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Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into something else

176 points by Balgair 8y ago

erikpukinskis 8y ago
It’s a nice train of thought, but it’s not a great essay. Good enough for a bar conversation but I don’t think it is saying much as currently written. What is metazoan computing? Given that our discrete computers encode many analog models, what exactly is he suggesting will be so now that it constitutes a new era? Reads a little like the writings of someone who so wants to say something bigger than everyone else that they end up not saying anything to anyone. Analog models are neat though, and pondering “could we do this analog” a good question to have in the design quiver.
- bitwize 8y ago
  > It’s a nice train of thought, but it’s not a great essay. Good enough for a bar conversation but I don’t think it is saying much as currently written. Oh, you must be new to Edge.org, which for as long as I've heard of it has been home to some of the most egregiously pretentious intellectual wankery about computers and technology and shit -- the kind of stuff that The Guy I Almost Was makes fun of. When some of your most level-headed essays come from Eric S. Raymond, it's time to acknowledge that you haven't just misplaced the plot.
- laughingman2 8y ago
  > Reads a little like the writings of someone who so wants to say something bigger than everyone else that they end up not saying anything to anyone. Exactly, similar to some of the (not all though) "insights" you have under the influence of psychedelics.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    I mean, some insights are crap, regardless of what chemicals you are on. But psychedelics have been clinically shown to help people have genuine insights.
cookingrobot 8y ago
The interesting idea I read here is that systems that were originally intended to measure the real world, like a traffic map or social network, become so influential they have a major effect on the thing it measures. This could result in an interesting new steady state, like side roads filled to capacity with people following Waze directions, or fractued networks of filter bubbles. Or instead of steady state the system might be unstable, like massive volatility cause by algorithmic trading. The “analog” metaphor here is that the user isn’t the consumer of a carefully design system, but they’re one “electron” in the circuit that carries many users, and the overall behavior of the system depends on what they and millions of other users do as they interact with each other. In that way he suggests the outcome is not planned and is probably unpredictable.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  Goodheart's Law, the recursive edition.
- GrantS 8y ago
  Agreed, it takes awhile to get there but the core idea comes toward the end: The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind.
  - bryanrasmussen 8y ago
    If the search engine is now human knowledge that would explain why everything seems to have gotten dumber in the last few years. We are all google now.
la6470 8y ago
Bullshit!! TFA writer is a pussy .. say it loud until it gets into your head .. More information is better !!! Even though there will be pain it is still better than ever .. the writer is a fucking moron
CptFribble 8y ago
I think this boils down to two things: 1) Algorithmic tech products replacing basic services are growing beyond even their creators' control 2) Analog computing will replace these algorithmic products and fix all the problems I disagree. Not with the "growing beyond control" bit, I think that's clear, but to the analog computing bit. First, Dyson doesn't explain what he means by analog computing, other than a basic "operates on real numbers and continuous functions." He also doesn't give any clues about what hardware or software for these systems will look like, or specifically how they will outcompete what we have now (Google, FB, etc). Second, I think he's wrong. The only things that determine the broad direction of society are who has the power and money. This has been true as far back as you go, whether kings or merchant guilds or the citizenry, when enough of them decide to work together for a revolution. And there's one fact Dyson ignores: No matter how much or little control the owners of these algorithmic tech products have over the direction and consequences of their use, they still get the money. As long as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the others are making the money, the unintended consequences of their algorithms dictating the shape of our lives will continue to be irrelevant.
- k9s9 8y ago
  He is not saying analog computation will "fix all problems". He is saying the computation that is happening that props up a Trump resembles an analog system where noise plays a role.
  - visarga 8y ago
    That fits well with neural nets, where noise plays a crucial role, from the random order of selecting examples into batches, to randomly dropping out synapses, directly injecting noise, or even starting prediction from pure noise (GANs). In RL the epsilon-greedy technique prescribes random actions from time to time, in order to better explore the environment. Noise, when used properly, makes neural nets better and more resilient.
- koonsolo 8y ago
  > First, Dyson doesn't explain what he means by analog computing, other than a basic "operates on real numbers and continuous functions." I think he means that neural networks are not binary, but use analog communication between the neurons. We simulate that digitally, but maybe a system that uses analog by nature is better for artificial neural networks. No idea if this is actually the case, or if this is what he meant ;).
