On Cultural Forgetting; Asimov's Criticism of Test Culture

Technician Aub apparently had, as his hobby, the reconstruction of some of these ancient devices, and in so doing, he studied the details of their workings and found he could imitate them. The multiplication I just performed for you is an imitation of the workings of a computer.--Asimov (1958) "The Feeling of Power."

Let's stipulate that human culture just is an innumerable number of replicating and transferable, interacting technologies and good tricks. Here I leave aside culture's relationship to our biological nature, although clearly our nature is more hospitable to such technologies than other animals's nature. Let's allow that these days cultural innovation can be a consequence of human intention, random trial and error, and relatively autonomous machine-learning and the interactions among them (as well as cultural drift, etc.). But, given scarcity, it's possible that ever subtle machine-acquired tricks displace some earlier technologies which go extinct in the human population.

Yesterday, Mario Santos-Sousa called my attention to Isaac Asimov's (1958) short tale "The Feeling of Power," which imagines a computerized future in which due to the success of robot learning, simple arithmetic (and higher other mathematics) is not just displaced, but entirely forgotten among the human population which, for any calculation, relies on hand-held computers. With the ubiquity and cheapness of computer-power, Asimov's future can be very likely if our educational practices and social institutions stop being hospitable to the body of good tricks (and rules) that make up the skill of computing in basic arithmetic. Unsurprisingly doing arithmetic is not the only cultural good trick that has been displaced entirely in Asimov's future.

As an aside, I often find myself thinking, while teaching introductory courses in the history of philosophy, that reading complex, opaque texts (recall) in a linear fashion in extended sittings will become nearly extinct in human populations (with, perhaps, a small number of academics and enthusiasts that prove the rule) unless the 'religions of the book' can ensure that the cognitive and social infrastructure of, what one may call, interpretive reading remains in tact.

In Asimov's imagined future, the capacity of doing arithmetic on paper remains latent in human nature. (I'll leave it to the cognitive philosophers of mathematics to decide how much cultural scaffolding inside and outside the brain needs to stay the same for this to be a realistic commitment--Mario thinks yes, but with qualification [I am less optimistic]). It is central to Asimov's conceit that one has high (scientific) social status if (a) one can score high on tests designed to "smoke out the gifted ones" and (b), thus, one can program computers to develop novel learning programs (that will direct war technologies). However, it is a lowly technician -- bad at test-taking -- who has received the "unusual gift," that is, the rediscovery of written arithmetic (they call it "graphitics").

In fact, the rediscovery of arithmetic turns out to be the result of a "hobby" in which Aub reverse-engineered (by way of the intentional stance) and then imitated ancient artifacts. In the context of a planned, war-economy in which the output of scientific research is captured by the military -- future earth is stuck in a stale-mated war with another planet in which the computers can counter each other's moves* -- this rediscovery is treated as a random ("accident") event, hence, "a gift." Aub commits suicide when he realizes that his rediscovery will be used to build more creative war-machines in which computers are coupled with humans, again.

Whatever Asimov's general views on the scientific-military-political complex, he was clearly suspicious of its ideology of meritocracy and the rule of the "talented:" the testing industry cannot predict all forms of ingenuity. While it would be wrong to read off a simple moral of the story -- e.g., anticipating Eisenhower's Farewell Address (recall) military funding of science corrupts all those that get touched by it (although this is certainly one of the story's messages) --, the story evinces a healthy respect for (useless) tinkering and antiquarian curiosity (away from the scientific research frontier).

In the previous paragraph, I rejected the simple moral. I did so because of the significance of Aub's suicide. Aub's suicide reads as follows:

When Project Number began, I thought that others were wiser than I; that graphitics might be put to practical use as a benefit to mankind, to aid in the production of really practical masstransference devices perhaps. But now I see it is to be used only for death and destruction.

That is to say, Aub shared his rediscovery with his superiors for philanthropic purposes. In doing so he reveals that he lacks political knowledge; he fails to understand his own democratic, warrior society. In particular, with the rest of his society, he assumes that high social status and good test-taking skills are a genuine proxy for wisdom. This is a form of foolishness. Asimov, who was, of course, not just a scientific popularizer, but who in his greatest series of novels, The Foundation Series, reflected in the manner of Bacon's Bensalem on the moral role of secret knowledge in aiding the cause of human "progress."

 

 

*In fact, Asimov assumes that the computers will be constrained in various ways in their ability to handle computational complexity. And the

Comments

[Aaron Alvarez]

You did not finish your thought in the footnote. You stopped at "And the".

[Eric Schliesser]

I finished my thought and then went beyond it. Thank you for catching that. I'll leave, as is.