December 8, 1939

Mary Catherine Bateson (December 8, 1939) is an anthropologist whose father Gregory Bateson, explored new intellectual ground and whose mother, Margaret Mead, is famous for her studies of certain societies. We explicate Mary Catherine Bateson's views by quoting from an interview she did:

'Until fairly recently, artificial intelligence didn’t learn. To create a machine that learns to think more efficiently was a big challenge. In the same sense, one of the things that I wonder about is how we'll be able to teach a machine to know what it doesn’t know that it might need to know in order to address a particular issue productively and insightfully. This is a huge problem for human beings. It takes a while for us to learn to solve problems, and then it takes even longer for us to realize what we don’t know that we would need to know to solve a particular problem.
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'How do you deal with ignorance? I don’t mean how do you shut ignorance out. Rather, how do you deal with an awareness of what you don’t know, and you don’t know how to know, in dealing with a particular problem? When Gregory Bateson was arguing about human purposes, that was where he got involved in environmentalism. We were doing all sorts of things to the planet we live on without recognizing what the side effects would be and the interactions. Although, at that point we were thinking more about side effects than about interactions between multiple processes. Once you begin to understand the nature of side effects, you ask a different set of questions before you make decisions and projections and analyze what’s going to happen.

'The same thing is true, for instance, with drug testing. The first question people ask is, "Does the drug work?" But the next question should be, "What else does the drug do besides dealing with the pathology?" A certain number of drugs get pulled off the market every year when people realize that the long-side effects may be more serious than what they’re trying to correct.

'What the analog to that in the computer world is, I don’t know. What we do is try to set up processes for problem solving and supply the data for analysis, but we don’t give the machine a way of saying, "What else should I know before I look at this question?" There has been so much excitement and sense of discovery around the digital revolution that we’re at a moment where we overestimate what can be done with AI, certainly as it stands at the moment.

'One of the most essential elements of human wisdom at its best is humility, knowing that you don’t know everything. There’s a sense in which we haven’t learned how to build humility into our interactions with our devices. The computer doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and it's willing to make projections when it hasn’t been provided with everything that would be relevant to those projections. How do we get there? I don’t know. It’s important to be aware of it, to realize that there are limits to what we can do with AI. It’s great for computation and arithmetic, and it saves huge amounts of labor. It seems to me that it lacks humility, lacks imagination, and lacks humor. It doesn’t mean you can’t bring those things into your interactions with your devices, particularly, in communicating with other human beings. But it does mean that elements of intelligence and wisdom—I like the word wisdom, because it's more multi-dimensional—are going to be lacking.
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'One of my favorite memories of my childhood was my father helping me set up an aquarium. In retrospect, I understand that he was teaching me to think about a community of organisms and their interactions, interdependence, and the issue of keeping them in balance so that it would be a healthy community. That was just at the beginning of our looking at the natural world in terms of ecology and balance. Rather than itemizing what was there, I was learning to look at the relationships and not just separate things.....

'My parents looked at the cybernetics conferences rather differently. My mother, who initially posed the concept of the cybernetics of cybernetics, second-order cybernetics, came out of the anthropological approach to participant observation: How can you do something and observe yourself doing it? She was saying, "Okay, you’re inventing a science of cybernetics, but are you looking at your process of inventing it, your process of publishing, and explaining, and interpreting?" One of the problems in the United States has been that pieces of cybernetics have exploded into tremendous economic activity in all of computer science, but much of the systems theory side of cybernetics has been sort of a stepchild. I firmly believe that it is the systems thinking that is critical.

'At the point where she said, "You guys need to look at what you’re doing. What is the cybernetics of cybernetics?" what she was saying was, "Stop and look at your own process and understand it." Eventually, I suppose you do run into the infinite recursion problem, but I guess you get used to that.
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'If you use the word "cyber" in our society now, people think that it means a device. It does not evoke the whole mystery of what maintains balance, or how a system is kept from going off kilter, which was the kind of thing that motivated the question in the first place. It’s probably not the first time that’s happened, that a technology with a very wide spectrum of uses has been so effective for certain problems that it’s obscured the other possible uses.

'People are not using cybernetic models as much as they should be. In thinking about medicine, for instance, we are thinking more than we used to about what happens when fifty years ago you had chicken pox and now you have shingles. What happened? How did the virus survive? It went into hiding. It took a different form. We’re finding examples of problems that we thought we’d solved but may have made worse.

'We have taller smoke stacks on factories now, trying to prevent smog and acid rain. What we’re getting is that the fumes are traveling further, higher up, and still coming down in the form of acid rain. Let’s look at that. Someone has tried to solve a problem, which they did—they reduced smog. But we still put smoke up the chimney and think it disappears. It isn't gone. It’s gone somewhere. We need to look at the entire system. What happens to the smoke? What happens to the wash-off of fertilizer into brooks and streams? In that sense, we’re using the technology to correct a problem without understanding the epistemology of the problem. The problem is connected to a larger system, and it’s not solved by the quick fix.
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'You don’t have to know a lot of technical terminology to be a systems thinker. One of the things that I’ve been realizing lately, and that I find fascinating as an anthropologist, is that if you look at belief systems and religions going way back in history, around the world, very often what you realize is that people have intuitively understood systems and used metaphors to think about them. The example that grabbed me was thinking about the pantheon of Greek gods—Zeus and Hera, Apollo and Demeter, and all of them. I suddenly realized that in the mythology they’re married, they have children, the sun and the moon are brother and sister. There are quarrels among the gods, and marriages, divorces, and so on. So you can use the Greek pantheon, because it is based on kinship, to take advantage of what people have learned from their observation of their friends and relatives.

'It turns out that the Greek religious system is a way of translating what you know about your sisters, and your cousins, and your aunts into knowledge about what’s happening to the weather, the climate, the crops, and international relations, all sorts of things. A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using knowledge of this to think about that. Religion is an adaptive tool, among other things. It is a form of analogic thinking.
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'What you have is this process of differentiation, which is intellectually profound but only a beginning. Taxonomy is an essential basis for all we know about the natural world. We have learned to classify. A bee is not a butterfly. You can see that stage in many forms of religion and mythology. And then in some later forms, the switch is from making distinctions to recognizing relationships.

'What comes along if you look at the New Testament is Jesus keeps violating all the rules about keeping things separate, which makes people angry, because that’s what they’ve been taught. He’s constantly posing the question, "What’s the connection?" And not, "What’s the difference?" You can see that this constant necessity of recognizing that things are separate and different and can be used in different ways, and then seeing that everything is connected, and how it’s connected and interdependent, that this is a sort of permanent balance in human intellect. ...

'The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.'
 
Elsewhere Mary Catherine Bateson is quoted as putting these issues thusly:

'Every effort to know about knowing involves the cat trying to swallow its own tail'