PerspectiveA Guide to Not Killing or Mutilating Artificial Intelligence Research
What’s the fastest way to build a jig-saw puzzle? That was the question posed by Michael Polanyi in 1962. An obvious answer is to enlist help. Polanyi found it obvious that the fastest way to build a jig-saw puzzle is to let everyone work on it together in full sight of each other. No central authority could accelerate progress. Polanyi, however, thought it “impossible and nonsensical” to guide science toward particular ends. Like in the jig-saw puzzle, no scientist understands more than a tiny fraction of the total domain. Joint opinion is reached when each scientist has overlapping knowledge with other scientists, “so that the whole of science will be covered by chains and networks of overlapping neighborhoods.” Intervention by a central authority can only “kill or mutilate” scientific progress, Polanyi argued; it “cannot shape it.”
What’s the fastest way to build a jig-saw puzzle? That was the question posed by Michael Polanyi in 1962. An obvious answer is to enlist help. In what way, then, could the helpers be coordinated most efficiently? If you divided pieces between the helpers, then progress would slow to a crawl. You couldn’t know how to usefully divide the pieces without first solving the puzzle.
Eric Lofgren writes in War on the Rocks that Polanyi found it obvious that the fastest way to build a jig-saw puzzle is to let everyone work on it together in full sight of each other. No central authority could accelerate progress. “Under this system,” Polanyi wrote, “each helper will act on his own initiative, by responding to the latest achievements of the others, and the completion of their joint task will be greatly accelerated.”
In the years after World War II, Polanyi heard many calls for the deliberate guidance of a national science program. These were inspired by the apparently successful record of Soviet five-year plans. Indeed, the Pentagon adopted the five-year plan in 1961, and it continues to shape decision-making to this day. Polanyi, however, thought it “impossible and nonsensical” to guide science toward particular ends. Like in the jig-saw puzzle, no scientist understands more than a tiny fraction of the total domain. Joint opinion is reached when each scientist has overlapping knowledge with other scientists, “so that the whole of science will be covered by chains and networks of overlapping neighborhoods.”
In this way, the independent initiatives of scientists result in self-coordination. The overall progress of science proceeds at its fastest possible pace. Intervention by a central authority can only “kill or mutilate” scientific progress, Polanyi argued; it “cannot shape it.”
