NYTimes has an interesting op-ed on whether or not we outsmarted ourselves with securitization and credit-default swaps over the past several years. "Beware of geeks bearing formulas" is the folksy one-liner from the demi-god Warren Buffet that they use to snag your eye. I love this quote, from a, err, prominent thinker about technology and society:
But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
The thinker? Ted Kacynski in his Unabomber Manifesto. (Point 173) Maybe the guy wasn't so bad after all....
I read the araticle in Fortune about Credit Default Swaps and was blown away ... 55 Trillion Dollars! Yikes.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we will one day talk about Ted the way we do Aristotle.
The last piece in Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" collection deals with such a future, in which we've basically handed economic planning to computers, but some anomalies seem to be showing up. The investigator assigned to look into the problem learns that these aren't anomalies at all, but decisions by the computers to undercut humans that want to undercut them, in order to protect the greater good. Perhaps troublesomely, the investigator decides to hide this fact in her report, again for the greater good.
ReplyDeleteBut Karl, if the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.
ReplyDeleteThe same theme lies at the base of the Unabomber and the Asimov sentiments--that the exponential advancement of science and technology is creating galaxies of specialized knowledge that are accelerating away from each other in some sort of Big Bang hyper-inflation. That may put too dramatic a point on it, but I think a lack of "scientific and technological middlemen" means that few of us have a complete understanding of a field other than our own.
ReplyDeletei'd love to meet someone with a complete understanding their own field.
ReplyDeleteironically, most of the finance guys i know are fine through this as they seem to have all kept their money in cd's.
maybe they have a complete understanding of their field?