Chapter 24 computer

You can make computers that are almost human-like.In some ways, they are superhuman: they can kill most humans on a chess board, memorize an entire phone book in the blink of an eye, compose certain kinds of music, write hazy poetry, diagnose heart disease, Sending private invitations to other parties, and even going crazy for a while.No one has yet designed a computer that can switch its mind to another solution when solving a difficult problem, or burst out laughing.But such a computer might actually come out.Sooner or later, there will be real human-like hardware, some big buzzing, buzzing boxes, smart enough to read magazines, vote, and think faster than we can compare.

It might, but at least not for a while.We'll one day start creating sanctuaries and sanctuaries for our own software, lest we disappear like the whales.But before that, I have something to say, which can make you feel at ease. Even if one day technology succeeds in producing a machine the size of Texas capable of doing everything we can do, it will at best be a single person, which is, in fact, nothing.To compare with us, there must be three billion of them, and more will continue to come down the assembly line.I doubt anyone could afford the money, let alone the space.Even if so many could be made, they would all have to be wired together in such a complex and delicate way that they communicate with each other, talking and listening non-stop, just like us.If they couldn't face each other in this way all their waking hours, they wouldn't be human in any sense after all.I think we can rest easy for a long time to come.

Our greatest mystery lies in our collective behavior.Unless we understand this mystery, we will not be able to build machines like us.And we are far from that understanding right now.We only know this phenomenon: We spend time sending messages to each other, talking and paying attention at the same time, exchanging information.This seems to be our most vital biological function, our life's work.By the end of the day, each of us has amassed a staggering amount of information, enough to keep any computer busy.Most of it is unreasonable, and generally speaking, we output more information than we gather.Information is our energy, we are powered by it.It has become a huge enterprise and an energy system that has the final say.All three billion of us are connected by telephone, radio, television, airplane, and satellite, using mass communication systems, newspapers, and periodicals to speak at length, drop leaflets from the sky, and chime in on the sidelines of other people's conversations.We are increasingly becoming grids, wires that circle the planet.If things go on like this, we will become a computer, which will replace all computers, and which can fuse all the thoughts in the world into a syncytium.

There is no closed, two-way conversation anymore.Everything you said this afternoon will be spread in all directions. It will spread throughout the city before tomorrow, and the world before Tuesday. It will spread at the speed of light, changing the tone as it spreads, forming new and unexpected information.In the end, it turned up in Hungary as a ridiculously ridiculous joke, as a swing in the financial markets, as a poem, or even as a long pause in the middle of someone's speech in Brazil. We engage in a great deal of groupthink, probably more than any social species.Although this thinking is done almost in secret, we do not publicly acknowledge this gift.We don't get the credit for groupthink the way insects do, but we still do.Effortlessly and without thinking, we can change our language, our music, our manners, our morals, our entertainment, and even our fashion of dress, all over the world in a single summer or winter.We appear to be doing this by a comprehensive agreement, but there is no vote or vote here.We just keep thinking along the way, spreading information here and there, exchanging codes cloaked in art, changing our minds, changing ourselves.

Computers can't do things at this level.This is unlikely for it.And it doesn't hurt either.If it can play this game, then we should try to gain control over ourselves so as to make a plan for long-term stability, otherwise it will definitely be our doomsday.That would mean that some brilliant, well-informed, and of course computer-led group would get to decide what human society would look like five hundred years from now, and the rest would somehow be persuaded to follow suit. he goes.At that time, the process of social development will grind to a halt, and we will be stuck in the ruts of today forever.

It's better not to have any jurisdiction and go out of your own way.Prospects are too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any reliable agent who can foresee what will happen next, and we need every chance of slipping or falling.Above all, we need to preserve the absolutely unpredictable and uncanny nature of our interconnected brains, to keep all options open to us, as in the past. If there's a better way to monitor what we can do, that'd be great.That way, we can be aware of change as it happens, instead of waking up from a dream and being surprised to find that the past century has not been anything like we thought it would be.Maybe computers can be used to help with this, but I still have my doubts.You can make models of cities, but you will know that these cities are beyond rational analysis; if you try to use common sense to predict the future, things will be messier than before.This is interesting, because cities are where the greatest concentrations of human beings are concentrated, all striving to exert influence.The city seems to have a life of its own.If we cannot understand the mysteries of how cities work, we will not be able to fully understand human society as a whole.

Still, you'd think there would always be some path to understanding.The brains of humans on Earth are clustered together and look like a unified, living system.The trouble is, the flow of information is mostly one-way.We're all obsessed with putting information in as quickly as possible, but lack the sensory mechanisms to get back as much as possible.I confess that I seldom feel what goes on in the mind of a human being, much more than I feel what goes on in the head of an ant.Let's think about it, this may be a good starting point.