One of the guys on that Radiolab program had a concern similar to some of those guys at the paper mill. Do we really need so many computers in a car, why do we have them? Because they do a better job than carbon units, another guy blithely answered. Well they probably do, carbon units are certainly prone to errors. Statistically we are better off with computers doing our driving. The one poor victim of a zapped bit is way outnumbered by the others whose wrong move was countermanded by the silicon unit.
But still there is something that sticks in the craw. If I am driving too fast because I am reckless and perhaps showing off for my sweetie and I lose control and crash into a tree. Well that is my fault, the cracked skull is on me. (Sweetie escaped without injury. No sweeties were harmed in this example). But if I am a reasonable man driving at a reasonable speed and through no fault of mine (act of god?) some obscure bit in my car's computer gets zapped by a gamma ray from some obscure nova in some obscure galaxy, why that is just unfair. That is like dying for no reason. That is dying in vain.
But of course most of us die in vain. I am hoping to do the same myself in some comfy hospice unit rather than on some cold and bloody battlefield.
But I am getting off the issue here. If I was driving the 1962 Corvair of my youth that gamma ray could have smashed anywhere into my Unsafe At Any Speed vehicle and it wouldn't have changed anything. It was the computer's fault. Well not exactly, it was the fault of some high muckety-muck, perhaps the nephew of the guy at the paper mill, who decided to fill the car with computers and did not have the sense to require redundancy in important functions like stepping on the gas.
Still a little off the subject, which is will they enslave us. Not that we haven't enslaved our own kind through most of history, but people prefer to be enslaved by their own people, or at least by people rather than some gizmo. I don't want the toaster to tell me how to insert the bread.
Like immigrants computers started doing the low-level jobs that no human wanted to do anyway, but increasingly they are doing higher and higher level things, they are examining contracts for lawyers and reading MRI's for doctors, They are even winning our quiz shows.
And you know they are not deep thinkers like us, they just turn their bits on and off mechanically, they don't soar through landscapes of reason like we do. Or do we? Maybe all this higher reasoning is nothing but the firing of neurons of which we have way more than computers have bits. When we are doing our deep thinking, reaching into our subconscious and all maybe we are just as mechanical as our silicon units.
Well, we've got this pesky emotional element to our brains, too which can skew our decisions for better in theory or worse as sometimes happens in practice. So because of this I think we're quite a bit different than our silicon units.
ReplyDeleteIf a reasonable man driving at a reasonable speed throws a tie-rod and crashes into a tree, why is that any different than a wayward ion disrupting the decision making of the silicon unit? That's the way I think about your example. The tie-rod holding the direction of one tire is just a tool, and so is the silicon brain unit. Mayhap we should just think about the silicon unit of the car as being a device in the car, not much different than the cotter pin that prevents the nut-cover of the wheel, which in turn prevents the nut from spinning off with wheel motion, dropping the wheel off the car at perhaps highway speeds.