The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines

THE DIGITAL APE

Sir Nigel Shadbolt is one of the UK’s foremost computer scientists. He is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of web science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Both of them leading the development of the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk website. In 2010, he joined the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board — overseeing Open Data releases across the public sector. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow and former President of the British Computer Society. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.

Roger Hampson is an academic and public servant. For 16 years, he was chief executive of the London Borough of Redbridge, which has a strong reputation for web-based innovation in service delivery, engagement of citizens, and the publication of data. He has also been a director of social services, an academic economist of social policy, and a research fellow at the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent, the world leader in the promotion of efficiency in social and health care by the rigorous analysis of data. He is a non-executive director of the Open Data Institute. He has published on plain language; the economics of political advertising; community care; social services; and reasoning in public life.

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Excerpts from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘The Rock’ by T. S. Eliot taken from The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems (Copyright © T. S. Eliot). Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Approximately fifty (50) words from GEORGE ORWELL: ESSAYS by George Orwell with an introduction by Bernard Crick (First published as THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL VOL's 1-4 Martin Secker & Warburg 1968, This edition Penguin Books 2000). Copyright © the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1984. Introduction copyright © Bernard Crick, 1994.

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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot

Contents

Chapter 1 Biology and technology

Chapter 2 Our hyper-complex habitat

Chapter 3 The digital ape emerges

Chapter 4 Social machines

Chapter 5 Artificial and natural intelligence

Chapter 6 New companions

Chapter 7 Big beasts

Chapter 8 The challenge of data

Chapter 9 Augmented wisdom?

Afterword

Chapter References

Bibliography

Chapter 1

Biology and technology

OVER 50 YEARS ago, in 1967, Desmond Morris published The Naked Ape. Darwin’s theory of the nature and origin of the human animal had, by then, been conventional wisdom amongst academics for 100 years. Now, a mass readership was pleased to be startled by a racy new perspective on many matters they took for granted in everyday life. The opening paragraph both set the scientific tone and teased the prudish, a requirement of any self-respecting 1960s bestseller:

There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones. He is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but attempts to conceal the fact that he has the biggest penis, preferring to accord this honour falsely to the mighty gorilla.

The Naked Ape: a zoologist’s study of the human animal, 1967

The word ‘naked’ is deployed with skilful ambiguity. At first blush, it means that Man (which then meant Woman, too) abandoned growing his own fur, in favour of nakedness and the ability to make clothes adapted to different climates and seasons, moods and messages. This is a good metaphor for all the other modern human traits that require a step change from a ‘natural’ world to a socially constructed one, where the successful brute displays strategy, practical understanding, and a thousand varieties of advanced technical eptitude. The word also means, of course, that The Naked Ape will reveal the bare truth about the hidden desires of readers and their neighbours, invoking as evidence surprisingly familiar behaviours and bodily urges manifested by our less inhibited, less dishonest, mammal cousins. We zoologists, it claims, have social permission to put on our white coats and tell true dirty stories that ordinary politeness forbids because — plus or minus a few genuine errors — we know the facts, and have a duty to announce them despite conventional morals.

The present authors have borrowed two of Dr Morris’ three words, in a blatant homage to an excellent scientist and a great populariser, a multi-talented man, one of whose rather good surrealist paintings graced the front cover of the first edition of The Selfish Gene by his friend Richard Dawkins. Wonderful metaphor though it was, we would argue that the nakedness itself, and the patterns of behaviour revealed when conventional modesty is cast aside, are no longer the aspects of this extraordinary ape most urgently in need of stripping bare.

A book should have a narrative arc, to take its readers on a journey. Ours is simple enough. We look at how the use of tools by early human species predates Homo sapiens by perhaps 3 million years, and was indeed one of the causes of the existence of our species, rather than a consequence. Much of our modern habitat is self-created, fashioned with the successors to the tools that fashioned us. We examine the key characteristics of that sophisticated technological environment. We link this to plain expressions of some of the hypotheses neuroscientists now use to model that most difficult subject, the nature of mind and brain. We contemplate what this tells us about Homo sapiens in a hyper-complex world, and make some well-grounded (we hope) predictions about how this habitat will rapidly develop, and how human nature, always in conjunction with technology, may well change with it.

