Modern historians count 1967 as an especially busy year: the six‑day war, the summer of love, Sgt Pepper, the first recorded deaths of American astronauts, the founding of the suburban utopia of Milton Keynes. And also, half-forgotten in the crush, perhaps the most consequential event of all: the invention of the first device ever that permitted us to henceforward stop using a part of our brains.
A young Dallas engineer named Jerry Merryman and his team gave us, courtesy of his employers, Texas Instruments, the Cal-Tech electronic calculator. For $400 you could own a shirt-pocket-sized plastic box with buttons and symbols that, if pressed, would answer in an instant, and with impeccable accuracy, any simple arithmetical question you might ask it. And most important, it performed its work invisibly. The abacus and the slide rule might have been mental labour-saving devices, but they still required you to make some use of your grey matter; the Cal-Tech freed you up entirely, removing all mathematical tedium from your daily life.
It was semiconductors and algorithms that helped make Merryman’s magic, and for the 60 years since, and in the hands of other similarly blessed engineers, they have continued to do so, relentlessly.
Their gifts have been all we might ever have wished for. Our brains can now relax. Whatever cerebral nooks and crannies we employed, for instance, to read paper maps, or to use sextants and compasses and chronometers to find out where we were, have now been put into cold storage: GPS has given us all the direction we might ever need. Not sure how to spell a word or how best to compose a sentence? From the 1980s onward there has been no urgent further need for an OED or a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage: Commodore’s WordCheck and its successors have such matters taken care of.
And after the presentation in April 1998 at a conference in Brisbane by two (now very rich) young Americans named Page and Brin, of their paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, we had Google, which, for the past quarter-century, has been able to answer all our questions about just about anything in microseconds. OpenAI is currently inventing even more advanced things that promise to blow out of the water whatever still remains of the requirement to do mental work.
This has in recent months led to widespread hand-wringing. Our minds, it is said, will inevitably fall out of use, atrophying, or distending, whichever is worse.
The nightmare model – for our bodies – is a movie like Wall-E, that dystopian vision from 2008 in which humans, having abandoned their polluted and garbage-choked world, live out their lives in cocoons suspended in suborbital space. Here they have evolved into flaccid slobs, marooned in recliners, fed on high-calorie mush from squeeze-packs while gazing glassily at telescreens.
So now there comes a similarly dire vision for our minds. With machines doing all our daily mental tasks for us, our brains will become literally thoughtless, our minds a haven for endless daydreaming. We will become spiritually moribund. As inherent knowledge vanishes, no longer much needed since it is now always on tap at the slightest brush of a touch-glass surface, the concept of human wisdom, which is after all a mix of knowledge and experience, will evaporate. Society will slowly flounder and decay, body, mind and soul.
This is one vision of our future doom. But I am not a doomsayer – not so far as our minds are concerned, at least. I challenge the notion that all is now going to intellectual hell. Rather I see ample reason for optimism. And I draw this hope from the sextet of Ancient Greeks who laid the foundations for and defined the very idea of knowledge: Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus and Euclid.
These figures, rightly revered and sanctified by time, had minds essentially little different from the finest of our own today – except in one important respect: there was, in the centuries in which these men lived, so much less for them to know.
Karl Popper’s droll and much-quoted remark that “knowledge is finite but ignorance is infinite” is objectively true, of course – and yet the amount of knowledge in our contemporary mental universe is immeasurably more vast than that in which the intellectual elite of classical times existed. These six and their like travelled little (Aristotle excepted), existing in a world necessarily circumscribed by so little known geography, by very much less history, by the existence of so little written prior description.
Their minds, though steeped in the totality of contemporary knowledge, were thus almost tabulae rasae – nearly empty, ready to take it all in, ready to think, primed for purpose.
Which is why our modern minds, once they have been purged of all that today’s algorithms might now deem unnecessary information, will be as ready as theirs were to think, to inquire, to wonder, to contemplate, to imagine, to create.
So I see today’s algorithmic revolution as a necessary cleansing, a movement by which we rid ourselves of all the accumulated bricolage of modern intellectual life, returning us to a more reasonable sound-to-noise ratio, gifting us with a renewed innocence, filled with potential.
Fanciful though it may sound, this new-made post-AI society could even see the emergence of a new Euclid, a new Plato, a new Herodotus. Such figures may now be waiting in the wings, ready to rise from the ashes of whoever created Milton Keynes, maybe to write us a new edition of the Ethics, or teach us afresh the true worth of human happiness, as Aristotle did so impeccably, 2,500 years ago.
If that is the true benefit of clearing our minds of the busywork that is perhaps best left to electronic others, then I can hardly wait.
• Simon Winchester is the author of Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge – from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic (HarperCollins).
Further reading
The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller (Picador, £10.99)
AI: Its Nature and Future by Margaret A Boden (Oxford, £12.99)
Power and Progress by Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu (Basic, £25)
