Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Erik Aru
This interview appeared in October 2011 in the Estonian print magazine HEI: Hea Eesti Idee, an EU publication known as “Estonia’s biggest innovation magazine.”
Alan N. Shapiro, a speaker at Tallinn’s Plektrum Festival, talks about how to think about the future, why artificial intelligence research is going nowhere, and how he plans to change the world with his technology firm.
Erik Aru: You’ve been called many different names – futurologist, social scientist, etc. How do you yourself define what you’re doing?
Alan N. Shapiro: I think that my main project is to invent a new computer science because I believe that many artists and scholars working in media studies, and new media art, and cyberculture studies – they are critical of the mainstream way of thinking about technology and I’m also critical. But they are not transforming informatics at the most fundamental level and that is what I’m trying to do – to change informatics at the most basic level of the science of computing, the way that software is written and the way that we think about automation. Because I think the information society has become very totalitarian in a way, surveillance and gathering information is like George Orwell’s 1984.
Computer science was invented as an engineering discipline. I believe that the true computer science which is still to come in the future is to include art and humanities fields, languages, sociology, philosophies, art. It must become interdisciplinary and then it will be real computer science. See, I am a software developer but I don’t want to be just an engineer. I want to create software that is like writing a novel, that is something creative.
Erik Aru: Do you have a certain kind of a point of departure when thinking about the future?
Alan N. Shapiro: What is very important to me is to look at science fiction – movies, television, stories. For example, the car industry is spending a lot of money to create the car of the future. But everyone in the world working on the car of the future focuses only on one aspect of the car, which is the fuel. What is going to replace the gas? Is it going to be solar energy, electric, hybrid energy, compressed air? Why do they only think about this one aspect of the car? Because they lack imagination, because they are trained in this university system which separates reality and fiction, reality and imagination, so they only think in a very mechanical engineering way.
I ask things like why we don’t turn the car on its side and make a vertical car and make streets narrower? Why, when we look out of the windows of the car, do we look at so-called reality? We could make the windows into video screens and have a three-dimensional virtual reality experience and the car can become a new game platform where you go on a virtual drive in the Swiss Alps or Las Vegas, the Arizona desert, driving on the Moon. The same thing when I’m thinking about robots.
Honda is making this Asimo robot. They have done a great job in this one area – this Asimo robot, it can walk very well, and it can almost run. So, mechanical engineering, they only focus on that. But there are many, many other aspects about robots and androids. For example, the body flexibility – if you want to have really flexible movement, study the movement of dancers and athletes. The robot should have emotions and feelings and not only rational thinking.
When I design the shopping mall of the future, department stores of the future, museums of the future, libraries of the future – these are all projects that I’ve worked on – I’m going outside of the box. I’m studying lots of science fiction, especially Star Trek has been important to me, there’s so many ideas in there. My favorite science fiction writer is Philip K. Dick. You can see great ideas in this fiction.
I want to create a radical technology company that is going to make more advanced software and really make artificial intelligence and also make futuristic design, so it will in a way be better than science fiction, it will try to bring fiction and reality together, which is what we are missing. We have a binary opposition or dualism between reality which is supposedly very serious and this is related to economics and engineering.
Erik Aru: Once you said in an article that everything you know you learned from Star Trek or Jean Baudrillard.
Alan N. Shapiro: That was at the beginning of my career. I think that Jean Baudrillard is the most important and rigorous thinker of his generation, because the other so-called postmodernist thinkers, they politicized philosophy, but they did not really study the social world that we live in. So they were very abstract and Baudrillard was the only one who studied consumer culture, television, media. But Baudrillard to me is in a way too conservative.
Star Trek is very important. I’ve started to write a book about another TV series called The Prisoner.
Erik Aru: The British 1960s series?
Alan N. Shapiro: Yes. Which I think was the best series ever. There were only 17 episodes made and Patrick McGoohan – he wrote it, he directed it, he starred as the main character. It’s exactly about the information society of today and it’s a great way to explain Orwell and Foucault and Baudrillard and McLuhan. It thought out a new form of totalitarianism, in the global village, in the information society, in Facebook, in the security state after September 11, 2001 – it’s all about that. And I think that we are faced with a new totalitarian system. I’m not only negative about technology, I’m also an enthusiast about technology. But right now it is going in a very totalitarian direction, so I think it is a good idea to publish a book about The Prisoner as a way of talking about it.
I think in my book on Star Trek I discovered a way of writing a kind of media sociology. There were about 500 people who read my book and said this is really fantastic, but from academia, from media studies as taught in universities, they couldn’t understand my book. It is actually a book about media theory and social theory, it’s a very serious book. But it’s a book about Star Trek, you see? I’m a critic of universities and I’m a critic of the existing classification system of knowledge, the way that knowledge is divided in universities – philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, science, management, design, art, linguistics, etc. This entire system is obsolete. And in a way with my Star Trek book I made a proof, I made a demonstration of that because in academia they assume that the title of the book corresponds to the subject of the book. And if I say it’s a book about Star Trek, to them it must be something stupid, a superficial hagiography, because Star Trek is too popular to be taken seriously by academia, you see. But it’s really a book about social theory and cultural theory, but I don’t call it that, and they don’t know how to deal with that. That’s too ironic for them. And irony is taught in literature which they don’t know anything about because it belongs to a different department.
