After Thought

287 Pages·1996·103.809 MB·English

by  James Bailey

H[]UGHT
THE COMPUTER
CHALLENGE TO
HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
JAMES BAILEY
~
BOCl<S
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 1996 by James Bailey.
Published by BasicBooks,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No
part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For
information address BasicBooks, 10 East 53rd Street, New York,
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Designed by Elliott Beard
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bailey, James, 1946-
After thought: the computer challenge to human intelligence /
by James Bailey. - 1st ed.
p. em.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-465-00781-3 (cloth)
ISBN 0-465-00782-1 (paper)
1. Computers and civilization. 2. Artificial intelligence.
I. Title.
QA76.9.C66B35 1996
303.48'34-dc 20 96-1050
CIP
98990001 +IRRD 10 9 8 7 65432
To Betsy

CONTENTS
1 . Reassigning the Tasks of the Mind 1
2 . The Master Thought Process of the Modern World 13
3. The Book of Nature 22
PART ONE OF
THE BOOK OF NATURE
PLACE
4. The First Fiction 37
5. An Emergent Fable of Astronomers and Stars 50
6 . The Computer Within Living Memory 60
7. Listening to Data 69
viii CONTENTS
PART TWO OF
THE BOOK OF NATURE
PACE
B . The Maths of the Industrial Age 85
9. The Advent of New Sciences and New Maths 100
1 o. Listening to Neuron 113
PART THREE OF
THE BOOK OF NATURE
PATTE R N
1 1. The New Intermaths of the Information Age 127
1 2. The Patterns Within Life 136
1 3. The Life Within Patterns 148
1 4. Computing the Patterns of
Societies and Economies 159
1 5. Computing the New Realities of
the Information Age 172
1 6. Computing the Patterns of Bodies and Minds 186
1 7. Listening to Life 197
THE A FT E R MAT H
Acknowledgments 223
Notes 225
Bibliography 243
Index 267
II
REASSIGNING THE
TASKS OF" THE MIND
W
hen Henry David Thoreau went to the woods of Con
cord, Massachusetts, he was seeking, among other
things, to take back a set of muscle tasks that had long
since been reassigned from humans to animals. Henry David sus
pected that it was a bad bargain. He saw his neighbors living in houses
far smaller than the barns they built for their draft animals. He saw
more of the crop being consumed in the barn than in the house. By
hoeing his own beans with his own muscles, Thoreau showed that the
reassignment was still reversible.
He succeeded because these muscle tasks had remained within
human scale and under human control. A horse is more powerful than
a person, but not vastly so, and it is difficult to apply even a dozen
horses to the same task in parallel. The 5-10 horsepower that was con
veniently available was enough to advance civilization but not enough
to revolutionize it. Society eagerly adopted horses to transport its sol
diers, oxen to pull its plows, and pigeons to carry its messages, but all
of these tasks retained a-human scale and character.
As he looked out across Walden Pond to the new railroad that
skirted the far shore, however, Thoreau could see that something
much bigger than himself was happening. Muscle tasks were making