Our central thesis is that we are now a truly digital ape. The elaborate products of our science stand in a new relation to us. The reader knows intimately many of the everyday manifestations of our extraordinary technology. Start with the dark marks here on this white page: more books are now bought via the World Wide Web than are bought in bricks-and-mortar stores. The odds are that this word-processed text, sent electronically to the publisher, was acquired online; a symbolic transaction in the ether, made real in the physical world by a huge computer-guided distribution system. Interestingly, only about a sixth of copies will be consumed by an ape with an e-reader. The ape constantly manipulates a smartphone, and commutes to a wired-up workplace on vehicles commanded by electronic engine management and radio signals from a central control room. Yet still mostly prefers, as do the present authors, the pleasure of turning paper leaves.

Every day, we are warned of new corners of life about to change utterly, if some combination of Bright Young Thing and Dr Strangelove has their way. Watch out! It’s very hard to tell what will be a billion-dollar business, what will be a significant twist in the workings of the bourgeois state, and what will be remembered, if at all, only as an internet comedy meme. Serious newspapers discuss the pros and cons of sex with robots. The Times doesn’t fancy it. Security experts warn us to expect a ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’. State-sponsored or terrorist-launched? Or just the defence agency seeing a chance to expand its budget? Perhaps all of the above. Courts experiment with virtual justice: in several countries, the penal system is gearing up to allow guilty pleas to minor offences to be made online. A trick by Big Brother to give busy people criminal records? FBI cryptographers fail to persuade Apple to help them bust the entry code on a terrorist’s iPhone. Embarrassingly, in the age of the fight against crime on the web, they have to pay a million-dollar bribe to some very smart hackers instead. Arkansas police reckon an Amazon Echo device may have witnessed a murder, and want Amazon to bring the evidence in from their servers. Amazon refuses, and fights in the courts; eventually, the accused authorises Amazon to hand it over, perhaps gambling that the Echo will testify for him, rather than against. Anyway, Amazon are busy patenting a huge flying warehouse, a Zeppelin-style airship stuffed with books and groceries, drones buzzing up and down to the houses below. There’s the digital pill that will tell the cabin crew if you’re a happy flyer; the artificial nose that can sniff out diseases; and, by the way, your spouse can track where you really are when you say you’re at the office, if you share your location on your smartphone with your loved ones at home.

And yet, the science is real. All of it built, quite literally, on sand, the silicon out of which the chips of every modern device are made. William Blake’s mysterious lines from the late eighteenth century take on a modern sense:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

‘Auguries of Innocence’, 1863

Nearly everyone now has infinity in a grain of sand in their hands. Citizens of London in Blake’s day were awed, as they were intended to be, by St Paul’s Cathedral. Cheops probably employed over 100,000 labourers to build the astonishing Great Pyramid of Giza. Our awesome cathedrals are tiny, with billions of components, vanishingly small nano-metres wide, assembled into exquisite architecture by more people than Wren or even Cheops dragooned. They should awe us just as much.

We will discuss at some length how the applied mathematics of our latest machines gives us a menu of what would have been, only a few years ago, impossible decisions to make about our habitat and about our own nature. These are real, important choices. We can be brought low by cyber warfare, the disappearance of privacy, and the greed of giant technology corporations. Or not. We can become serfs to robots. Or not. We can manage the physical environment of the planet more sensibly. Or not. Perhaps more positively, we can manipulate our own DNA, and use tools to augment all our mental and physical capabilities, indeed our wisdom. Or not.

Our emphasis is thus very different to that of Desmond Morris. Homo sapiens really does have ‘the biggest brain of all the primates’, which contributes to us having the most powerful and most versatile wits of any species on the planet. (Scientific knowledge of animals, as of everything else, has moved on in 50 years. Zoologists now recognise over 600 species of primate rather than Morris’ 193.) The power and reach of that brain are exponentially extended — and modified — by a cornucopia of machines entwined with our desires and behaviours, rooted in a vast industrial infrastructure.

