The Distance Between the Head and the Heart

Twenty-five years ago today, I was sitting behind a television desk at Bloomberg in New York narrating the day in live broadcast while people I knew were dying in the very “news” I was describing.

Some of them were communicating with me through the Bloomberg Terminal from inside the World Trade Center.

They told us about the smoke. The heat. The stairwells. The people trying to get to the roof. The people jumping.

And then the buildings came down.

The messages stopped.

Trauma does something strange to human beings.

When an experience becomes too painful to absorb, the mind finds ways to protect us from it. Sometimes memories disappear. Sometimes they return years later. Sometimes we remember perfectly well what happened but detach the facts from the feelings that accompanied them.

We know the chronology.

We can tell the story.

But we don’t have to feel it.

The head separates itself from the heart.

It is an extraordinary survival mechanism.

It can also be extraordinarily dangerous.

Because once the separation occurs, the mind can begin constructing explanations and solutions without consulting the emotional reality that created the problem in the first place.

This happens in families all the time.

A child growing up with an abusive parent may find it psychologically easier to blame the parent who failed to stop the abuse than to confront the terrifying reality of the person actually inflicting it. The story becomes distorted because the truth is too painful to hold directly.

The distortion protects the child.

Until it doesn’t.

What begins as survival can become addiction, rage, paralysis, broken relationships or unrealized potential decades later.

I have begun to wonder whether countries do the same thing.

Because nothing about September 11 felt political to me on September 11.

It was almost violently personal.

There were no policy debates inside the buildings.

There were people calling their husbands and wives.

People trying to find stairs.

People helping strangers.

People trying to get home.

People realizing they weren’t going to.

And millions of Americans experienced some version of that emotional rupture simultaneously.

Then almost immediately, the machinery of the mind went to work.

Who did this?

Why?

What should we do?

Who should pay?

Those were necessary questions.

But they were being asked by a traumatized country.

And traumatized people are not always good at identifying the source of their pain.

Al-Qaeda carried out September 11. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals.

Iraq did not attack the United States on September 11.

Yet less than two years later, American soldiers were invading Iraq.

Whatever arguments were subsequently made about Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction, regional security or democracy, Iraq was not responsible for the event that had created the enormous reservoir of American fear and rage from which the war drew much of its political energy.

We redirected the trauma.

And once we did, extraordinary things became possible.

War became permanent.

Surveillance expanded.

Executive power grew.

Torture acquired bureaucratic terminology.

Young Americans were sent repeatedly into wars whose relationship to the morning that changed their country became increasingly difficult to explain.

When I left television, I moved just down the road from Camp Pendleton, a Marine base in southern California, and worked with veterans who carried the consequences home in their bodies, their marriages, their sleep and their lives.

I have heard descriptions of rules of engagement and battlefield decisions inside a war zone and were almost unbearable when translated back into ordinary human terms.

That’s another thing separation allows us to do.

It converts human consequences into procedures.

Targets.

Threat assessments.

Collateral damage.

Acceptable losses.

Necessary measures.

The sterilized language becomes cleaner as the reality becomes uglier.

This isn’t because the people making these decisions are monsters.

Quite the opposite.

It’s because human beings frequently cannot continuously experience the emotional consequences of every decision they are required to make.

So we compartmentalize.

We become efficient.

We become rational.

We become capable of doing things that would be almost impossible if we had to experience fully what they meant to another human being.

And this is where September 11 unexpectedly collides, for me, with the question I find myself thinking about twenty-five years later.

Superintelligence.

I use AI daily. It is one of the most extraordinary tools I have ever encountered.

But the destination now being discussed is not merely better software.

It is superintelligence – a completely different animal. Think about the clean power from a nuclear power plant and the annihilation of a nuclear bomb.

Intelligence beyond human intelligence.

And I keep returning to a question that suddenly feels less technological than psychological:

What is intelligence when it has no heart?

For most of human history, intelligence and emotion have existed inside the same animal.

Imperfectly.

Messily.

Sometimes disastrously.

But the person calculating the consequence was at least theoretically capable of feeling the consequence.

We are now contemplating separating those things completely.

We may create intelligence capable of optimizing systems beyond anything a human mind could accomplish while possessing no intrinsic human experience of grief, love, humiliation, terror, tenderness, mortality or loss.

Think about what that means.

The machine may know exactly how many people a decision will hurt.

It may model their behavior perfectly.

It may predict their deaths.

It may calculate the economically optimal response.

But it cannot stand outside a building waiting for someone it loves to come out.

It cannot receive the last message.

It cannot lose a child.

It cannot hold someone’s hand.

It cannot know what any of those things mean unless human beings insist that meaning remains part of the calculation.

That may be the real danger.

Not that machines become too intelligent.

That intelligence itself becomes completely separated from the human experience it is supposed to serve.

We have already seen what human beings can do when trauma creates distance between the head and the heart.

We have built bureaucracies capable of creating even greater distance.

Now we are building machines for which that distance is infinite.

Twenty-five years after September 11, I remember the messages on the screen.

But what matters to me now isn’t the information they contained.

It is that there were human beings on the other side of them.

People who were afraid.

People who wanted to live.

People who loved someone.

That is the information no system can be allowed to discard.

Because intelligence is a tool.

Markets are tools.

Governments are tools.

Technology is a tool.

Systems are tools.

Human life is the point.

And perhaps the most important question of the next twenty-five years is whether we remember that before we build an intelligence capable of forgetting it for us.