The Digitalized Portal
How the world of ideas and of objects interact together thanks to information technologies
How the world of ideas and of objects interact together thanks to information technologies
We are living the first pandemic of the digital era. Despite the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is a moderately, by any standard, dangerous virus, the world is at a standstill. This worldwide crisis reveals the bitter pills our digital societies will force us to swallow: if information technologies have changed the world, and most of the time, act as strength multipliers for the good, sometimes also for the bad. It is not by chance.
Good vs Evil and binary numbers
The invention of binary numbers by Leibniz is fascinating. Published in 1703 in “Explication de l’arithmétique binaire qui se sert des seuls caractères O et I avec des remarques sur son utilité et sur ce qu’elle donne le sens des anciennes figures chinoises de Fohy”, he showed that every number could be written using only “0”s and “1”s. This idea, that is nowadays commonplace, unexpectedly comes from a deep theological controversy about the existence of Evil in the world. This relentless problem still continues to haunt religious people: how come a perfect loving God allows suffering, misery etc. in His creation?
Many answers have been proposed. The one of Leibniz was of a very mathematical flavor. Schematically his idea was as follows: what we call evil is not a thing in itself, it is the absence of God that we call evil. The answer to the question of why God is absent from parts of His creation being that if it were not the case, then God’s creation would be isomorphic to God Himself. And ultimately nothing would have been created at all. Leibniz also had been greatly influenced by Pythagorean philosophy: he thought that everything could be described using numbers. Hence to back up his proposition on the problem of Evil he wanted to show that every number (and ultimately everything following Pythagoras philosophy) could be described as combination of God “1”, and absence of God “0”.
Compass and Maps vs Google Maps
Google maps is an epitome of what information technologies can bring you. I have vivid memories of myself looking at Wargames as an early teenager during the mid eighties. There is a scene where they follow a car on a screen of a computer. The car was bugged and they were following its movements on an electronic screen displaying the map of the city. I distinctly remember my feelings looking at this: “this time they have been too far, it is simply not possible”. It was clear to me at the time that this was much more crazy to be able to track live a car somewhere on the earth than to have an Artificial General Intelligence overriding humans and taking control of the US nuclear arsenal. Of course everyone today is using Google Maps to visit their friends, have a journey in a country they never put a foot on, or broadcast live their position with additional features like traffic in real time, what restaurants are opened (and what people think of those restaurants) in the area etc.
This is truly magic when you think of it. Just remind yourself, at least for the older of us, how it was just fifteen years ago. Maps, Lonely Planet travel guides, etc. were mandatory when you wanted to travel in place where you never had been before. My point is not to discuss how much more from less can be done today through new information technology, see for instance the book of A. McAfee on that interesting subject. My angle, in this article, is to look at the flip side of these technological feats.
The first interesting thing to notice is that this Google Maps magic trick is only possible because of a an incredibly complex and entangled chain of technologies. From the space industry (for the GPS satellites to be put in orbit) to quantum mechanics (for your smartphone to work on WiFi for instance) passing by the electronics and the Gorilla Glass of your phone it is a marvel of cooperation between zillion of technologies. This necessary chain of cooperation also multiplies systempunkts: if there is no electricity (ok it is a major disruption but it happened in Venezuela in 2019), no GPS data (GPS is owned by the US military, if an armed conflict arises the US Army may decide unilaterally to stop the service), any disruption in the supply chain to build smartphones may drop the production (early estimates that COVID19 crisis may lead to halve the production of smartphones) etc. then this technology won’t work anymore. From this point of view it is much more fragile than the old compass/map setting which demands a shift in magnetic poles to no longer work: it happens once in while but not more often than, let’s say a Carrington event that have the potential to wipe out most of the electronics on earth. Of course, the very same information technologies allows backup strategies and introduces agility in the industrial processes… up to a point.
Actually there are deeper considerations to contemplate that are linked to the fact that digitalization has made the interactions between the world of objects (like the compass) and ideas (like the software behind Google Maps) more frequent and more important in our everyday life. And it turns out that, more and more, ideas acquire objects characteristic and vice versa.
Ideas and Objects
This is not the place to present and analyze the various flavor of dualism and their critics here, I will simply stick to an intuitive presentation: it is clear that ideas and objects are not living under the same constraints. To name but a few differences: ideas can be shared without a loss, they are not subjected to time (Pythagoras's theorem in 2020 is the same as in 2020 B.C.) , they can’t be destroyed or enclosed into a specific location (once a secret has been made public you cannot make it secret again), etc. It is the exact opposite for objects. The relation between those two worlds are extremely hard to grasp and understand. A theological version of these issues can be witnessed by the Trinity doctrines (Jesus representing the material world, God the Ideas and the Holy Spirit a link in between) and the millennia of controversies around these doctrines. I hold the thesis that if we have such a hard time to understand quantum mechanics it is because observations are the dual of free will, and we don’t really understand what free will is. The former makes the world of objects influence ideas, while the latter makes ideas have an impact on the world of objects. Information technologies have blurred the lines between those two worlds (to say it quickly you can digitized using scans/smartphones, and turn files into objects via, for instance, 3D printing) with surprising consequences.
The relation of these philosophical considerations to the subject of this article is the following: as our society became more and more digitalized, the material world has acquired more and more “ideal characteristics”. Let us examine a few of those interactions. First consider objects that acquire ideal characteristics:
An idea is correct or incorrect: more and more cars, refrigerators etc. embeds electronic parts that either work or don’t work at all, in a very binary way. Before the 2000’s a mechanics was able to tinker any motor and make a car more or less work even if the right pieces were not available for a complete fix. In our current COVID19 crisis the world is at a halt, at a point that is a first in history: in April 2020 half the world is under a form of lockdown, some activities have simply stopped quasi overnight.
The marginal cost of the copy and spread of ideas is more or less 0, therefore ideas can be spread around the globe in a glimpse. The rapidity of COVID19 crisis unfolding speaks for itself. The way governments across the world have synchronized (and the uniformity of the answer) in their response to it, is also staggering.
Then let’s have a look at ideas that acquire object-like characteristics:
Ideas are unique (truth is unique), you cannot have different versions of an idea unlike objects (you can make copies of an original piece of art) but in our digitalized era they can be modified. You have recognized the fake news problem. There is no longer a single narrative dominating the public discourse. For instance, in the COVID19 crisis, you have those attempts by the CCP to rewrite history on the pandemics in an attempt to model truth in the same way as you sculpt an object.
You can copy ideas without a loss, but blockchain technologies allow you to tackle with the multiple spending problem of electronic coins. You can make a distributed ledger so that the same coin cannot be spent many times in parallel, while the coin is nothing but a large number (at the end of the day it is only a string of “0”s and “1”s as Leibniz foresaw it).
Powers and Responsibilities
With great powers come great responsibilities as they say. The information technologies have given us the power to make the world of ideas and the world of objects interact in a more efficient way. Before that era the only way to interact was through our will which is nothing else than a way to make ideas have an impact on the world of objects. Most of the time these new powers help us to achieve results that were previously truly unimaginable. Just think at what happens when you order an item through Amazon. It is nothing short of what is described as magic in the literature: you are using magic wand (a computer) and a magic spell (your credit card number) and if you have enough experience/power (money on you bank account) a Gobelin (an UPS delivery boy) will bring you the desired object. Information technologies have made real (which is paradoxical in itself) the magical agenda. The story Fantasia warns us: those new powers come with a price, because the multiplicative force is also at work when things don’t unfold as planned.