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Nothing that the information revolution has yet thrown up suggests any of that has changed. There more technology is deployed, the more fog of confusion and complexity engulfs us. | Nothing that the information revolution has yet thrown up suggests any of that has changed. There more technology is deployed, the more fog of confusion and complexity engulfs us. | ||
===But chess-playing supercomputers === | ===But chess-playing supercomputers... === | ||
Hand-waving about chess and go-playing supercomputers — there is a lot of that in {{br|A World Without Work}} — does not advance the argument. Both are hermetically sealed games on small, finite boards with simple sets of unvarying rules between two players sharing a common objective. Outcomes are entirely deterministic, and you can see that, at the limit, the player with the superior number-crunching power ''must'' win. Even here the natural imagination of human players, otherwise at a ''colossal'' disadvantage from an information processing perspective, made the job of beating them surprisingly hard. This ought to be the lesson: even in thoroughly simplistic binary games, it takes a ton of dumb processing power to beat a puny imagineer. Instead, Susskind reads this as a signpost to the [[ | Hand-waving about chess and go-playing supercomputers — there is a lot of that in {{br|A World Without Work}} — does not advance the argument. Both are hermetically sealed games on small, finite boards with simple sets of unvarying rules between two players sharing a common objective. Outcomes are entirely deterministic, and you can see that, at the limit, the player with the superior number-crunching power ''must'' win. Even here the natural imagination of human players, otherwise at a ''colossal'' disadvantage from an information processing perspective, made the job of beating them surprisingly hard. This ought to be the lesson: even in thoroughly simplistic binary games, it takes a ton of dumb processing power to beat a puny imagineer. Instead, Susskind reads this as a signpost to the [[Apocalypse]]. | ||
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. In the world of [[systems anaysis]], [[Chess]] and [[Go]] are [[complicated]], not [[complex]], problems. The risk payoff is normal, not exponential. They can, in theory, be “brute force” managed by skilled operation of an algorithm, and the consequences of failure are predictable and contained — you lose. ''[[Complex]]'' problems — those one finds at the frontier, when one has boldly gone where no-one has gone before, in dynamic systems, where information is not perfect, where risk outcomes are [[convexity|convex]] — so-called “[[wicked environment]]s” — are not like that.<ref>There is more on this topic at [[complex systems]].</ref> Here algorithms are no good. One needs experience, wisdom and judgment. | ||
===Computers can’t solve novel problems=== | ===Computers can’t solve novel problems=== | ||
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 | 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 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'' [[metaphor|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. | Until they can do these things, they can only aid — in most circumstances, ''complicate'' — the already over-complicated networks we all inhabit. | ||