HAL 9000: New York Reframed?

Stanley Kubrick's exploration of artificial intelligence--or engineered sentience--on the silver screen a year before a human being set foot on the moon has become a strong influence for a generation of science fiction writers and technology oriented thinkers. In considering the proposition of engineered sentience, it seems we--the creators--have at the outset one critical choice to make: do we render beings whose intellectual functions are essentially modelled after our own or do we attempt to omit certain components and introduce new components so as to "improve" the new being.

I would argue that Kubrick's HAL 9000 was an example of creators choosing the former logic. Indeed, 'HAL's' memory and computational capacities apparently vastly exceeded what theconscious human brain might offer (although I reserve the right to contest that the network structure of the human brain and our ability to intuit and experience 'gut feelings' seemingly based on computations of which we are unable to be consciously aware, may be vastly more powerful than any computations we perform consciously); however, HAL was ironically hamstrung by the same operational maxims that can jeopardize humans' abilities to carry out particular missions when the operations necessary to do so come into conflict with those maxims.

An example is the maxim of self-preservation. HAL used the preservation of the mission as a justification for murdering his human companions when, in my interpretation, he more fundamentally wished to preserve himself. (Perhaps irony is the best indicator we've got for identifying areas of our intelligence which could do with improvement?) Although Dr. Baumann was capable, we're left to assume, of resurrecting achievement of mission objectives from the wreckage left by HAL's deadly autonomous episode, the pathway to achievement seemed sub-optimal.

And thus erupts the complimentary question to any thesis positing means to improvement on human intelligence: how do we define and measure improvement? Any my answer is this: we may define it generally as an ability to harness energy in a more optimal fashion to achieve agreed goals (i.e. missions). Here other writers have often identified (and corrected for) another seeming deficiency in human sentience--that there is so much of it trapped within multitudinous discrete membranes with insufficient mechanisms for sharing and agreeing missions. Although our technologies are increasingly accelerating toward a state of total communication, our inherent physical autonomy will, I believe, always prevent humanity from a full dissolution of personal boundaries toward perfect collective consciousness.

Among the primary triumphal conflicts in the Wachowski's 1999 film The Matrix, was Agent Smith's defection from the collective mind that would later (flatteringly, given my assumed profession) be summarized as "the Architect". The film(s) thus argued implicitly that absolute collective consciousness--which might be restated as singular consciousness--is inferior to plurality (in spite of the chaos and destructiveness that inevitably follows from the latter when interests clash). Is this view correct? Is plurality of sentience superior to singularity? It depends, I think, on the nature of the mission.

New York: 1968. A giant reproduction of a photograph of Manhattan taken from the air somewhere high above Ellis Island, looking northward, rests upon the wall opposite the end of my bed. I'm not expert enough yet on the history of the city's landmark buildings to say exactly when the photograph was taken, but it would be somewhat poetic (and conceivable based on what I do know of its history and which buildings are and more importantly are not yet in the image) if the year were 1968. New York is a city with a mission: maximize profits. A dangerous oversimplification, I agree, but this facile reprographic survey of the city's geography reveals a governing logic wherein relative location and access inform land value and land value dictates building height. Architects of the thousands of micro-universes which fill in the idealized rectangular gaps between gridded streets may attempt to inject superficial formal idiosyncracy, and sometimes aberrations in the "game" such as privately funded museums, civic buildings and monuments allow for severe formal deviance. However, from this remote vantage point, the city as a whole is approximating a three dimensional bar graph of land value. And versus older cities in Europe or China, whose socio-political and economic histories have typically been more varied and left more aberrant, dissonant residue within their urban lattices, New York (or some might counter Chicago) may be the best example humanity has of a city approaching singularity of mission.

And yet when I remove my "cool glasses"--symbols of my membership in the cult of pluralism and worshipping of the radical that I reason must naturally predominate among sentients who cannot escape their discrete vessels, and thus accept and embrace--and see the city with fresh eyes, it looks an absolute mess. I say it "approximates" optimality in achieving its agreed mission because it appears less messy than other examples, such as London (where I presently reside). If the optimal case were a city perfectly spatially attuned the maximization of profits, I imagine it's skyline would be far less fractured, and it might undulate in response to changing trends.

In fact, just as HAL required immense infrastructure to run, such a city of singularity might achieve the ultimate flexibility by the detachment of its cores--the vertical means of servicing and access in space--from its leasable space. Both cores and lease-space would be modularized and mobile. And infrastructure would exist to facilitate the mobility of modules throughout the urban core(s) and amongst them, globally. Contemporary systems of logistics--container terminals--may be the best examples of this logic.

"Buildings" or really sites for urban development would then be divided into those with permanent cultural significance and those of purely economic utility, with the former being reserved for idiosyncratic residue of historic cultural phenomena, places for recreation and functions necessary to administer and police the city, and the latter harboring near total spatial flexibility within a modular framework.

Stepping back for a moment into the philosophical frame within which this essay began, I wonder what a singular consciousness would actually build. The economic principles I observe at work in New York are, after all, the result of scarcity dealt with by multiple actors. Without plural interests, I should think the only threat to the singular mind is the end of the universe--its presumed habitat. If, inherently, it is competition for scarce resources necessary to remain alive which ultimately motivates actors in a universe of plural sentience, what else besides Armageddon would motivate a sentient in a universe where its in the only game in town? Further, I would think that such a singular consciousness would immediately set about determining if there were means to perpetuation of itself transcendent of the vessel of the extant universe. And woe to it if it were able to determine that there were no such means (in advance of an omega event), as it would then have nothing but the exploration of the arbitrary fabric of the extant universe to content itself with.

(this goldfish, found here, is appropriately named "Daisy".)

Imagine if you or I were the goldfish trapped in a reflective bowl with only colourful pebbles constituting the geography of our existence and no "higher purpose" to aspire to. Jumping out of the bowl wouldn't seem irrational. And yet, absent confirmation of some higher purpose, we as humans in our plural system, are usually content to compete with each other and explore a rather large fish bowl over the duration between our own alpha and omega events.

Most of us accept the proposition. And that is why we don cool glasses, enjoy New York, enjoy London even more, and chuckle at HAL's autonomy in spite of the slaughter.