81,898
edits
A World Without Work: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
| Line 10: | Line 10: | ||
No innovation since the wheel has failed to create unexpected diversity, or opportunity — that’s more or less the definition of “innovation” — ''or'' more subsidiary complexity & inefficiency as a by-product. Both the opportunities and the inefficiencies “need” human midwifery, to exploit (for the former) and effectively manage (for the latter). | No innovation since the wheel has failed to create unexpected diversity, or opportunity — that’s more or less the definition of “innovation” — ''or'' more subsidiary complexity & inefficiency as a by-product. Both the opportunities and the inefficiencies “need” human midwifery, to exploit (for the former) and effectively manage (for the latter). | ||
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]] — as in [[complexity theory]] complexity — engulfs us. | ||
=== | ===... 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 [[Apocalypse]]. | 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]]. | ||