The relationship between brain size and intelligence is not at all straightforward. Crows, ravens, and some parrots have tiny brains, yet are very bright — for birds. Sperm whales have the largest brains of all, but are poor conversationalists and no good at chess. Brain size per body volume sounds like a fairer measure, but still fails to account for the key factors, for instance the number of neurons and the speed of their connections. Nevertheless, it is a simple fact that the average member of Homo sapiens has a much more powerful intelligence than the average member of any other life form on earth, ever. Moreover, the species has developed so that our collective intelligence, mediated and fertilised by multilateral communication, can be brought to bear on an astonishing range of issues. Purposeful cooperation of human brains has been essential from the earliest days, starting with hunting and gathering and protection against predators and poisonous plants, and moving on eventually to the efforts of the great universities and Wikipedia and medical science laboratories to know everything that can be known, cure every illness, improve every life.

There are several plausible theories that attempt to explain the nakedness of the ape. All of them involve a gradual loss of fur by the various species of hominin, our precursors in the millions of years before Homo sapiens emerged, then dominated the other human forms, then was alone. All also agree that mastery of fire, over many millennia, must have been vital. This early tool was, yes, a direct source of warmth, saving energy in the body’s central heating system, and, after the loss of fur, extending the range of habitable territories. But, crucially, the cooking of food is a kind of pre-digestion, outside the body. The same amount of foodstuff, scavenged or trapped, could be processed by a simpler stomach that used less energy. The body could expend the energy surplus on power for a larger brain, which was needed to understand shelters and garments and handaxes, all of which themselves augmented the powers of the burgeoning brain, and helped it to find energy to fuel a virtuous spiral of cognitive enhancement. A key divisor between the early humans and all their cousin mammals was the use of tools.

Although nakedness is a sexy motif for a book, arguably that intimate involvement with things we fashioned ourselves is our true visibly distinctive characteristic, beginning a long time before language. From the earliest days, we have driven other species to extinction, hunted them down, or grown crops where they used to graze. Out of 8.7 million different earthly species — all with a wide variety of body plans — only Homo sapiens had the ability to sculpt the entire planet by mastery of external objects. We have always created stuff to manufacture a world of artefacts and eventually remodel the whole of our habitat: from our own external surfaces, outwards to vineyards and pyramids and skyscrapers, and inwards to micro-processors, gene editing, and nano-fabrication.

In the past 70 years, there has been a sea change, a transformation. Immense factories and power stations, arterial motorways, and huge dwellings, all of which themselves impacted greatly on how a large proportion of the species led their daily lives, have been joined by electronic machine-based systems, which (to use terms loosely) talk to us and to each other. The digital ape exists in a torrent of information, and so do our devices. Sometimes the information is, or looks as if it is, one-way messages from other humans: films and radio stations for instance. Sometimes it is reciprocal between humans: voice calls, e-mails, and Facebook and other social media pages. Sometimes it is invisible silicon conversations, machine transacting with machine: managing drinking water reservoirs and the electricity grid, paying salaries and standing orders at the bank, automatically monitoring internet traffic, on the look-out for dissidents and criminals.

The broad consensus is that our last common ancestor with our great ape cousins lived around 7 million years ago. Our early human predecessors emerged about 4.5 million years ago, and began to use stone tools about a million years after that. The oldest date respectably speculated for when our predecessor Homo heidelbergensis may have developed a version of language, different to ours, is 600,000 years ago. Anatomically modern humans date from about a quarter of a million years ago. The development of our present form of language is usually placed at around 100,000 years ago. ‘We’ had arrived as a physical form, with voice boxes and brain configurations adapted for our wide range of speech noises. We had become recognisably us, although only roughly 50,000 years ago did we adopt many of the patterns of social behaviour integral to our present mode of humanity. Any way you look at it, millions of years of tool use by our forebears was the instrumental means by which the new sapient species, kitted out with the mind that could manipulate the instruments, came to dominate its habitat. In anatomical terms, we staked our survival on a body plan with opposable thumbs and a smaller stomach. Fire had been tamed and brought to bear on the raw materials outside the body, freeing up energy that allowed us to develop a brain able to understand and facilitate social activities and strategies.