king_magic 8y ago
> Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well. Uhhhh, it didn’t end well because (in the book) humanity was doomed to evolutionarily tear itself apart, and the Overlords knew this. Seems pretty disingenuous to use that fictional scenario not ending well in this context.
- DKnoll 8y ago
  Yeah, I don't get the link to Childhood's End at all. He should have gone with Terminator but I guess he was looking for a more sophisticated reference. As an aside, to anybody reading this that enjoys science fiction: read Childhood's End. It's my favourite book.
  - tnecniv 8y ago
    Really great, short read!
- bencollier49 8y ago
  Actually, it would be a fantastic comparison if the author had explained it. It's almost as if he heard it somewhere else and repeated it verbatim (which is exactly the case, he's quoting someone else's essay without fully explaining or possibly comprehending it). The internet presents us with a similar existential threat to human identity as in the book. Like the masks hiding a higher intelligence at the end of the Difference Engine, the apotheosis of the internet threatens to rob us of our individuality but offers the chance of the development of a higher form of consciousness, like the Overmind in Clarke's book. But this article went in a different direction.
- ngmc 8y ago
  > Uhhhh, it didn’t end well because (in the book) humanity was doomed to evolutionarily tear itself apart Yes and no. Humanity ends as something else takes its place. Quoting from the book (haha of course I just pulled this up on my Kindle): But there is one analogy which is–well, suggestive and helpful. It occurs over and over again in your literature. Imagine that every man's mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but their individuality would have gone. Telepathy, as you have called it, is something like this. Swap "telepathy" with "telecommunications" and the analogy is–well, suggestive and helpful. The book is one of my favorites. Lo and Behold is also worth a watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold%2C_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold%2C_Reveries_of_t...
aurelian15 8y ago
> Digital computers deal with integers, binary sequences, deterministic logic, algorithms, and time that is idealized into discrete increments. Analog computers deal with real numbers, non-deterministic logic, and continuous functions, including time as it exists as a continuum in the real world. As a computer scientist/computational neuroscientist, I don't really buy the analogue vs. digital distinction. Basic information theory tells us that any noisy continuous system is equivalent to a discrete system of a certain resolution/bit-depth. As the author continues to write > [...] analog computers embrace noise; a real-world neural network needing a certain level of noise to work. A few bits are sufficient to describe the output of a real-world neuron. Action potential timing has jitter in the sub-millisecond range, which means that relatively coarse discrete time steps are sufficient for a simulation. Yes, our brains are extremely noisy systems, yet this is exactly the reason why they (in theory at least) can be simulated on a discrete/digital computer. In practice there is little to be gained from analogue computation, except for a (potentially) reduced energy consumption compared to a digital implementation of the system in question. But on a theoretical level, nothing changes.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >But on a theoretical level, nothing changes. Although your overall point is correct, I disagree with this statement. It is in fact only theory that distinguishes between continuous systems and very high resolution discrete ones, because the time-evolution of an ideal computer is nowhere differentiable while the time-evolution of a physical system is everywhere differentiable. Indeed, it is not only "discrete" and "continuous" that are indistinguishable below a certain threshold. For any data, there are an infinite number of continuous theories that are all indistinguishable from each other, and also are indistinguishable from an infinite number of discrete theories, which are yet also indistinguishable from each other - all that it takes for this to happen is for us to agree that the data doesn't specify anything below a certain scale. Then, every theory that agrees on the large scale will match the data, leaving room for anything you can imagine at the bottom. So discrete vs. continuous isn't the core point.
  - aurelian15 8y ago
networkimprov 8y ago
It commences with a fair bit of hand waving, and thus was I waved away from the rest of the story :-)
- vixen99 8y ago
  Not waving but drowning.
- networkimprov 8y ago
  I regret it if folks found this comment irritating. I only meant to convey my sense that the article began with rather broad but vague statements, which dissuaded me from finishing it.
mackalex6 8y ago
well, true in some context future could be dangerous these self controlled machines getting more destructive or could be programmed by few insane rebels to harm the humanity and people drastically!
- Lernor 8y ago
  they will not be dangerous more than any kind of human
josephpmay 8y ago
