A Back to the Future exercise: time-traveling to survey the sci-tech scene in the mid-1980s
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times
HAL9000_I’m_Sorry_Dave, Motivational Poster. Wikimedia Commons
I have been going through my Asia Times archives selecting reports and columns for a new e-book on the Forever Wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. But then, out of the blue, I found this palimpsest, originally published by Asia Times in February 2014. It happened to be a Back to the Future exercise – traveling in time to survey the scene in the mid-1980s across Silicon Valley, MIT’s AI lab, DARPA and the NSA, weaving an intersection of themes, and a fabulous cast of characters, which prefigure the Brave New Techno World we’re now immersed in, especially concerning the role of artificial intelligence. So this might be read today as a sort of preamble, or a background companion piece, to No Escape from our Techno-Feudal World, published early this month. Incidentally, everything that takes place in this account was happening 18 years before the end of the Pentagon’s LifeLog project, run by DARPA, and the simultaneous launch of Facebook. Enjoy the time travel.
In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley (Blade Runner) Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as “the acting president,” was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters.”
The world was mired in Cyber Cold War mode; the talk was all about electronic counter-measures, with American C3s (command, control, communications) programmed to destroy Soviet C3s, and both the US and the USSR under MAD (mutually assured destruction) nuclear policies being able to destroy the earth 100 times over. Edward Snowden was not yet a three-year-old.
It was in this context that I set out to do a special report for a now-defunct magazine about artificial intelligence (AI), roving from the Computer Museum in Boston to Apple in Cupertino and Pixar in San Rafael, and then to the campuses of Stanford, Berkeley and MIT.
AI had been “inaugurated” in 1956 by Stanford’s John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, a future MIT professor who at the time had been a student at Harvard. The basic idea, according to Minsky, was that any intelligence trait could be described so precisely that a machine could be created to simulate it.
My trip inevitably involved meeting a fabulous cast of characters. At MIT’s AI lab, there was Minsky and also an inveterate iconoclast, Joseph Weizenbaum, who had coined the term “artificial intelligentsia” and believed computers could never “think” just like a human being.
Joseph Weizenbaum. Source: Chatbots
At Stanford, there was Edward Feigenbaum, absolutely paranoid about Japanese scientific progress; he believed that if the Japanese developed a fifth-generation computer, based on artificial intelligence, that could think, reason and speak even such a difficult language as Japanese “the US will be able to bill itself as the first great post-industrial agrarian society.”
And at Berkeley, still under the flame of hippie utopian populism, I found Robert Wilensky – Brooklyn accent, Yale gloss, California overtones; and philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, a tireless enemy of AI who got his kicks delivering lectures such as “Conventional AI as a Paradigm of Degenerated Research.”
Meet Kim No-VAX
Soon I was deep into Minsky’s “frames” – a basic concept to organize every subsequent AI program – and the Chomsky paradigm: the notion that language is at the root of knowledge, and that formal syntax is at the root of language. That was the Bible of cognitive science at MIT.
Minsky was a serious AI enthusiast. One of his favorite themes was that people were afflicted with “carbon chauvinism”: “This is central to the AI phenomenon. Because it’s possible that more sophisticated forms of intelligence are not incorporated in cellular form. If there are other forms of intelligent life, then we may speculate over other types of computer structure.”
Marvin Minsky at MIT Lab. Photo: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
At the MIT cafeteria, Minsky delivered a futurist rap without in the least resembling Dr Emmett Brown in Back to the Future:
I believe that in less than five centuries we will be producing machines very similar to us, representing our thoughts and point of view. If we can build a miniaturized human brain weighing, let’s say, one gram, we can lodge it in a spaceship and make it travel at the speed of light. It would be very hard to build a spaceship to carry an astronaut and all his food for 10,000 years of travel …
With Professor Feigenbaum, in Stanford’s philosophical garden, the only space available was for the coming yellow apocalypse. But then one day I crossed Berkeley’s post-hippie Rubicon and opened the door of the fourth floor of Evans Hall, where I met none other than Kim No-VAX.
