reading in hindsight: The Feeling of Power by Isaac Asimov
The Feeling of Power is an old story, dating back to 1958, as I’m happy to view a story published before I was born as ‘old.’ (And this reminds me of a conversation I once had with a senior colleague about the definition of a ‘classical result.’ His definition was that a result was classical for a person if it had been published before the person got to graduate school. He was not amused when, the next day, I referred to one of his results as classical.)
One way of interpreting this story is that we have handed a chunk of our thinking over to the machine world, in this case the ability to do mathematical calculations; we lose our ability to do that thinking on our own; and we then see that there is value to understanding how these operations work.
And reading the news, the first part, handing a chunk of our thinking over to the machine world, of this is an argument that continues to roil. My year in high school, some few years ago, was the first year that students used calculators rather than slide rules, which met with some disapproval, and so this is an argument that we’ve had before.
But the current argument seems different than those older arguments about calculators, in a lot of what’s been written. Part of this is the scale and the breadth of what’s now possible through the use of different shades of the artificial intelligence engines that have been developed.
But beyond this, there is another aspect that doesn’t appear in Asimov’s story. In the story, the humans’ plan is to rediscover how to undertake mathematical calculation and then use this to replace the vast, bulky, heavy thinking machines and have nimbler, human powered weapons. And this is not how things have developed.
In these early days, computers were vast things that filled entire rooms, and there wasn’t much explicit discussion of size. But more than that, I’m not sure the extent to which some of these authors had any appreciation of just how fast computers would become, in terms of doing heavy duty computation.
To what extent would current computational power, for instance on desktop computers, or laptops, or tablets, or phones, would strike someone from the mid-20th century as akin to magic.
We are handing some of our critical facilities over to our devices, as they did in the story, but I don’t see that we’ll be able to recover them in the way they’d hoped. Back to an old theme, we are building tools, and it is not clear to me that we have a clear idea of how to use them well.
multijimbo 