Throughout his career, whether studying language, advocating a realistic biology of
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Throughout his career, whether studying language, advocating a realistic biology of
mind, or examining the human condition through the lens of humanistic Enlightenment
ideas, psychologist Steven Pinker has embraced and championed a naturalistic
understanding of the universe and the computational theory of mind. He is perhaps the
first internationally recognized public intellectual whose recognition is based on the
advocacy of empirically based thinking about language, mind, and human nature.
“Just as Darwin made it possible for a thoughtful observer of the natural world to
do without creationism, ” he says, “Turing and others made it possible for a thoughtful
observer of the cognitive world to do without spiritualism. ”
In the debate about AI risk, he argues against prophecies of doom and gloom,
noting that they spring from the worst of our psychological biases—exemplified
particularly by media reports: “Disaster scenarios are cheap to play out in the
probability-free zone of our imaginations, and they can always find a worried,
technophobic, or morbidly fascinated audience.” Hence, over the centuries: Pandora,
Faust, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein, the population bomb, resource depletion,
HAL, suitcase nukes, the Y2K bug, and engulfment by nanotechnological grey goo. “A
characteristic of AI dystopias,”’ he points out, “is that they project a parochial alpha-
male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. . .. History does turn up the occasional
megalomaniacal despot or psychopathic serial killer, but these are products of a history
of natural selection shaping testosterone-sensitive circuits in a certain species of primate,
not an inevitable feature of intelligent systems.”
In the present essay, he applauds Wiener’s belief in the strength of ideas vis-a-vis
the encroachment of technology. As Wiener so aptly put it, “The machine’s danger to
society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it.”
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