This was a powerful feedback loop. As we have said, a slight surplus of food over everyday needs, won by small, hungry, smart-ish brains, could be burned into sufficient energy to develop larger, hungrier, smarter brains, and increase that surplus enough to sustain the energy needs of the larger brain. A big part of that loop, also, was that the larger brain of Homo sapiens could process the larger number of social relationships necessary to survive and thrive as Homo sapiens. Influential Oxford anthropologist and expert on primates Professor Robin Dunbar believes that the number of sustainable relationships for most humans approximates 150, as we will see. The smarter, socially adept ape could more cannily cooperate with bigger gangs, share more varied tasks, transfer new skills. Individuals could specialise. All of which served to make the grey matter more affordable, in the virtuous circle. And that further altered, reconstructed, the geography on which the ape depends, making it more fecund and more intricate.

Our habitat is not just the physical environment, in plain sight. It is, even more, what underpins it, the ubiquitous sophisticated patterns of relationships and mutually supportive networks, of supply of goods and services, of consumption and communication; the world economy that sustains 7.5 billion humans in complex societies. Different, smaller scale, versions of sophisticated economies have thrived for some thousands of years. Patently, that has always been intertwined with the capacity of individual brains, and their force in combination.

The basic format of the brain, the operating system, that has achieved so much is still the early model developed to suit the needs of a foraging, hunting animal in plains and forests and mountains. The brain is plastic, malleable by what it is used for, in the individual and across generations, a point we will dwell on. But the brain that, for the past few centuries, has run manufacturing industry and newspapers and sports leagues, is very much the same brain that worked out how to trap and skin a bear and use the results to survive a frozen winter. The latter, just to be clear, is a very difficult set of tasks, involving a high order of strategic and tactical nous, trust and teamwork; intimate knowledge of the behaviour patterns of another species; the ability not merely to fashion and wield weapons, but equally to devise specific knives to butcher the animal, and other tools again to fashion garments. A knowledge system transmitted and preserved via oral tradition, and via practical demonstration, memorised from previous practice. Few modern urban citizens could make a good fist of any phase of that, let alone of the whole process.

We do, however, now have a very different approach, socially, to all of our most difficult tasks. The modern ape has built itself intelligence accelerators, as it were, over millennia. Social arrangements and physical entities that make brains, working in harness, more effective. We constructed libraries and schools. We self-consciously built up organised systems of thought, and techniques outside of human bodies to convey and preserve knowledge. What the philosopher Karl Popper called ‘World 3’: the myths, works of art, scientific theories, birth certificates, and last season’s football scores, encoded on cave walls and scrolls and codex books. In the past 70 years or so there has been a further twist: the brain has been supercharged. The acceleration has been accelerated. We have permeated everyday life with the gargantuan progeny of a simple thought-experiment by Alan Turing: general-purpose thinking-machines which execute a very wide range of analytic, predictive, managerial, and social tasks on our behalf. And which are capable, in principle, of being reassigned to almost any other job that requires logic, memory, and number-crunching.

Think of the mobile phone, which began as a clever way of making voice calls without a wire, then added text and music capabilities, and radio and geo-location tricks, and a multiplicity of internet-enabled applications. The processing power in the handset and in the servers owned by the operating company was not invented to achieve one specific objective, not even to further a broad strategic idea of a telephone. It was the embodiment of a set of concepts developed independently of telephony, which could be endlessly engineered and re-engineered into machines in a multitude of arenas. And still can be, at least in principle, even in the device in your hand, if you feel like opening it up with a screwdriver or writing your own app. Most of us will in practice wait until the manufacturer offers a software update, or puts on sale a different attractively moulded and marketed gadget with new functions and greater capacity. There are always hundreds undergoing beta tests and a final polish in the factories.

