World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

It’s pretty clear that most of his colleagues in Silicon Valley agree that monopoly is the natural, desirable order of things. That’s why start-up companies no longer dream of displacing Google or Facebook, but launch themselves with the ultimate aspiration of getting bought by the giants.

This is the essence of its attempts to build an unabridged database of global knowledge and its efforts to train algorithms to become adept at finding patterns, teaching them to discern images and understand language.

It was easy to see why this field would appeal to someone with Carl’s streak of intellectual adventurousness. Yes, the pursuit of artificial intelligence required computational acumen and a knack for algorithmic thinking. But if you wanted to replicate the working of the human brain, you had to intimately understand your model. AI, in other words, required psychology.

The Second Self. Because she was perched at MIT herself, she had a fairly unimpeded view of her subjects. The portrait she constructed was so piercingly apt that they may not have been able to recognize themselves in it. Artificial intelligence, she concluded, wasn’t just a lofty engineering goal; it was an ideology.

is a testament to Carl Page’s teaching that his son went on to found the most successful, most ambitious AI company in history. Although we don’t think of Google that way, AI is precisely the source of the company’s greatness.

The messy, war-torn seventeenth century touched Descartes directly. He served in both Catholic and Protestant armies in the Thirty Years War—an intramural fight over the religious future of Germany that ensnared the major European powers.

He asserted that the human casing contains a divine instrument that elevates humankind above the animal kingdom. Inside our mortal hardware, the “prison of the body,” as Descartes called it, resides the software of mind. In his theory, the mind was the place to find both the intellect and the immortal soul, the capacity for reason and man’s most godlike qualities.

This was a gorgeous squaring of the circle. Descartes had somehow managed to use skepticism in service of orthodoxy; he preserved crucial shards of church doctrine—the immortal soul, for starters—while buying intellectual space for the physical sciences to continue the march toward knowledge.

The high priest of this religion is a rhetorically gifted, canny popularizer called Ray Kurzweil.

For all his optimism, however, Kurzweil couldn’t escape his fears—or more precisely, he couldn’t escape the biggest fear of them all. His mind frequently wandered to death, such a “profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it.” But this, too, he vowed, was a problem that engineering could solve.

But pharmaceuticals are just a sideline for Kurzweil. His main business is prophecy.

Peter Diamandis, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious thinkers, puts it quite starkly: “Anybody who is going to be resisting this progress forward is going to be resisting evolution. And fundamentally they will die out.”

LARRY PAGE LIKES TO IMAGINE that he never escaped academia. Google, after all, began as a doctoral dissertation—and the inspiration for the search engine came from his connoisseurship of academic papers. As the son of a professor, he knew how researchers judge their own work.

Because DeepMind feared the dangers of a single company possessing such powerful algorithms, it insisted that Google never permit its work to be militarized or sold to intelligence services.