Kurt Gödel showed that all formal systems are incomplete, meaning that there are truths that can be stated within a system that cannot be demonstrated within it. This means that truth cannot be reducible to axiomatic principles and, therefore, that there is no single system to which all truths could be reduced, whether it be physics, mathematics, logic, or any other system of abstraction.These principles have become widely accepted within mathematical and scientific communities. After Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it has become common to think of domains of knowledge as paradigms which are never proven or disproven but which are eventually abandoned in favor of new, more helpful, or more interesting paradigms. What makes a paradigm valuable cannot be shown within the paradigm itself but by the problems it helps solve or the vistas it allows.
I've been trying to think through the implications of these insights for technology ever since reading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. As I understand it, the book's main point is that any attempts to create artificially intelligent systems that are grounded solely in deductive logic are doomed to failure. Human thought involves deduction, but it involves much more. As Hofstadter writes in his introduction to Ernest Nagel and James Newman's Gödel's Proof, the goal of AI research should be to devise systems "guided by visual imagery, the associative patterns linking concepts, and the intuitive processes of guesswork, analogy, and esthetic choice that every [person] uses."
The kind of AI we are most familiar with is Google. It is probably a stretch to say that the Google engine thinks, but it is certain that the algorithms it uses to filter and aggregate trillions of bits of information are guided by analogies and associations if not esthetic choice. Google gets feedback from users in the form of click-throughs, so it can better predict what sites to show in the future. Feedback loops like this are at the center of thought and learning. The more the Google engine can modify itself instead of relying on engineers to tweak algorithms, the more it can be said to think.
But the computer side of this loop is only one half of the picture. Just as computer systems learn from us, we learn from the systems. It's a dynamic, co-evolutionary process, and we need to think about the kinds of choices that computers make available to us. Eli Parser has coined the term 'filter bubbles' to describe the ways that applications like Google and Facebook filter information for us and thus structure the choices we make. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since we desperately need ways of filtering out information that is not relevant to our purposes. However, it will be a co-evolution that requires careful attention, for, unlike the bee and the flower, we can control our collective destiny.
This brings me back to Kuhn, since he suggests that the terms we currently use to think about our co-evolution are not necessarily the best for the job. One of the interesting things about computing is the way its concepts and language have been used to understand other things. Metaphors from other walks of life permeate computing, like 'the cloud', 'friend', or 'stream', but computing has also shaped the ways we understand each other and the world. It's not simply a matter of words like 'Google', 'text', and 'filter' becoming commonplace, because everything is either a computer or something to be computed today. For example, it's hard not to think of human minds (or 'wetware') along computational lines now. Not only do we 'process data' and 'filter out noise', but we act on information that has been computed so that we can better operate computers. Commercials tell us that our very personhood is threatened if our personal data are lost.
I wonder if we're seeing the waning of a paradigm, or the waxing of a new one. Will the next years of computing see more of the same, only faster? Or will we come to understand thought, action, art, ethics, and even humanity in an entirely different, techno-saturated vein? Are computers just machines (with which have have been long familiar--we are eating machines, sex machines, and poop machines). Or are they something different?
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-Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget
