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A World Without Work: Difference between revisions
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But life is not a two-person board-game on a small-board with fixed rules a static, common, zero-sum objective. Analogising from this — ironically, something a computer could not do — is not great police-work. | But life is not a two-person board-game on a small-board with fixed rules a static, common, zero-sum objective. Analogising from this — ironically, something a computer could not do — is not great police-work. | ||
By design, computers can only follow rules. One which could not be relied on to process instructions with absolute fidelity would be a ''bad'' computer. ''Good'' computers cannot think, they cannot imagine, they cannot handle ambiguity — if they even have a “mental life”, it exists in a flat space with no future or past. Computer language, by design, has no ''tense''. It is not a ''symbolic'' structure, in that its vocabulary does not represent anything.< | By design, computers can only follow rules. One which could not be relied on to process instructions with absolute fidelity would be a ''bad'' computer. ''Good'' computers cannot think, they cannot imagine, they cannot handle ambiguity — if they even have a “mental life”, it exists in a flat space with no future or past. Computer language, by design, has no ''tense''. It is not a ''symbolic'' structure, in that its vocabulary does not represent anything.<ref>See: [[Code and language - technology article|Code and language]].</ref> Machines are linguistically, structurally ''incapable'' of interpreting, let alone ''coining'' metaphors, and they cannot reason by analogy or manage any of the innate ambiguities that comprise human decision-making. | ||
Until they can do these things, they can only aid — in most circumstances, ''complicate'' — the already over-complicated networks we all inhabit. and this is before one considers the purblind, irrational sociology that propels most organisations, because it propels individuals in those organisations. Like the academy, in which {{author|Daniel Susskind}}’s millenarianism thrives, computers function best in a theoretical, platonic universe governed by unchanging and unambiguous physical rules, and populated by rational agents. In that world, Susskind might have as point, but even there I doubt it. | Until they can do these things, they can only aid — in most circumstances, ''complicate'' — the already over-complicated networks we all inhabit. and this is before one considers the purblind, irrational sociology that propels most organisations, because it propels individuals in those organisations. Like the academy, in which {{author|Daniel Susskind}}’s millenarianism thrives, computers function best in a theoretical, platonic universe governed by unchanging and unambiguous physical rules, and populated by rational agents. In that world, Susskind might have as point, but even there I doubt it. | ||