I've finished my first class assignment for my PhD; the assignment is to write a short (500-1000) analytic review of some or all of the texts we've been reading. Language here is fuzzy; in this class, and across all of the PhD materials, I’m seeing critical analysis, critical review, book review, analytic review, critical discussion, discussion, interpretation, and critical interpretation all used interchangeably. In this case, the review is intended to be a short summary of what was read, with little questioning or introspection. I found myself having a hard time being non-interpretative and simply stating what I read. I tried two approaches, one where I followed the format recommended and considered only one text, and one where I tried to weave more of a thread through several papers.
Version one
A review of Man-Computer Symbiosis
By J.C.R. Licklider
Published in: IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (Volume: HFE-1, Issue: 1, March 1960)
Page(s): 4–11
Date of Publication: 31 March 1960
DOI: 10.1109/THFE2.1960.4503259
In J.C.R. Licklider’s text Man-Computer Symbiosis, the author makes a case for a coupling of humans and machines: a combined human/computer entity can support formative thinking and can better help people make decisions in the context of ill-structured problems. He then observes his own behavior over the course of the day, to understand some of the tasks and activities that can be optimized by computation, and finds that most of his work involved keeping records, finding information, calculating, transforming data—things he views as clerical. Finally, he provides a detailed specification of the various technical challenges that need to be overcome to achieve that coupling, such as the need for large amounts of memory and simple input mechanisms.
Licklider’s perspective of humanity is one that acknowledges and fears inefficiencies. Efficiency is a respectful use of limited resources, where resources are prioritized, consumed, and valued. In a world full of problems, resources should logically be spent to solve them, and so this perspective leads to a simple reason for existence and goal for intellectual pursuit: humans exist to solve problems. Inefficiency is the state of disrespecting these resources, and treating them as unlimited and free. Our personal time and money are long-term limited; our attention and active memory are short-time limited. Limit is a word of poverty. If humans are efficient or inefficient, then they are rich or poor, and someone who is rich finds and solves problems.
Licklider presents the human experience as one to be optimized, and the optimization will occur through a biological melding of the human brain and a computer. This does not exist now, and when this text was written in 1960, it did not exist either. His text presents a case for this melding, which will “hopefully [to] foster the development of man-computer symbiosis,” which will then in turn allow people to “think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approachable by the information-handling machines we know today.” This future is one of fast processing, convenience, and a respect for efficient use of limited resources.
His text describes how that melding will occur; the text is a playbook that identifies the challenges that will inevitably be faced in creating a man-computer. Computers are faster than the inefficient “users.” Memory is scarce and expensive. Retrieval must deal with the “human operators and their predilection to designate things by naming or pointing.” People speak a different language than computers, and computers will need to use and support visual work and auditory commands. Speech will be recognized, but that speech would have to be “without unusual accent.” The playbook essentially describes how the symbiosis will solve the problem of human inefficiencies themselves.
Licklider states that the end benefit of those solved efficiencies will be multifaceted, but one benefit stands out: the merging will “make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance.” And this will be “intellectually the most creative and exciting” moments in the history of mankind; while the inhumanities will not be addressed, the inefficiencies will have been solved.
Version two
Our Fascination with Libraries That Hold All of the Answers
Technology is often described in terms of advancement and potential. Digital technologies will make things faster, clearer, and better. This has been the promise of modern innovations in artificial and mixed reality, in non-fungible tokens, in blockchain, in mobile computing, in the internet of things, and going back to the initial theoretical computational thinking of Blaise Pascal, Charles Babbage, and Vannevar Bush. Many of these inventions start with a fiction—a science fiction, often dystopic.
One of these fictions is offered by science fiction writer H. G. Wells, who is best known for The War of the Worlds, one of the first sci-fi stories to "go viral." The story is less recognized for its plot as it is for the claim that it incited mass panic when it was read aloud on a radio show and listeners did not realize that the alien invasions being described were fictional.NPR, “75 Years Ago, ‘War Of The Worlds’ Started A Panic… Or Did It?,” The Two-Way, October 30, 2013 In 1937, several months before this occurred, Wells offered another lesser-known fictional view of the future, one that is much less dramatic and slightly more banal: a vision of all of the information in the world catalogued in a "Permanent World Encyclopedia," a digital archive freely shared globally and offering instant access to the details of everything that has ever happened. H. G. Wells, “The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia,” in World Brain (New York: Doubleday, 1938)
Wells described, operationally, how the encyclopedia would work, and then explained the immense value of such an innovation. Described as an "all-human cerebrum,"Ibid. the encyclopedia will cure many woes and vastly improve the human condition: it will provide humanity with "a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose and of a commonweal such as now we hardly dare dream of."Ibid. It will be a global unifier, a world organ, and a "real intellectual unification of our race."Ibid. It is through a searchable index of all knowledge like this that we will reach an end game of harmony and cooperation.
