Agent Smith Visions

Not to beat it to death, but there's a bigger problem with Isaac Asimov's Malthusian reasoning in Robot Visions, one that I didn't write about on Monday but is worth bringing up because it's a common belief, and it's wrong. I think of it as Agent Smith's fallacy.

There are many reasons not to like the movie The Matrix: Using humans as power sources doesn't jibe well with the law of conservation of energy, for one, and the hand-to-hand combat scenes are silly. But The Matrix is a fun popcorn flick—despite Agent Smith's humanity-is-a-virus speech.

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.

Natural equilibrium? This is wrong. Do lions go on hunger strike when their numbers swell too large? Do deer choose not to breed so that they don't have too much impact on their environment? Do bacteria have any instinct at all? There is no such thing as an instinctual will to equilibrium. Every species is doing the best it can to increase its population; they just happen to fail most of the time and instead maintain a stable population. Humans happen to be increasing their numbers right now.

Many people—not just Asimov—think something similar to what Agent Smith thinks. Humans consume too much. Humans destroy too much. Humans are evil. There's a tacit assumption that the misfortunes humanity creates for itself are done so through deliberate choice, whereas other species on the planet are mindlessly behaving according to harmonious instinct. What evidence do we have for this distinction between us and other species? This is a flimsy proposition, and we wouldn't believe it if we didn't want to believe it.

There are many reasons to project sin onto humanity—some of them even useful—but the two reasons that stand out to me are: (1) you call evil only that which has power over you—in this case, humanity and the inhibitive social order it imposes over individuals— and (2) the alternative explanation—that no one is in control—is scarier than believing we're evil. For if we're not in control, then we won't ever choose our equilibrium with the environment, but instead we'll have that equilibrium “chosen” for us.