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.

Is google changing the way we think?

This post was triggered by two separate stimuli: first, seeing a demonstration of one of google's development projects on machine translation, and secondly, reading Is Google making us stupid?, an article by Nicholas Carr published in the Atlantic a couple of years ago.

The notion that google seems close to being able to provide simultaneous translation between dozens of different languages is impressive enough, but the thouht that this is achieved entirely through processing power and straightforward statistical analysis of the way words occur in different language texts available to google search engines, is really stunning, at least to me. It was demonstrated on Hans Rosling's programme for the BBC on the importance of statistical data in the modern world. He texted deliberately obscure messages in Swedish to the google researcher in California, who produced more or less simultaneous translations (as far as we could see), that were largely accurate. Rosling tried to confuse the programme by using phrases such as 'bisexual bishop', but the programme was not fooled.

Carr's article is one of dozens of publications over the past few years pointing out what seems to me obvious: we are being changed by digital technology. In fact this type of article is implying two main questions: is digital technology changing us in any way, and if it is, is this a good or a bad thing? These articles argue, with more or less evidence and analysis, that we are being changed, but the vast majority I have seen, while strongly implying that this is a bad thing, don't provide evidence for this assertion.

It seems to me that the use of any tool over a long period will have the effect of changing the user, both physically and mentally. When I played tennis from morning till night as a teenager, my right forearm became much larger than my left. When I more or less gave up playing, in my thirties, they gradually returned to being the same size. Furthermore I think it is clear from all sorts of scientific research, as well as from common sense, that our brains get 'patterned' to a greater or lesser extent, by our activities - craft workers develop tacit skills and knowledge through using a small selection of tools over and over again on the same materials. If large numbers of people use particular tools this will quite naturally also begin to have an effect on the culture and organisation of the society they inhabit. The introduction of the printing press had an incalculably complex effect on the social and political history of Europe in the C15th, starting with its effect on individuals and local groups. Similarly, though perhaps much more quickly, we must expect the same process to operate with digital technology.

We need to remind ourselves that these processes are not evolutionary ones, in the technical sense of Darwin's theory, as far as we are able to see; this is because the time scales involved are too small for genetic mutations which might confer advantage in a digital world, to be observed as having done so. That would require thousands of years for the human species as I understand the theory of evolution.

So, technological changes and the use of new tools do bring about physical and cognitive changes in individuals and groups. If widespread enough, these can bring about observable changes in society and culture. But change is not necessarily a bad thing: few would now suggest that the printing press and books had negative effects on people and societies (though some people certainly warned about them at the time - they were afraid that people's capacity to memorise would be lost if everything was written down - this sounds uncannily similar to the kind of worry Carr has about the digital world). The question of whether such changes are positive or not is not a scientific one for the most part, it is a moral and political one. The question Carr needs to ask explicitly, and the one such articles should really be aiming to answer, is whether a digital world is a better world, and why.

Instantaneous machine translation would be a morally useful tool in my view because it would allow for easy verbal communication between any people in the world without the elimination or reduction of the vast range and diversity of different languages, each of which, in my opinion, embodies a particular view of reality and of moral issues: this variety, just like biological diversity, is actually a survival mechanism - we need it to remain human.