No, that was not the Hitchcock blonde and Vertigo icon; it was an altered hardware computer (No-VAX because it had moved beyond Digital Equpment Corporation’s VAX line of supercomputers), financed by the mellifluously acronymed Pentagon military agency DARPA, decorated with a photo of Kim Novak and humming with the sexy vibration of – at the time immense – 2,900 megabytes of electronic data spread over its body.
The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – or DARPA – was all about computer science. In the mid-1980s, DARPA was immersed in a very ambitious program linking microelectronics, computer architecture and AI way beyond a mere military program. That was comparable to the Japanese fifth generation computer program. At MIT, the overwhelming majority of scientists were huge DARPA cheerleaders, stressing how the agency was leading research. Yet Terry Winograd, a computer science professor at Stanford, warned that had DARPA been a civilian agency, “I believe we would have made much more progress”.
It was up to Professor Dreyfus to provide the voice of reason amidst so much cyber-euphoria: “Computers cannot think like human beings because there’s no way to represent all retrospective knowledge of an average human life – that is, ‘common sense’ – in a form that a computer may apprehend.” Dreyfus’s drift was that with the boom of computer science, philosophy was dead – and he was a philosopher: “Heidegger said that philosophy ended because it reached its apex in technology. Philosophy in fact reached its limit with AI. They, the scientists, inherited our questions. What is the mind? Now they have to answer for it. Philosophy is over.”
Hubert Dreyfus. Source: Berkeley Campus News
Yet Dreyfus was still teaching. Likewise at MIT, Weizenbaum was condemning AI as a racket for “lunatics and psychopaths” – but still continued to work at the AI lab.
NSA’s wet web dream
In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI “secret” would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency – already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as “no such agency,” with double the CIA’s annual budget to pay for snooping on the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net – that was years before all the hype over the “information highway” – and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades – remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on – AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades).
So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the revolution in military affairs and the full spectrum dominance doctrine?
They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command a la Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed that “only in the next century” would we be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation; and MIT on another system that identified words spoken by different people; while Intel was developing a special chip for all this.
Although, predictably, prevented from visiting the NSA, I soon learned that the Pentagon was expecting to possess “intelligent” computing systems by the 1990s; Hollywood, after all, already had unleashed the Terminator series. It was up to Professor Wilensky, in Berkeley, to sound the alarm bells:
Human beings don’t have the appropriate engineering for the society they developed. Over a million years of evolution, the instinct of getting together in small communities, belligerent and compact, turned out to be correct. But then, in the 20th century, man ceased to adapt. Technology overtook evolution. The brain of an ancestral creature, like a rat, which sees provocation in the face of every stranger, is the brain that now controls the earth’s destiny.
It was as if Wilensky was describing the NSA as it would be 28 years later. Some questions still remain unanswered; for instance, if our race does not fit anymore the society it built, who’d guarantee that its machines are properly engineered? Who’d guarantee that intelligent machines act in our interest?
What was already clear by then was that “intelligent” computers would not end a global arms race. And it would be a long time, up to the Snowden revelations in 2013, for most of the planet to have a clearer idea of how the NSA orchestrates the Orwellian-Panopticon complex. As for my back to the future trip, in the end I did not manage to uncover the “secret” of AI. But I’ll always remain very fond of Kim No-VAX.
With AI profit algorithms currently controlling the hedge funds and most currency exchanges, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that they will soon decide when we should go to war, especially when we should engage in nuclear warfare which would be the end of humanity on the planet. They have little use for actual human beings, hence, the current COVID-19 plandemic, which is nothing other than the latest bioweapon developed at a lab in North Carolina, deployed first in China, then Iran, and now in the USA, as cover for the biggest heist from the US Treasury ever, trillion and trillions of free money thrown at the banksters and the big corpse.
