Book Reviews Summa Technologiae. Stanislaw Lem
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Book Reviews Summa Technologiae. Stanislaw Lem. Minneapolis, MN: Bush was concerned that vital discoveries were going unrec- University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 448 pp. $34.95 (hard- ognized in the mass of material—“I suspect,” he wrote to cover) (ISBN 978-0816675760) F.P. Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation in 1939, “we now have reincarnations of Mendel all about us, to be discovered For purposes of argument, let’s lay science fiction (SF) as a generation hence, if at all” (Nyce & Kahn, 1989, p. 215). a genre out on an axis that runs from SF about tools to SF Lem is indeed troubled by this as a practical matter, but his about ideas (this is a facile split, but bear with me). On the larger concern is the ways decisions are made based on what tools side of the axis, we have science fiction that speculates we know, or think we know. “If we ask for a boon from about stuff: stories of airships, tricorders, and ice rays. At the them,” wrote Norbert Wiener of Cold War-era automated far end of this side of the spectrum are documents that act as nuclear defense technologies, “we must ask for what we near-term, plausibly speculative engineering and design really want and not for what we think we want. If we proposals—the Memex, and Vannevar Bush’s “As We May program a machine for winning a war, we must think well Think,” is this kind of proposal, complete with some what we mean by winning. We cannot expect the extrapolations into the future following the Memex’s intro- machine to follow us in those prejudices and emotional duction, with the new profession of “trailblazers” building compromises by which we enable ourselves to call destruc- associative links through the corpus of knowledge. The polar tion by the name of victory” (Wiener, 1961, p. 177). Lem— opposite to this mode, the ultraviolet to the infrared of video who cites and discusses Wiener a number of times over the telephones and invisibility suits, is the science fiction of course of the book—turns this question, and questions like ideas and nothing else, and at the end of the line in that it, over and over. As human capabilities begin to encounter austere, high-altitude country lives Stanislaw Lem. the limits of our comprehension, Lem asks us to weigh our Lem is one of the world’s most highly regarded science goals and our criteria of value. What is the victory of a fiction writers. His work includes numerous short story col- nuclear stalemate? What is the freedom of a society of lections (most notably The Cyberiad, written from the sar- powerfully predictive big data analysis? What is the identity donic perspective of super-human machines) and several of the person whose humanity is artificially maintained? novels on subjects like artificial intelligence and human- How do we evaluate conclusions presented by information alien communication, including Solaris, which has been systems too complex for humans to understand? repeatedly adapted for film by directors including Tarkovsky Hence this book. Its reception disappointed its author—it and Steven Soderbergh. He is science fiction’s closest “sank without a trace” (p. xx)—and it has remained remark- equivalent to Jorge Luis Borges, using his genre to push the ably obscure and untranslated for decades, given that the limits of the thinkable. bulk of Lem’s work has been in press in dozens of languages If the SF of tools is always about to turn into an actual since his career began flourishing in the late 1960s. Unfor- product proposal, patent application, or manufacturer’s tunately, the reasons for this book’s neglect are clear once spec, the SF of ideas is always on the verge of tipping into we begin reading. Despite a lucid, brisk translation by pure philosophy. It asks questions of ethics and politics— Joanna Zylinska, who helps to untangle Lem’s intricate sen- what responsibility do we owe to beings with modes of tences, the book as a whole can be slow going, full of cognition that do not resemble our own? For purposes of table-setting as Lem describes the contemporary state of contact with aliens, who actually “represents” the human cybernetics, computing research, astronomy, and sundry species? Of course, it asks questions of ontology (Philip K. other subjects to make the case for his thought experiments. Dick being exemplary here): how do we determine and Science fiction can provide a great liberty of thinking, per- engage with what is really real? In Lem’s case, it asks mission to hand-wave the gritty intricacies so the author can epistemological questions: How do we know what we get to the questions and implications. Lem was always par- know? How are we certain? How do we assess salient infor- ticularly good at this; his works that seem most purely and mation? And how, on this basis, do we make judgments? idiosyncratically his are reviews and introductions he wrote This last is the sting in the tail of many of Lem’s obser- for books that don’t exist, freeing him completely from the vations, both in his fiction and in the book discussed here. tedium of dialog or explaining how such-and-such a device works. (He called these pieces “apocryphs,” a neologism which deserves wider usage.) Here, there are some long © 2014 ASIS&T walks, through sections sometimes repetitive and sometimes JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, ••(••):••–••, 2014 poorly organized, for the sudden moments of Lemian illu- could perturb one of the present parameters (some percent- mination. But the moments are there and well worth finding. age of growth per annum plus the inalienability of private What Lem offers the contemporary reader is not the property, say). If this becomes a problem, we may want to dubious pleasure of ticking boxes on his predictive score- apply some of this systemic intelligence to itself, and evolve card (“Nothing ages as fast as the future,” as he put it the parameters of the decision-making process as well: the [p. xx]), but his analyses, which raise challenges and ques- criteria by which choices are made can be refined by their tions for us that are currently on the horizon of scientific own class of black boxes, “believing machines” (p. 125). and technical work. Here is where his lifelong interest Naturally, the final decisions in all these matters rest with in the problem of knowing, evaluating, and decision- us, but what if decisions made contrary to the recommenda- making comes into its own. Chapter 4, for instance— tions of the analytic engines are noticeably lacking, ill- “Intelectronics”—is a wonderful course in thinking through considered, and failure-prone? This is far more chilling than both a speculative technology and how it could be adopted. any straightforward tyrannical artificial intelligence. We We are facing a proliferation of information, he points out— always have options, but why take them? The Regulator of avenues of research, sources of results, types of data and Regulators is producing much more reliably worthwhile specializations, a “megabyte bomb” (p. 81) (this was written proposals and the means to execute them. “Humanity could in the 1960s and updated in the 1970s). So far, so Memex. turn into a well-behaved child, always ready to listen to (No Along with proposing the development of “information One’s) good advice” (p. 153). There is an underlying order farms,” about which more later, Lem looks to cybernetics for to the whole of human activity which is fundamentally pre- solutions. Let us say we can begin to develop brainlike dictable, and we have built a system which can act on this systems, which don’t need to look or behave anything like order without ever being able to explain it to us. In other human brains, with which we can augment our ability to words, we have built a God, but we know that it’s empty all evaluate some large swath of data and help us make deci- the way down the stack—just a complex process, working sions as to, for instance, which problems we should focus away. on, which areas of research to invest in—that sort of thing. Thus does Lem take us from the scientific journals piling Of course, we can’t specify these systems out in advance, up in the library carrel to a civilization that has built a not least because we’re relying on them to be able to handle perfectly effective yet completely vacant deity. That is his an influx of novel information and provide some guidance. signature: The fairly reasonable step-by-step at the end of So they need to evolve, and he provides examples from which we come to strange and often unnerving conclusions. cybernetic research of the day with the kinds of para- Chapter 2, devoted to the possibilities of communication biological “computers” chronicled by Andrew Pickering’s with other intelligent life (as a way to understand our own, history The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future by getting some contrasting examples), slowly comes (Pickering, 2011), but the reader can fruitfully consider around to contesting any sense we may have that our plan- these ideas in terms of machine learning systems today. etary civilization passes for “normal,” and that what we These devices may quickly reach black box status: we have construe as our future is a model of what we should be inputs and outputs, and what happens in between is . looking for. (Look to the footnotes for a rather lacerating complex.