Note the symmetry here to a distinctive characteristic of both the human brain and the human hand. We can turn our minds to, we can put our hands to, countless tasks. Hand and brain, like all our other major components, are adaptations, the composite of thousands of accidental mutations which made their bearers better suited to meet the challenges of their environments. Over many millennia, the costs of general capacity were substituted for the costs of specific ability. The old job was done in the new way, which allowed other jobs to be done too, at the same energy price. A large, chambered stomach was traded up for an open mind. The hand and arm in chimpanzees are shaped by the demands of tree climbing; in humans, their primary functions moved by incremental evolutionary steps to include wielding implements, initially probably throwing and clubbing. This first relationship that apes had to portable tools, the necessary precursor of all the rest, required anatomical redesign, from shoulder socket to thumb.

The consequence of the vast range of applications of general-purpose computation is that the earth now has a controlling mind composed jointly of human brains and the machines tasked by them to carry a big part of the intellectual load. The works of this coalition are widely and deeply embedded. As will scarcely have escaped the notice of the reader.

Nevertheless, in this book we spend some time on an elaboration of how the transformation wrought by the supercharged human brain now manifests itself, and how this will change over the coming century. The cumulative effect of what is now a super-fast and hyper-complex interconnected world of immensely powerful devices is, we believe, startling and disturbing.

Wonderment in the face of the imminent possibilities is naturally widespread and constant. Leave aside the supposedly factual news and often better grounded current affairs think-pieces, along the lines of ‘Will robots replace your job?’, or variations on ‘Our Automated Future’, the title of an excellent article by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. Artists in every medium, and the closely related entertainment industry, have in recent years vigorously renewed their long-term trope of exploring by exaggeration any new social trend or technical achievement. There have been a thousand varieties of the genre over a very long time. A central feature of the science fiction enjoyed by mainstream middle-of-the-road readers and viewers has always been close interplay between the newest technology and fantasy. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, mass market science fiction majored on extrapolations, to inter-planetary scale, of the rocketry and piloting devices, and life-support systems invented in the Second World War. In 1950, the intrepid young Belgian Tintin was the first human to step on to the moon. The spaceship he travelled in, the pressure suits he, Captain Haddock, and Snowy wore as they explored the surface, were close approximations in broad outline and principle, but only some of the detailed engineering, to those eventually used by Neil Armstrong 19 years later. Tintin’s rocket was a logical adaptation, to include a crew, of the V2 ballistic revenge missile which Hitler launched on London in 1944. Both the Nazi V2 and NASA’s Saturn V were blueprinted by the German engineer Werner von Braun. Therefore, in effect, so was Tintin’s moonshot, contrary to the claims of Professor Calculus.

Today, however, science fiction has to reflect the fact that we live in an age when science fact is stunning the observant citizen every day. An unprecedented outpouring of real-world invention has changed how we read books, go to college, hail taxis, book holidays, and have our groceries delivered. There have been seismic shifts in how humanity socialises. Although Minority Report, Westworld, Her, Ex Machina, and The Man in the High Castle are fantasy projections, they are also philosophical explorations of how we are about to live our lives, if we don’t already. They conceive of a world in which every surface glows and chatters with electronic information. And robots and machine operating systems care deeply about us, share friendship and hot lust with humans. And parallel universes overlap. And … Some things they describe may indeed be a short distance ahead of us. Digital apes certainly will soon share their lives with household and office machines capable of acting, if we wish, as our closest companions — gossiping, advising, consoling. Some things they describe surely aren’t near, or ever at all likely. Bridges to parallel worlds would transform the package tour industry, but don’t buy a hologram suitcase just yet.

