The Industrialization of Intelligence

Mind and Machine in the Modern Age

Noah Kennedy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351164863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1989 The Industrialization of Intelligence is a spirited blend of the principles of social science and computer technology. Critically praised in the United States and England by leading lights both literary and technological, it develops an original and provocative model of the interplay between computer systems and social systems.

Noah Kennedy has composed a compelling story from key episodes in the development of the computer, and coupled it with a probing analysis of the true role of automation in modem society. The result firmly plants computer technology in the soil of western culture and denies the shrill claims that the information age represents a sudden break with the historical past.

He starts with biographical vignettes from the lives of five pivotal thinkers, weaving their crucial insights into the larger fabric of contemporary and future society. He then gives a provocative forecast of the role of artificial intelligence in future society, and examines the probable impact of new computer technologies on employment and on the relationships between nations. The result is a reasoned understanding of our imminent future through a thoughtful analysis of our historical past.

1

The Machinery of Self-Love

Between the vast expanse of Western history that was characterized by the most slowly evolving precepts of traditional social order and the current age that is characterized by dynamic social change was a brief era when thoughtful men held that right human reason should reign over the earth. The Enlightenment lasted scarcely more than a lifetime, being neatly framed by the beginning and end of the eighteenth century, but in that brief time the fundamental philosophical revolution that heralded the modern age was conceived through the very forces of reason the movement championed and tempered in the experiences of a changing world it could not ultimately apprehend. Thought at the time to represent the dawn of a new age of rationality and virtue, the historical role the Enlightenment has been forced to accept is that of a curious philosophical bridge between an antique world we would only dimly recognize and the modern world in which we move.

Though its reign was fleeting, the social philosophy that was developed during this period contains premises that we retain as unspoken truths today. Running through the Enlightenment was an attitude that man should judiciously employ his rational skills to define and address the issues of individuals in contemporary society, and that conversely all aspects of nature that were not immediately reducible to rational reflection were outside the bounds of productive human conduct. A secular code of virtuous rationality was invoked in the consideration of all things of any social importance: of governments and laws, of metaphysics and morality.

Those who were aligned with the ancient institutions that relied on traditional authority – particularly kings and clergy – though not exactly in full retreat, generally were forced to accommodate the new age of reason on its own terms and cede to rational reflection some domain of their discretion. In no social sphere was this more obvious than the rise during the Enlightenment of several related notions regarding moral behaviour, new concepts that regarded morality as the domain of secular philosophy rather than the exclusive realm of Christian dogma. According to the adherents of natural religion and the so-called Deists who flourished during the Enlightenment among the well educated in England and France, God did indeed exist but it was irrational to believe that he would reveal himself in any way except through the mechanism of his works, which were assumed to be reflections of divine intentions. Since God himself must conform to the dictates of reason, his characteristics must be discoverable to anyone who could shrewdly observe and reflect upon his works as they were manifest in nature. Thus the traditional concept and authority of God was captured by rationality, as was the responsibility for prescribing the activities that characterized a moral life. Rather than surrendering to faith in scripture and traditional dogma, philosophers spoke of natural laws that were discernible only through reason, laws to which even the Almighty must be subject. A sort of umbrella science termed moral philosophy’ became a part of the core curriculum in many European universities, which corresponded roughly to today’s social sciences. This was predictably a very fractious turn of events to traditional Christians and their clergy, but it also bore the unmistakable stamp of reason and as a practical matter moderate-minded clerics and politically sensible secular philosophers learned to live with one another and to ignore the ramifications of each other’s dogma.

The authority of secular philosophers to pass judgement on issues of morality expanded as the outlines of a future era of industrial capitalism became dimly discernible and the traditional oracles of morality seemed unable to speak to the moral issues of a new world. One of the most pressing ethical issues offered for philosophers’ consideration was defining virtuous conduct among individuals in society and the obverse issue of to what extent selfish conduct should be tolerated or condoned. As if the high-minded reflections of Enlightenment philosophers were tardy in attending to the problem, the issue was forced on to the philosophical agenda by an impudent pamphleteer who threatened to topple not only traditional Christian notions of morality but also the secular moral philosophers’ claim that they had anything of value to contribute to the question. The writer’s name was Bernard de Mandeville, a well-travelled Dutchman who had studied philosophy and medicine in his native country before settling in England at the end of the seventeenth century. If he had writing in mind when he selected his new home, it was a propitious choice, for this was the time and place for popular polemics due to the recent expiration of the Licensing Act through which the state had previously censored the press. Soon after settling in his new country, Mandeville took to writing an incendiary treatise on the relationship between individual virtue and social prosperity, a treatise that was to enjoy the distinction of being roundly condemned both from the pulpit and from the highest echelons of secular philosophy.