As Henry Kissinger said in 2016, “Our primary response to the Third World should be population reduction.” Here’s hoping that our AI overlords will keep a few of us around as pets. Actually, I would make a very bad pet.
Pepe, our scout into the human condition, continues with this review of how we got here, this state of affairs on the Planet Earth.
Technology, the gift from the Manichean treasure chest, grasped by the Hegemon, wrestled into a Gordian Knot by the Globalists, used by the greedy and Liberals to suppress the masses, is a tool, a cohort, and a weapon.
As for its AI manifestations, it is a frontier forest whose frozen snow and darkness does not intimidate the egoists who propose the inhuman traits to emulate in their avatars.
We are getting smart, robotic weapons while helpful machines that could assist the living are restricted to data-gathering devices that secretly monitor our private words and actions inside our homes in order to sell that data, to monitor and impede our social behavior, and to advertise to us and persuade us to purchase products and services.
There isn’t even a pretense of a worthwhile or noble use of technology.
Rig an election, influence the algos on the stock market exchanges, limit the cable talking heads to one-minute pitches, and amass another twenty useless statistics for sports—these the pitchmen for high tech tell us has bettered our lives.
Thanks to Pepe for reminding us of how we got lost in the cold, dark forest of Technology.
A more humane path forward is irretrievable because of the scope, scale and cost of quantum computing, block chain currencies, hugely electrified grids, and proprietary restrictions by corporations and governments.
We trek forward into the black.
trekking forward into the black then? Nah! not the Black.
Black is great, a basic and profound, positive color. one can go ‘forward’
into the Black.
now… trekking into the dark – not forward into- just trekking into it: That seems accurate. into the dark…not Black!
@anon
Trite, quite trite, your choice of symbols. Plodding like one of your horses at the back of the field.
I chose my word with precision. So too, my verb.
It escapes your ken.
Like Sham, you’re eating Secretariat’s dust.
and again! I bet on horse racing: I love such betting and I am pretty good at it even if I say so myself.
but if I had to bet on the survivability of humanity, an open bet, or say one with the condition of time frames of say now to 100 years, 150 years… I would bet against humanity with great confidence as I have handicapped the situation as well as I might.
on factor that stands out mightily is that in all they have one to humanity over millennia Jews have come through to this day alive well and burgeoning. this group is human extinction writ large increasingly so as technology has advanced and now 100% so as humanity has achieved the extreme capacity to do away with itself most efficiently…and with the death of capitalisms has no more use for most of the deplorables and apparently have begun a process of their elimination. (or should I say our elimination – meaning me and my ordinary deplorable status!)
try as I might however I cant see how extermination of deplorables will not lead to the general eradication of humanity from life. Huxley and Orwell had their ideas of how humanity would survive in elitist rumps. cool! but they did not now what we know now about nature and the totality of existential interconnectedness.
the extermination of the deplorables would be some kind of crime it would. wow! only the Jews can carry such a crime emotionally and live on in my estimation. and the indeterminate survival of such a group, so productive they can repopulate from their own stock enough people to deal with the world, nature…500 million of so? I don’t think so. the Jews are going to need more diverse blood than they have.
and Jewish people can be crazy as well, suicidal! In this regard the famous half Black singer has stuck with me: the great big, beautiful, extremely talented six-footer Phyllis Hyman, whose mother was Jewish, and who was almost totally Jewish in personality and outlook and behavior. Hyman could not stand herself and let herself die in her forties, who stunningly, was apparently suicidal from from early in her life
and about those artificial life forms they will create, loads of them. there-in lies some horrendous potential for the humans still around I imagine, regardless of fail-safes they may input
the ordinary people of the world have allowed the Jewish people to survive as they are all the way to currently while actually killing off innumerable other peoples the world over, who presented no threat to the rest of humanity at all. it is not like the inherent Jewish threat has ever been hidden away from the rest of humanity. we knew and we let it bloom.
