You forgot to plug me in Dave…. Dave….
Computers think really fast.
And people think really fast.
Computers convey information really fast.
People, on the other hand, take a long time to explain something.
So, it may be, that in the long run, as we start to link together our computers, and as they start to talk to one another, their conversations may soon outrun our ability to follow what they are talking about.
This has been the plot of lots of bad movies, like Colossus, The Forbin Project, in which the defense department builds a computer to oversee control of nuclear weapons and the Russians do the same, and then the two computers link up and start talking to each other and pretty soon take control of the world.
Needless to say, the computers that starred in The Forbin Project (left) look like they are better designed to play 8-track tapes than to take over the world, let alone crunch enough numbers to control a nuclear launch. But that was 1970.
A lot has changed since then.
In 1998, George Dyson, son of nobel winning nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson and brother of Release 2.0’s Esther Dyson published the rather radical, (at the time) Darwin Among the Machines.
Dyson’s premise was that we had reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac, and that the next leap in evolution would be to pure intelligence, in the form of our machines, as opposed to biological. They increasingly will (he predicted a decade ago), think faster than we do.
Dyson pointed out even then that computer code was being produced so quickly now (much of it by machines themselves) that even if everyone on earth did nothing but read lines of code all day long, every day, we could not possibly catch up.
And that was in 1998!
Now, The New York Times runs a piece asking exactly the same question:Â “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man“.
Dyson, it seems, might not have been so wild and radical as he would have seemed.
Machines get faster and faster, and we, ourselves, are linking them up, building a kind of global neural net.
Facebook alone now has 250 million members. That’s 250 million computers all linked together. Admittedly, what they are sharing at the moment is garbage, but that’s only at the moment.
As AI software improves and as social contact increasingly becomes online and through cyberspace; as computers learn to think as we think and react as we would react – only better and faster, are we headed toward a time when we, ourselves, may become superfluous to the process?
What, after all, in the end, are people for?
