Striving

 In a post I wrote for this blog last month, I engaged at length with a riveting column by Ezra Klein that—better than any other piece of writing I've seen on the topic—crystallized our current moment's dread about the AI revolution. In one of the most striking images in the piece, Klein compares the human creation of an artificial mind to an act of spirit-conjuration. "I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors [for AI] lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts," writes Klein. "As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal." 

The archetype hovering over this passage—too obvious perhaps to be name-checked—is that of Faust. Through many technological vicissitudes, the Faust legend has served humanity as a metaphor for tampering with powers so great and terrible that they verge on the supernatural. Until recently, many modern minds would have gone to nuclear weapons as the most potent example of humanity's ability to unleash such satanic forces. Now, the contemporary breakthroughs in AI are provoking the same kinds of reflections. And so, hoping for insight, I turn to Goethe's famous rendition of the Faust story to make sense of the new AI era on which we are embarking. 

A first-time reader of Goethe's masterwork—as I was—will find many surprises. I knew the outline of the story chiefly from the Murnau film and the Gounod opera—and anyone who has seen these works before reading the drama (on which they are based) will be caught off guard by the fact that the Gretchen plot in Goethe's version is confined entirely to Part I of the epic. The second, far-longer part follows Faust (and, in some cases, far more minor characters who appear and vanish with the scene) as he invokes his Mephistophelean powers to establish modern finance and currency, become a brigand-king on the outskirts of ancient Sparta, seduce and wed Helen of Troy, wage war, witness the rise of feudalism, and create modern global trade. 

Not only is this far-ranging latter half of the epic seldom adapted for other media—or otherwise recalled—it also contains a message far different from the one that people often read into the Faust story. Other renditions of the Faust legend, as we have seen, tend to serve as warnings: humankind must not meddle in forces beyond its ken, lest it risk damnation. Goethe's version of Faust, however, makes as a condition of his devil's pact that he will never stagnate or rest from striving, and only falls into Mephistopheles' clutches when, like Lot's wife, he lets pause for a moment his forward efforts and allows himself a wistful glance upon the present. Moreover, instead of being damned, Goethe's Faust is at last saved by celestial spirits that praise his eternal striving, and see in it the seeds of humankind's salvation. 

This is not to say there is nothing in Goethe's version that expresses a sense of unease about humanity's technological adventuring—nor that there is nothing in it that speaks to our era's immediate concerns about the development of AI. Faust creates modern finance through a magical illusion—issuing bills of redemption for phantom underground treasures that may never be retrieved; and so seems to imply that all of banking and currency is really a sort of Ponzi scheme (here is Mephistopheles sounding like a proto-Bernie Madoff, or—more contemporary still—a prophet of Crypto currency: "If metal's wanted [...] the golden cups and chains can then be sold at auction,/and prompt redemption of these shares/ confounds all skeptics who might mock us./ Once used to this, no one will want another system." (Atkins translation throughout.)

Likewise, Goethe's drama shows the origins of great empires and international trade to be equally illusory or ignominious: The space for Faust's great palace that he rears in the play's final act—developing thereby the principles of modern engineering—is obtained through murder and arson (in one of Goethe's innumerable mythological touches, the couple Faust kills to clear his way are Baucis and Philemon). 

Moreover—as I said above—Goethe's drama does in passages capture the sense of dread we feel in the face of AI. In one passage early on in the play, when Faust is experimenting with conjuring, but has not yet welcomed Mephistopheles into his study, he is overwhelmed by the appearance of an Earth-spirit that he has summoned. "So gigantic was the apparition," he relates, "that I, alas, could only think myself a dwarf." One is reminded not only of Ezra Klein's words above about AI as an act of spirit-summoning, but more specifically of a passage from a recent journalistic account of an early user of one of the latest AI engines. This tester of the device told the reporter he had experienced "an 'existential crisis,'" when using the product, "because it revealed how powerful and creative the A.I. was compared with the tester’s own puny brain." In other words, "so gigantic was the apparition," he was instantly overthrown by the comparison, just like Faust in his study, confronting the Earth spirit. 

Then there is another passage more apt still, in the second part of the drama, when a medieval alchemist—the successor to Faust's former professorial post, after the doctor departed to pursue his career of satanic powers—seeks to create an artificial mind. He does so by pursuing the alchemical legend of the "homunculus," or synthetic human that could supposedly be created through an admixture of chemical elements. In seeking to describe the disturbing goal of his pursuits, the alchemist, Wagner, begins to sound an awful lot like the AI researchers Ezra Klein quotes, as they attempt to bring an artificial mind into existence: "A grand design may seem insane at first;/ but in the future chance will seem absurd;,/ and such a brain as this, intended for great thoughts, will in its turn create a thinker too."

As much as Faust could be quoted—and often is so quoted—as a warning against such treacherous technological researches, that push beyond familiar grounds of human achievement into nearly-supernatural domains, however, Goethe's text when read as a whole is far more ambivalent. Faust is, as I mentioned, saved at the end. And if we wish to continue to apply the metaphor, beyond the frightening admonitions we have quoted above, we can perhaps say that humanity can hope for salvation even after tampering with the forces of AI; that these new devices may in fact open up scope for further human advancement, rather than spelling our doom. Not only is Faust saved in the second part of Goethe's drama, after all—he is saved precisely because of, not in spite of, his questing, entrepreneurial spirit and his technological endeavoring: "for him whose striving never ceases/ we can provide redemption," the Angels say. 

There are some who have found this a too-easy salvation. It is not clear that Faust comes to genuinely renounce his past actions or regret the harm he has caused (much of it unintentionally but foreseeably) in his varied career as seducer, financier, brigand, strategist, colonizer, empire-builder, and murderer (for it is Faust who orders the abduction of the old couple that causes their death—Mephistopheles is merely acting as his cat's paw). Goethe does not dwell on an implied change of character, and thereby leave the impression that his Heaven positively welcomes and encourages the spirit of ruthless conquest and technological progress, even when it is purchased in blood. The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray sees in Faust's redemption then "an excuse for Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and all such tyrants who could honestly say, 'To the end of my days I never had a moment's rest'," and deplores what he sees in Goethe as "an unstinting sympathy for a billionaire businessman always enriching and aggrandising himself without a sign of remorse[.]"

If Faust offers a message of redemption, then, perhaps it is a false light. Many of us will feel compelled to agree with Gray, after all, that striving and endeavoring alone do not make for moral salvation, when they are striving in the pursuit of nothing but gain, power, and ruthless advantage. The question of AI therefore will come down to this: is it, at last, a striving for human betterment? Or will it tear through the fabric of society, leaving only the charred remains of humanity in its wake, like the cottage of Baucis and Philemon that Faust sets alight to make his fortune?