The Maker Who Doubts

There is a particular weight to a verdict delivered by the person who built the thing, and it is a weight that operates differently from all other expert testimony—because the doubter is not reasoning from outside the machine but from the inside, from a knowledge of its parts so complete that the maker concludes there is no place in the parts for the property being claimed. Federico Faggin, who designed the first microprocessor and then spent thirty years arguing that no computer can be conscious, is the paradigm case; but the figure recurs across the history of technology, and the recurrence is instructive. The maker's doubt is not the humanist's fear ("I do not understand the machine and therefore distrust it") nor the regulator's caution ("I have not tested it enough"). It is the builder's testimony from total familiarity: "I know every part of this, and the claimed property is not in any of them." The testimony deserves more weight than the field typically