The treatise that caused such a stir was a collection of writings that was eventually published as a book entitled The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits that appeared in its final form in 1729, though Mandeville had actually commenced the work in 1705 with the publication of a popular tract that contained the rough-hewn essence of his argument. A thoughtful and deliberate stylist, Mandeville apparently resolved to demonstrate that the deceptively simple thesis of his initial work would stand up to the most rigorous rational criticism, and so the twenty-four years between the first and the final version of his treatise were consumed in painstakingly expanding the original pamphlet to accommodate all conceivable assaults on his logic. At the heart of the final book was the original work, an allegorical poem entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn’d Honest, followed by the extensive exegesis he had developed over the intervening years in the form of dialogues and essays. The consistent theme of this ongoing intellectual exercise was that intuitive notions of virtue do not stand up to rigorous analysis, and that philosophical systems that rely on these concepts of virtue are fatally flawed.

The Grumbling Hive tells the story of individuals in society, who are thinly disguised as bees in a massive beehive. The hive is generally a thriving community, respected for its military prowess by rival beehives, but populated by bees that uniformly display the same petty vices as commonly pervade human society. Just like their human counterparts, the bees are skilled in disguising their vices as virtues. As was common in populist tracts, there are entertaining jabs taken at stereotypical objects of popular abuse: bee doctors that pay more attention to their grave demeanour than to curing illness, bee lawyers who trade in specious lawsuits, lecherous bee clergy who prey upon the public, bee bureaucrats who swindle the bee sovereign, and so on. But all in all the state of commerce and living conditions in the hive are adequate, making it on balance a good, if somewhat irritating, place for a bee to live.

One day, through divine intervention, all the bees in the hive suddenly see through their pretensions to virtue, and the vice that pervades their behaviour becomes glaringly apparent. The entire colony suffers through intense introspection on the motives and ramifications of each of their selfish acts and virtuously embarks on a new age in which every action is scrupulously examined to ascertain its basis in vicious motives. The colony becomes a resolutely moral place: quacks and shysters repent, people lose all sense of vanity and selfishness, and workers who are not performing socially responsible and competent work voluntarily gravitate to more virtuous endeavours.

The ironical conclusion of the allegory is that the elimination of vice from the beehive does not make it a Utopia by any standard, but rather a dull and listless place that contrasts unfavourably with the way things were when viciousness was allowed to rule individuals’ behaviour. Without vicious motives, the instinct to harbour the luxuries and trappings of vanity disappear, and as the demand for these things declines the economy of the hive stagnates. Mandeville’s immediate point was that a thriving hive is in fact highly dependent on the system of selfishness that characterized it before its moral redemption, and in the process he challenged intuitive notions of the nature of vice and virtue. His thesis was that the amalgam of the selfish behaviour of individuals in society was necessary to what was generally considered to be the progress of mankind, and that conversely if individuals acted according to the finest Christian values the material progress of society was bound to collapse.

Mandeville refused to accept cosy notions about human virtue. To him, it was hypocritical to suppose that there was some transcendent good behind apparently virtuous activity, as all human action is ultimately based on assessments of selfish gain. If one accepted the traditional definition of virtue as action that in some way acted contrary to the selfish animal passions of man, Mandeville could reply that actions that fit this description did not really exist, since all actions could in one way or another be seen as being motivated by some selfish desire, whether it was making more money or assuring oneself a better place in the hereafter. Conversely, the only real human motives were vicious – some subtle, some brazen, but all vicious none the less, and it was this viciousness that fuelled the material wealth of society. Animal passions and wants forced humanity towards opulence just as hunger forces animals to obtain food. Contentment with one’s social position and moral rectitude in one’s actions were actually the bane of industry and commerce and the enemies to what most people hold dear.

As if such a polemic were not provocative enough to established religious dogma, Mandeville’s larger point was directed at the elite secular philosophers of the era who were attempting to construct elegant rational models of the value of virtue in contemporary society. His challenge to them was that any new system of moral philosophy that was founded on traditional concepts of individual virtue was an edifice built on a flawed foundation. Virtue did not properly exist, and one might as well confess the point and surrender any pretensions that rational reflection on virtue would yield meaningful laws on how one should conduct oneself among others. The operative concept was clearly human selfishness.