I think this article has an incredibly important point most people are missing because it is terribly written. Part of this is that analog vs digital isn’t the right term. Vacuum tubes are completely irrelevant to the point he is trying to make, and confuse the reader. The point he’s trying to make (which unfortunately I’m unable to explain right now better than he can) is about the emergent properties of systems made up of independnt entities in a rigid form and how this is a type of computing that differs from what we usually think of as computing. The example he have about DNA vs the brain sort of gives an example of this. DNA is coded similarly to computers, and in many ways cells are like computers/programs (that happen to self-propagate according to their software). On the other hand, brains are this other type of “system” computer made up of a combination of independent actors (neuron cells), a regidid but adaptable structure (the physical structure of the brain), inputs, and information sent between the individual actors. This is very similar to a million computer-regulated human systems where we react to information we receive through the platform, and we relay our reaction to the system, and that reaction affects how the system interacts with other individual actors.
- Joeri 8y ago
  about the emergent properties of systems made up of independnt entities in a rigid form and how this is a type of computing that differs from what we usually think of as computing A way of viewing it is inversion of control between emergent behavior and programmed behavior. When the number of interactions between discrete units of programmed behavior exceeds a certain threshold the programmed logic responds to the emergent interactions instead of dictating it. The system as a whole starts obeying its own logic instead of one programmed into it. I suppose you need to see such systems more like ecologies to be studied with techniques not far off from those used to study natural ecologies.
  - diydsp 8y ago
    ah, almost like when we have robots building so many products, but the robots are limited in what they can fashion, so we end up mostly using products which are reflections of machine-capabilities?
jaabe 8y ago
I think this is an interesting article, though not from a CS point of view. Basically my take away can be boiled down to the brilliantly put “Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around.”. I work with digitisation and automation in a Danish muniplacity, and I’m actually one of the authors “hidden” hands on architects. Because I’m a techie in a non-tech world, and, because a large part of Enterprise Architecture is the business end, I see the impact daily on the non-tech savvy world. Digitisation has absolutely changed the way organisations work, and not always in the way we intended. There is a reason why AI/ML is so hyped now, and it’s because we’ve trained our organisations to utilise Business Intelligence in every aspect of their daily lives. It’s more than that though, if you give people a system, they’ll use it, and not always in a manner that makes sense. From managers trying to make informed decisions to employees simply trying to do their best. An excellent example of the dangers popped up last summer. We were reviewing a process scheduled for Robotic Process Automation, to see how suitable it would be and to sum up our benefit realisation prospects. Only it turned out that the process wasn’t really sound at all. In short we had a team of employees who spent a lot of time distributing tasks in Outlook. They even had a colouring system in place, one colour per employee, to make it easy to spot your individual tasks once distributed. Except they had more employees than there are standard colours, and because they didn’t know how to make more colours some people had to share. They wanted it automated, and we could have done that. Only, the entire thing was just silly. It was even more silly than I’ve just outlined. Because after they had colour distributed the tasks, each employee would archive their individual tasks in our ESDH system (electronic journaling). During this proces, everyone would fill out a standard ESDH form, where you also need to select a responsible employee. So basically they were distributing tasks twice. No one had questioned this for almost a decade, and these are intelligent workers mind you, to then it was just how the systems worked. We swooped in, looked at it for about 15 minutes and then forwarded them to a LEAN consultant who saved their department from around 600 yearly hours of needless bureaucracy. And that’s just one story.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  A variant of this used to be called Time and Motion, also known as Taylorism, and is based on the uncomfortable assumption that left to their own devices humans are rather stupid and need to be told what to do. In detail. There are two elements to this. One is the idea that there's an executive class which is born (or at least educated) to rule, and the other is the not-quite-identical observation that many people lack genuine independent agency, either by nature or because they lack the political/managerial leverage needed to make productive changes. The personal part of the "digital revolution" was supposed to be a way for people to explore independence, agency, and creativity. It actually turned into yet another scheme by which those who believe they're born to rule can use algorithmic machinery to farm and control the economic and political activity of everyone else (input and output), without the stickiness and inertia of traditional long-term employment. Which was itself another form of farming and control, but with hard-fought humane benefits. This is a political problem, not a technological problem. It can only be solved with technology where the political situation allows it. For now it seems to be true that most humans are rule-takers and mimics, not creative innovators or strategic thinkers. I have no idea if that's a genetic limitation or an educational one. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if personal computing had gone in the direction it was originally supposed to, and education had followed.