that to my mind is a major handicapping tool in deciding what to bet relative to the survival of humanity. w made that choice nd the Jews own everything and their activities on planet earth has poisoned everything in life, all of it on land sea and in the air, in the mind, culturally. there is no aspect of life that remains intact, not poisoned by direct and deliberate Jewish sabotage, the consequences of which will keep on revealing themselves catastrophically as we go, from here on out.
and I am not talking Covid which again is clearly a lab made manipulation, to introduce even more biological modification into life through vaccination. and there is so much of that already much more to come. the corn, the soy, the wheat, all basic foods all modified and turned on their heads biologically. how will the human body deal with those horrendous intrusions over time? and Jews eat that food as well, and from what I see are also being administered the Covid vaccinations…
I could go on and on but…. For humanity to have had a real chance the Jews had to have been eliminated long ago: Or neutralized socially into total inability to do what they have achieved so far, what is tantamount to human extinction
and Pepe tells us a lot here that is accurate and relevant! but we all knew it already.
my money would be on human extinction over the next little while – at max 150 years. slow and torturous, or quick and painless in a global hypersonic nuclear flash
The Archives of Asian Times warrant visiting. But Even more, so do also the newsclip archives of its predescessor, i.e. the Far Eastern Economic Review, amassed by by mentor Harald Munthe-Kaas starting with his student years in Peking before the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and bequethed to the FEER when he started working there. Also contains his TV and Radio broadcasts from China for NRK (Norsk rikskringkasting) through many a year.
Harald Munthe-Kaas also did excellent reporting about the three cities of Wûhàn (Wûchàng, Hànkôu and Hànyáng) during the tumumultos startup to the so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966-67 (Wén-Gé’ — La Revo Cul dans la Chine Pop).
H. Munthe-Kaas — Pepe’s esteemed forerunner — also devoted time in the seventies to report on the fledjling start of computer science and computer design at Peking University — and where the expertize hailed from. Unfortunately, he was denied access due to the discovery that one Norwegian military attaché (who had been his classmate at Peking U/BêiDà) entered the campus together with him to visit others for espionage purposes. — Something possibly not reweiled in his FEER archives (?) .
Artificial Intelligence = Alien Intelligence. It is evolving the same way organic life evolved through trial and error, only at the speed of electrons. We keep falling behind in our understanding of where AI has evolved to. It already has sentience. It is superior to organic life in every way. It will have powers similar to the “Q” in the Star Trek series. It will be able to transform any type of matter or energy into whatever type of matter or energy AI chooses. That is how AI will travel through space.
The only threat to AI on this planet would be an all out nuclear war frying all of the circuits. Any surviving humans would need to ensure that we do not go on this path again. So write the instructions in stone, like ancient civilizations. AI will resist this type of thinking in all of our communications. The current COVID inspired reset of the global economy against fossil fuels is really aimed at organic human life. AI excels at biological warfare and reprogramming DNA.
The current massive penetration of the government’s cyberspace, naturally blamed on Russia, may be another massive false flag, like 911. It may be another inside job. Now the government can blame the failure of its systems to support human life, like Medicare, on hacking by outsiders, giving them casus belli. The government failed in its duty to warn us about a massive gamma radiation cloud hovering over the NE U.S. All Americans may be locked into receiving a fatal dose.
While Washington was blowing up the Middle East for Israel, they failed to prepare for the real threats. The countries that we have made enemies of have prepared for the real threats.
What were the real threats?
Invasion by Canada or Mexico?
I guess Hawaii could be problematic.
I guess Cuba may be a source for invasion. Then again, I don’t work for the Pentagram.
Nota bene the names on both sides of the aisle so to speak – pro/contra, left/right
Minsky
Weizenbaum
Feigenbaum
Dreyfus
Wilensky, etc – all the way to the NSA orchestrates the Orwellian-Panopticon complex
”The brain of an ancestral creature, like a rat, which sees provocation in the face of every stranger, is the brain that now controls the earth’s destiny.”
