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  issue 5, spring 2001 |
| Dune and the Future of Your Computer by Robin Banerji |
Sure computers are useful, but aren't they just a bit creepy, like perhaps they're up to something? Recently, The Matrix imagined a world in which man lives in terrible submission to machines. In Dune mankind has won the battle with machines and developed different ways to extend human capabilities. Robin Banerji speculates on just how you and your palm pilot are going to grow old together. |
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| Anyone who saw David Lynch's film Dune probably remembers little aside from its art nouveau-meets-ruritania look, its worm-like mutants and monsters and Sting grimacing hammily. There is more to Frank Herbert's novel, however, than all that. Though Dune, the book, mainly reworks Mohammed's unification of the Arabs, it also has a back-story: 10,000 years ago humans and machines fought a war to control civilization; humans won and never again made machines that ‘mimicked the human mind’. Does this story have anything to tell a generation that watches as machines become increasingly sophisticated and soon perhaps even intelligent? | ||
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| Like Star Wars, Dune is medieval science fiction. Instead of knights and wizards, we get super-skilled warriors and mystic-magi who have undergone an arduous and esoteric training. In Dune the reader meets a sisterhood who, through what sounds like some super yoga unknown even to Madonna, have gained such control over themselves that they can affect the instinctual processes of their bodies; they can read peoples’ minds through observing their body language; they have limited prescience. There are also men who have been trained to surpass the logical powers of machines, while understanding human motivation. Other men who can see the future with the help of mind-altering drugs and so navigate between the stars. Others still who have trained their bodies till they make Jean Claude Van Dam look like Tinky Winky the Teletubbie. Divorced from the drama of the story these characters may sound merely childish or bizarre. But are they more? Do such latent capacities exist? Who knows? It would certainly be interesting to find out. Especially as, in the novel, humans developed such capacities only in response to the challenge posed by machines. This is a challenge that our civilization is just about to face. | ||
| At the moment, our machines are still tools. However, there’s something about them that is more intimate than a tool, something almost prosthetic. They are like limbs we strap to ourselves or mental capacities lying outside the skull. As superb tools, we can already use them to beat the best chess players and, more impressively and usefully, predict the weather. A tool relects the mind. And the more sophisticated it becomes, the more sharply it mirrors humankind to itself. But tools don’t just reveal us; they change us at the same time. Though humankind hasn’t evolved since the Old Stone Age, a modern person is different from his archaic ancestor in physique, imagination, and powers of reasoning. We are not more intelligent; we have simply developed certain latent skills. Tools don’t just reflect us, they literally shape us. Mechanically, computers are rows of switches. But they symbolize a dispassionate, disinterested, and disembodied intelligence; a view of the world as an object for use, rather than as a home. We can ponder on what it is to be human through observing our reactions to this quasi intelligence that is incapable of creating values or ends. | ||
| We do not face a choice between having computers and supermen, clearly we would have computers. Nonetheless, computers can lead us to think about what we now no longer need to do. My father knows his multiplication tables to 20; calculators have allowed me to stop at 12x12. One of the pleasures of watching many 60s films and TV programs is their optimism. Batman and Bond, the Thunderbirds and the Jetsons all imagine a future in which machines take care of the boring bits of living. The Bond films and the Jetsons cartoons are both full of sleek machines, though Bond’s are sexy and the Jetsons’ cute. More mechanization, they asserted, will lead to more leisure. Their future, which we live, was to be one of endless holidays, twenty hour weeks, and societies given over to pleasure, ‘...where machines do all the work and men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes...’ as Angela Carter put it. It’s possible that advances in computers and mechanization will increase productivity in ways that are difficult to foresee. However, I doubt this will increase leisure. What’s more likely, is that technologically advanced societies will move towards economies based on service industries. If we take call-centers as the model for such an industry, and they are one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, the talents they develop do not seem particularly valuable. An ability to converse is an important and an essentially human capacity, indeed it’s possibly the defining human tool, the tool which is ourselves, but a remorseless narrative of offer and acceptance/offer and refusal diminishes talk to chatter. For the many people in these low skill service industries the next twenty years or so are likely to be a period of underemployment. Although they may not be working quite as many hours as people did in the past, the financial insecurity and the piecemeal nature of their work will prevent them from having more leisure time, that is enjoying their time off work. | ||
| Thinking about Dune and computers suggests that we need to look at what men and women are pre-eminently capable of as embodied, passionate, and interested intelligences and intuitions. The investigation and training of our physical, aesthetic and who knows? even visionary selves, could become the point of leisure, and need not be the pastime of an elite. While the human genome project and biotechnology reveal incredible potential power over the human organism, we need an alternative kind of knowledge, where biology, psychology and anthropology meet, which would investigate not human bodies but human beings. | ||
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text © 2001 robin banerji, used with permission Robin Banerji is a writer and journalist living in London. |
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