I don’t believe it’s possible to have a disembodied intelligence without a physical connection to reality. Everything we think, everything in our thought processes is built around being in touch with reality. Even the word “touch”…Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics. 

I first heard of Rodney Brooks in 1997 when I saw him in Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. In it, Brooks talks about making simple, cheap, insect-like, robots with closed circuitry that didn’t work on paper (it was ten years ago that I saw the movie and I am technically way over my head so I may have misremembered some of this). The robots kept falling down and bumping into walls but as they did they started self-correcting; soon they were walking and not bumping into walls. Their learning was shaped by an external reality.  

We humans, Homo sapiens, are social animals and we are shaped by our social environment as well as our physical environment. Not just growing up but as grown-ups. Hermits aren’t hermits because they are weird, they become weird because they have no social environment to bump into to keep them reasonable. People who live alone, like the uni-bomber, become strange; if they started strange, they become stranger living alone; isolated. Because dictators are usually behind a wall of courtesans, in a very real way, they are also alone which, I think, is why so many of them spiral into increasingly extreme behavior. They are alone because nobody is pushing back everybody is unctuously agreeing.

I think this isolation, surrounded by toadies and fixers, is the way Trump ran his business and, increasingly, the Trump Presidency. Extrapolating, this is the problem with the closed feedback loop of Facebook. Only hearing our side of the story makes us crazy.