Erich Fromm on the Quest for AI (1968)
An interesting passage from the book The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (1968) by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm:
“The tendency to install technical progress as the highest value is linked up not only with our overemphasis on intellect but, most importantly, with a deep emotional attraction to the mechanical, to all that is not alive, to all that is man-made. This attraction to the non-alive, which is in its more extreme form an attraction to death and decay (necrophilia), leads even in its less drastic form to indifference toward life instead of “reverence for life.” Those who are attracted to the non-alive are the people who prefer “law and order” to living structure, bureaucratic to spontaneous methods, gadgets to living beings, repetition to originality, neatness to exuberance, hoarding to spending. They want to control life because they are afraid of its uncontrollable spontaneity; they would rather kill it than to expose themselves to it and merge with the world around them. They often gamble with death because they are not rooted in life; their courage is the courage to die and the symbol of their ultimate courage is the Russian roulette.1 The rate of our automobile accidents and the preparation for thermonuclear war are a testimony to this readiness to gamble with death. And who would not eventually prefer this exciting gamble to the boring unaliveness of the organization man?
“One symptom of the attraction of the merely mechanical is the growing popularity, among some scientists and the public, of the idea that it will be possible to construct computers, which are no different from humans in thinking, feeling, or any other aspect of functioning.2 The main problem, it seems to me, is not whether such a computer-man can be constructed; it is rather why the idea is becoming so popular in a historical period when nothing seems to be more important than to transform the existing man into a more rational, harmonious, and peace-loving being. One cannot help being suspicious that often the attraction of the computerman idea is the expression of a flight from life and from humane experience into the mechanical and purely cerebral.
“The possibility that we can build robots who are like men belongs, if anywhere, to the future. But the present already shows us men who act like robots. When the majority of men are like robots, then indeed there will be no problem in building robots who are like men. The idea of the manlike computer is a good example of the alternative between the human and the inhuman use of machines. The computer can serve the enhancement of life in many respects. But the idea that it replaces man and life is the manifestation of the pathology of today.”
Michael Maccoby has demonstrated the incidence of the life-loving versus the death-loving syndrome in various populations by the application of an “interpretative” questionnaire. Cf. his “Polling Emotional Attitudes in Relation to Political Choices” (unpublished through 1970).↩
Dean E. Wooldridge, for instance, in Mechanical Man (New York: McGraw– Hill, 1968), writes that it will be possible to manufacture computers synthetically, which are “completely undistinguishable from human beings produced in the usual manner” [!] (p. 172). Marvin L. Minsky, a great authority on computers, writes in his book Computation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice–Hall, 1967): “There is no reason to suppose machines have any limitations not shared by man” (p. VII).↩