Searching for the Anthropological Alien

An eminently sensible article in today's New York Times from Seth Shostak, the Director of SETI and a tireless advocate for our continuing quest to find intelligent life beyond the Earth.  But not just that: he's also been a leader in the continuing discourse of what each of the terms in the acronym "SETI" should mean: what kind of search?  Where?  And what should constitute "intelligence"?  This time, he's weighing in on a debate over actively courting extraterrestrial neighbors by broadcasting transmissions into space.  What should we say?  And shouldn't we be more careful?  Perhaps extraterrestrial intelligence will be less-than-impressed with the ravages that modernity and capitalism have wrought.  Or perhaps they'll see our various weaknesses, and swoop down to attack!  These arguments, Shostak suggests, have more to tell us about contemporary, Hollywood scripts than about the intentions of aliens, and he counters with another, suitably contemporary, proposal: send the aliens Big Data!

But this Big Data approach to SETI (Big Data SETI?) seems just as implicated in our vision of human futures as any Hollywood evocation of alien invasion.  "Big Data" seem poised to solve all of our problems, and it was just a matter of time before the idea came up in the context of extraterrestrial life.  And this is ok.  Unavoidably, SETI is about communicating with humans--today.  Each SETI proposal, each new Arecibo project, is potentially data about extraterrestrial intelligence, but also data about terrestrial intelligence.  As Kant writes (and as David Clark expertly annotates),

"The highest concept of species may be that of a terrestrial rational being [eines irdischen vernünftigen], but we will not be able to describe its characteristics because we do not know of a nonterrestrial rational being [nicht- irdischen Wesen] which would enable us to refer to its properties and consequently classify that terrestrial being as rational. It seems, therefore, that the problem of giving an account of the character of the human species is quite insoluble [sie schlechterdings unauflöslich], because the problem could only be solved by comparing two species of rational beings on the basis of experience, but experience has not offered us a comparison between two species of rational beings."  

To put it another way--we have already given Kant his aliens, and each SETI experiment is simultaneously an encounter with an extraterrestrial rationality with which to measure ourselves.  As we move from SETI@home to what will undoubtedly be fascinating experiments with Big Data, we uncover more and more of our own assumptions about intelligence and communication, and our own concern about the intentions of the humans and nonhumans around us.  In this case, "we" (keeping in mind this is hardly a universal "we") worry about the messages we're sending, the networks we're forming.  The albatross of Big Data around around our necks continues to compel us (like the Ancient Mariner) to tell the governments and institutions around us everything about ourselves, all of the time.  Do we really want aliens mining our Big Data?  Do we really want the terrestrial, non-human agents around us to mine our Big Data (search engines, social network analysis, etc.)?



      

Manufacturing the Alien

I've been thinking on and off about aliens these days. One of the reasons must be because I'm on the CONTACT! listserve, which is fairly choc-a-block with speculations on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. The other has to with my research on other "aliens," those non-human agents that are more and more part of our everyday life.

Of course, it's odd to think about these "agents" (software or hardware) as "aliens" at all, but this is exactly what Morton Klass did in a 1983 essay of his I just re-read, "The Artificial Agent: Transformations of the Robot in Science Fiction" (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 470 (171-179)). Klass spent much of his career as Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College (Columbia University). But his early career was one saturated in science fiction. As the brother of William Tenn (aka Phillip Klass), Morton Klass contributed several sf stories in the 1950s and early 1960s--several which subsequently were re-printed in anthropological science fiction collections like Leon Stover's Apeman, Spaceman.

In this essay, he tries to conjoin those two, otherwise distinct careers in a bit of speculative , cultural analysis on why we feel more comfortable with the alien we've manufactured (the alien we know?) than with the one we don't:

The robot in science fiction was portrayed at first as an alien and as a threat, but the danger was perceived as primarily an economic one--apart, that is, from the theological danger. The robot may drive us from our jobs and otherwise destroy our economic well being, it was felt; it may even threaten to destroy the world as we know it; it may endanger our collective soul. But we have never believed it would dishonour or corrupt us, something we have always assumed that our aliens wanted most of all to do. Perhaps not surprisingly then we seem to be able to live with whatever threat, economic or theological, the robots represent; we do not exhibit horror or revulsion, or even very much trepidation.

What strikes me about this passage is the fate of the robot today. Is it considered alien at all? Perhaps this is one of the reasons I found the movie version of I, Robot so unsatisfying: the robot today is hardly a figure of fear (at least to those people not being bombed by drones). I would even go further and say that the robot isn't really figured as a robot at all, if by that we mean some anthropomorphic, Capek-inspired robot. Instead, we have a wide variety of hardware and software agents that have seamlessly(?) extended our cognition, perception and sociality without actually demanding that we consciously recognize their alien autonomy from us. Of course, robotics labs manufacture extremely life-like robots, but these are not the ones that we encounter in our everyday practice. Our robots have faded into the (human) woodwork--as tools we use. Or, perhaps it's the case that we have become more alien, multiply supplemented by the artificial and hence no longer distinct from some intelligent 'Other".