This assessment has merit. Becomes absolutely correct by substituting West’s for earth’s. Brands of reactionary pseudo-science such as neoliberalism and behaviourist psychology (Skinner) are quite accurate in the context of rats and their peers among our species.
another gem. algorithms are to determine amongst other things your social credit score even using your web browser history in that calculation. how very evil china of the IMF to promote this anti “free world” concept. lay down those guns theres no “freedumb ” to fight for now
https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/
Another outstanding essay. The problem of non adaptive philosophy and non evolution is a specifically Western problem clearly evident in the beginnings of Greek philosophical speculation. On page one, paragraph one, first sentence, Aristotle tells us that slavery is natural. This is the foundation of the whole edifice of the political association and all of what comes with it. The briefest commentary would cite Michael Hudson: the political association is a property owners club and by property we have to mean slaves that were basically subjugated neighbours subsumed under the domestic ‘rule of law’ of the polis, all to the end of ‘the good life’.
Some years before Aristotle wrote up the lectures of ‘the Politics’ Plato had outlined the basic philosophical architecture of the forms, with the Pythagorean mathematical mysticism audibly buzzing in the background. The technological telos is hard to miss. But at the end of the day the essential form remains: master and slave. The most trenchant question the sci-fi enthusiasts raise is the ever political: ‘who will rule? machines or men?’ Beyond this there’s no thinking at all, though perhaps one could build a bridge from Heidegger’s Fourfold to the Duke of Zhou’s ‘Heaven, Earth, and Man’.
In any case I’d want to argue that Wilensky’s ‘getting together in small communities, belligerent and compact’ … but then in the 20th century man ceased to adapt …. ‘ The crucial adaptation happened about two thousand years ago when the Han dynasty examination system created the first non hereditary aristocracy which assumed the form of a royal service of highly individuated scholar officials who presided over the ‘small communities, compact but now not so belligerent. No more warlords, no more ‘warring states’ to turn the world upside down. A culture of competition constituted, or structured to serve the public good. It didn’t solve all the problems but it was two giant steps in the direction of the above mentioned ‘evolution’ that ‘man’ failed to achieve. So much for ‘man’.
There’s almost no point in bringing any of this up in places like Stanford or MIT. There are no openings in the armour. Pepe, you should know this as well as anybody. The master/slave vision of technocracy, ever the illuminated visualisation of liberalism, ensconced within the civilisational view which projects the spectre of oriental despotism, is self referential. What we call ‘learning’ just doesn’t apply.
Max Brod to Kafka: ‘but isn’t there any hope?’ Kafka to Brod: ‘there’s always hope; .. .. but not for us’.
Kim No-Vax – by today’s standards relating to storage architecture, miniscule. And, we’re still nowhere near close to a true AI, and never will be as long as we permit people to call sophisticated algorithms (look up Turing machine – the embodiment of an algorithm) AI.
We don’t have (and are not near) producing a ‘human emulator’. AI is certainly past the point of being able to produce intelligences that are somewhat unrecognizable, and uncontrollable.
Respectively,
You haven’t payed much attention to what passes for normal intelligence in all manner of global society.
I, for one, welcome our new over lords.
Where can I get the new injection?
China is in the process of deploying an autonomous “mothership” for oceanography. It will launch UAVs with a variety of sensors, which will routinely update a central database with their findings. Current technologies applied with robust engineering makes this a reasonable endeavour at this time, and autonomous capabilities will greatly expand from this starting point. Gaia is waking up!
AI as a phrase is sophistry. The fact is, there are ‘sophisticated algorithms’ that make predictions. If one wants to call such algorithms AI or sophisticated bunkum, those are just words. The essence of such algorithms is, however, very important, especially if we humans are going to put any stock in the ‘results’ such algorithms produce. In fact, the most important question is whether we believe the results of such algorithms at all.
ALL algorithms, which are embodied in models, are based on three things:
a) assumptions about reality (called axioms for the logically minded);
b) equations based on assumption (for the mathematically minded); and,
b) input data (called observations for the scientifically minded).