What is true is that the digital ape enjoys a plethora of ways to augment any or all senses and capacities. We have ingested drugs since the first pre-historic forest-dweller chewed psychoactive mushrooms. Worn spectacles and ear trumpets for centuries. We can today opt for virtual reality headsets, pills to improve exam results, or the whole world’s memory via a wristwatch.

So a four-year-old girl in a developed country now faces a life in some ways very like that her parents and grandparents have lived, and in many ways radically different. The tragedy of mortality will not disappear in her time, although death for most will be postponed a little, perhaps quite a lot. (It has been much extended for even the poorer half of the world in the past 50 years, and that will continue.) The scope of her relationships, her understanding of her surroundings, the possibilities of her habitat, are already altered, and will continue to mutate. The digital ape, closely related to and just as wonderful as our ancestor primates in Plato’s Athens, or Galileo’s Florence, or Newton’s London, is a recently renewed animal. Our technology a million years ago was a central catalyst for our biology. Our biology ever since has been remaking our technology, and in the past few decades has crossed a watershed. The fundamental shift in our instruments transforms who we are, at this moment, and offers to transform what we are in the next phase of civilisation, as we further harness machines in vital everyday tasks and huge enterprises. We devote a lot of thought in early chapters, using examples from fact and fiction, to how the new world of machines and apes does and will operate.

We follow that with a quick conspectus of how modern brains work, and of the options to change the stuff of which we are made. Humans know today, as Darwin did not, how DNA stores complete information about a species within each individual, sufficient to build, and do running repairs on, that animal, and to replicate similar ones. The theory of genetics involves high order mathematics. Increasing our knowledge of the material biology of our psyche and our soma uses much supercharged brainpower and vast quantities of machine analysis. It has, however, already led to what (to the scientists involved) is a reasonably straightforward technique: CRISPR. Pronounced ‘crisper’, this stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. In plain English, it is a gene-editing tool. With it, a geneticist, and so potentially a medical doctor, can cut and paste any short strip of DNA, and thereby ‘correct’ any mutation with undesirable consequences for the individual, or the individual’s descendants. Also, at least in principle, to ‘improve’ any species. Fish, flesh, fowl, insect, ourselves, can all have their genetic operating systems modified, perhaps even upgraded. The digital ape finally has technology powerful enough to consciously, purposefully, edit our own biology.

This is only one marvellous and dangerous invention. We devote another chapter to the generally happy, if sometimes stormy, marriage between the ape and the robot. We portray social machines, like Wikipedia, in which lots of computer effort and lots of human effort combine to build an immensely powerful and useful force. And the Internet of Things: soon nearly every machine and gadget at home and abroad will have the capacity to independently communicate with others, generally at our command, but vulnerable to interference from third and fourth parties.

And, yes, robots will continue to change the world of work in the way that machines always have done. So far, the Luddites of the early nineteenth century have been wrong for 200 years and counting. Industrial and agricultural revolutions made obsolete the weaver and the tallyman, and quartered the number of shepherds needed to shear a herd of sheep. At the same time, these innovations always led overall to increases in production from the workforce, and capitalism, broadly, found that to survive it had to lavish much of the new wealth on the labourers themselves. There need to be enough customers to stand at the end of the manufacturing line and buy the product. The labourers therefore need to take home enough cash to buy what they make. At every juncture, fear and hope arise, often asymmetrically. As new technologies come to grips with industrial societies at the forefront of development, the fearful can see very clearly which long-established ways of life are under threat. The hopeful will have far less detail of the new social patterns that will emerge to replace the old ones. Much of the new world has yet to be invented. Those dark satanic mills will pay wages which will eventually enable the factory hands to afford unforeseeable novelties like driverless motor cars, cosmetic surgery, and Netflix from their unimaginably high wages. Machines expand economies by increasing the bounty of human labour, not by destroying it.

In parallel, the fundamental trend of western societies has always been to reduce the proportion of the population who are expected to work to support all the others. Increased wealth from industry eventually built schools and colleges, and allowed young people to stay in them until adulthood. Improved sanitation, food, and medicine, affordable on the back of industrial and agricultural growth, allowed old people to live decades after