heightened human sense of self-importance may, in fact, merely reflect a reaction to the recognition of our declining collective relevancenot to mention the dwindling significance of the individual.

A college professor of mine once remarked that the social urge to be noticed and remembered motivates such endeavors as having children, writing books, and planting trees. I chose writing books, and my attachment to place and time yielded a preoccupation with history, especially in one focused era. After a decade or two I began making connections that produced an occasional stir, at least within my limited fieldnot because I was endowed with any particular talent or intelligence, but from a simple combination of good memory and obsessive, concentrated research. From a trove of trivia I simply recognized and illuminated characters or concepts common to different episodes.

Such minor research coups were the only achievements by which historians can distinguish themselves, but as history turns more quantitative those discoveries are frequently the products of computer analysis. Teams of practitioners who betray more interest in their tools than in their craft input endless streams of data, regurgitating computations with lightning speed and formulating conclusions faster than the academy can absorb them. The sources can be mined and sifted before a plodding archive rat can transcribe his research notes, and his interpretations may be superseded before they are fully developed.

This winter, I thought I had found another project for which I could claim a useful combination of qualifications. Having learned that a coveted historical journal in a private French manuscript library had been published, I ordered a copy and began translating segments of it. As usual, I sent relevant portions to some friends who are working on similar subjects. Their surprise that I could read it suggested that the traditional expectation of fluency in two foreign languages (customarily French and German) is no longer required for doctoral-level Civil War specialists. Thanks to machine translators, it may never be required again, either. Now anyone, including someone completely unfamiliar with either French or English, could translate that entire 600-page journal by just typing it in. Even the archaic idioms that my 1890-vintage Larousse helps me decipher may soon be available for automatic translation. I might as well have spent those six years of French classes watching television.

Almost no human occupation seems exempt from substitution by a machine, including the job of building and programming the machines. With the added ingredient of artificial intelligence, the threat to humanity only escalates. Scientists who see no ethical limits to their ambitions strive to create human life in the laboratory, trying to reduce reproduction to machinelike replication. Meanwhile, engineers work to design machines with ever-more human skills and the ability to reason. Time alone separates the machine from becoming the supreme being, and reproducing its own creator for utilitarian purposes as it was once used. Skeptics often draw the obvious analogy that those involved in robotics are actually developing their own replacements, but it might be equally apt to suggest that they are forging their own chains.

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Bill Marvel: Mechanical Darwinism - Conway Daily Sun