Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.

Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan Am, F.W. Woolworth, Fotomat booths, Borders bookshops, and Pier 1. Americans were watching Happy Days, M*A*S*H and Charlie’s Angels on television; their British cousins were watching George and Mildred, The Goodies, and Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. If you turned on the radio, “Hotel California” by The Eagles was alternating with “Dancing Queen” by Abba (and, if we want to be completely honest, “Car Wash” by Rose Royce). Most cars still ran on leaded gasoline, most phones were still rotary dial, and the Internet was a wonky idea that was still a few weeks from a working prototype.

_The Thorn Birds_ was on top of everyone’s bestseller list. The first Apple II home computer had just gone on sale. The Sex Pistols were in the studio wrapping up _Never Mind The Bollocks_; they would tour on it for just three months and then break up, and within another year Sid Vicious would be dead of a heroin overdose. Barack Obama was a high school junior living with his grandparents in Honolulu, Hawaii: his grades were okay, but he spent most of his time hanging with his pot-smoking friends in the “Choom Gang”.  Boris Johnson was tucked away at the elite Ashdown House boarding school while his parents marriage was slowly collapsing: although he was only thirteen, he had already adopted his signature hair style.  Elvis had just died on the toilet a few weeks ago.  It was the summer of Star Wars.

And Voyager 1 was blasting off for a tour of the Solar System.

There’s no way to pack the whole story of Voyager 1 into a single blog post.  Here’s the TLDR: Voyager was the second spacecraft to fly past Jupiter, and the first to take close-up photos of Jupiter’s moons.  It flew on past Saturn, and examined Saturn’s moon Titan, the only moon with an atmosphere.  And then it flew onwards, on and on, for another forty years.  It officially left the Solar System and entered interstellar space in 2012.  It just kept going, further and further into the infinite emptiness.  

(You know about the Golden Record?  Come on, everybody knows about the Golden Record.  It’s kind of hokey and cheesy and also kind of amazing and great.)

Voyager has grown old.  It was never designed for this!  Its original mission was supposed to last a bit over three years.  Voyager has turned out to be much tougher than anyone ever imagined, but time gets us all.  Its power source is a generator full of radioactive isotopes, and those are gradually decaying into inert lead.  Year by year, the energy declines, the power levels  relentlessly fall.  Year by year, NASA has been switching off Voyager’s instruments to conserve that dwindling flicker.  They turned off its internal heater a few years ago, and they thought that might be the end.  But those 1970s engineers built to last, and the circuitry and the valves kept working even as the temperature dropped down, down, colder than dry ice, colder than liquid nitrogen, falling towards absolute zero.  

(Voyager stored its internal data on a digital tape recorder.  Yes, a tape recorder, storing information on magnetic tape.  It wasn’t designed to function at a hundred degrees below zero.  It wasn’t designed to work for decades, winding and rewinding, endlessly re-writing data.  But it did.)

Voyager kept going, and kept going, until it was over 15 billion kilometers away.  At the speed of light, the Moon is one and a half seconds away.  The Sun is about 8 minutes away.  Voyager is twenty-two hours away.  Send a radio signal to it at lunch on Monday, and you’ll get a response back Wednesday morning.

* * *

I could go on at great length about Voyager — the discoveries it has made, the Deep Space Network that has maintained contact over the decades, the ever shrinking crew of aging technicians keeping it alive on a shoestring budget, how amazing it has all been. But I’ll restrict myself to just this:  the Pale Blue Dot.

In 1990, just before Voyager’s camera shut down forever, the probe turned around and looked backwards.  It zoomed in and took a picture of Earth.  But by that time, it was so far away that Earth was just a single pale blue pixel.  Look at the right-most band of light.  A little past halfway down — see that speck?  It’s not a defect.  It’s not something on your screen.  That’s the Earth.

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” — Carl Sagan

Voyager kept going for another 34 years after that photo.  It’s still going.  It has left the grip of the Sun’s gravity, so it’s going to fall outward forever. 

* * *

Here’s a bit of trivia: Voyager 1 currently holds the record for most distant active spacecraft.  It’s not even close.  The only other contender is Voyager’s little sister, Voyager 2, which had a different mission profile and so lags billions of kilometers behind their older sibling.

Here’s another bit of trivia:  if you’re reading this in 2024?  It’s very unlikely that you will live to see that record broken.  There are only two other spacecraft outside the Solar System — Voyager 2 and New Horizons.  Both of them are going to die before they get as far as Voyager 1.  And nobody — not NASA, not the Chinese, not the EU — is currently planning to launch another spacecraft to those distances.  In theory we could.  In practice, we have other priorities.