abledon 8y ago
side note: The author's father was Freeman Dyson, a physicist who popularized the idea of the Dyson Sphere.
ck425 8y ago
Terribly written article but very very good points (ignoring the whole analog metaphor). Emergent systems are already seeing damaging side effects such as accidentally inbuilt racism. The perception that programmers are in control is dangerously inaccurate but I'm not sure how we can go about educating the public without destroying the trust we have left.
xte 8y ago
Mh, actual status is not due to technical evolution but to commercial one. We have had, and there is no reason but commerce and ignorance, machines that work under the control of it user notably LispMachines, Alto Workstations &others. They push knowledge, they help draw a personal evolution path, they solve problem. Today we have something similar with Free Software. Those ideas are not much accepted by "the big and the powerful" because they mean a real free market in witch only knowledge and work have a value, not much marketing and certainly not commercial secret agreements. So yes, digital revolution has turned from a free academical intelligent project and dream to a new way to subject whole populations and this start to happen years ago, and start to be so evident now that even totally ignorant in IT terms start to feel it. Few subject succeed to displace public knowledge to private companies, to displace free market in a sort of Soviet Union planned economy draw instead of a dictatorial government by few equally dictatorial companies/founds. The next step is abolish entirely public (paper/coin) money substituted it only with digital payments, another step declare "politics" as a bad thing to be abolish substituting it with a corporate council like "Continuum" TV series foresee well, and George Orwell foresee even before with "1984". Beware a thing in the past dictators need manpower so "force" is not all in few hands. In a not-so-far future manpower will not be needed anymore. So the chance to revolt and gain freedom is lower and lower. Imaging a future with autonomous robotic army, cars, "smart" devices everywhere. Think how we can revolt, and against who. Also think how we can communicate, being tied to proprietary devices and platform, without pens, paper anymore, without the knowledge to write text with pen&paper, without the knowledge of "past" things like "postal system" and "newspapers" that well, we know but at the same knowledge of today's people know ancient mimeograph and polygraph...
mark_l_watson 8y ago
Interesting take on emergent properties of large numbers of simpler things no longer being ‘knowable’ or ‘understandable.’ Even though his analysis of how search engines end up being how we see the world seemed like a tangent to his big idea, it made me think of how knowledge graphs at Google and Facebook grow out of many sources of information and end up being the ground truth for organizing information about the world. The difference is that you can track the provenance of data going into huge knowledgegraphs but you can not understand the emergent properties of a complex system any more than you can understand how a billion parameters in a deep learning model function.
rhn_mk1 8y ago
I'm surprised no one mentioned cybernetics yet. Author's premise seems to be that digital, centrally controlled systems are becoming pieces of systems made up of self-regulating sets of feedback loops. The idea certainly isn't new, having been written about in the '50s in Stanisław Lem's "Dialogi". The observation about digital systems is certainly fresh though.
Lernor 8y ago
Every creation in our existing "observation" (aka simulation) obeys to "main principle of life" - wave expansion and compression. Everything in the world from human traffic to internet traffic has same origins of wave principles. It means, that all created instruments for life from "the moment of birth" fated to become rulers of its creators. If only critical mass of their popularity reaches "event horizon of birth". Then they become a part of global ecosystem. We should not be afraid of digital world and our depending from IT(it). We need to find way to mix all forces, deeply understand "main principle of life" and create brand new dimension of World "observation" (aka simulation). Or... Starting analog revolution, humanity will simply launch opposite movement of mirrored wave, which after some time becomes ruler of those who launched it. Control aspects of human life the same way as digital world doing right now. From Nature to Digital from Digital to Nature. In the end it doesn't really matter, cause "hidden hand" will not disappear and human being will start thinking opposite way, writing new essay about need of technological revolution. It sounds familiar and rather funny, is not it?
api 8y ago
Worth reading simply for the term "oligarchia." What we may very ironically be witnessing with the recent international populist uprising that seems in part aligned with certain trans-national oligarchical interests is the emergence of the beginnings of an actual global government. Unfortunately it seems to be a global government run by gangsters. The fact that US Democrats (and a few Republicans) are hung up on "Russia" shows that they don't get it. Russia is as irrelevant as the USA or China to these people. I mean sure some of them are Russian and may have ties to the Russian government, but Russia and Putin are just tools to them as are all other national and governmental powers. They're trans-national and represent an emerging power that has no national loyalty. We're heading for a world run by gangsters and corporations. William Gibson remains the most prophetic of all sci-fi writers.

