A Sentient Machine, a Mindless Hive

Or, an unlikely connection between my robot vacuum and the rise of fascism.

It’s the weekend before Christmas, and I have a little free time before traveling. Well, not really—I should be cleaning. Like Don’t put ketchup bottles on the dinner table, Clean house before you travel is a deeply ingrained dictate of my upbringing.

I recently got a robot vacuum when my old-fashioned one broke, but Roombie needs a little supervision. It deftly avoids perilous drops and repeated head banging, but it sweats the small stuff—cat toys, area rugs, and power cords. So instead of doing advanced human things like reading and writing while the machine cleans, I follow it around anxiously, lifting it out of trouble and cheering it on. (Apparently, I’m not the first person to anthropomorphize their vacuum.)

Now I’ve cleared the bedroom of clutter and closed Roombie in there to run its course through invisible reams of code. Thousands of conditional statements govern the robot’s movements based on the input of its sensors. Stairs? Turn back. Corner? Spin until you see open space. Wall? Hug the perimeter. Map the room as you go and keep track of how far you’ve traveled. Interestingly, the first iRobot patent referenced the behavior of ants as inspiration. Social insects aren’t individually smart, but in a colony, their simple, collective behaviors add up to the appearance of purposeful intelligence. Roombie isn’t an “I”; it’s more like an anthill or the Borg. That catnip ball will be assimilated.

Reflecting our fears of AI, science fiction has been disturbing us with malevolent machines for at least half a century. Anybody remember the Twilight Zone episode “The Fever” with the moralizing-husband-turned-gambling-addict and the slot machine that tormented him? “Franklin…Franklin…” The fear is that a thinking machine will develop its own agenda, and we’ll just be in its way.

Frankly, though, I’m less worried about my vacuum developing a mind of its own than I am about people losing theirs. What keeps me awake nights is not a rebellious broom; it’s the brutish hive-mind of a totalitarian state. We don’t have to dream up such societies—we’ve seen them and the way they suck up everyone in their path. Some people become cogs, and others get crushed in the gears.

So while my vacuum whirs benignly in the background, I’ve been rereading parts of Sebastian Haffner’s memoir Defying Hitler. Haffner, who’s real name was Raimund Pretzel, was a law student in Berlin when the Nazis rose to power. He and his pregnant Jewish girlfriend/future wife fled to England in 1938, where Haffner became a highly respected journalist analyzing the German Reich for an English audience.

But one of Haffner’s most compelling works dates from before the war. In his last years in Berlin, he kept a private chronicle of the rise of Nazism. He considered the memoir too personal and emotional for publication and tucked it away in a drawer. When his son discovered the manuscript after Haffner’s death, he decided to publish it, for which I’m thankful. The genuineness and immediacy of that young man’s voice seem somehow just what we need now.

Haffner wrote the following about Hindenburg’s Jan. 30, 1933 appointment of Hitler as chancellor:

I do not know what the general reaction was. For about a minute, mine was completely correct: icy horror. Certainly this had been a possibility for a long time. You had to reckon with it. Nevertheless it was so bizarre, so incredible, to read it now in black and white. Hitler Reich Chancellor….for a moment I physically sensed the man’s odor of blood and filth, the nauseating approach of a man-eating animal—its foul, sharp claws in my face.

Then I shook the sensation off, tried to smile, started to consider, and found many reasons for reassurance. That evening I discussed the prospects of the new government with my father. We agreed that it had a good chance of doing a lot of damage, but not much chance of surviving very long….

Defying Hitler gives us one thoughtful person’s day-by-day witness of Hitler’s takeover of Germany. The memoir helps answer the question, “What were good Germans doing during the rise of Nazism? Why didn’t they act before it was too late?”

One answer is that reasonable people could scarcely believe what was happening. “Too late” arrived very suddenly—with machine guns in the streets, mowing down anyone who refused to give the Nazi salute—after a long, slow slide to totalitarianism. According to Haffner, when Hitler took over Germany, it seemed as if "a million individuals simultaneously suffered a nervous collapse."

Another answer is that Hitler and his inner circle were masters of propaganda. They always projected their evil intentions onto others; they relentlessly promoted their Big Lie about German victimhood with Jews and Communists as the villains. They pushed the lie so persistently that maybe a quarter of Germans would end up willingly aiding and applauding their atrocities, while others would decide that the very ideas of truth and goodness had become meaningless.

Reading Hitler’s first radio address as chancellor—the one Haffner would have heard—I find the language so familiar: the fierce, florid nationalism; the narrative of noble victimhood; the vague yet stirring words about eternal values, unity, strength, and power. The gist, of course, was “make Germany great again.” He didn’t say one word about Germany’s Jews, but in hindsight, we know that Kristallnacht was less than six years away.

People like Haffner could smell the stench of death from the beginning, yet they could do little beyond small gestures of defiance. Most people are not epic heroes; we just want to live our lives and look after our own. But generally speaking, we also want to stay human. Haffner watched in horror as two of his friends joined the Nazi party and became high-ranking officials.

Now I’m thinking of lines from a different witness of those times. Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jew who wrote diary entries and letters up until her deportation to Auschwitz, where she died at the age of 29. Also unpublished until long after the war, the diaries and letters are gathered in An Interrupted Life. Etty wrote this after a young Nazi bellowed at her in the Gestapo hall in occupied Holland:

And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask, "Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down? " Yes, he looked harassed and driven, sullen and weak. I should have liked to start treating him there and then, for I know that pitiful young men like that are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind. But all the blame must be put on the system that uses such people….

All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow beings very close to us. That makes these happenings more familiar, then, and not so frightening. The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men’s hands, tower high above us, dominate us, yet many collapse over our heads and bury us.

Sebastian and Etty were both thoughtful witnesses of those “incredible” times. One was the son of a comfortably middle-class German Aryan family who had to choose between becoming a cog in the Nazi machine or fleeing its reach. The other was one of the machine’s marked victims, a gentle soul with compassion even for her oppressors. Maybe the clearest lesson of both accounts is to act while we still have choices—before the machine backs us all into a corner and rolls forward relentlessly.