Don't pray to the dynamo
Learning from Henry Adams to avoid AI metaphors
I’m not sure how to think about AI, but I am sure that the solution lies more in learning about how it actually works –the software and math– more than in metaphors and attempts to use existing moral frameworks. To see why, look back to how an intelligent, well-educated person tried to make sense of a prior time of technological change.
Henry Adams, born 1838, had high expectations for himself. He came from a family of wealth and prestige. His great-grandfather was John Adams, Founding Father and second US President. His grandfather was John Quincy Adams, the sixth US President. His father would go on to become Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to the UK. He went to Harvard and trained to be a lawyer. He appeared to have every privilege in education and family position.
But over his life, which ended in 1918, the world changed dramatically. His traditional, classical education prepared him for debates in a US Senate composed of elder statesmen, but it did not prepare him for the technological and sociological upheavals of the later 19th and early 20th centuries. He felt adrift, a creature of a prior age with no place in the present one.
We know how Henry Adams felt because he wrote an autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, focused on the overall theme of how his original education failed him and how we tried to self-educate to better adapt to the changing world. (Why on earth would one read such a dull-sounding book, you might ask? Because it was on more than one list of top 100 books in English.)
Henry Adams spent a lot of time at the 1900 exposition in Paris, where he puzzled over new technologies like electricity. To me, it is shocking that, not only does Adam fail to understand electricity, he doesn’t even have a framework with which he could begin to understand electricity:
Until the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus meditating chaos, [his friend and renowned scientist Samuel] Langley came by, and showed it to him. At Langley's behest, the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way. [...]
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris. [...]
Adams is particularly flummoxed by the hall of dynamos, large wheels of magnets and wires used to convert mechanical motion, such as from a coal-powered steam engine, into electric current. Run in reverse, a dynamo becomes a motor, turning electric current into mechanical motion. Dynamos were the immediate predecessor of the technology we use today to turn mechanical motion into electricity (and vice versa).
Adams can tell there is some kind of power or force at play here, but his only metaphor is a religious “moral force”:
Then he [Langley] showed [Adams] the great hall of dynamos, and explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it. To [Langley], the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As [Adams] grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheely revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. [...]
Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar of exhibits. For Adams’s objects its value lay chiefly in its occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian’s objects. No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley could not help him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces were anarchical [...]
Adams desperately wants to make sense of this new world, to be part of it, but he feels that the gap between the old world and the new world is so great that he cannot bridge it. His metaphor for this gap is a religious one: he compares the invention of electricity to the Roman emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the 300s AD:
Copernicus and Galileo had broken many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross [...]
(The rest of the chapter is speculation that, since Constantine’s time, the world had been dominated by a feminine, “virgin” energy related to the Virgin Mary, an energy which was being displaced by the “masculine” energy of the dynamo.)
This chapter from Adam’s autobiography is a cautionary tale about metaphorical thinking, about trying to reason about a new technology without actually learning about the new technology. Don’t pray to the dynamo; learn physics.
Source of the text: Smithsonian Library, Chapter 25