176 points by Balgair 8y ago

It’s a nice train of thought, but it’s not a great essay. Good enough for a bar conversation but I don’t think it is saying much as currently written. What is metazoan computing? Given that our discrete computers encode many analog models, what exactly is he suggesting will be so now that it constitutes a new era? Reads a little like the writings of someone who so wants to say something bigger than everyone else that they end up not saying anything to anyone. Analog models are neat though, and pondering “could we do this analog” a good question to have in the design quiver.

bitwize 8y ago
> It’s a nice train of thought, but it’s not a great essay. Good enough for a bar conversation but I don’t think it is saying much as currently written. Oh, you must be new to Edge.org, which for as long as I've heard of it has been home to some of the most egregiously pretentious intellectual wankery about computers and technology and shit -- the kind of stuff that The Guy I Almost Was makes fun of. When some of your most level-headed essays come from Eric S. Raymond, it's time to acknowledge that you haven't just misplaced the plot.
laughingman2 8y ago
> Reads a little like the writings of someone who so wants to say something bigger than everyone else that they end up not saying anything to anyone. Exactly, similar to some of the (not all though) "insights" you have under the influence of psychedelics.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  I mean, some insights are crap, regardless of what chemicals you are on. But psychedelics have been clinically shown to help people have genuine insights.

cookingrobot 8y ago

The interesting idea I read here is that systems that were originally intended to measure the real world, like a traffic map or social network, become so influential they have a major effect on the thing it measures. This could result in an interesting new steady state, like side roads filled to capacity with people following Waze directions, or fractued networks of filter bubbles. Or instead of steady state the system might be unstable, like massive volatility cause by algorithmic trading. The “analog” metaphor here is that the user isn’t the consumer of a carefully design system, but they’re one “electron” in the circuit that carries many users, and the overall behavior of the system depends on what they and millions of other users do as they interact with each other. In that way he suggests the outcome is not planned and is probably unpredictable.

hprotagonist 8y ago
Goodheart's Law, the recursive edition.
GrantS 8y ago
Agreed, it takes awhile to get there but the core idea comes toward the end: The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  If the search engine is now human knowledge that would explain why everything seems to have gotten dumber in the last few years. We are all google now.

la6470 8y ago

Bullshit!! TFA writer is a pussy .. say it loud until it gets into your head .. More information is better !!! Even though there will be pain it is still better than ever .. the writer is a fucking moron

CptFribble 8y ago

I think this boils down to two things: 1) Algorithmic tech products replacing basic services are growing beyond even their creators' control 2) Analog computing will replace these algorithmic products and fix all the problems I disagree. Not with the "growing beyond control" bit, I think that's clear, but to the analog computing bit. First, Dyson doesn't explain what he means by analog computing, other than a basic "operates on real numbers and continuous functions." He also doesn't give any clues about what hardware or software for these systems will look like, or specifically how they will outcompete what we have now (Google, FB, etc). Second, I think he's wrong. The only things that determine the broad direction of society are who has the power and money. This has been true as far back as you go, whether kings or merchant guilds or the citizenry, when enough of them decide to work together for a revolution. And there's one fact Dyson ignores: No matter how much or little control the owners of these algorithmic tech products have over the direction and consequences of their use, they still get the money. As long as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the others are making the money, the unintended consequences of their algorithms dictating the shape of our lives will continue to be irrelevant.

k9s9 8y ago
He is not saying analog computation will "fix all problems". He is saying the computation that is happening that props up a Trump resembles an analog system where noise plays a role.
- visarga 8y ago
  That fits well with neural nets, where noise plays a crucial role, from the random order of selecting examples into batches, to randomly dropping out synapses, directly injecting noise, or even starting prediction from pure noise (GANs). In RL the epsilon-greedy technique prescribes random actions from time to time, in order to better explore the environment. Noise, when used properly, makes neural nets better and more resilient.
koonsolo 8y ago
> First, Dyson doesn't explain what he means by analog computing, other than a basic "operates on real numbers and continuous functions." I think he means that neural networks are not binary, but use analog communication between the neurons. We simulate that digitally, but maybe a system that uses analog by nature is better for artificial neural networks. No idea if this is actually the case, or if this is what he meant ;).

king_magic 8y ago

> Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well. Uhhhh, it didn’t end well because (in the book) humanity was doomed to evolutionarily tear itself apart, and the Overlords knew this. Seems pretty disingenuous to use that fictional scenario not ending well in this context.

