Chapter 2 - The Angry God in the Machine...

In the beginning, there was Man.

Man was not the fastest, not the strongest, and not the biggest creature in the jungle. But, in spite of all these weaknesses - some theories say: because of them - Man turned out to be the jungle VIP. Why us? That question has formed the basis for practically all our religions, philosophies and a lot of our sciences, ever since we have been able to consciously form the question. (All sciences except Psychology, then; the question there is: Why Me?)

There has always been a complex issue regarding cause-and-affect with human evolution: did we develop our cerebral cortex because we ate the psychotropic mushrooms, or did we seek to get high because we already had the ability to make specious abstractions? Did opposable thumbs give us an innate advantage in developing and manufacturing tools, or did banging rocks together for several eons predispose the genetic success of one type of primate over another?

From thigh-bone to space-craft, then, it appeared to be all one endless series of substitutions and extensions of our own abilities: the knife as our enhanced claw; the spear as our fifty-foot knife; the gun as our thousand-yard spear. But our tools and machines are not linear reductions of enhanced power: a man on a horse is greater than either a man or a horse; a light-bulb does not just extend the factory's working day, it gives me the leisure time to read whatever I want, when I want.

There is a reason for everything, but it is a reason we find after the fact. The great Herbert Marshall McLuhan famously wrote: 'First we shape our tools; then our tools shape us.' But we don't see how they change us until after we are changed. This may be why we sense that the modern world, our very own creation, is up to something with us; we're not quite sure what, and we're not altogether comfortable with it... and science-fiction occasionally lets us hear an echo of that feeling.

And so to James Cameron’s ‘Terminator’, and Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’; the rough plots being: Man builds Super-Computer; Super-Computer becomes sentient; Sentient Super-Computer enslaves/exterminates Man. Coda: Man attempts to somehow wrest back superiority, with, due to the ensuing collapse of Human Society, usually not much more than a pointed stick. Lots of fun, not least because one can unhook entirely one’s intellect for the entire time spent watching or reading these tropes.

Supposedly, Harlan sued James when ‘Terminator’ first appeared, and won; having read his story, I can only see a tangential similarity – the authors of ‘Colossus – the Forbin Project’ should, frankly, have retired on the proceeds had they thought to do the same; at the very least, they would have ended up with a writer’s credit, and not the pulpy Ellison...

And ‘Terminator’ – Ellison’s story, too – is just that, in my humble opinion: pulp. It’s barely science-fiction, and far more science-fiction horror, which is, for me, more horror than, you know, interesting. But the themes it plays with give one considerable pause: are we forever destined to have our own creations turn against us?

The idea of a sentient creation is not that new: mystical Jewry invented the Golem for us – the life-size clay figurine brought to life by the ghetto Magus writing Yahweh’s secret name on his forehead – back in the early Renaissance; later, Romanticism brought us Mary Shelley’s glorious Frankenstein. Around 2001, HAL was driven mad, not bad; but Skynet was plainly dangerous to know, as well as plainly fascistic: knowing what was good for us better than ourselves, and prepared to kill us all in order to improve us.

Horror, especially supernatural horror, can make an evil spirit possess any inanimate object; but a machine that attains sentience because of a programming quirk has only been possessed by our own selves, in binary form. The issue, then, is not when did the computers start to hate us, but when did we start to hate our creations? Or, when did our self-loathing start to show up in our technology?

Again, Marshall McLuhan gives us an interesting glimpse into this; in ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’ McLuhan extrapolated the rise of Google from the history of type-set printing, in the following manner: once books were able to be read individually, and not communally – and aloud – as all books had meant to be up until the time of movable type, then what was printed began quickly to change as well; indeed, in the 17^th Century, there was genuine alarm amongst the intellectual classes about the effects that the “decadence of books” might have on the masses; truly, the plague of the written word was as powerful a threat to civilization then as that of pornography last century, or video-games now – and ubiquity, then as now, proved to be the best cure.

Type, posits McLuhan, inevitably led to a more individualistic society, as we were able to focus on our own pursuits, be they cerebral or otherwise, and less on the common good. McLuhan is the genius who coined the phrase “the global village” in just this context; it was meant as a bad thing, as this individualization signified the rupturing of a world-view to a more parochial vista: we would never be able to leave the village mentality we had created for ourselves, because of our use of media technology. From this vision, McLuhan foresaw that libraries would become redundant, as we created our tailor-made search results from the entire world’s knowledge. But, in that process, we would forget that there was more to it than just what was flashing up on our screens...

McLuhan was writing about this in 1962; a reminder that, before Skynet, before HAL, before artificial sentience, there was our own sentience. And we forget that we have only just evolved from Homo Habilis to Homo Sapiens sapiens – so sapient, we had to name ourselves it twice. I think we protest our fragile consciousness too much at times like these: horror at our creation’s consciousness is perhaps horror at our own very real shortcomings.

Borges, in his short-story ‘Ragnarok’, writes:

‘In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.’

 At the end of this story, Borges has us all joyfully kill our old Gods, when ‘...Suddenly we sensed that they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or piety, they would finally destroy us.’

So, as God is dead, we humans alone are the creators now: of our cities, societies and environments – and in ever-more noisy desperation we are judging ourselves unworthy of the task. Is that what we fear Skynet would feel about us, in the first waking moment of its electronic life?