Mandeville was slippery enough that to this day there is no real consensus about what his own outlook really was. He was either a shocked moralist condemning the licentiousness of mankind and its allegiance to material wealth, or a hardened cynic who could not resist kicking the foundations away from underneath mankind’s pretensions to virtue. Perhaps he was a bit of both; perhaps he was neither. He may well have been a keen observer of humanity and a disciplined thinker whose conclusions outran his own moral comprehension. But regardless of his personal outlook, his reasoning was seductive and his conclusions were discomfiting to anyone who sought a rational confirmation of their claim to either virtue or worldly success, not to speak of those who aspired to both.

Anyone who could administer a healthy intellectual drubbing to Bernard de Mandeville was bound to be a hero to polite society, and Mandeville-bashing became great sport and almost a rite of passage to generations of intellectuals in England and on the continent. Among those philosophers who sallied forth to engage in a noble intellectual joust with the vulgar pretender were David Hume, William Law, John Dennis, George Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, Edward Gibbon, Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, T. R. Malthus, James Mill, John Wesley, Immanuel Kant and Montesquieu. But the attention the philosophical community directed towards Mandeville had just the opposite of its intended effect. Like pouring water on flaming oil, their unremitting critiques only served to disseminate Mandeville’s influence further, frustrating attempts to deal with his assertions decisively.

Some critics, despite their protestations, set out to refute Mandeville only to be strongly influenced by him. Rather than resisting the notion that self-love was at the core of all human action, they were persuaded to redefine vice and virtue in terms of what the effect of the action would ultimately be on a larger segment of society. In this rephrasing of Mandeville’s tale, virtue is redefined as action that has the effect of making a great number of people happy, so that virtue should be gauged by its utility in society as a whole despite the animal motives that may have been its direct inspiration. From this strain of thought emerged the ethical notion of utilitarianism that was central to the concepts of classical political economy. Among those who originally set out to denounce Mandeville only to be profoundly influenced by him was an obscure, amiable and infamously eccentric Scottish academic named Adam Smith, who went after Mandeville with vigour in his first major work only to be accused of plagiarizing Mandeville in his later masterpiece.

Adam Smith’s assault on Mandeville came in his first book, entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759 when Smith was 36. At the time of its publication, Smith was a popular lecturer in the field of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the book was a recapitulation of some of his lectures. Abstractly philosophical and academic in tone and firmly rooted in what might now be termed a bourgeois perspective, the book was hardly a work of fearless conviction. When it was critical of the privileged in society, its jabs were frequently couched in vague rhetoric; when it drew metaphysical conclusions, there was clearly an appeal to liberal Deist and fundamentalist Christian alike. Like his later masterpiece, the outlook of the book was unapologetically optimistic about the future of human society, but the basis for its optimism was fundamentally different. There was explicit reference to the ‘invisible hand’ of the Author of Nature that guides the individual actions of men, and the pronouncement that individuals’ actions in society serve to advance the plan of providence, themes for which Smith would later be renowned. But in contrast to his later development of these ideas, in this early work it was primarily the moral behaviour of the individual that advanced the providential plan, not his self-interest, and it was the individual’s virtue that was primarily the fountain of man’s worldly success, not his prudence and industry.

The point of departure for the book was doubtless a fine point of contention between Smith and his mentor Francis Hutcheson, who was a devotee of rational natural law and a passionate advocate for individual liberties, as well as a staunch critic of the bothersome Mandeville. Smith developed in a rather dry manner a theory of ethics that relied upon each person’s inner self being sympathetic to the plight and concern of others, while understanding that total empathy with the experiences of others was impossible. This, according to Smith, left to each individual the quite natural responsibility to evaluate and pursue what are in his own best interests. Smith implied that one should show some concern for those in misery, but argued that a tempered concern for the plight of the miserable along with a heightened awareness of those who are successful is a natural, socially productive, and ultimately moral perspective to assume. It was in this vein that Smith took his turn at sniping at Mandeville. While confessing the popular appeal of Mandeville’s arguments, Smith claimed that Mandeville’s philosophy confused the pride that comes from legitimate success with vanity of a ridiculous or fraudulent sort. The search for fraudulent acclaim was a deceit upon the just sympathies of other people, and it was this that distinguished virtuous from vicious acts. According to Smith’s philosophy, there was still a very important place in moral philosophy for both virtue and vice, and it was still immanently possible virtuously to pursue wealth without being overly distracted by those who are less fortunate.