DKnoll 8y ago
Yeah, I don't get the link to Childhood's End at all. He should have gone with Terminator but I guess he was looking for a more sophisticated reference. As an aside, to anybody reading this that enjoys science fiction: read Childhood's End. It's my favourite book.
- tnecniv 8y ago
  Really great, short read!
bencollier49 8y ago
Actually, it would be a fantastic comparison if the author had explained it. It's almost as if he heard it somewhere else and repeated it verbatim (which is exactly the case, he's quoting someone else's essay without fully explaining or possibly comprehending it). The internet presents us with a similar existential threat to human identity as in the book. Like the masks hiding a higher intelligence at the end of the Difference Engine, the apotheosis of the internet threatens to rob us of our individuality but offers the chance of the development of a higher form of consciousness, like the Overmind in Clarke's book. But this article went in a different direction.
ngmc 8y ago
> Uhhhh, it didn’t end well because (in the book) humanity was doomed to evolutionarily tear itself apart Yes and no. Humanity ends as something else takes its place. Quoting from the book (haha of course I just pulled this up on my Kindle): But there is one analogy which is–well, suggestive and helpful. It occurs over and over again in your literature. Imagine that every man's mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but their individuality would have gone. Telepathy, as you have called it, is something like this. Swap "telepathy" with "telecommunications" and the analogy is–well, suggestive and helpful. The book is one of my favorites. Lo and Behold is also worth a watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold%2C_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold%2C_Reveries_of_t...

aurelian15 8y ago

> Digital computers deal with integers, binary sequences, deterministic logic, algorithms, and time that is idealized into discrete increments. Analog computers deal with real numbers, non-deterministic logic, and continuous functions, including time as it exists as a continuum in the real world. As a computer scientist/computational neuroscientist, I don't really buy the analogue vs. digital distinction. Basic information theory tells us that any noisy continuous system is equivalent to a discrete system of a certain resolution/bit-depth. As the author continues to write > [...] analog computers embrace noise; a real-world neural network needing a certain level of noise to work. A few bits are sufficient to describe the output of a real-world neuron. Action potential timing has jitter in the sub-millisecond range, which means that relatively coarse discrete time steps are sufficient for a simulation. Yes, our brains are extremely noisy systems, yet this is exactly the reason why they (in theory at least) can be simulated on a discrete/digital computer. In practice there is little to be gained from analogue computation, except for a (potentially) reduced energy consumption compared to a digital implementation of the system in question. But on a theoretical level, nothing changes.

whatshisface 8y ago
>But on a theoretical level, nothing changes. Although your overall point is correct, I disagree with this statement. It is in fact only theory that distinguishes between continuous systems and very high resolution discrete ones, because the time-evolution of an ideal computer is nowhere differentiable while the time-evolution of a physical system is everywhere differentiable. Indeed, it is not only "discrete" and "continuous" that are indistinguishable below a certain threshold. For any data, there are an infinite number of continuous theories that are all indistinguishable from each other, and also are indistinguishable from an infinite number of discrete theories, which are yet also indistinguishable from each other - all that it takes for this to happen is for us to agree that the data doesn't specify anything below a certain scale. Then, every theory that agrees on the large scale will match the data, leaving room for anything you can imagine at the bottom. So discrete vs. continuous isn't the core point.
- aurelian15 8y ago

networkimprov 8y ago

It commences with a fair bit of hand waving, and thus was I waved away from the rest of the story :-)

vixen99 8y ago
Not waving but drowning.
networkimprov 8y ago
I regret it if folks found this comment irritating. I only meant to convey my sense that the article began with rather broad but vague statements, which dissuaded me from finishing it.

mackalex6 8y ago

well, true in some context future could be dangerous these self controlled machines getting more destructive or could be programmed by few insane rebels to harm the humanity and people drastically!

