Multiple Intelligences

Advances in machine learning are making me more tender toward the human brain.

I tell my children I'm a digital native because I wrote my first line of code in 1969 when I was 13 years old. Computer scientists at the major universities got together and committed to teaching high school students how to code, which was beginning to seem as essential as teaching math and biology. At the time, computers were building sized so high school classrooms were connected to them by teletype machines operating over telephone lines. Dartmouth University sponsored my Boston high school, and I was told I was taking a computer class.

I was identified early on as wetware compatible. In computer science there was hardware, software, and wetware. Wetware is humans. I was interested in how it all worked much more than I was interested in writing programs, and got the role of tech support.

One-celled organisms with nothing approaching a brain, nonetheless, are able to move toward favorable conditions and to move away from unfavorable conditions.

How do they know? What they have, that the water molecules they swim among don't have, is life. A life force moves them that doesn't move a grain of sand.

That sand often is a silicon compound. A computer chip is ultra-processed silicon. The code that Marvin Minsky cheekily called Artificial Intelligence is zeroes and ones running on silicon chips. It's hella code, running on a prodigious amount of silicon. Still, as my computer scientist friend points out, it has no intention. It has the same life force as a rock rolling down a hill, which is to say none. At the same time, it is an expression of human intelligence in the same way the 30,000 year old outline of a hand in a French cave, the hieroglyphs in an Egyptian pyramid, the Aztec Sun Stone, the Dan masks of the Ivory Coast, the soldiers of the Terracotta Army near Xi'an, the Koran, and the Book of Kells are. Humans have downloaded, stored, and shared our intelligence with whatever technology we could access or invent. Now humans have invented and downloaded a prodigious amount of human intelligence that can be accessed and manipulated over that prodigious amount of silicon.

In the room next to the one I write this, there is a 2000 year old clay toy from the TlatTilco culture. It came to me as a gift. It appears to have been a baby's rattle. Through the engineered clay, I feel tender toward the baby, the parents, the toy maker, the person who gave it to me. The engineered clay communicates with complexity and expression. The clay needed a human to make it, and humans to receive and understand the love it represents.