Words&Dirt

“Princess Nell’s recent travels through the lands of King Coyote, and the various castles with their increasingly sophisticated computers that were, in the end, nothing more than Turing machines, had caught her up in a bewildering logical circle. In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing machine could not really understand a human being. But the Primer was, itself, a Turing machine, or so she suspected; so how could it understand Nell?

Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her?”

––The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson, loc. 6736

“The innovations that have resulted in fantastic wealth and influence in today’s information economy, while certainly significant, do not really compare in importance to the groundbreaking work done by pioneers like Alan Turing or John von Neumann. The difference is that even incremental advances are now able to leverage that extraordinary accumulated account balance. In a sense, the successful innovators of today are a bit like the Boston Marathon runner who in 1980 famously snuck into the race only half a mile from the finish line.

Of course, all innovators stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. This was certainly true when Henry Ford introduced the Model T. However, as we have seen, information technology is fundamentally different. IT’s unique ability to scale machine intelligence across organizations in ways that will substitute for workers and its propensity to everywhere create winner-take-all scenarios will have dramatic implications for both the economy and society.

At some point, we may need to ask a fundamental moral question: Should the population at large have some sort of claim on that accumulated technological account balance? The public does, of course, benefit greatly from accelerating digital technology in terms of lower costs, convenience, and free access to information and entertainment. But that brings us back to the problem with Kurzweil’s argument about mobile phones: those things won’t pay the rent.

It should be kept in mind, as well, that much of the basic research that enabled progress in the IT sector was funded by American taxpayers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created and funded the computer network that ultimately evolved into the Internet. Moore’s Law has come about, in part, because of university-led research funded by the National Science Foundation. The Semiconductor Industry Association, the industry’s political action committee, actively lobbies for increased federal research dollars. Today’s computer technology exists in some measure because millions of middle-class taxpayers supported federal funding for basic research in the decades following World War II. We can be reasonably certain that those taxpayers offered their support in the expectation that the fruits of that research would create a more prosperous future for their children and grandchildren. Yet, the trends we looked at in the last chapter suggest we are headed toward a very different outcome.”

––Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, by Martin Ford, pg. 79-81