Back in 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum expressed concerns
about the impact of computers on human existence, in his
_Computer Power and Human Reason: From judgment to calculation_.
And we know that the sense of "objective reality" which we take for
granted is largely a side-effect of the stolid reliability of uniform
printed editions.
--
Last night I had a thoroughly unsettling experience: I was trying
to write a simple letter, using Microsoft Word (Word 97 for Windows,
at SR-2 maintenance level). Somehow, I started noticing that
my typing was not showing up where the cursor was, that pieces of
passages I had typed were not where they should be (this was a slightly
over one page long letter, and I was working on only a single
paragraph!)....
I tried to UNDO "my latest changes" -- esp., these inexplicable
little "clumps" of words I had written but
which were appearing in odd places in the text, etc. But UNDO
did not get me back to any state I recognized myself as having
intended.... (What is this phrase doing in that
sentence?", etc.)
Finally, after getting so anxiously distraught
that I ripped off my sweater to try to keep down my body temperature,
I figured that there was no way I could straighten this out
by trying to figure it out and taking reasonable
action (at least not at the risk of *further* exacerbating the
chances of losing the text I did *not* want to retype again!).
I SAVEd the document, and reopened it, and, ?fortunately?,
it was in better condition than I had last seen
it on the screen *before* saving it. And further editing of the
re-opened document did not seem to give rise to any new
implausible phenomena. I got my 1-1/2 page letter printed!
--
Which reminds me of a story from when I was a COBOL programmer trainee,
in 1972. I made a point of counting the characters written to an output
file, by the program I was developing. "Amazingly", the program printed
the message I had put in it to report if the number of characters in the
file was not the same as the number of characters written to the file.
I told the systems programmer about it, and he said that if it had
been any other application programmer, he would have told them to go
correct their program, but I had won his trust, and he called IBM, and
sure enough there was a known "bug" that caused files to not be
fully written to disk in certain unusual cases. IBM gave him the fix, and
that fixed the problem which had been detected by a trainee's
hypervigilance while production was running [at least seemingly...] without
a glitch....
--
Obviously, nothing can be "perfect" (or at least every thing has
"fringes", so that the most conscientious
work of the mind and hand of man always
"dovetails" with Darwinean/Brownian/etc. "mess". And surely there
is room for "competition". But competitive market forces
will not reliably bring massive social resources to bear on
organizing the technological processes ("working conditions", etc.) to
inspect and secure the ontological basis of "economic" activity.
[The world is real, so we don't *need* philosophers, etc.]
Science and work must be oriented toward
protecting the sentences we use from turning against us,
not merely through their "unintended side-effects",
although that is very important, but even in the
very process of expressing them. "Artificial intelligence",
e.g., raises the stakes for us of our artifices, including
threatening to derange our intelligence.
"Yours in discourse [which needs to be conserved and
cultivated!]...."
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [log in to unmask]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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