BOOK REVIEW : An Ambitious Faith Placed in Computers

Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century by O. B. Hardison Jr. (Viking: $22.95; 359 pages)

This is a very ambitious book. It aims to draw together science, technology and culture, and it spans history, language, architecture and art, ultimately arriving at machine intelligence as the apex and metaphor of thought.

If this sounds both challenging and wacky, it’s because that’s a fair description of the book. There is much here worth thinking about and saying. But in the end, it doesn’t hang together. The conclusions don’t follow from what comes before.

In “Disappearing Through the Skylight,” O. B. Hardison Jr., a distinguished professor of English at Georgetown University and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, attempts a synthesis of the two cultures and a forecast of where they--and we--are heading. What characterizes both science and art, he says, is the loss of certainty, or what he calls “the disappearance of fundamental verities.”

It is no coincidence, he argues, that both physics and art were rocked to their foundations between 1900 and 1910 and that neither has recovered since. In those years, Einstein published the theory of relativity, and Picasso began his Cubist paintings. The world was turned on its head.

Hardison’s examples range from quantum mechanics to the Eiffel Tower to Christo’s “Running Fence” to poetry written by computers (and by people) and to many, many more things. The breadth of his knowledge is stunning. He thinks imaginatively in many fields.

The effect of the changes that this century has seen is to question the very idea of meaning. Computer programs have been written that can “write” poetry in the sense of mechanically choosing words from a dictionary and inserting them in a prearranged pattern. This works particularly well in haiku, which typically has a dreamy, suggestive quality that can sometimes be evoked by random assortments of words.

Suppose you came across this poem. What would you make of it?

Still midnight, silent

Still waters, still frozen,

Battle, dusk, and fear.

If it appeared in a book of ancient Japanese poetry, you would be tempted to look for meaning. It seems to say something. If, on the other hand, you were told that it was written by a computer that randomly selected its words, your reaction would probably be very different.

“Is the traditional concept of art still adequate for the images and music and poetry they (computers) are creating?” Hardison asks. “What is the meaning in computer music of terms like ‘compose’ and ‘instrument’ and ‘perform’; in art of ‘artist’ and ‘paint,’ and ‘model’; in literature of ‘author’ and ‘write’ and ‘read’? When computer art is interactive, does the consumer become the artist? When computer art is collaborative, is the machine equal in standing with the artist?”

So far so good.

But all of this somehow leads Hardison to the conclusion that computers may be evolution’s next step after people. He writes: “Perhaps the relation between carbon man and the silicon devices he is creating is like the relation between the caterpillar and the iridescent, winged creature that the caterpillar unconsciously prepares to become.”

But that’s not all. Not only are computers like butterflies, Hardison goes on to imply that they may even be God. We believe what computers say even when we can’t prove it.

For example, there is a famous conjecture in mathematics called the four-color theorem, which had defied human proof for more than a century. In 1976 it was proved by a computer. But the proof is so complicated that it can never be checked by a human mind. We take it on faith.

“God is that which validates the unprovable, and that which validates the unprovable is the functional equivalent of God,” Hardison says. “Just as Jehovah is the source of truth of, say, the Ten Commandments, a silicon device is the source of the truth of the four-color theorem. Acceptance of the proof of the four-color theorem involves faith in silicon devices that is analogous to religious faith.”

Not quite. Religious faith is the ability to believe what you know isn’t true. Faith in the four-color theorem requires no such suspension of disbelief.

In general, Hardison places too much faith in computers. They do some things marvelously well, spectacularly better than people can. But even when they write poetry or music, and even if they could write a short story (which they can’t), they do not know that they have written it. They do not write from emotion and feeling; they merely shuffle words around.

Are such machines butterflies? Or God? Is Hardison serious?

I wanted to like this book much more than I did.