Lernor 8y ago
they will not be dangerous more than any kind of human

josephpmay 8y ago

I think this article has an incredibly important point most people are missing because it is terribly written. Part of this is that analog vs digital isn’t the right term. Vacuum tubes are completely irrelevant to the point he is trying to make, and confuse the reader. The point he’s trying to make (which unfortunately I’m unable to explain right now better than he can) is about the emergent properties of systems made up of independnt entities in a rigid form and how this is a type of computing that differs from what we usually think of as computing. The example he have about DNA vs the brain sort of gives an example of this. DNA is coded similarly to computers, and in many ways cells are like computers/programs (that happen to self-propagate according to their software). On the other hand, brains are this other type of “system” computer made up of a combination of independent actors (neuron cells), a regidid but adaptable structure (the physical structure of the brain), inputs, and information sent between the individual actors. This is very similar to a million computer-regulated human systems where we react to information we receive through the platform, and we relay our reaction to the system, and that reaction affects how the system interacts with other individual actors.

Joeri 8y ago
about the emergent properties of systems made up of independnt entities in a rigid form and how this is a type of computing that differs from what we usually think of as computing A way of viewing it is inversion of control between emergent behavior and programmed behavior. When the number of interactions between discrete units of programmed behavior exceeds a certain threshold the programmed logic responds to the emergent interactions instead of dictating it. The system as a whole starts obeying its own logic instead of one programmed into it. I suppose you need to see such systems more like ecologies to be studied with techniques not far off from those used to study natural ecologies.
- diydsp 8y ago
  ah, almost like when we have robots building so many products, but the robots are limited in what they can fashion, so we end up mostly using products which are reflections of machine-capabilities?

jaabe 8y ago

I think this is an interesting article, though not from a CS point of view. Basically my take away can be boiled down to the brilliantly put “Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around.”. I work with digitisation and automation in a Danish muniplacity, and I’m actually one of the authors “hidden” hands on architects. Because I’m a techie in a non-tech world, and, because a large part of Enterprise Architecture is the business end, I see the impact daily on the non-tech savvy world. Digitisation has absolutely changed the way organisations work, and not always in the way we intended. There is a reason why AI/ML is so hyped now, and it’s because we’ve trained our organisations to utilise Business Intelligence in every aspect of their daily lives. It’s more than that though, if you give people a system, they’ll use it, and not always in a manner that makes sense. From managers trying to make informed decisions to employees simply trying to do their best. An excellent example of the dangers popped up last summer. We were reviewing a process scheduled for Robotic Process Automation, to see how suitable it would be and to sum up our benefit realisation prospects. Only it turned out that the process wasn’t really sound at all. In short we had a team of employees who spent a lot of time distributing tasks in Outlook. They even had a colouring system in place, one colour per employee, to make it easy to spot your individual tasks once distributed. Except they had more employees than there are standard colours, and because they didn’t know how to make more colours some people had to share. They wanted it automated, and we could have done that. Only, the entire thing was just silly. It was even more silly than I’ve just outlined. Because after they had colour distributed the tasks, each employee would archive their individual tasks in our ESDH system (electronic journaling). During this proces, everyone would fill out a standard ESDH form, where you also need to select a responsible employee. So basically they were distributing tasks twice. No one had questioned this for almost a decade, and these are intelligent workers mind you, to then it was just how the systems worked. We swooped in, looked at it for about 15 minutes and then forwarded them to a LEAN consultant who saved their department from around 600 yearly hours of needless bureaucracy. And that’s just one story.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
A variant of this used to be called Time and Motion, also known as Taylorism, and is based on the uncomfortable assumption that left to their own devices humans are rather stupid and need to be told what to do. In detail. There are two elements to this. One is the idea that there's an executive class which is born (or at least educated) to rule, and the other is the not-quite-identical observation that many people lack genuine independent agency, either by nature or because they lack the political/managerial leverage needed to make productive changes. The personal part of the "digital revolution" was supposed to be a way for people to explore independence, agency, and creativity. It actually turned into yet another scheme by which those who believe they're born to rule can use algorithmic machinery to farm and control the economic and political activity of everyone else (input and output), without the stickiness and inertia of traditional long-term employment. Which was itself another form of farming and control, but with hard-fought humane benefits. This is a political problem, not a technological problem. It can only be solved with technology where the political situation allows it. For now it seems to be true that most humans are rule-takers and mimics, not creative innovators or strategic thinkers. I have no idea if that's a genetic limitation or an educational one. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if personal computing had gone in the direction it was originally supposed to, and education had followed.

abledon 8y ago

side note: The author's father was Freeman Dyson, a physicist who popularized the idea of the Dyson Sphere.

