The mechanisms of torture

A NUMBER of recent books and movies explore the relationship between humans and robots. Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots documents the increasingly successful supplanting of human skills by robots. It's no longer just work deemed to be blue collar. Technology's job-eating maw now threatens the most expansively educated, as lawyers and radiologists are watching their work being exported to China. Human nuance, reduced to algorithms, can now grade university essays.

The movies Her by Spike Jonze and Ex Machina by Alex Garland raise the questions originated by Alan Turing - the so-called Turing test of robots for the presence of intelligence - artificial intelligence - demonstrating consciousness. The two movies are, by themselves, deserving of a future column, as they explore essential questions about the nature of the relationship between man and his creations. Even more important than a Turing Test to differentiate machine from man are the questions raised as to the nature of man in a technologic and mechanistic world.

Nowhere is the answer more pressing than in consideration of war and its methods. Recently, the US Public Broadcasting Systems documentary programme, Frontline, released an in-depth exploration of the CIA's use of torture and the report of the Senate intelligence committee investigation of the programme. You can see the Frontline programme here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secrets-politics-and-torture.

The origin of the torture programme indisputably came in response to 9-11. It was not long after that the first of what would be many prisoners was captured, Abu Zubaydah, whom the CIA initially claimed was a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda. He became the guinea pig for what was later described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" or more corporate speakishly, "IET" - that is, torture. He was waterboarded 83 times. None of the torture produced actionable intelligence and the CIA later admitted in its internal documents that he wasn't actually a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda; he wasn't a member of al-Qaeda at all.

When it came to light that CIA operative Jose Rodriguez had ordered destruction of tapes of torture, contrary to court orders, the Senate intelligence committee, under Senator Dianne Feinstein, began what became a six-year investigation. The study, based on six million classified internal CIA documents, contradicts the agency's claim that torture helped prevent a second attack after 9-11. The CIA, having failed to provide the intelligence that might have prevented 9-11 in the first place, has morphed into a secret para-military organisation including use of torture to deflect criticism should there be another attack.

Two things make this clear. The CIA gave its version of events to the producers of Zero Dark Thirty, including its director, Kathryn Bigelow, to create the impression that torture provided the essential clues to the finding of Osama bin Laden. Senator Feinstein labels this a falsehood and accuses the CIA of planting false material in a motion picture to gather support from Americans retrospectively on the question of its torture practices.

The idea that the CIA, an organisation tasked with gathering foreign intelligence, sees nothing wrong in propagandising US citizens is disturbing enough. The words and attitudes of its chief lawyer, John Rizzo, are mesmerisingly alarming. When he was presented with the initial torture interrogation methods, it was for the purpose of "finding a way to be clear that this was legal". Asked by Frontline's interviewer whether he thought the torture was moral, Rizzo quickly answers that the morality issue was not part of his task, so he did not address it.

It seems that such men have come far in this mechanistic age in removing from consideration what is right from the mere utilitarian. An essential difference between human and intelligent robot is conscience, the appreciation of that moral dimension. The torture programme shows how far men descend when they begin to resemble robots.

If men like Rizzo can't or won't consider the moral dimension of actions, just what are they protecting us from? And who will protect us from them?

-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable