In a subject that’s obsessively concerned about the future, it takes a certain amount of dedication to required to dig into its past. Indeed, the quick movement of technology often shrewdly makes yesterday’s (or God-forbid last week’s) analysis a dated artifact. Charles Jonscher’s WiredLife: Who are we in the digital age?, published in the heady days of 1999 -- before the burst of the tech bubble and amidst trepidation over the Millennium bug-- provides a perspective that’s simply different than our current one.
The title question: “Who are we in the digital age?” is one that we’ve been wresting with for decades. In contrast to broader questions about how technology has changed the structure of society as in the case of the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution, Jonscher helpfully limits his discussion to just the digital. Suffice to say, it’s quite difficult to pick apart how the digital age may be changing “who we are”, and our proximity to it largely blinds us to these ways.
Jonscher draws a distinction between how humans and computers think -- mainly that computers don’t think. Indeed, as exciting the prospect that a computer could checkmate the world’s best chess player, the computer is. While the sort of “combinatorial” analysis needed to play a good game of chess pales in comparison to the intelligence needed to react to situations in real life where there are infinite combinations.
There are structural limitations, Jonscher says, to the ability of machines to think, and for us to think like machines. It’s easy to forget that complex machines are made up of simple logic gates that open or close depending on the voltage applied to it. While there have been experiments in AI, neural networks, expert systems, and genetic algorithms, the dominant paradigm of digital age is operations coded into 1’s and 0’s, and this language is largely incapable of thinking in a human way.
In the early days of computing there was excitement over the invention of the transistor and the microchip, and the assertion by computing pioneer Alan Turing that any logical problem could be solved using simple gates. However, some of this excitement -- at least in academic circles -- was largely quelled by Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Not so a demonstrated weakness in computing but that of logic itself, Gödel’s found that logical premises wouldn’t always lead to all conclusions, nor would all logical problems be computable. Take, for instance, the following logical problem: “There is a barber in a village who shaves all (and only) the men in the village who do not shave themselves.” The paradox over whether the barber shaves himself makes the statement nonsense.
What’s with all this computer bashing? Computers, after all, outperform humans computers in the amount of data they can process in a given time. Well, not all functions are created equal. Computers are able to process vast amounts of data, but it becomes harder for them to match humans as they move up the hierarchy from data to information to knowledge. Indeed, fears that machines will replace lawyers and other heavily analytical professionals are, at least now, quite unfounded.
Indeed, most computer scientists gave up on the dream of a thinking machine by the end of the ‘80s. And in the fallout of the unrealized artificial intelligence dream, people embraced computers as a way to break down the barriers of human communication. “The idea of creating machines to compete with our mental powers has been quietly superseded by the development of networks for us to communicate with each other,” Jonscher writes.
In order to understand who are we in the digital age, Jonscher helps us understand that machines are merely a medium through which we communicate. This leaves some larger questions unanswered. For instance, the digital age bombards us with more information and competing viewpoints than before.
Jonscher’s stance is that human hardware takes much longer to rewire than computer hardware, and that we are, more or less, the same as we’ve always been -- we’re just better equipped with information and technology. This argument, in my opinion, falls short given the psychological and social effects that we can’t even begin to imagine. While we may have the same brain structure as the generation before, it remains to be seen what gains and disorders come from the relentless bombardment -- not of technology -- but of humans.
Of course, given that sophisticated computer systems are created and programmed by people, they can be thought of as a testament to the human mind. And this should give us hope that the human mind will prevail even if machines cannot be taught to think for us.
