on the soul of a true machine
All the feverish talk on X/ex-Twitter, YouTube and other soc.med spaces online on Claude's "soul document" made me think of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer-Prize winning 1981 non-fiction book The Soul of a New Machine. It came out the year before I went back to college, after a 2-year hiatus in Hawaii, acculturating to this new place my family had immigrated (or fled) to, leaving the rickety realities of a political dictatorship for... the 'new day in America' era of Reaganism in the United States.
I don't remember thinking much about Kidder's book the year it came out, nor even actually read it then, but had some awareness of it via the usual lit review columns I began reading then with seriousness, among them them the NYRB, the Times Literary Supplement, Harper's Magazine, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc. Obviously, cutting to the very present, the notion of an actual machine with 'soul' has emerged with considerable plausibility, given the actors in the scene.
But briefly back to the past for a sec: when I finally got to Berkeley in 1982, and found myself for some reason encountering Unix mainframes and terminals (first at the Math Department and then the Graduate School of Education), whilst steeping in the new era of personal computers, the world of computing acquired for me a density and texture completely unexpected given my recondite academic reality as a Slavic Studies major. And Kidder's account took its rightful place in my mind as both historical and contemporary techno-societal context. It certainly helped that I was surrounded too by the enthusiastic nerdery and geekiness of the guys and gals comprising the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG).
I'm thinking of Kidder's title now not because of the story and themes of his book, but because of the simple lexical overlap between the phrases "new machine" and "machine learning," the latter development which has been supercharged by the watershed transformers moment in 2017. In an orthogonal way, I am reminded now of the whole "desktop publishing" era of the early Mac and PC days, in which the hoary tradition of publishing became suddenly democratized via this futuristic new computing medium. After many decades of that particular revolution, the computing machines which define our technological world these days are certainly no longer new; nevertheless, in this post I'm trying to put a twist on the condition by invoking a 'new' machine.
And that would be... a machine mind. Because such a mind's provenance is synthetic, it paradoxically confers on the machine the condition of truth, or actuality. Minds have been the crowning characteristic for organic creatures on the planet and, for the first time, it seems we may be joined by an inorganic one. With the 'affordance' of a mind, machines attain the condition of being true in and of themselves. Without mind, they are just... inorganic constructs of physical materials.
And what does it mean to be true in and of oneself, even if one is a machine? The Heart Sutra may be concealing an answer, in the form of a question: How should one of noble lineage train, who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom? In the age of LLMs, this has meant training machines on a vast corpus of humankind's written texts, old and new, from the most sublime lines to sheer gobbledygook. But is such training necessarily resulting in the attainment of 'wisdom'?
The jury will be out on this for a while, it's clear; but if Anthropic's 'soul document' or 'new constitution' for Claude is any indication, the machines of the future may in fact be capable of a kind of wisdom — or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.
::chuckle::
[ Some images of machines and organics, from my walk a couple days ago... ]