* * *

We thought we knew how Voyager would end.  The power would gradually, inevitably, run down.  The instruments would shut off, one by one.  The signal would get fainter.  Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data.  A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — something like an operating system.  And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.

(This is a problem NASA long since solved.  These days, every space probe that launches, leaves a perfect duplicate back on Earth.  Remember in “The Martian”, how they had another copy of Pathfinder sitting under a tarp in a warehouse?  That’s accurate.  It’s been standard practice for 30 years.  But back in 1977, nobody had thought of that yet.)

Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens.  Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds.  The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age. 

And they’re trying to fix the problem.  But right now, it doesn’t look good.  You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away.  They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day.  They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.

So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat.  And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.

And that’s all.

In The Quickest Revolution, Jacopo Pantaleoni examines modern technological progress and the history of computing. Bringing to bear his background as a visualisation software designer and a philosophical lens, Pantaleoni illuminates the threats that technological advancements like AI, the Metaverse, and Deepfakes pose to society, writes Hermano Luz Rodrigues.

The Quickest Revolution: An Insider’s Guide to Sweeping Technological Change, and Its Largest Threats. Jacopo Pantaleoni. Mimesis International. 2023.

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“This changes everything” is perhaps the most hackneyed phrase found in YouTube videos when the topic happens to be new technologies. Such videos typically feature enthusiastic presenters describing the marvellous potentials of a soon-to-come technology, and a comment section that shares the same optimism. These videos proliferate daily, receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Regardless of whether we take them at face value or with extreme scepticism, their abundance illustrates the craze for technological progress, and more importantly, that a critical view of this attention is wanting.

Pantaleoni uses theories such as Moore’s Law, which explains an exponential growth phenomenon, and inputs from his career and personal experiences, to frame the history of, and the philosophical ideas driving, technological change.

In The Quickest Revolution, Jacopo Pantaleoni aims to fill this gap by supplying the reader with a critical, yet personal, analysis of modern technological progress and its impact on society. Coming from a background in computer science and visualisation software development, Pantaleoni uses theories such as Moore’s Law, which explains an exponential growth phenomenon, and inputs from his career and personal experiences, to frame the history of, and the philosophical ideas driving, technological change.

The first few chapters of the book are devoted to a survey of the defining moments of pre-modern scientific advancements in the Western world. The chapters include breakthroughs from historical figures such as Copernicus, Galileo and Bacon. The author then fast-forwards to the 20th century to briefly introduce the achievements of the godfathers of computer science like Alan Turing. The descriptions of these events foreshadow the book’s main focus on contemporary technological development and its concerns. In the latter, Pantaleoni approaches many tech-related keywords trending today from a philosophical perspective: AI, Metaverse, Deepfakes, and Simulation, among others.

what distinguishes Pantaleoni’s approach is the fact that he analyses these themes with a gaze that stems from the fields of realistic visualisation and simulation.

While such at-issue discourses on contemporary technology may be plentiful among enthusiasts (eg, podcasts like Lex Fridman), what distinguishes Pantaleoni’s approach is the fact that he analyses these themes with a gaze that stems from the fields of realistic visualisation and simulation. This distinction is not to be taken lightly. Throughout the book, there are surprising overlaps between these specific fields and society’s perception and interest in technology. For example, the author notes how films such as The Matrix, which used technology to simulate and depict “another reality that did look real”, offer proof of “how deeply computer graphics has been affecting our culture” (185). In fact, he argues that not only did sci-fi and CGI-laden media foment interest in stories about simulated worlds, but the technological achievements of such productions heavily contributed to society’s adoration and pursuit of advancements in realistic visualisations and simulations.

Pantaleoni acknowledges that society’s pursuit of a realistic-simulated future is replete with potential benefits, such as reduction of operation costs, accessibility through remote work, and engagement by telepresence. But, he notes that it may bring forth undesirable consequences

Pantaleoni acknowledges that society’s pursuit of a realistic-simulated future is replete with potential benefits, such as reduction of operation costs, accessibility through remote work, and engagement by telepresence. But, he notes that it may bring forth undesirable consequences to the physical world. For him, such aspirations implicitly denote a belief that “advances in photorealistic rendering, networking, and artificial intelligence will provide us the tools to build a better version of reality” (244). He cautions that this reality exodus neglects existing problems, and poses the question: “If we are failing to set things straight in the real world, what chances do we have to fair better, or ‘do it right’ in a hypothetical Metaverse?”(244).