Erik Aru: You already mentioned artificial intelligence (AI). So you think that AI is possible?
Alan N. Shapiro: Ok, let’s define AI. I will define it as the idea that software can achieve an autonomous intelligence, that software can have original thoughts, creative thoughts, something can happen which is not programmed in. In existing software, even in computer games, there are no surprises.
AI is a dream and a project since the 1960s. Someone I know who works at MIT told me that Marvin Minsky, who is a very famous computer scientist, said at a meeting: “Everything we have done is wrong. Our approach, the assumptions of all the different teams working towards making a breakthrough in AI, are all wrong and we have to start from scratch.”
I agree with that statement that we need to start from scratch. In the philosophy of science one of the most important books ever is called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. He says science proceeds in paradigms. Most scientists are working within normal science and they are following a paradigm that was established by someone in the beginning of an era that lasts 100 years or 50 years. The only way to have the breakthrough in AI they are dreaming about is to have a paradigm shift. The reason all AI projects have failed is that they all work within the paradigm of computer science as an engineering discipline. We need a revolution in computer science.
I can speak about it in two different levels. I can speak about it at an intellectual level and that involves bringing philosophy, art and literature and linguistics into the writing of code. That’s a very abstract statement. On another level I can say that I actually have the code, I actually have friends that I’m working with, and they have written code which is a kind of AI. And it’s actually coming from industry computer science and not academic computer science, because the object-oriented paradigm – there actually was a paradigm shift in computer science about 25 years ago when it shifted from procedural programming to object-oriented programming, but university professors never look at that because it’s happening in the business world. The object-oriented way of programming software is already halfway the breakthrough that we need in AI – software objects that are free from the control of the programmer. This is what you see in the French philosophy that I’m very interested in. Thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard, basically they are making a critique of Rene Descartes, who developed the Cartesian method that is subject centered. And what the French postmodern philosophy is all about is that there’s something wrong with the subject being in control of the world. That’s why nature is being destroyed, that’s why men think they’re superior to women, that’s why humans think they’re superior to animals, that’s why Europe and America think they’re superior to the Third World and that’s why we took Africans as slaves and destroyed Native American cultures – because of this arrogance of the subject.
In computer programming it’s exactly that. The way that Alan Turing invented programming in 1936 – I admire him, but his paradigm in programming the computer is total domination by the subject. The computer programmer is issuing a series of commands to the computer that is treated as a dead object, like a machine, like a thing. So we have a total dualism of subject and object, the programmer is the boss, and the software is the slave or the worker. I am making a complete new design in software and that is power to the object. The software objects must be in control of themselves, without the programmer. That is then the direct way to autonomous software.
Another way to think about it is the quantum computer. The approach by computer scientists to quantum computing is also wrong, in my opinion, because they are focused on the hardware, they focus only on speed, increasing the processing power. That is completely wrong because the real revolution must be in the software. Software is also cultural, related to the human being and society.
There’s another aspect of revolutionizing IT. IT is about automation. We are automating the world. We are using IT to automate everything. Unfortunately every book written on automation is either for or against. I think that automation is half-good and half-bad. To say now we have to automate everything – well, that’s stupid. I believe it’s very important now to bring back the human subject to IT systems. Take for example, software for museums. We need to have a human expert who knows about art, who knows about objects in this particular museum and no automated system is going to replace the knowledge of the human expert. It might be possible in 50 years, but we need to have human knowledge, we need to have human decision making.
There is a difference between information and knowledge. The internet and all the databases have made the proliferation of information and this is no real knowledge anymore. I want to make hybrid systems that are half automated, involving information systems, and half non-automated, involving the human beings.
Erik Aru: But isn’t self-conscious software dangerous? It is usually dangerous in science fiction. Of course, there’s [android] Data in Star Trek, but…
Alan N. Shapiro: I think that anything is dangerous if it’s used in the wrong way. I would say it’s dangerous when we don’t change our way of thinking. Take for example Honda who is building robots. If they continue the way they are doing now, which is without awareness, their goal is to build robots that are our servants or even our slaves. There are already lots of robots in factories, the idea of an android is that it looks like a human. This is a sociological question, not a question of mechanical engineering. We are going to have creatures that look like humans, that interact with humans.
First of all, it’s about work. If you say we are going to build robots to do our laundry, we are going to sell them in a market of the private consumer or even in factories for economic effect, that’s in my view dangerous. What’s dangerous about it, is that we keep ourselves, the humans in the mentality of workaholism. I think the most basic problem of human society is we have to forget about work, we have to transform work into play and creativity. We have to get beyond the binary opposition between work and play, then we can live a much longer life, we can be healthier and happier, we can be more flexible and mobile. I think work is a very bad system.
