Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

The honeybee scout returns to the hive from a foraging expedition and “dances,” rapidly crawling in a particular, fairly complex pattern over the honeycomb. Pollen or nectar may adhere to her body, and she may regurgitate some of her stomach contents for her eager sisters. All this is done in complete darkness, her motions monitored by the spectators through their sense of touch. Given only this information, a swarm of bees then flies out of the hive in the proper direction to the proper distance to a food supply they’ve never visited as effortlessly as if this was their daily, familiar commute from home to work. They partake of the meal described to them. All this occurs more often when food is scarce or the nectar especially sweet.⁸ How to encode the location of a field of flowers into the language of dance, and how to decode the choreography is knowledge present in the hereditary information stored inside the insect. Maybe they are “only” robots, but if so these robots have formidable capabilities.

When we characterize such beings as only robots, we are also in danger of losing sight of the possibilities in robotics and artificial intelligence over the next few decades. Already, there are robots that read sheet music and play it on a keyboard, robots that translate pretty well between two very different languages, robots that learn from their own experiences—codifying rules of thumb never taught to them by their programmers. (In chess, for example, they might learn that it is generally better to position bishops near the center than near the periphery of the board, and then teach themselves circumstances in which an exception to this rule is warranted.) Some open-loop chess-playing robots can defeat all but a handful of human chess masters. Their moves surprise their programmers. Their completed games are routinely analyzed by experts who speculate about what the robot’s “strategy,” “goals,” and “intentions” must have been. If you have a large enough pre-programmed behavioral repertoire and if you are able to learn enough from experience, don’t you begin to appear to an outside observer as if you’re a conscious being making voluntary choices—whatever may or may not be going on inside your head (or wherever you keep your neurons)?⁹

And when you have a massive collection of mutually integrated programs, capability for learned behavior, data-processing prowess, and means of ranking competing programs, might it not start feeling, on the inside, a little bit like thinking? Might our penchant for imagining someone inside pulling the strings of the animal marionette be a peculiarly human way of viewing the world?* Could our sense of executive control over ourselves, of pulling our own strings, be likewise illusory—at least most of the time, for most of what we do? How much are we really in charge of ourselves? And how much of our actual everyday behavior is on automatic pilot?

Among the many human feelings that, although culturally mediated, may be fundamentally preprogrammed, we might list sexual attraction, falling in love, jealousy, hunger and thirst, horror at the sight of blood, fear of snakes and heights and “monsters,” shyness and suspicion of strangers, obedience to those in authority, hero worship, dominance of the meek, pain and weeping, laughter, the incest taboo, the infant’s smiling delight at seeing members of its family, separation anxiety, and maternal love. There is a complex of emotions attached to each, and thinking has very little to do with any of them. Surely, we can imagine a being whose internal life is nearly wholly composed of such feelings, and nearly devoid of thought.

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The spider builds her web near our porch light. The fine, tough thread reels out from her spinneret. We first notice the web glistening with tiny droplets after a rainstorm, the proprietor repairing a damaged circumferential strut. The elegant, concentric, polygonal pattern is carefully stabilized with a single guy thread extending to the cowl of the lamp itself, and another to a nearby railing. She repairs the web even in darkness and foul weather. At night, when the light is on, she sits at the very center of her construction, awaiting the hapless insect who is attracted by the light and whose eyesight is so poor that the web is quite invisible. The moment one becomes entangled, news of this event travels to her in waves along the threads. She rushes down a radial strut, stings it, quickly wraps it in a white cocoon, packaging it for future use, and rushes back to her command center—composed, a marvel of efficiency, not even, as far as we can see, a little out of breath.