dacs.doc electric

SOMEHOW OR OTHER, civilization got along for quite a while without computers. Granted, not as well as it has with them, but, somehow, humankind muddled through. But for all the rest of civilized existence on this planet, or any planet we may colonize in the future, what the computer does is going to be as much a part of our lives as mechanical tools, written language, or social organization. There is no going back. We can no more erase what is in the written or spoken history of humankind as we can turn back time.

So, if computers are here to stay, let’s consider what they are and what they do both for us and to us. We are in pretty much the position of Og the Cave Man being interviewed on his expectations of what the wheel would do for him.

“Mr. Og, how will the wheel effect your life?”

“It’s too much. First fire and now this crazy wheel. Everything’s moving too fast. I want the old days.”

And Johann the Smithy at the time of Gutenberg would have dismissed the printing press because all the reading was done by the clergy; there was no apparent value to him in the printed page. So what we have to do is evaluate something that is as far out of our frame of reference as the wheel or printing press was to Og or Johann.

An insight might be gained from the general reaction when IBM’s Deep Blue took Garry Kasparov in their monumental chess match. Reaction was partisan, much like the aftermath of a Super Bowl game, however, the most significant observation was made by Garry himself when he said that he sensed some sort of presence in Deep Blue.

Now, Deep Blue was not programmed as an Artificial Intelligence application.

There was no emulation of human logic or reasoning built into the program. It was a pure number-crunching algorithm written in C to grind out massive numbers of calculations. Big Blue simply modeled a finite set of the moves it could make against a set of countermoves that its opponent could make, then assigned values to them all. The highest value determined the move it selected. But from this mindless assault of unimaginable numbers of calculations came a presence that Kasparov could sense. The significance here is that the “presence” or “intelligence” came from the machine doing its own thing, massive calculations, not from trying to simulate or emulate the way that a human works. In a way it is similar to the mechanical age that Og could not see or the Age of Enlightenment that Johann the Smithy had no way of foreseeing.

Of course, we all use computers so we know all about them. Right? Actually all we really know about them is that they are going to get smaller, faster, and more ubiquitous. What we don’t know is what life will be like when we wear one all the time like a wristwatch. But unlike a wristwatch, we won’t be able to ignore it, or even take it off. Our life will be so wired into society that suddenly being disconnected would be as great a shock as plunking Og down on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

But the real intrigue is not the computer doing more of what it does now, but what it will be doing in the future. The evolution of our physiological capabilities is measured in terms of Darwins, the unit measure of genetic modification to environmental challenges. The units of Darwin modification are millennia. The human of one thousand years ago was not appreciably different from either you or me.

The evolution of the computer is measured in terms of Moores doubling every eighteen months. The computer increases its functional capabilities at least 2000 times faster than we do. But won’t it saturate soon? Isn’t the silicon substrate close to its physical limit? Yes it is. But the computer is not silicon. It started as germanium, and from silicon it will evolve to another medium, perhaps gallium arsenide, perhaps the nether regions of molecular structure, perhaps biological based media — it doesn’t matter. The computer is based on a bistable element, any element that can be switched from one state to another and can maintain that state for an indefinite period of time.

Thus we have the magic of all that the computer has brought to our lives. From the utter reliability and switchability of this element, we have been able to model the arithmetic system. We can model the countability of integers, we can cause numbers to be negative, and we can approximate very large numbers. Even more important, we can implement the various logics using the conditionals, “and,” “or,” “not,” and so forth to emulate the sequential conclusions of our evaluation of our outside world.

So perhaps we are seeing the first glimpse of intelligence outside of our human envelope. A machine presence that emerges from the massive calculations done by the computer doing its own thing. This emergent property of the computer will become as important to human interactions as our language or our social environment.

This machine presence will evolve from our growing use and dependence on computers. As Og invented spirits to explain natural events, we will begin to invent all kinds of culture-oriented images to explain what we can’t understand because it is in our nature to have an explanation. Kasparov, unwilling to admit defeat, looked for an unearthly explanation for his loss. But perhaps he was on to something. His experience may have been the first of its kind, a human competing mano y mano with a machine on its own terms.
Humans will do what humans do best, and machines will do what machines do best, but just what is that best?

Machines move things. The first machines were used to move rocks, big rocks, that people with muscle and sweat alone couldn’t move. Eventually, the machines could move almost any rock, anywhere. What the humans did, however, was to decide which rock to move, where to move it, and why it would be better there than here. The key concept is that the tool can’t and doesn’t do anything unless the human uses it for some intended function. The stick lying there is not a tool until a person picks it up and uses it to move a rock. The glory and genius of the human is that we are able to augment our physiological capabilities. We can move one hundred times faster by flying in an airplane than we can by walking. We can lift one thousand times more weight by using a crane than we can by using our backs. We can transmit data information ten thousand times faster over electrical wires than we can by talking face to face. But the significance is that it is we who are directing this augmented capability.

What it all comes down to is whether the computer machine is an extension of humankind, and therefore an integral and augmenting aspect of whatever it is to be a human, or whether the computer machine generates something outside of the human envelope. We can certainly envision, and even plan, a computer-type machine that could function on solar power, replenish its failing components, and continue its functionality long after the last human has succumbed to global pollution or annihilation. What we must think about is what would be the meaning of such a mechanical presence. It is the fundamental question of whether a falling tree in the forest makes a sound if there is no one there to hear it. Would a computer calculation be an element of intelligence if it occurred on a planet where all humankind was gone?