Keith Boesky has an interesting essay on the implications of letting “the computer” do everything for us. He foresees a bleak future, where most everything is mediated by computers and little technical mistakes could have dire consequences.
He also invokes the singularity meme. His take though, is that computers are not necessarily becoming smarter, but humans are getting dumber (by letting mental skills atrophy, due to reliance on tech). Although a bit paranoid, these ideas are food for thought.
Boesky explains:
Some people identify the Singularity as the point computers become more intelligent than humans. But intelligence is relative. By trusting the bots as we do, we are making ourselves less intelligent, less independent and more reliant on the machines. My grandfather ran a drug store in Detroit. He could take a stack of numbers as long as his arm, run his finger down them like a blind man reading braille, and add them up faster than anyone could punch them into an adding machine. Later on, he would stand next to my dad with a stack of number and add them up while my dad punched them into the calculator. My dad never got the answer any faster than my grandfather, and my grandfather never trusted the calculator. I couldn’t add a stack of numbers as long as my little finger if you lit a fire under my ass. I rely on calculators to do it. The portion of the brain my grandfather developed so well, completely atrophied on me. More significantly, the distrust of the bots atrophied as well.
A Tree Falling In The Forest: Rampant Parinoia: Singularity Edition
[via Mark Pesce]
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It’s extremely obvious in our schools and with recent grads. the generation that knows more than any other generation…but understands nothing.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
“He could take a stack of numbers as long as his arm, run his finger down them like a blind man reading braille, and add them up faster than anyone could punch them into an adding machine”
But is this intelligence?
Humans are good at things like analysis, problem-solving, and making policy judgments. Why should we spend our time on computation when we can direct our energies toward the larger issue we want to address? Calculators are infinitely better than humans at doing this sort of thing, so why shouldn’t we embrace their efficiency? We should certainly understand the how and why of mathematical functions, understand which ones to use when, and so on, but do we really need to write out every multiplication and division problem that arises? Should we give up matches so that we don’t lose the knowledge of how to make fire with sticks?
September 8th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Kurtzweil pointed out in The Singularity is Near that over 50% of human to human communications are via AI or software.
How true and how strange.
September 8th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
If we don’t think at all and listen to computers call , the power of our land will be in computers hand . So , we should fight against the commands of industry technical slavery .
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:40 pm