Most compelling of Wells' vision is the simplicity with which he felt it would be implemented, as "there is no practical obstacle whatever"Ibid. to realizing this universal index, and "its creation is a way to world peace that can be followed without any very grave risk of collision with the warring political forces and the vested institutional interests of today."Ibid. A searchable index of all knowledge, for Wells, is nothing less than the "only means of dissolving human conflict into unity."Ibid.
Poet Jorge Luis Borges conceived of the same library in his fiction "The Library of Babel."Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998). In his library, people search for and come across books. The search is endless, because the library is "total—perfect, complete, and whole"Ibid. but without index, only completeness. This wholeness was identified and declared to all humankind, and when it was announced, "all men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure."Ibid. Taken metaphorically as library-as-religion, the library itself is a single book, and the single book is a Torah or a Bible or a Quran; as in real life, when it was rumored that a single book contained all knowledge, "thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons… [they] strangled one another on the divine staircases… others went insane."Ibid. Knowledge, in the Babel library, provokes, persuades, attracts, and encourages selfish exclusivity in the name of religious commitment, where "young people prostrate themselves before books and like savages kiss their pages, though they cannot read a letter."Ibid.
A modern read of the 1941 story is to consider the library as the utility of the internet, or as AI, or as an archive and cyberspace of digital information. It is a place of opportunity for learning and knowing, yet retrieval is often impossible due to the vastness, the arbitrary organizational structure, and the conflicts between constituents. Borges did not know of the internet, but the idea of a history that is recordable and available, and is also susceptible to rumor and secrets, is an accurate representation of being online.
Babel's library can also be viewed as more base—a metaphor for a spiritual place of existing. Men, in this case, may be one man or all of humanity as one organism, and the library is our collective experience of being. Knowledge is not literal facts, but is instead a "certainty that everything has already been written"—a feeling of inevitability of life and death. This inevitability of the infinite is where the narrator begins, and ends: as he prepares to die, he sees before him a sublimity, and predicts that "my tomb will be unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite."
The Library of Babel is a story of human belief and intelligence. It is a metaphor (and a warning), yet it bears a striking resemblance to the future world Vannevar Bush predicts (or implicitly proposes) in his seminal article from 1945, As We May Think.Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic 176, no. 1 (July 1945): 101–108. Bush sees a future where a user will be able to use a device to build and traverse trails in the same way that the human mind works. Bush describes that the device mirrors the mind, which "operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next which is suggested by the association of thoughts."Ibid.
Bush, Wells, and Borges have conceived of the same future, one that is a library that holds all of the answers. Their libraries have become, of course, the blueprints for an AI internet. Borges was writing fiction, Bush was not, and it's unclear if Wells intended his library to be taken seriously or to incite the same response as War of The Worlds. But in all cases, the texts have become viewed as instruction guides rather than warnings.
Why do we have a fascination with libraries that hold all of the answers?
Wells views an omniscient library as the only means of "dissolving human conflict into unity." Wells, “The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia.” Knowledge can overcome irrational behaviors; if only we knew more, we would not engage in conflict and war.
Borges' protagonist is less optimistic, and sees humanity "at the verge of extinction." Borges, “The Library of Babel.” Even while mankind is eliminated, Babel library will endure, and so the answers will remain, even with no one to ask the questions.
For Bush, the library is much more pragmatic. He published As We May Think in July of 1945, when he was the CEO of defense contractor Raytheon and had played a large part in the development of the atomic bomb—which was then dropped on Hiroshima a month later. Perhaps Bush viewed the library as a tool of future war optimization, a way of learning from his practical mistakes.
Or, Bush may have considered that a machine that can know all things can help a post-war society find peace, just like Wells; that the woes of society are illogical, and logical knowing will fix all wrongs.
Perhaps he was just bored. Bush begins his article by claiming the war as complete, and then asking, rhetorically, "What are the scientists to do next?" Bush, “As We May Think.”