Though Mead was globally famous in her lifetime, I think her historical impact is substantially underrated today. A pioneer not just in anthropology but also in science communication (a teenage Carl Sagan was one of her many fans) Mead was probably the most ambitious and controversial American scientist of her generation.
She was also, for a time, a leading proponent of what is now often called techno-optimism: the belief that technology will propel our species toward a transcendent new state by expanding human potential. Mead thought those changes were impossible to predict with any certainty. She just knew they were coming, and that she wanted to be part of them.
If humanity was to survive the twentieth century, Mead wrote in July of 1939, we needed “to envisage a world in which new social inventions will permit us to draw upon human potentialities as never before... to build a world which shall be as new in the ordered interplay given to man’s myriad gifts as the present world is new in the technological utilization of physical resources.” The alternative, she wrote, was “a frightened retreat to some single standard which will waste nine-tenths of the potentialities of the human race in order that we may have a too dearly purchased security.”
Part of why Mead is so intriguing is not just that she was saying this kind of thing back in the 1930s. It’s that, after World War II, she also became a prominent theorist of existential risk.
In other words: the same person helped inspire the two supposedly opposed schools of thought that are battling it out in AI research today.
After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mead and Bateson dedicated themselves to publicizing the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb. In speeches, articles, and radio appearances, they argued that the creation of a world government was the only path which could ensure humanity’s survival. Bateson, who was deeply troubled by his wartime experiences in the OSS, the predecessor organization to the CIA, was markedly more pessimistic than Mead about our collective odds. Once, in 1947, Bateson spent the night at J. Robert Oppenheimer’s house. Over breakfast with the physicist’s family, the two men discussed whether “the world is moving in the direction of hell.” They both agreed it was.
What makes Margaret Mead such a complex figure in the history of twentieth-century science is also what makes her relevant for understanding AI in the 2020s. She sought a middle way between the dystopias conjured by Bateson and the naive assumptions of the earliest techno-optimists (more on that below).