The problem of unemployment arising from automatization is no longer conjectural, but has become a very vital difficulty of modern society.
If we are to treat knowledge only in terms of Omniscience, power only in terms of Omnipotence, worship only in terms of the One Godhead, we shall find ourselves entangled in metaphysical subtleties before we shall have really embarked upon our study of the relations between religion and science.
We must disencumber ourselves of the superimposed layers of prejudice that we use nominally to protect the homage which we pay dignified and holy things but in fact, as often as not to relieve ourselves from the sense of unworthiness which we feel in looking unpleasant realities and dangerous comparisons in the face.
Even in the field of science, it is perilous to run counter to the accepted tables of precedence. On no account is it permissible to mention living beings and machines in the same breath. Living beings are living beings in all their parts; while machines are made of metals and other unorganized substances, with no fine structure relevant to their purposive or quasi-purposive function. Physics—or so it is generally supposed—takes no account of purpose; and the emergence of life is something totally new.
There are at least three points in cybernetics which appear to me to be relevant to religious issues. One of these concerns machines which learn; one concerns machines which reproduce themselves; and one, the coordination of machine and man.
An organized system may be said to be one which transforms a certain incoming message into an outgoing message, according to some principle of transformation. If this principle of transformation is subject to a certain criterion of merit of performance, and if the method of transformation is adjusted so as to tend to improve the performance of the system according to this criterion, the system is said to learn.
O be able to play a game in the von Neumann manner is tantamount to possessing a complete theory of the game and to having reduced the game to a triviality.
There is a religious problem to which those notions are relevant. This is the problem of the game between the Creator and a creature.
Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?
A game-playing machine may be used to secure the automatic performance of any function if the performance of this function is subject to a clear-cut, objective criterion of merit.
The chief criterion as to whether a line of human effort can be embodied in a game is whether there is some objectively recognizable criterion of the merit of the performance of this effort.
Man makes man in his own image. This seems to be the echo or the prototype of the act of creation, by which God is supposed to have made man in His image. Can something similar occur in the less complicated (and perhaps more understandable) case of the nonliving systems that we call machines?
What is the image of a machine? Can this image, as embodied in one machine, bring a machine of a general sort, not yet committed to a particular specific identity, to reproduce the original machine, either absolutely or under some change that may be construed as a variation? Can the new and varied machine itself act as an archetype, even as to its own departures from its own archetypal pattern?
But what is a machine? From one standpoint, we may consider a machine as a prime mover, a source of energy. For us, a machine is a device for converting incoming messages into outgoing messages. A message, from this point of view, is a sequence of quantities that represent signals in the message. As the engineer would say in his jargon, a machine is a multiple-input, multiple-output transducer.
Even living systems are not (in all probability) living below the molecular level.
There is one motive which it is harder to establish in any concrete case, but which must play a very considerable role nevertheless. It is the desire to avoid the personal responsibility for a dangerous or disastrous decision by placing the responsibility elsewhere: on chance, on human superiors and their policies which one cannot question, or on a mechanical device which one cannot fully understand but which has a presumed objectivity.
If you are playing a game according to (59) certain rules and set the playing-machine to play for victory, you will get victory if you get anything at all, and the machine will not pay the slightest attention to any consideration except victory according to the rules. If you are playing a war game with a certain conventional interpretation of victory, victory will be the goal at any cost, even that of the extermination of your own side, unless this condition of survival is explicitly contained in the definition of victory according to which you program the machine.
For many years all armies have played war games, and these games have always been behind the times. It has been said that in every war, the good generals fight the last war, the bad ones the war before the last. That is, the rules of the war game never catch up with the facts of the real situation.
While it is always possible to ask for something other than we really want, this possibility is most serious when the process by which we are to obtain our wish is indirect, and the degree to which we have obtained our wish is not clear until the very end. Usually we realize our wishes, insofar as we do actually realize them, by a feedback process, in which we compare the degree of attainment of intermediate goals with our anticipation of them. I should very much hate to ride on the first trial of an automobile regulated by photoelectric feedback devices, unless there were somewhere a handle by which I could take over control if I found myself driving smack into a tree.
The gadget-minded people often have the illusion that a highly automatized world will make smaller claims on human ingenuity than does the present one and will take over from us our need for difficult thinking, as a Roman slave who was also a Greek philosopher might have done for his master. This is palpably false. A goal-seeking mechanism will not necessarily seek our goals unless we design it for that purpose, and in that designing we must foresee all steps of the process for which it is designed, instead of exercising a tentative foresight which goes up to a certain point, and can be continued from that point on as new difficulties arise. The penalties for errors of foresight, great as they are now, will be enormously increased as automatization comes into its full use. .
The failsafe technique is legitimate and useful. However, it is of very little value against a danger whose nature has not been already recognized. The failsafe technique, while it may be necessary to avoid a human catastrophe, can most emphatically not be regarded as a sufficient precaution.
In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purpose has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations. This is only one of the many places where human impotence has shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly.
It is relatively easy to promote good and to fight evil when good and evil are arranged against one another in two clear lines, and when those on the other side are our unquestioned enemies, those on our side our trusted allies. What, however, if we must ask, each time in every situation, where is the friend and where the enemy? What, moreover, when we have put the decision in the hands of an inexorable magic or an inexorable machine of which we must ask the right questions in advance, without fully understanding the operations of the process by which they will be answered?
The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
Render unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s.
Although science is an important contribution to the homeostasis of the community, it is a contribution the basis of which must be assessed anew every generation or so. Here let me remark that both the Eastern and Western homeostasis of the present day is being made with the intention of fixing permanently the concepts of a period now long past. Marx lived in the middle of the first industrial revolution, and we are now well into the second one. Adam Smith belongs to a still earlier and more obsolete phase of the first industrial revolution. Permanent homeostasis of society cannot be made on a rigid assumption of a complete permanence of Marxianism, nor can it be made on a similar assumption concerning a standardized concept of free enterprise and the profit motive.