This is why ‘the Machine’ concerns me

“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.” (E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909)

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometres an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.” (Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, 1954)

“Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.” (Confucius)

“Sorry, a machine can’t forgive your mistakes.” (Anon.)

“Books don’t need batteries.” (Nadine Gordimer)

"Now, a machine however subtle does not feel love, does not pray, does not have a sense of the sacred, a sense of awe and wonder. To me these are human qualities that no machine, however elaborate, would be able to reproduce. You may love your computer but your computer does not love you." (Kallistos Ware)

Source: https://twitter.com/nasahistory/status/951861340557234177

This is why ‘the Machine’ concerns me. Not that it might one day determine what I might eat or drink, or whether I can drink or eat at all, but that it will not hear my cries. That it will know nothing of physical thirst or of gut-wrenching despair. How can ‘they’ not understand this? It will have no comprehension of forgiveness. It will never wipe the slate clean. There is no delete. No such thing as absolution. It will deny to give me a fresh start [another more terrible dimension to DoS attack]. Mercy does not run through its microcircuitry. Don’t rush to embrace it too soon, this Trojan Horse which comes as a peace offering to the gods. The Creator has mercy for us, “[t]hough your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (Is. 1:18). The ‘Machine’ which is ‘spirited’ by power to apply force and control, is unmoved to our petitions, “Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye” (2001: A Space Odyssey). This is the elephant in the living room. Something holds us back, a foreboding, a premonition perhaps, that keeps us from directly addressing this subject.

It really is difficult to see people broken, humiliated, and in some instances to have their lives taken away from them because of something they might have said five, ten, twenty or more years previously. For someone, for whatever reason, to dredge up ‘sins’ of the past in order to hurt, or more concisely, to cause irreparable damage to the other. Who among us hasn’t said something which they haven’t later regretted, or where our words and sentiments can be elicited to carry a meaning or an attitude not originally intended? These can be errors of speech, peer group pressure, or the result of youth and immaturity. Yet it is there, it has been recorded. It is ‘played back’ oblivious to the context. Context is that which “throws light on meaning”.[1] We all make stupid mistakes. It takes time for wisdom and life experience to meld. And in other instances we get to a certain age and become anachronistic dinosaurs. The ‘Machine’ [input-process-output] is calculating and efficient. To ‘terminate’ these people is to simultaneously terminate ourselves. It is to do to another, that which can be done back to us. The ‘Machine’ defines us by our mistakes. It groups us in categories and dumps us in information silos. Is this the fate of the human spirit, to be “born into this?”[2] Imprisoned inside the “big iron” mainframes… like Ted Hughes’ proud Jaguar in “prison darkness” in its cage?

To forgive is an expression of one of our highest elevations as human beings. It is nobler than our finest literature, our greatest art, our most beautiful music. It is greater than all these when practised with a true heart for it takes us into the realms of the deepest mysteries of our combined representations of the Divine. In our religious experience we do not awe at the Creator’s ability with the harp or the writing of celestial sonnets, but rather we are amazed at the expression of God’s mercy and forgiveness. To the extent that we ourselves do the same with our fellow human, that is, to extend our grace towards those who we perceive to have wronged us, we are in the “image and likeness” of the Creator (Gen. 1:26).  We forgive that we could enter more genuinely into the space of compassion, that we might go on loving. The root of “forgive” is the Latin word “perdonare,” meaning “to give completely, without “reservation.” (“perdonare” is also the source of our English “pardon”).  We give up the desire or the power to punish.[3] The ‘Machine’ knows nothing of compassion. It will not forgive because it cannot love. Algorithms don’t have soul; they are devoid of incorporeal essence:

“You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush.” (Maya Angelou)

In life not all acts of fellowship are received well or reciprocated. When the grace we give is not accepted and is returned it can be brutal. It is a place of heavy tears. We are living increasingly in a world which keeps us isolated one from the other, and where we might be called-out or cancelled as swiftly as the swatting of an irritating fly. This is not because people are wicked, on the contrary, most people are generous and kind-hearted. We are all fragile vessels on an oftentimes bumpy journey. We can crack. And this is the tragedy, the irony, that this very fragility draws us into systems and networks and ‘mobs’ where we do things so that we, ourselves, might not be hurt. It is increasingly becoming a survival technique. The online world especially has hurt and devastated people by its millions, either by their own hand [addictive behaviours] or cyber-attacks [bullying, misinformation]. “As rapidly as technology advanced,” writes Joseph Carvalko in his prescient novel Death by Internet, “goodness declined…”. Communication technologies are not exempt. They are the voice of ‘the Machine’. The apparatus has no spiritual knowledge of humility and so it cannot practise repentance. Computational empathy or affective computing, is mimicry at worst, and simulation at best. The ‘Machine’ possesses no natural ontology, knowledge representation and reasoning, does not automatically equate to higher consciousness. It cannot possess “human memory”. And therefore it does not know what it is like to be human. I dread to think, if the present-day capabilities of our 21st century technology were available to past totalitarian regimes [especially Advanced LBS and monitoring systems], how enormously more multiplied and innovative their crimes would have been.[4]