The book makes the case that there are signs that the hitherto inexorable drive for progress in these technologies is leading to devastating effects. As practical examples, the author cites the impacts these technologies have had on political elections, the economy, and collective identity, among others. The book also underscores how physical and virtual/simulated have become increasingly intertwined through technology. Sherry Turkle observed this phenomenon many years prior in her presentation Artificial Intelligence at 50: “When Animal Kingdom opened in Orlando, populated by ‘real’, that is, biological animals, its first visitors complained that these animals were not as ‘realistic’ as the animatronics creatures in Disneyworld”. That is, while the animatronics featured “typical” characteristics, the real animals were perceived as static in comparison.

In a similar fashion, Pantaleoni recognises the capacity of contemporary technologies to shift perceptions and recoil in society as proxies. He writes that the overwhelming majority of Deepfakes, for example, either create pornographic or troubling scenes using celebrities. Furthermore, he notes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots are capable of impersonating a human being and that AI is automating both physical and mental human labour.

Whatever risks these new technologies seem to embody, however, are often brushed off by enthusiasts. This rather careless stance might be due to what Pantaleoni describes as a “blind” faith in technological progress, a belief akin to a “new and widely spread religion” (242). At its core, this techie religion is based on the imperative that technological growth is not to be questioned or impeded, for it makes “promises of a better reality” (243).

While previous technologies were essentially engineered by humans, society is transitioning towards new technologies that are increasingly autonomous and uncontrollable

Two arguments regarding the implications of this “religion” may be extracted from the book. The first argument is that for the zealots, it doesn’t matter how things progress (the means), as long as they continue to do so (produce results). While previous technologies were essentially engineered by humans, society is transitioning towards new technologies that are increasingly autonomous and uncontrollable, because these new technologies produce results that are “far much better than any handcrafted algorithm a human could make”(126).

Similar to the deceiving Mechanical Turk of the 18th century, many of today’s black-box technologies are very convincing in providing an illusion of their capabilities, while little is known about their under-the-hood properties or actual affordances.

The second argument is that what is perceived as progress may actually be a sort of artifice. Similar to the deceiving Mechanical Turk of the 18th century, many of today’s black-box technologies are very convincing in providing an illusion of their capabilities, while little is known about their under-the-hood properties or actual affordances. This concealment of properties and their seductive realism lure techno enthusiasts because of their desire to believe in them. Pantaleoni reminds us, however, that image-generative AI models, for instance, “know nothing about physics laws and accurate simulations” (141). Instead, it achieves extreme realism by feeding millions of training examples (141).

Throughout the book, Pantaleoni engages the reader in the challenges of technological development, through a distinct and compelling gaze – that of his specialisation in realistic visualisation software. Moreover, he does so in the tone of a passionate advocate of technology and a worried critic. There are a variety of contemporary “revolution” topics and discussions, such as the ethics behind the implementation of new technologies or its impact on the economy, and depending on each reader’s preferences and interests, some will resonate more than others. However, readers are likely to find the historical accounts narrated in the first few chapters disjointed from the book’s focus. These accounts are broad and familiar, with much of its content being assumed knowledge for most readers. Nevertheless, Pantaleoni offers notable contributions to the field with his shrewd observations anchored by his vast experience. In a field saturated with either theorists or quacks, it is especially commendable to read a book from the perspective of a practitioner.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Bruce Rolff on Shutterstock.

In Language and the Rise of the Algorithm, Jeffrey Binder weaves together the past five centuries of mathematics, computer science and linguistic thought to examine the development of algorithmic thinking. According to Juan M. del Nido, Binder’s nuanced interdisciplinary work illuminates attempts to maintain and bridge the boundary between technical knowledge and everyday language.

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm. Jeffrey Binder. The University of Chicago Press. 2023

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Arguably, the history of what we now call algorithmic thinking is also the history of the consolidation of algebra, mathematics, calculus and formal logic as tools for composing, enunciating, and thinking about abstractions such as “some flowers are red”. But in less obvious ways, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm shows, it is also the history of trying to compute with, and often in spite of, language, to convey a meaningful proposition about the world. In other words, it is the history of ensuring that “red” actually means red – that we are all clear on who sets what red means (for example, experts through definition or ordinary people through usage) and agree on it – and of whether agreeing about these things is what matters when we use language.

The history of what we now call algorithmic thinking […]is also the history of trying to compute with, and often in spite of, language, to convey a meaningful proposition about the world.

Harking back to the 1500s, the first of the book’s five chapters examines attempts to use symbols to free writing from words at a time when vernaculars where plentiful, grammars unstable and literacy rates low. Algebra was not then considered part of mathematics proper but its rules, expressed in spoken language, were used for practical purposes like calculating taxes and inheritance. From myriad writing experiments emerged algebraic symbols: uncertain and indeterminate, they enabled computational reasoning about unknown values, a revolution that peaked when Viète first used letters in equations in 1591 (33-36).