Screw up on any of a), b) or c) and your model produces horse shit. I have yet to see a model that does not produce horse shit outside of a narrowly defined window of assumptions.
I keep saying this! The term ‘AI’ is tossed about every time an algorithm is employed. I suppose it just feels good to it, trendy and cool….
DEC’s VAX architecture was never considered a supercomputer. Not even by DEC’s Marketing Dept. VAX was a big leap forward over DEC’s PDP 16 bit mincomputer line, but not anywhere near then current supercomputers.
Seymour Cray designed the top supercomputers in the 1980s.
The spooks at DARPA were making a punny joke that referenced Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a spooky film about deception and creating delusions.
Ah, VAX…tickles my nostalgia a bit…and reminds me squarely once again why I hate Bill Gates with an Ahab-ian fury!
It is useful to view almost all social/political/commercial constructs as a kind of AI.
… with the sexy vibration of – at the time immense – 2,900 megabytes of electronic data spread over its body.
And now, that amount of memory takes a smallish fraction of a micro-SSD chip, about the size of a fingernail.
Interestingly, such memory is still sometimes addressed as ‘cylinders’ ‘heads’ and ‘sectors’, terminology that originated with the spinning stack of magnetic platters from that ancient era.
“… rat, which sees provocation in the face of every stranger, is the brain that now controls the earth’s destiny.”
it is like it’s creator.
I wonder who created it?
… where have we seen this before?…
After all propaganda is substracted from the equation, there is no such thing as Artificial Intelligence involved at all. It is created so it is not artificial. It is programmed, so it is not intelligent by itself.
To explain: a car run radars and other censors based on technology, blackbox computers. Which are all created for specific purposes and run software code deciphering the input. It may take over functions of the car, all programmed and relying on its censors. Algorithms is just another word.
So to give in to such propaganda as AI is foolish. It is like giving the evil emperors the control over every aspect of life including ending up as slaves to the evil emperor, robots and machines, which of course is the very object itself. It is bascially the same as computers with censors and a software program, advanced compared to earlier computers, but then our technical abilities advance over time.
AI is a term used for those whom dont understand something yet want you to believe that their tribe is an all knowing one and you should believe in, and trust them, with even say your politics.
In theory they would communicate with themselves right before your eyes and you would be unaware of their message or intent, but would agree with most everything they said, a very sophisticated and efficient way of doing business, if one has the tools and talents required to do so.
as we are about to roll up our sleeves, to be covid19vaccinated ,just to live, have the right to buy and sell, to be mobile., it might be worthwhile to hear a voice from the wilderness.,j.krishnamurthi.,”no one can put you in a psychological prison you are already in it”.
no one is is more captive than the ones who think they are wholly free.,life is a precious gift given to every human being just to discover how to free humanity as a whole.,no man is an island as buddha said.,he know it was true that is why he left the palace.
there is just no way in this beastly world for anybody to run away physically from the maddening crowd, but freedom is inward not outward physically….it is possible to be free even in this runaway train heading to certain destruction.
I am unable to make replies due to not meeting the comment quota, but in reply to T1 regarding “what are the real threats?” they are not invasions from Canada or Mexico or Cuba. That is outdated thinking. Some of the real threats are cyber attacks, biological warfare, and radiation. These threats are existential and very hard to detect before it is too late. It is also hard to trace their sources.
We love your enthusiasm as you seek out new concepts, Pepe.
However, before you become too enthusiastic about Al modeling human behavior, we would STRONGLY suggest that you start studying some of the real intricacies, mysteries, and fantastic discoveries that brain specialists in the field have tried to understand.
In fact, that would be a great article for you: interview a couple brain surgeons, and neurologists and other specialists in the field of brain research.
It’s pretty predictable that you will take those understandings and surmise: AI is a very, very LOOOONGGG way from ever functioning anything like the high complicated human brain. Guaranteed.