Summa Technologiae by

For purposes of argument, let’s lay science fiction (SF) as a genre out on an axis that runs from SF about tools to SF about ideas (this is a facile split, but bear with me). On the tools side of the axis, we have science fiction that speculates about stuff: stories of airships, tricorders, and ice rays. At the far end of this side of the spectrum are documents that act as near-term, plausibly speculative engineering and design proposals—the Memex, and Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” is this kind of proposal, complete with some extrapolations into the future following the Memex’s introduction, with the new profession of “trailblazers” building associative links through the corpus of knowledge. The polar opposite to this mode, the ultraviolet to the infrared of video telephones and invisibility suits, is the science fiction of ideas and nothing else, and at the end of the line in that austere, high-altitude country lives Stanislaw Lem. Lem is one of the world’s most highly regarded science fiction writers. His work includes numerous short story collections (most notably The Cyberiad, written from the sardonic perspective of super-human machines) and several novels on subjects like artificial intelligence and humanalien communication, including Solaris, which has been repeatedly adapted for film by directors including Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. He is science fiction’s closest equivalent to Jorge Luis Borges, using his genre to push the limits of the thinkable. If the SF of tools is always about to turn into an actual product proposal, patent application, or manufacturer’s spec, the SF of ideas is always on the verge of tipping into pure philosophy. It asks questions of ethics and politics— what responsibility do we owe to beings with modes of cognition that do not resemble our own? For purposes of contact with aliens, who actually “represents” the human species? Of course, it asks questions of ontology (Philip K. Dick being exemplary here): how do we determine and engage with what is really real? In Lem’s case, it asks epistemological questions: How do we know what we know? How are we certain? How do we assess salient information? And how, on this basis, do we make judgments? This last is the sting in the tail of many of Lem’s observations, both in his fiction and in the book discussed here. Bush was concerned that vital discoveries were going unrecognized in the mass of material—“I suspect,” he wrote to F.P. Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation in 1939, “we now have reincarnations of Mendel all about us, to be discovered a generation hence, if at all” (Nyce & Kahn, 1989, p. 215). Lem is indeed troubled by this as a practical matter, but his larger concern is the ways decisions are made based on what we know, or think we know. “If we ask for a boon from them,” wrote Norbert Wiener of Cold War-era automated nuclear defense technologies, “we must ask for what we really want and not for what we think we want. If we program a machine for winning a war, we must think well what we mean by winning. . . . We cannot expect the machine to follow us in those prejudices and emotional compromises by which we enable ourselves to call destruction by the name of victory” (Wiener, 1961, p. 177). Lem— who cites and discusses Wiener a number of times over the course of the book—turns this question, and questions like it, over and over. As human capabilities begin to encounter the limits of our comprehension, Lem asks us to weigh our goals and our criteria of value. What is the victory of a nuclear stalemate? What is the freedom of a society of powerfully predictive big data analysis? What is the identity of the person whose humanity is artificially maintained? How do we evaluate conclusions presented by information systems too complex for humans to understand? Hence this book. Its reception disappointed its author—it “sank without a trace” (p. xx)—and it has remained remarkably obscure and untranslated for decades, given that the bulk of Lem’s work has been in press in dozens of languages since his career began flourishing in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, the reasons for this book’s neglect are clear once we begin reading. Despite a lucid, brisk translation by Joanna Zylinska, who helps to untangle Lem’s intricate sentences, the book as a whole can be slow going, full of table-setting as Lem describes the contemporary state of cybernetics, computing research, astronomy, and sundry other subjects to make the case for his thought experiments. Science fiction can provide a great liberty of thinking, permission to hand-wave the gritty intricacies so the author can get to the questions and implications. Lem was always particularly good at this; his works that seem most purely and idiosyncratically his are reviews and introductions he wrote for books that don’t exist, freeing him completely from the tedium of dialog or explaining how such-and-such a device works. (He called these pieces “apocryphs,” a neologism which deserves wider usage.) Here, there are some long walks, through sections sometimes repetitive and sometimes © 2014 ASIS&T