Chapter 8 people make mistakes

By now, everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error.Suddenly there are reports of bank balances jumping from $379 to millions; letters pleading for charitable donations, to ridiculous-sounding names, arrive at your address again and again the department store sends the wrong bill; some utility company will write that they can't do anything; that sort of thing.If, after all this hard work, you finally connect with someone and complain, at that point, you'll get an instant printout of an apology from the same computer saying, "There's something wrong with our computer. Your account is being corrected. "

These things are considered purely accidental glitches.People don't think that making mistakes is the normal behavior of a well-oiled machine.If something goes wrong, it must be a personal error, a human error.Wrong fingering, interference, a key stuck, someone hit the wrong key, etc.Computers, in their best normal state, are invariably correct. I doubt this is true.After all, the whole point of the computer is that it represents an extension of the human brain, vastly improved but still human, maybe superhuman.A computer can think clearly and quickly, enough to kill you on the chessboard, and some are even programmed to compose vague poems.They can do everything we can, and much more than we can.

It is not yet known whether computers have a consciousness of their own.And finding that out is hard.When you go into one of the vast halls now built for these gigantic machines, and stand and listen, it is easy to imagine that the faint sound in the distance is the sound of thought, and that the turning of the scrolls makes them seem more like a This beast is rolling its eyes, trying to concentrate, staring at something, choking on too much information and speechless.But real thinking, and dreaming, are another matter. On the other hand, there is evidence that something much like the unconscious, the equivalent of our unconscious, is everywhere around us, in every piece of our email.As extensions of the human brain, their composition has the same fallible quality, being spontaneous, uncontrollable, and full of possibilities.

Mistakes are rooted in the very foundation of human thinking.They are embedded there, feeding the structure like nodules.If we weren't equipped with the knack of making mistakes, we would never be able to do anything useful.We think by making a series of right and wrong choices, and the wrong choices must be made as often as the right choices.We live like this.We are built to make mistakes, coded to make mistakes. We say that we learn by "trial and error".Why do you always say that?Why not say "tried-correct" or "tried-successful"?That old phrase because that's how things are done in real life.

A good laboratory, like a good bank, a good company, or a good government, has to run like a computer.Almost everything has to be done flawlessly, by the book, all the addends add up.Make up the expected sum.Time passed day by day like this.Then, on a lucky day, in a lucky laboratory, someone made a mistake: the wrong buffer was used, a blank was filled in wrongly, a decimal point was wrong, the room temperature was one and a half degrees higher, a Mice escaped from their cages, or simply misread the day's protocol.In any case, when the results come out, it is clear that a metric has been illegally inflated, and that's when the action begins.

Misreading is not yet an important error; it merely opens the door for error.The next step is what matters.When the researcher can say, "Nevertheless, but lo and behold!", then that new discovery, whatever it may be, is just a step away, just to be grasped.What progress requires is to act upon that error. Whenever a new type of thinking is to be accomplished, or a new style of music is to be born, there must be some debate beforehand.There are two sides in the same mind arguing, declaring, impassioned, with the lovely understanding that one side is right and the other is wrong.Things will come to light sooner or later.Yet without these two parties, without this argument, there would be no action at all.Hope lies in this ability to make mistakes, this tendency to fall.The ability to leap over a mountain of information and land softly on the wrong side represents the pinnacle of human genius.

Perhaps, this is the unique talent of human beings, and it may still be prescribed in our genetic instructions.Other creatures do not seem to have such a DNA sequence, making making mistakes a routine in daily life, and certainly not making programmed mistakes a compass for action. Our minds are fickle.Our human nature is best revealed when there are more than two choices.Sometimes there are ten, or even twenty, paths to follow, and all but one are bound to be wrong.In this situation, that abundance of choice can elevate us to a whole new level.This process is called exploration, and it is based on human fallibility.If we had only one center in our minds that could respond only when a correct choice was about to be made, instead of this messy system of disparate, gullible clumps of neurons that could rush into A dead end, going to the poor and falling to the underworld, taking the wrong road, turning the road, we can only be nailed to what we are today.

The lower animals have no such glorious freedom.Most of them are restricted and can only be absolutely accurate.Cats, for all their goodness, never make mistakes.I have never seen a clumsy, negligent cat.Dogs sometimes make mistakes and make cute little mistakes, but they do so while trying to imitate their owners.Fish are impeccable in everything they do.The individual cells of a tissue are little mindless machines, perfectly performing their functions, like swarms of bees, absolutely inhuman. This should be kept in mind as we increasingly rely on ever more sophisticated computers to organize our affairs.I would say, give those computers brains; let them do things in their own way.If we can learn to do things like this, to turn our backs on the job and let it go, then both humans and computers will have a bright future.An average good computer can do in a split second the calculations that any of us would spend a lifetime with a slide rule.Think of what we can gain by exploiting the machine-made, delicate miscalculations that are now infinitely close to us.We'll get our hands dirty with our own toughest puzzles.How, for example, should we organize our own herd life on a planetary scale, now that we are clearly a single group?As a working premise, we might as well assume that all roads to this point are unsuitable.Then, in order to make progress, we would need a long list of wrong choices, far longer and more interesting than the list of wrong routes any of us can think of now.In fact, we need an infinitely long list, and when this list is printed out, we need the computer to start on its own, make random choices, and choose what to do next.If it's a big enough mistake, we'll be stunned to find ourselves on a new level, out of the woods, and able to move again.