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Subject: Global Cow From: armin@easynet.co.UK (Armin Medosch) Date: 24 Aug 1997 21:24:13 +0200 * * * * * The Global Cow I. For more than 40 years mathematicians, computer scientists and philosophers have been working on the problem of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The aim is to program computers in such a way that they show human-like intelligence. Within the last 10 years a new field of research has opened up. AI has obviously failed to reach any of its goals. Although computers are 'better' than humans in some fields ('number crunching') their ability to interact with real life situations is very weak and they are not even able to understand 'natural language'. (The reason for this inability is the so called 'knowledge bottleneck': to be able to understand natural language a computer should have a huge amount of contextual knowledge and should be able to access this knowledge database in a way which relates to a specific situation. But the processor power as well as contemporary programming methods are still unable to provide this context specific access to knowledge. The question is if this can be seen as a problem of quantitative computing power at all.) Instead of continuing to feed this real world knowledge into computers through human programmers, computer science has recently chosen a different approach. Computers should 'learn' real life knowledge through evolutionary processes. For this new objective of AI, the term 'Artificial Life' was coined. The terminology of AI and AL shows how terms which are deeply rooted in culture - very 'imprecise' terms in the scientific world view - are applied to the rationalist world of computers and their 'machine logic'. The computer becomes a brain and vice versa. This would not be a problem in itself if computers didn't stand for something completely different: the world of 'hard' science and objective truth. Computers are not only the preferred tool of hard science, they are also its ultimate expression. Science claims a position of priority over all other forms of gathering knowledge. 'Culture is bad science'. (Marvin Minsky 'AI- Pope') But as the examples of AI and AL show, the 'objectivity' of computer science is deeply compromised by the cultural preferences of its protagonists. They assume that they can create 'intelligence' or 'life' but are not even able to define those terms. This dilemma drasticaly deepens through the fusion of computer science with other fields of knowledge, namely biology, evolution theory, robotics, medicine, genetics and economic theory. AL is not only based on the belief that machines can come to terms with the complexity of living matter and that they are able to help in defining the essence of life (soft AL), but also that they generate life itself and, in the case of biotechnology, manipulate it in any desired way (human genome project and its results). With biotechnology and AL 'life' is subsumed under the notion of the machinic. Technological culture is declared as second nature. Slowly and without the public taking notice the connotations of many terms have changed. DNA is called the 'genetic code', thereby suggesting that the reproduction of living cells has a strong analogy to computer processes like storing and copying. Artificial (manmade) and natural (grown) aren't strong contradictions any more. This is not a bad thing in itself, but is very problematic under the conditions of a technologically powered world capitalism and the way that this system deals with human and natural resources. Computers are the epistemological as well as the symbolic agents of a worldwide control system through feedback (cybernetics - cyberspace). Seen philosophically, a technologically grounded 'biomorphing', the melting of natural and technical systems, can be quite seductive. But under the restraints of the existing economic and political power system, with its inherent social darwinism, biomorphing is a serious threat to mankind. It would be nice to no longer see a contradiction between 'machine' and 'alive'. But the contradiction continues to exist on another level; that of the pragmatic living situation of human beings. In this context a solution cannot be seen in a fundamentally reactionary defense of 'life' against the 'machine', but rather vice versa in redefining the machinic through new metaphors. The machine is not 'objective'. It is a part of human culture and can be redefined in its essence. II. As an alternative we propose the metaphor of the 'cow'. The 'cow' is an ideal metaphor for adressing questions of information processing and for giving computer science a new goal. Information processing in computer networks shows a strong analogy to the metabolism of a cow. The digestive apparatus of a cow, with its rumen and its intestines, is amazingly similar to the approach of distributed computing. Computing power from various resources is used via a network of connections instead of having just one cpu. The cow therefore, is not just a metaphor for a single computer workstation but also for worldwide computer networks like the internet. Hence we speak about the 'global cow' (referring to the notion of 'global village'). In terms of evolutionary steps the cow is well ahead of any contemporary computer systems. As opposed to computers the cow is an almost perfectly self-contained system. - the cow needs almost no servicing - it is able to reproduce itself - the cow has an input/output system that really makes sense (its user interface is much more appropriate to humans than screens, keyboards or the 'mouse') - even after its death all its parts can be recycled and used in various ways In the parallel processing units (rumen) of the cow, various microorganism are living, e.g. bacteriae, amoebae, spori, fungi. They all collaborate in an interacting complex system to process the input of the cow. Doesn't this collaborative way of processing data provide a strong analogy to the various Internet-User-Communities? The diverse microorganisms in the rumen of the cow produce an amazing aesthetic variety, far more elaborate than any computer graphics which we have seen today. As opposed to the official world of computer science the heretical culture of hackers and freaks has already adapted the cow in various ways. Some examples: MOO - MUD Object Oriented (text based multi- user-worlds) COW - Client of Win (UNIX Client for Games) ASCII - the cow as an aesthetic data object. The global cow is the ideal computer of the future. It makes us wonder that the cow is not already the official metaphor for computers. The global cow helps us to understand today's computers. We can avoid scientific paradoxes and technodeterministic and reductionist metaphors like AI or AL. There may be better metaphors than the global cow. But at the given level of computer technology we think that the global cow is a very useful tool for elementary progress in working with and thinking about computers. The global cow opens up new horizons for the philosophical and social dimensions of techno sciences. The Global Cow - March 1996 - August 1997 Armin Medosch (armin@easynet.co.uk) and Manu Luksch (manu@silverserver.co.at)