No Man is an Iland....

 

‘No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;  if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were;  any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ (Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1624)

Iron and Nickel

 

Recently I re-read two 'stories', Iron and Nickel, from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table – I can’t remember how long ago it was that I last read this book – I didn’t have a clear recollection of either story, so I must have read them too quickly.  The book was a very early edition given to me by a house-mate in about 1983.  Both stories in different ways are absolutely wonderful, essential reading for everyone, as Saul Bellow says on the cover.  Nickel is interesting but Iron is both moving and inspiring. The two stories, in different ways, bear on my focus of interest these days, about practice being the point of interaction between humans and the world, and the (for Levi, always moral) implications of this for the way we understand what happens to us, what we decide to do, and how we make the best of things.  The name Nickel comes from the German for ‘little devil’…. – this section reminds me of an powerful episode in the amazing tour de force historical novel by Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver, an episode which takes place in the silver mines of Germany at the dawn of the modern age, and that the word dollar comes from thaler, one of the early modern currencies, that name deriving from the German word for valley (thal).

The Invincible: Lem's tale of one possible process of technological evolution

 

I have just re-read The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem, one of the finest ‘hard’ sci-fi novellas I know, absolutely as good as his other much better-known story, Solaris.  It was written in the early 1960s, and is structured as either a detective story or, if you prefer, a report of a scientific investigation concerning the unexplained loss of a spaceship and all its crew on a deserted planet.  It’s told from the perspective of the commanders and crew of a second space ship, called The Invincible, similar to the first, which has been sent to investigate the disappearance.  It reads as halfway between a scientific report and a regular novel, very characteristic of one of Lem’s many different writing styles – sober, concerned primarily with factual occurrences, though also recording emotions in so far as these indicate the strangeness of the circumstances – the style ofTthe Invincible is almost identical to that of Solaris, and some of his Pirx the Pilot stories – Lem was after all a trained and sophisticated scientist.    

As the story unfolds Lem gradually introduces the amazing idea of a process of competitive machine evolution carrying on for millions of years, with no human or other sentient involvement whatsoever, hypothesising that if the initial conditions are right, then the outcome of that evolutionary struggle would be the simplest and smallest kind of ‘device’, powered by the most widely available source of energy (solar power), but having the capability to join together with millions of identical others to form enormous ensembles, able to generate gigantic magnetic field gradients which enable them to ‘fly’ and to attack and disable other machines, which it recognises through their electrical activity.  Over time the remnants of their original programming become a kind of radically simplified group memory, including how to disable different types of potential competitor – and this includes sentient beings too – there are no animals or plants on the land areas of the planet, but there are in the sea, though these flee quickly if they detect any movement on land.  The crew’s investigations lead to some of them being completely disabled by being subjected to massive magnetic field gradients, which wipe their consciousness, effectively reducing them to the state of babies, behaving completely anarchically and unable to look after themselves – and this is what has befallen the previous crew.  Lem’s idea is that this form of ‘device’ might have evolved through millions of years of struggle for resources and power between different types of machines left behind on the planet by sentient beings, the key thing being that in this struggle and in the conditions pertaining on this planet, it wasn’t superior consciousness that won out, but simplicity, small size and flexibility.  And he keeps reminding us that this process could take place in the complete absence of what the singularity merchants would call ‘consciousness’.  The original machines that started the process were programmed to find resources and to protect themselves, whatever their other functions, and if necessary by competing with other machines: this programming was the driver for the evolutionary process the human scientists on the Invincible eventually hypothesise, before leaving the planet having recognised that the only way to ‘manage’ the situation would be to destroy all, or nearly all the tiny ‘machines’, which would effectively mean destroying the planet.  

Very interesting in the context of discussions and debates about the future direction of AI in the real world, and of the MSc module I'm teaching this term on AI, Work and Learning, about the developing social impacts of AI on workplaces, with my colleague David Guile. It’s impressive how absolutely topical the theme of this story is, written over half a century ago, but how in one respect at least it is of its time and its specific place in Iron-Curtain Europe – there are no women in the story, and no women are even mentioned.  At least the US film version of Solaris made some of the crew women, and one of them black.  Furthermore, Lem’s space ‘workers’ –always hyper-professional and always proceed according to protocols as far as they can – are Eastern-block explorer-scientists, apparently culturally neutral, egalitarian and non-competitive compared to their western counterparts, but as far as I can remember (I’ve been reading and collecting his stuff ever since seeing the Russian film of Solaris while I was at university in the early 70s), absolutely always male.

An interesting attempt to imagine the tiny 'robotic' devices encountered by Horpach, Rohan and their colleagues on Regis 111 - but they look much bigger than I imagine them.  There are hints on the web of an animated film of The Invincible being in the pipeline, but nothing definite that I can find.