The MOIO Factor



“It’s alive! It’s alive!”
-Victor Frankenstein


          Photoshop may have it in for me.
          Perhaps I have insulted it without knowing.  Or maybe it is simply fed up with my attempts to retouch photos of myself.  Who knows?
          I say this because the program keeps crashing the moment before I save all my work.  Doesn’t matter how far along I am, or what the project is, or how complex the file…it crashes just in time to drive me nuts, every time.  Which means that it seems to know just when to do that.  
          None of the tech blogs I consulted helped; plenty of theories but no explanations.  And no cure.  One wise geek said it was no big surprise at all and chalked it up to the MOIO (pronounced mo-yoh) Factor.  MOIO is not Yiddish.  It is an acronym for Mind Of It's Own.  That may be a joke but it is also one of the most persistent ways in which we think about machines.           
          Everyone knows that a technode cannot think for itself.  Not yet at least.  For now MOIO simply reflects our sense of the complexity all around us.  But while single widgets are mindless, technology as a whole does have a mind of its own in a way because it operates in an evolutionary sphere beyond our plans and schemes.  Surprising outcomes often fall outside the narrow definition we have of mind...what we intend, wish, or will.  It is not that they are thinking for themselves exactly, just that they are not thinking for ourselves.             
          This incorrigible capacity is what we are invoking when we resort to the MOIO explanation.  It is part of our co-evolution with technology, reflecting a desire for smarter machines on one hand and an outright dread of them on the other.
          All of which brings to mind the story of the Golem.

          In the most common telling of this fable, the Golem of Prague was created by Rabbi Judah Lowe in the 17th century as a mash-up of Batman and Gumby.  Made of clay, it was brought to life by a secret sign written on a piece of paper that was slipped into its mouth.  During the week it brought criminals to justice and exposed anti-Semites.  But Rabbi Lowe removed life from the creature every Friday so it could not go out on its own and desecrate the Sabbath.  He did that by erasing one letter from the paper which contained the word Emeth in Hebrew, which means truth.  Erasing the first letter turned it into the word Meth, which means death.  This led to all sorts of problems of course because our relationship to machines is filled with truth and death.  It also, I suppose, makes Hebrew the first programming language. 
          Naturally, like Frankenstein and other similar stories, mistakes are made and the creature runs amok.  These are cautionary tales about power and control and they are the very embodiment of MOIO.  This is worth remembering because as the Gizmos evolves, the secret signs get hidden under newer layers of complexity…underlying structures become more untouchable and out of reach. 
          Model T cars, for example, came with a toolbox that allowed drivers to fix most of the problems that arose on the road but to do so now you would need a truckful of computerized diagnostic devices that would themselves need experts to fix.  For the same reason, I cannot get into the Emeth within my computer to understand the motives of Photoshop.  And on the grandest scale of all, the secret sign in lost in the flux.  I may be able to turn off my computer but no one on earth can turn off the Web.

          Yet the moral of most golemic tales does not come from MOIO run amok.  That provides the adventure but not the lesson.  What really touches us is the critical moment in such stories.  That instant – so poignant, so central – when what we have made turns to us for answers we do not have.  That scary point when the created stops serving and starts demanding.  And we stop ordering and must begin explaining.
          Sounds like science fiction all right…a futuristic Photoshop with artificial intelligence that refuses to fix the blemishes because, unlike me, it will not lie.
          But a friend of mine who is a rabbi has suggested that this dilemma between creator and created may be cosmic.  Perhaps, she says, this is precisely the same position our creator is in, relative to us.  It is a view of the universe that relies on a Great Initiator, inventive and hopeful, but one who is surprised at outcomes and struggling to keep up.  No more in control of the biocosm than we are of our own technocosm. 
          And with no better answers to our questions than we will have for our machine creations…once they wake up and ask.
          Hello, Photoshop…anyone home?

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