To meet likeminded spirits along the way means so very much. It could make all the difference in the world, to have the strength, to hold onto the courage, to keep pushing apart that impalpable space between the light and the darkness. How good to have a friend who is real and co-substantial. To receive an encouraging message to remind you of your humanity, to have sympathy for you precisely because of your flesh and blood. To be accepted for all your faults and list of misdemeanours. And if need be, as it sometimes will be, for one or the other to say “I am sorry”, and to hear those marvellous words in reply, “All is good, I understand.” Not just a graphical control element, or a voice on the other side of an interface, or a recorded message with push button instructions. A machine could be programmed to ‘speak’ all the good things in the realm of metaphysics, but we will always have the perspicacity, that penetrating discernment, that it is artificial, and synthetic. Those words, the programming languages [even if they should ever become distinctly compositional], will never, cannot ever come from the heart [“the blood-beat” of the poets], the place of will and intention. Technology, of course, in and of itself, is not the problem, but our connection to it needs to be kept under constant vigilance, that is, we must keep awake as to how it infiltrates and attempts to redefine our very existence as human beings. When we are in need of some light and succour all the artificial intelligence and interconnectivity in the world will mean nothing. It is like being trapped in a vault of bullion of an unlimited value with no means of escape or communication. What then the benefit of all that precious metal? What good if we are building towards this terrible prediction:

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” (George Orwell)

We give our technology compelling names and dress it up with the most dazzling colours and logos. Many of these technologies, ultimately the most potentially dangerous, we make anthropomorphic. We dress up for example, and give large adorable eyes to the robots. We make-believe that we are understood and can even be loved by ‘the Machine’, that its cold intelligence will keep us warm at night. ‘It’ will seek those divine attributes which we ordinarily attribute to Deity: omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnificence. But being created in the image and likeness of the creation itself it cannot by definition ever achieve them. And so it will incrementally grow to become commensurately desirous and aggressive. The monster built by Victor Frankenstein eventually turns on his creator in murderous rage for making him hideous and incapable of fulfilling its integrated dynamism [5] . The singularity will not breathe new life into us to make us immortal. It could one day make you the ‘undead’, but never immortal. We would do good, as well, to not quickly forget the lesson of the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9). Technology gone awry on account of the hubris of the builders and the resultant breakdown of communication.

We know ourselves better than those who might be wanting to hurt us and much better than ‘the Machine’ which wants to imprison us in its central repositories and data warehouses. Their efforts to cause us pain, to potentially bring us to some humiliation, pale in comparison to our own battles, the fight against our compulsions, and those myriad fetishes within. We know much better than our real-life adversaries and the ‘electronic eye’ of the darkness fighting, assailing our souls, as we try to limit its impact on our lives and on the lives of others. If only they [both the adversaries and the ‘comptrollers’] knew the whole truth, had some insight of the context, they would be ashamed and terrified at the same time. Big Brother and uberveillance as much they might try to get inside the head, to get to the “whole truth” with their own particular strains of watching techniques, can only endlessly fall short of the mark. Our life is a mystery infinitely inexhaustible. We are so much more, much more than our search history and CCTV captures. It is weight enough to grasp what those words below from Miłosz mean for each one of us, before even ‘the Machine’ goes after our self-discovery to take away that private space where away from prying eyes we do our living and our dying: 

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labour for one human life.” (Czesław Miłosz)

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/context

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQJengH58ow

[3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/forgive

[4] https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1716&context=infopapers

[5] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/frankenstein

The huge dragon and the little boy

Gerringong, NSW

It had become a second skin and went deep into the blood. This spectral dream from my early childhood refused to go away. Sometimes I would think of it in terms of Leibniz’s speculation of an “unconscious psychic activity” or as Freud might have supposed a result of some “repressed childhood memory”. But what it did was to indelibly mark the start of my pilgrimage and to cast its shadow on almost everything connected to my life. I prayed it might empty of itself and let me alone. Decades later when I was to become keenly interested in Jung, I would also understand it as the beginning of my “individuation”. It has re-visited me in varying manifestations since that Christmas Eve of 1969. I was eight-years old.[1] From this night onwards I would be drawn into another reality of the light’s interminable vibration.

We were now living in the outer suburbs of middle-class Kingsgrove where my parents had bought our new home with its own backyard. To a little boy used to the inner city sprawl it seemed an impossible thousand miles away. I can still remember an ancient looking Mrs Moorefields with her big twist of white hair and thick rimmed magnifying glasses. She lived directly opposite with her motley crew of cats in a large cottage blanketed by beautiful native flowers. Here was a character who could have stepped right out of a Brothers Grimm fairy-tale. The road was named for her family and she would make sure to let you know. One day the feisty old lady was quick to rap me over the knuckles for ‘decapitating’ one of her wild Correas.