ck425 8y ago

Terribly written article but very very good points (ignoring the whole analog metaphor). Emergent systems are already seeing damaging side effects such as accidentally inbuilt racism. The perception that programmers are in control is dangerously inaccurate but I'm not sure how we can go about educating the public without destroying the trust we have left.

xte 8y ago

Mh, actual status is not due to technical evolution but to commercial one. We have had, and there is no reason but commerce and ignorance, machines that work under the control of it user notably LispMachines, Alto Workstations &others. They push knowledge, they help draw a personal evolution path, they solve problem. Today we have something similar with Free Software. Those ideas are not much accepted by "the big and the powerful" because they mean a real free market in witch only knowledge and work have a value, not much marketing and certainly not commercial secret agreements. So yes, digital revolution has turned from a free academical intelligent project and dream to a new way to subject whole populations and this start to happen years ago, and start to be so evident now that even totally ignorant in IT terms start to feel it. Few subject succeed to displace public knowledge to private companies, to displace free market in a sort of Soviet Union planned economy draw instead of a dictatorial government by few equally dictatorial companies/founds. The next step is abolish entirely public (paper/coin) money substituted it only with digital payments, another step declare "politics" as a bad thing to be abolish substituting it with a corporate council like "Continuum" TV series foresee well, and George Orwell foresee even before with "1984". Beware a thing in the past dictators need manpower so "force" is not all in few hands. In a not-so-far future manpower will not be needed anymore. So the chance to revolt and gain freedom is lower and lower. Imaging a future with autonomous robotic army, cars, "smart" devices everywhere. Think how we can revolt, and against who. Also think how we can communicate, being tied to proprietary devices and platform, without pens, paper anymore, without the knowledge to write text with pen&paper, without the knowledge of "past" things like "postal system" and "newspapers" that well, we know but at the same knowledge of today's people know ancient mimeograph and polygraph...

mark_l_watson 8y ago

Interesting take on emergent properties of large numbers of simpler things no longer being ‘knowable’ or ‘understandable.’ Even though his analysis of how search engines end up being how we see the world seemed like a tangent to his big idea, it made me think of how knowledge graphs at Google and Facebook grow out of many sources of information and end up being the ground truth for organizing information about the world. The difference is that you can track the provenance of data going into huge knowledgegraphs but you can not understand the emergent properties of a complex system any more than you can understand how a billion parameters in a deep learning model function.

rhn_mk1 8y ago

I'm surprised no one mentioned cybernetics yet. Author's premise seems to be that digital, centrally controlled systems are becoming pieces of systems made up of self-regulating sets of feedback loops. The idea certainly isn't new, having been written about in the '50s in Stanisław Lem's "Dialogi". The observation about digital systems is certainly fresh though.

Lernor 8y ago

Every creation in our existing "observation" (aka simulation) obeys to "main principle of life" - wave expansion and compression. Everything in the world from human traffic to internet traffic has same origins of wave principles. It means, that all created instruments for life from "the moment of birth" fated to become rulers of its creators. If only critical mass of their popularity reaches "event horizon of birth". Then they become a part of global ecosystem. We should not be afraid of digital world and our depending from IT(it). We need to find way to mix all forces, deeply understand "main principle of life" and create brand new dimension of World "observation" (aka simulation). Or... Starting analog revolution, humanity will simply launch opposite movement of mirrored wave, which after some time becomes ruler of those who launched it. Control aspects of human life the same way as digital world doing right now. From Nature to Digital from Digital to Nature. In the end it doesn't really matter, cause "hidden hand" will not disappear and human being will start thinking opposite way, writing new essay about need of technological revolution. It sounds familiar and rather funny, is not it?

api 8y ago

Worth reading simply for the term "oligarchia." What we may very ironically be witnessing with the recent international populist uprising that seems in part aligned with certain trans-national oligarchical interests is the emergence of the beginnings of an actual global government. Unfortunately it seems to be a global government run by gangsters. The fact that US Democrats (and a few Republicans) are hung up on "Russia" shows that they don't get it. Russia is as irrelevant as the USA or China to these people. I mean sure some of them are Russian and may have ties to the Russian government, but Russia and Putin are just tools to them as are all other national and governmental powers. They're trans-national and represent an emerging power that has no national loyalty. We're heading for a world run by gangsters and corporations. William Gibson remains the most prophetic of all sci-fi writers.