The Book No One Read

By Lee Billings · Nautilus · September 11, 2014 · View original ↗

Lee Billings’s essay on Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae. Lem wrote it in Poland in the early 1960s as a sweeping forecast of where technology would take humanity. It went mostly unread in the English-speaking world until a full translation appeared in 2013.

Summary

• The setup. Billings attends the 2007 Singularity Summit in San Francisco and finds a room focused on transhumanist futures, mostly ignoring the social and ecological problems right outside the building. Few attendees have heard of Lem or his book.
• Why no one read it. Until 2013 it existed in English only in excerpts. Its prose is dense and full of coinages: “phantomatics” for virtual reality, “molectronics” for nanotechnology.
• Lem’s method. A polymath working from Shannon, Turing and von Neumann, Lem reasoned from plausible premises to surprising conclusions rather than writing science fiction about them.
• The core argument. Drawing on evolutionary biology, thermodynamics and cybernetics, Lem holds that technological growth first stabilizes a civilization, then runs into an “information barrier”: more information than human minds can process. That barrier sets off a developmental crisis.
• The way through. Human cognitive obsolescence is unavoidable, so progress depends on automating cognition: algorithmic systems and, eventually, superhuman AI. The article puts the paradox as “To maintain control of our own fate, we must yield our agency to minds exponentially more powerful than our own.”
• Where it came from. Lem’s wartime experience in occupied Poland left him preoccupied with chance, entropy and the fragility of systems, and with whether people control technology or technology controls them.
• Billings’s verdict. Lem’s strength is taking human nature seriously. His weakness may be his optimism that humanity will rise to the challenge. For Billings, “the Singularity is less an opportunity than a question mark.”

Connections

• Summa Technologiae — the book itself, now on the anti-library.
• Singularity — the article opens at a Singularity Summit and treats Lem as an earlier, more rigorous prophet of the same idea.
• Artificial Intelligence / AGI — Lem’s 1964 case for automating cognition once humans hit the information barrier.
• David Cahn’s “AI Faith Test” — saved the same day; on AI as a religious project as well as an economic one.