AI, *Muybridge*, and the Mind

Graphic novelist Guy Delisle is most famous for his memoir Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. I’ve read virtually every word he’s ever written, and seen virtually every picture he’s ever drawn. After two readings, I’m ready to affirm that Delisle’s new Muybridge is his very best book.

Muybridge (pronounced MY-brij) is at once a graphic biography of photographer-inventor-entrepreneur Eadweard Muybridge, a history of 19th-century photography, and a crash course on cross-species anatomy. At the meta-level, more importantly, it is a profound treatise on how technology changes the worldview of humanity — opening new vistas and creating novel confusions at the same time.

The titular character is famous for proving that horses at full gallop get all four hooves off the ground simultaneously. A topic I couldn’t care less about, honestly. Indeed, I’d never ever heard of Muybridge before I bought the book. But Delisle’s narration totally won me over. After introducing his central character, the writer-artist gives a quick history of photography, then shows how Muybridge built his brand, crisscrossing the mid-19th-century U.S. to capture its natural wonders. Early photography was perfect for landscapes and other stills, but struggled to take clear pictures of living — hence fidgety — beings.

Muybridge in Yosemite. (A self-portrait because his assistant was too scared to pose).

Once Muybridge became a top nature photographer, Leland Stanford — mogul, one-time California governor, and horse enthusiast — hired Muybridge to decisively prove that horses at full gallop get all their hooves off the ground. The project takes years, interrupted by an unrelated capital murder trial. (Muybridge was a cool guy, but a bad man). Standing on the shoulders of other inventors, Muybridge finally develops the technology for sequential high-speed photography. Which solves the galloping horse question — and unlocks untold secrets of the anatomy of man, beast, and bird. And also quickly leads to motion pictures. Read the whole book for details.

The most spell-binding part of the book for me, however, comes near the beginning, when Muybridge is first learning about photography. I keep thinking about these three panels.

“Can the people in the picture see us?” was a common question in the early days of photography. No one at the time wondered if paintings of human beings were human or conscious. But photographs seemed eerily different. When a picture superficially looks exactly like a real human being, it’s easy to start wondering if the picture also has the deeper characteristics of a human being. Since the person in the portrait is looking right at you, maybe he can see you. If he can see you, he’s conscious. He has a mind, like you or me. Hence, alive!

After sympathetically putting yourself in the shoes of people first encountering photography, I hope you’ll still agree that such musings were utterly absurd. You don’t have to understand how eyes work to realize that a drawing of an eye can’t actually see. Nor do you need to understand how vision works to realize that the reason why a drawing of an eye can’t see is not that the drawing is insufficiently realistic. The visual awareness possessed by a cartoon, a quick sketch, a painted masterpiece, and a photograph is always the same — and always equal to zero. Furthermore, even though no one has ever built a new eye, getting the right biological building blocks is crucial. Fleshy material at least has the potential to see, but ink and paper never will.

So what? Humanity is once again at the dawn of an amazing yet unsettling technology: AI. Since human nature remains the same as in the mid-19th-century, many of us feel the same way our forebears felt when they first saw photographic portraits. AI visionaries see the potential to make life better. Good for them! But lots of other folks are going crazy, attributing literal consciousness to software that expertly simulates human communication.

My point: Once you realize that an infinity of perfect pixels don’t make a portrait come to life, you should also conclude that an infinity of perfect words don’t make software come to life, either. Both are technologies of superficial simulation. A photograph is designed to look just like the human it captures. An AI is designed to talk just like the data upon which it is trained.

Superficial simulations are immensely useful for some purposes. I can only imagine how Muybridge would have swooned to use a modern camera phone. But for other purposes, they’re useless. Taking a photo of your dying friend may make you feel better, but it doesn’t actually keep him alive. The same goes for building a chatbot of your dying friend. To simulate a mind is not to save it. Or to update Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my bot; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

What makes me so sure that AIs aren’t even slightly literally conscious? The same thing that makes you sure that portraits of staring people can’t slightly literally see you. Sure, you can pretend that biology or physics let you resolve the latter question. But that’s too clever by half. You don’t need to study STEM for years to realize that photographs or AIs aren’t actually conscious. All you need is common sense philosophy of mind — and if you don’t have that common sense, all the STEM in the universe won’t save you.