In the background I could hear my parents’ voices. They were on the telephone speaking to Uncles and Aunts in Greece exchanging the customary seasonal greetings. In those days speaking to somebody overseas was a special event and could take hours, if not days of preparation. The prototype of the first handheld mobile produced by Motorola (who beat Bell Labs to the race) was still four years into the future and the first-generation (1G) of wireless telephone technology more than a decade away. There was something mysterious and sacramental to the voice back then, there was preparation and ritual to most of our communications. The telegram, too, held its own unique fascination.

I was about to fall asleep looking forward to the next morning, the celebration of Christmas and to the red scooter with the silver bell. Santa Claus delivered that year! I must have fallen into a deep slumber for when I awoke, frightened in the middle of the night, it seemed to me that I had been sleeping for many hours. Yet the ‘vision’ remained clear in my mind, as if replayed on the light blue wall in front of me. It never seemed like a “normal” dream to me, even back then. Later I would read of lucid dreaming.[2] The discovery proved to be vital and would help me to not only better comprehend this particular dream but also a number of the others. Lucid dreaming relies on the cooperation between the conscious waking mind and the different levels of consciousness during sleep. Dream experts consider it a “very advanced type of dreaming” in which the dreamer is conscious of their dreaming consciousness. Theologians might speak of these experiences in terms of visions. And the eastern orthodox would warn with the concept of prelest (“a false spiritual state”). The question is then, to what extent is a young child capable of these advanced types of dreaming? That is, to spot the difference between the ‘canvas’ and the ‘window’.

I have no recollection of discussing this experience with mum and dad the next morning. It might have been the shock or an awareness that this needed to be kept secret. I am not sure. Though there was an acute sense of something going on in the inside of me, which I had not felt before. I could not know at that young age what this permeating mood was to prefigure and how it would touch my life. Not long after my initial encounter with OCD a year earlier, I am convinced that this was now the onset of the melancholia which I would continue to struggle with to the present day. Over the course of the next three or four years this dream would revisit. Still I would remain silent. This is near enough to what I saw that night on Christmas Eve in 1969. It was the year Max Yasgur’s farm near Bethel, New York, played host to Woodstock and Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon:

A little boy is standing some distance from the seashore, before him spreads a vast body of dark water. It is still. On the other side of this water, he can see a huge dragon. It is smacking its enormous tail on the land and then heaving it up into the night-sky as if trying to bring down the stars. On its head a big shimmering crown. The beast catches sight of the child. It opens its monstrous mouth and a great stream of fire spews in the direction of the terrified little boy. In the background there is sound like a humming, or an echo. Sometimes it sounds like a choir of voices. And other times like the ‘buzzing’ of a large swarm of flies.

In the times which followed only small bits of the dream would change. The more recognisable being the distance between the “little boy” and the “huge dragon” which appeared to be retreating. The “humming” also became increasingly audible resulting in equal amounts of joy and dread. When the dream stopped for no evident reason after my twelfth birthday, it would return some twelve years later. By now I had become familiar with the Book of Revelation (and had started to reflect on Rev 12-13) so I was in possession of vital clues as to what it could mean. The sense of relief would soon give way to long periods of trepidation. I prayed for enlightenment but my prayer was impure. A spiritual director of the kind I would later read about and seek out during my pilgrimages would have been very helpful. Of course, the archetypes and numerical symbolisms are striking.[3] One way or another, whether sacred or profane, they cannot be entirely coincidental.

Did I catch a glimpse of the “little boy’s” face? No, I did not. Only once do I remember seeing the face. And even on that rare occasion it was from a ‘distance’ when it seemed to me that I had carelessly startled him. This would be much later in a place far away from home and on the other side of the world (where I would meet the second of the three elders or “the three wise men” as I would sometimes refer to them). I needed desperately to distinguish and to discern between the “real” dream (Matt. 1:18-25) and the deceptive (Jer. 23:25-27). The Scriptures plainly speak of both.[4]

Above and beyond this dream was meant for me. It is a significant part of my story. That is all, and nothing else. In the meantime a soft drum inside my head, similarly to the heart, keeps to a regular beat.

Keep moving, Michael, do not stop… 12… 1234… 12… 1234… 12… Tap… Tap… Tap… Tap… Tap…

[1] When my son George was eight years old he stunned me when on the whiteboard of the children’s playroom he sketched a rough drawing of a large dragon with a huge crown on its head. The beast was being lassoed by a little boy.

[2] This is a good introduction to a difficult subject often misunderstood and exploited:  Laberge, S. and Rheingold, H., Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, (United States: Ballantine Books, 1990); the knowledge of such dream states is not new, Aristotle had noted much earlier on “...often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.” Andreas Mavromatis references the Greek philosopher in a detailed work on the subject:  Hypnogogia: The Unique State of Consciousness between Wakefulness and Sleep (United Kingdom: Thyrsos Press, 2010).

[3] For the “language of dreams” see: Jung, C.G. Dreams, (London: Routledge, 2002), Trans., R. F. C. Hull.

[4] http://www.orthodoxchristian.info/pages/dreams.htm A very brief overview but on the dot for the purposes of this small post.