The fact that companies like Honda want to make robots so that they will work is just an indication that they have not thought that work is not a good thing, not good for robots, not good for humans. So I think that the invention of androids is an opportunity for humanity to improve our life quality, to get more freedom and more happiness. The androids are not only going to work. They are going to do some work, but they are also going to be our teachers and teach us to change. The most important thing about Data in Star Trek is that he wants to have emotions, to get an emotion chip and I think all human beings need that. In the western society we are too rational, too centered in the brain. I’m interested in Buddhism also and the Dalai Lama says that people in the West need to develop the heart.
Erik Aru: But does a robot have to look like a human?
Alan N. Shapiro: The definition of an android is that it looks like a human, skin and facial features – really looks like a human in [the film] Blade Runner. Robots look less human than androids, but they look more human than robots in the factories we have now. So actually Ars Electronica invented a concept called robotinity, which is like humanity. What Honda is doing with Asimo, the word robot does not actually describe that, because it’s somewhat in the step of looking like humans.
The word robot was invented many, many years before the word android. In films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or in Karel Capek’s [novel] R.U.R., I think in the early 20th century the idea what robots could look like was kind of mechanical, because the technology was mechanical and electromechanical, and later it started to evolve more biological.
I think Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick, is a great film about androids. I, Robot is also a great film, but that is depicting a negative side, the danger of robots. But what is the danger of robots? In I, Robot, the robots rebel and the start killing people. But why do they rebel? Because people treat them as slaves. It became dangerous because the original design concept was wrong.
My idea of critique of work comes from Karl Marx. There is one very important thing about Marx which is in a book called Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844, which was first published in 1932 – it was an unpublished manuscript, discovered by some scholars in Moscow. In this very great book Marx writes about alienated labor. He writes that the problem with capitalism is work and that people don’t have control of their own activity. They are selling their life in exchange for money and they’re living unhappy. I know about that because I studied history and philosophy. You have to know about that in order to make robots the right way.
Erik Aru: But hasn’t it always been so that most people are working all the time? Slaves in antiquity, peasants in the Middle Ages.
Alan N. Shapiro: Actually, as we are being taught in school, there has been progress towards freedom in history, we went from slaves to serfs to workers. So I’m talking about the next stage of evolution of the story of freedom. We would become free workers. I think diversity is important. We only have one person, one profession. I think each person should have at least five different activities that they do for variety.
Erik Aru: You have started a company based on your ideas about work. How is it going?
Alan N. Shapiro: Well, very little has happened so far, to be honest. Mostly it’s something I’ve been talking about. I have about a hundred friends who would like to be members of this radical technology company. But now it’s only three or four people.
But I believe it is the only hope to change the world, to make it better. Enterprise, that word I also take from Star Trek. My fantasy is that it would be something like Apple Computer, a technology and media company, also active in energy. It will be like Apple Computer but much more radical and much more taking seriously knowledge. Some time ago many people thought the vehicle for political action should be a political party, like in the 1940s-50s Jean-Paul Sartre thought the French Communist Party would be a vehicle for social change, in the 1980s in Germany many intellectuals thought the Green Party should be the vehicle for social change. I think that’s obsolete. I don’t think meaningful social or political change can happen on the level of the society as a whole or the state or politics, because we are not really living in a democracy, we are living in a spectacle of democracy. You can only have meaningful social or political change [paradoxically] through something private. [In the movement of 1977 in Bologna and Rome, they said "the personal is the political", and this is a new interpretation of that] People who are workers and are information technology workers. [The idea of the "new working class" of technology workers was crucial in May-June 1968 in Paris, and for neo-Marxist thinkers like Andre Gorz and Serge Mallet]
Erik Aru: The topic of your lecture in Tallinn was the meaning of life. Can you elaborate on that?
Alan N. Shapiro: I took the opportunity of my speech here to make a kind of announcement – I believe that postmodernism and deconstruction is finished in a way and that we need to return to existentialism. I think in the mid-20th century there were very important thinkers like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Goodman, and people in Gestalt Therapy. These existentialist writers of the mid-20th century which were being taught in all the universities until the [late] 1970s, when this turn to postmodernism and deconstruction began, focusing on all these French thinkers and also German theorists like Jürgen Habermas. And since then that has been the main focus of humanities, social studies and philosophy in universities.
Erik Aru: And why should we return to existentialism?
Alan N. Shapiro: Because, first of all, biology is very important, life sciences, genetics, psychology, psychoanalysis – all these things are important. Postmodernists focused on language and culture and as a consequence they didn’t respect science. Postmodernism and deconstruction had three problems.
One, they didn’t respect science enough. Two, they fall into a kind of cultural relativism. Three, they ignore the human body. Actually 80% of what makes a human being is not cultural, it’s not what culture I’m living in, 80% of it belong to all human beings, in body and mind. So we have to develop an existentialist science also because we must become interdisciplinary. Scholars, students and intellectuals must be competent in their knowledge of many different fields. It no longer makes sense to be a specialist in only one field.
It’s impossible to become competent in many different fields only through the intellect, so you have to have something like psychotherapy for intellectuals or university students where you become much more in contact with your self in a holistic way. You really know who you are and your biography and your sexuality and your desires and your emotions and feelings and how you relate to other people – everything that is your existential being in life. We cannot make knowledge that you learn at university to be so abstract and detached from your self. So I call it existentialist.
