Edward Ashford Lee


On his book The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines

Cover Interview of May 20, 2020

In a nutshell

We are all used to the idea that humanity shapes technology. After all, we humans are the designers, right? Wait. Maybe we are being a bit arrogant here. The French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier, known as Alain, wrote this about fishing boats in Brittany:

Every boat is copied from another boat. ... Let’s reason as follows in the manner of Darwin. It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages and thus never be copied. ... One could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others.

In this view, boat designers are more agents of mutation than designers, and sometimes their mutations result in a “badly made boat.” Could it be that Facebook has been fashioned more by teenagers than by software engineers?

My book takes the position that digital technology coevolves with humans. Facebook changes its users and its designers who then change Facebook. The thinking of software engineers is shaped by the tools they use, themselves earlier outcomes of software engineering. And the success of each mutation depends less on its technical excellence than on its ability to “go viral.” The techno-cultural context has more effect on the outcome than all of the deliberate decisions of the software engineers. And this context evolves.

All of this implies that we humans are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we tend to think. My book tries to help us understand this trajectory as a Darwinian coevolution. To do that, I had to take a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how technology today resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet.

This latter idea, to view digital technology as a new life form, is likely to be the most controversial idea in the book. Computers are made of silicon and wires, not meat and leaves. Sure, the mechanisms and the chemistry are different, but what we need to focus on is not how they are made, but rather on how they work.

Life is a process, not a thing. In the words of Daniel Dennett, “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.” The digital processes that surround us, like living creatures, respond to stimulus from their environment. They grow. Think about how Wikipedia started on one server in 2001 and has grown to run on hundreds of servers scattered around the planet. The machines, and most especially the software, even reproduce (mostly with our help, for now). They also inherit traits from their forebearers (“Every boat is copied from another boat.”)

Don’t get me wrong. To consider the machines to be “living” is not to assign them rights or agency. It is just understanding that they have a certain autonomy and an ability to sustain their own processes. Some are capable of behaviors that we can call “intelligent,” but most are not.

Even if we view them as “living,” in some sense, we have to recognize that they are not biological beings, and they differ from us in important ways. Digital machines, defined by software, can be copied perfectly and “travel” at the speed of light. No biological being can do that. Also, no AI software has a body like ours. To the extent that our own cognitive selves depend on our embodiment, the AIs will never be like us. But the machines are acquiring bodies. Consider a self-driving car. Will it ever reach the point that we must hold it accountable for its actions?