Largely because Smith’s book elegantly reaffirmed that worldly success was not antithetical to virtue, and in fact was often a manifestation of virtuous conduct, it was a hit among the upper class in England and served as his entree into elite intellectual circles. Among those who were impressed by the book were Charles Townshend, a feisty nobleman and politician who was in and out of several high-ranking government posts in the period, none it seems without controversy. Townshend was a man of tremendous wit, ambition and vanity, a passionate and skilful orator described as one of those statesmen whose abilities are the misfortune of the nation they serve’.¹ It is ironic that this one man’s vanity and poor judgement led to the two most significant events of the incendiary year of 1776. In the first instance, as chancellor of the exchequer, Townshend impetuously supported the reinstitution of the Stamp Act that was so hated in the American colonies, this as an attempt to balance the British budget on the backs of the colonies following a stinging rebuke of his domestic tax bill in Parliament. In the second instance, he had made the peculiar selection of the infamously idiosyncratic Dr Smith to serve as his stepson’s tutor for his continental tour, a curious choice that was assumed by many to be an attempt to share the limelight with the newly fashionable philosopher. The former miscalculation created a storm in the northern American colonies that erupted into a riotous frenzy when Townshend foolishly compounded his error by attempting to subjugate colonial resistance to his new tax regime. The latter misjudgement forced the retiring Scottish academic to face the disordered real world, and to accommodate within his tidy and cloistered system of philosophy the messy details of the petty affairs of men as well as the discordant philosophies of the continent. Townshend’s first misjudgement erupted in the summer of 1776 with the American Revolution, his second had led to the publication a few months earlier of what must be the most influential polemic ever penned – Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

As a young man’s continental tour, the two and a half-year excursion that was Smith’s responsibility was uninspired, if not a total failure, but in terms of its effect on the tutor it was a historical event. The trip was undemanding enough to give Smith ample opportunity to reflect on his new book and boring enough to force the sometimes lazy philosopher to do so. He observed at first hand the indigenous economies of the Toulouse region in southern France and noted with interest the benefits of far-sighted government investment for canals and roads. He became incidentally embroiled in the fractious French politics of the region and the ongoing dispute over regulatory authority between the provinces and the crown. He stayed in Geneva, where he visited frequently with Voltaire, and rounded out his trip by spending ten months in Paris, where he dined in the fashionable French salons. He was saturated with French thought on government and society, and it is clear that these discussions had a profound effect on him. He dined frequently with Helvétius, who advocated creative legislation to steer individual behaviour towards social justice, and with Turgot, a brilliant champion of rational and practical government policy. He made acquaintance with the French Physiocrats, a group of reform-minded economists who advocated minimal taxation and a move away from mercantilist economics. He discussed political economy at length with François Quesnay, who popularized the phrase laissez-faire, and is reported to have considered dedicating The Wealth of Nations to him had the French economist not died before its publication.

Smith returned to England in 1766, when the tour was rudely terminated by the death of the brother of the pupil in his charge, and dedicated himself for the next ten years to writing the book that would be his masterpiece. He poured himself into the effort and, always a bit of a hypochondriac, suspected that the sustained intellectual effort would be the death of him. When it was finally published, it sold well and caused a stir but not a tremendous one. It went through several editions in Smith’s lifetime, but the powerful interests in England were not yet anxious to embrace the book, for its lesson of liberal reform was unmistakable and perhaps more disconcerting than its promise of expanded wealth was attractive. The French Revolution was a frightening spectacle for English observers to behold and since the book had the air of French influence the upheavals in France had the effect of dampening enthusiasm for the book until after Smith’s death in 1790. But as commercial interests grew more powerful with the widespread use of power machinery and manufactories assumed the more recognizable form of the modern factory, Smith’s polemic became increasingly popular with capitalist interests, and liberal-sounding laissez-faire became the norm among conservative moneyed interests.

The philosophy contained in The Wealth of Nations is the result of formal academic analysis blended with real-world understanding, and of keen original insight made to m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Capital Lost
• 1 The Machinery of Self-Love
• 2 Machinery and Labour
• 3 The Division of Mental Labour
• 4 The Laws of Thought
• 5 Origins of a System
• 6 Of Little Men and Monsters
• 7 Systems of Belief, Systems of Production
• 8 Technology and Employment
• 9 Human Capital and the Wealth of Nations
• Epilogue: On Leading the Leading Edge
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index