Language is a Window into Human Nature

I just read The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker. When I finished it I was disappointed. I had heard so much about Pinker (this is the first book of his I’ve read), and I felt like I had learned very little about human nature. But as I reflected on it over the next few days, my opinion radically changed. I kept bumping into things that were illuminated by the insights in this book.

For example, I read an article about how robots are being programmed to follow some of the basic modes of human thought so they interface with humans better, and these basic modes are exactly what Pinker outlined.

The basic message of the book is that there are deep structures in our brains, evolved over countless millennia, which allow us to make sense of our sensory experience. These are very similar to the “categories of understanding” described by Immanuel Kant 225 years ago. Pinker lists space, time, substance, object, causation, force, possession, and goal as the basic concepts that form the scaffolding that constructs our mental model of the world.  

These models are very useful for helping us to navigate the physical world, but science has discovered that our evolved models don’t accurately match reality. Pinker writes, “They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic.” In other words, the basic concepts box us in; they restrict how we can think about reality. This is why quantum physics is so hard to comprehend, and also why it is so difficult to put spiritual experiences into words.

Causation is one of the basic concepts, and it forms a big part of our worldview. We attribute causation whenever we see an action by an autonomous actor. Scientists have done studies where shapes move on a computer screen. If, for example, a yellow triangle moves towards a red circle and stops just when it touches the circle, and then the circle starts moving, subjects overwhelmingly say, “the triangle caused the circle to move.” There’s been research with shapes on computer screens in which the movements are so involved that the subjects start telling stories about the shapes as if they are living creatures, even imbuing them with emotions.

Our Robot Future

I was a child in the 1960’s, and one of my favorite cartoons was “The Jetsons.” 

I expected that my future would look like the world portrayed in the show—I particularly wanted to jet around in my personal rocket ship. (I didn’t play too much attention to how boringly conventional the family structure was—dad goes to a dull job while mom goes shopping.)

In the 1950s and 60s the technological advances of the twentieth century inspired dreams of a future of leisure. “Design for Dreaming” wonderfully illustrates these dreams  (This is the MST3K version and well worth watching!), including technology that liberates women from the drudgery of housework. And that has come true: I can remember my mother laboriously defrosting our refrigerator on a regular basis. Now my refrigerator does the work for me.

But as the century wore on it seemed like the grandiose dreams of the future were just a fantasy. What happened to our personal rocket ships? We did get lots of new technologies, like computers and smartphones that have made life more interesting and productive, but they have also made our lives more complex and caused us to work more, not less.

What happened to that dream of leisure?

Kevin Drum warns in a recent Mother Jones magazine article (May/June 2013, “Welcome Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?”), that most of us will soon be living lives of leisure, but it’s not going to be pleasant.

He provides a fascinating analogy to describe how the foundation for this future has been building so slowly that we are mostly oblivious to it; but we are just a decade or so away from seeing it transform our world (see the bottom of the article for a description of this analogy).

The essence is that artificial intelligence (AI) and robots have been steadily increasing in computational ability and numbers, and they are about to put almost everyone out of work. In fact, Drum suggests that this is already happening: this is why the unemployment rate has stayed so stubbornly high in the last few years.

When is the last time someone pumped your gas for you? Think of how many service station attendant jobs have been eliminated. Grocery store cashiers are soon to be obsolete. How many receptionists have been put out of work by businesses using interactive phone answering software?

Some new products coming that will reduce the need for humans in other jobs: driverless cars mean we’ll no longer need taxi drivers; implants that sense an impending heart attack and call 911 via your smartphone will reduce the need for all kinds of medical services; computers that grade student’s papers and scan legal documents eliminate the need for teacher’s assistants and lawyers.