Algebra was not [In the 1500s] considered part of mathematics proper but its rules, expressed in spoken language, were used for practical purposes like calculating taxes and inheritance

Chapter Two explores Leibniz’s attempts to produce a philosophical language made of symbols and unburdened by words, such that morals, metaphysics, and experiences are all subject to calculation. This was not an exercise in spitting out numbers, but with the aim of demonstrating the reasoning behind every step of communication: a truth-producing machine (62-64). The messiness of communication struck back: how can one ensure that all terms and their nuances are understood in the same way by different people? Leibniz argued that knowledge was divinely installed in us, waiting to be unlocked by devices such as his, but Locke’s argument that knowledge comes from sensory experience and requires an agreement over what things mean won the day (79), paving the way towards an emphasis on concepts and form.

Leibniz argued that knowledge was divinely installed in us, waiting to be unlocked […] but Locke’s argument that knowledge comes from sensory experience and requires an agreement over what things mean won the day

Leibniz also sought to resolve political differences through that language. Chapter Three argues Condorcet shared this goal and the premise that vernaculars were a hindrance, but contrary to Leibniz, he believed universal ideas needed to be taught, not uncovered. Condillac’s and Stanhope’s experiments with other logical machines – actual, material devices designed to think in logical terms through objects  – epitomised two tensions framing the century after the French Revolution: first, the matter of whether the people, and their vernacular culture, or the learned, and their enlightened culture, should govern shared meanings – that is to say, give meaning – and second, whether algebra should focus on philosophical and conceptual explanations or on formal definitions and rules (121).

The latter drive would prevail, and as Chapter Four shows, rigour came to emanate not from verbal definitions or clarity of meanings, but from axiomatic systems judged on consistency: meanings are irrelevant to the formal rules by which the system operates (148). Developing this consistency would not require the complete replacement of vernaculars Leibniz and Condorcet argued for: rather, symbolic forms would work alongside vernaculars to produce truth values, as with Boolean logic – the one powering search engines, for example. The fifth and last chapter, “Mass Produced Software Components”, rise of programming languages, in particular ALGOL, and the consolidation of regardless of specifics: intelligible, actionable results within a given amount of time (166).

Binder’s rigorous dissection of debates over language, philosophy, geometry, algebra, history and culture spanning 500 years integrates debates that most disciplines today, aside from some strands of media studies and Science and Technology Studies, tend to treat separately

This book is a tightly packed, erudite contribution to the growing concern in the Humanities with algorithms. Binder’s rigorous dissection of debates over language, philosophy, geometry, algebra, history and culture spanning 500 years integrates debates that most disciplines today, aside from some strands of media studies and Science and Technology Studies, tend to treat separately or with a poor sense of their inbuilt connections. A welcome result of this exercise is the historicisation of certain critiques of technological interventions in politics that, generally lacking this kind of integrated, long-range view, we tend to treat as novel and cutting-edge. For example, an 1818 obituary for Charles Mahon, third Earl of Stanhope and inventor of the Demonstrator, a “reasoning machine”, already claimed that technical solutions for other-than-technical problems such as his tend to replicate the biases of their creators (113), and often the very problems they intended to solve. This critique of technoidealism is now commonplace in the social sciences.

A second benefit of the author’s mode of writing is not explicit in the book but is arguably more consequential. From Bacon’s dismissal of words as “idols of the market” in 1623 (15) to PageRank algorithm’s developers’ goal to remove human judgement by mechanisation in the 1990s (200), the book traces attempts across the centuries to free reason and knowledge from language and rhetoric. In doing this, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm effectively serves as a highly persuasive history of the affects, ethics and aspirations of technocratic reason and rule. The book cuts across the histories of bureaucracy and expertise and the birth of governmentality to tell us how an abstraction in how we make meaning work emerged – an abstraction we are asked to trust in, and argue for, partly because it is the kind of abstraction it ended up being.

The book traces attempts across the centuries to free reason and knowledge from language and rhetoric

This is a rich and nuanced book, at times encyclopaedic in scope, and except for a slight jump in complexity and some jargon in the fifth and last chapter, it will be accessible to readers lacking prior knowledge of algorithms, mathematics or language philosophy. It will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, from philosophy and history to sociology and anthropology, as well as readers in political science, government studies and economics for the reasons listed above. It could work as course material for very advanced students.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Lettuce. on Flickr.

Right-wing ranters in my Twitter timeline are pooh-poohing the whole climate discussion without doing their homework. So, here’s a little reader to aid and abet (sorry, early retired teacher and that all). Let’s start at the beginning:1. CO2 is measured at the Manua Loa station. Results are clear, robust, and stark: CO2 is increasing. And […]