21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Plato, Cyberspace and the Human Spirit, August 10, 2000
Jonscher's book is about the impact of IT on our work and lives. Unfortunately, like so many other popular science writers, he spends most of his pages laboriously recounting for beginners the history of technology, from the origins of writing to genetic engineering and the millennium bug. We get the umpteenth elementary explanations of, amongst others: bits, bytes and Turing machines; semiconductors and integrated circuits; electromagnetism and telecommunications technology. Jonscher writes mostly about the physical infrastructure that makes IT work. Oddly, he has almost nothing to say about software and how it is created.
Humanoids
Running almost in parallel with this potted history, is Jonscher's semi-philosophical analysis of our present and future relationship with the digital world. He is clearly worried that computers are a threat to what he calls central value systems of western civilisation:
"Lurking behind predictive scenarios of computer-driven society is an emaciated view of what it is to be human: a model of the person as an entity whose objectives we have understood and can deliver by programming machines - who is responding to images and sounds and not to the hearts and minds of those behind the images". (p. 249)
The origins of Jonscher's worries lie in the long tradition of rationalism in western science and philosophy, in the belief that logic and the scientific method together define what we can and cannot know about the world. Add to the rationalism the positivist belief that we know what is good for us, and you get the "emaciated view of what it is to be human". William Blake's famous line about "dark satanic mills" (which Jonscher does not quote) is often misunderstood as a reference to the cotton mills of the industrial revolution in Britain. In reality, Blake was writing before that period and referring to the rationalist philosophy of Bacon, Newton and Locke, which he saw as an attack on the spiritual and poetic side of life.
Artificial Intelligence
Jonscher's distaste for this "emaciated view" was no doubt partly formed by his exposure to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community in Cambridge Mass during its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, the idea that the brain was essentially equivalent to a computer was taken very seriously by both AI researchers and their philosophical supporters.
Jonscher devotes a considerable amount of space to showing that the brain has almost nothing in common with a computer. He points out that a single neuron is more complex than any conceivable microprocessor based machine (it contains about 100,000 different proteins), and that same neuron is connected to as many as 80,000 other neurons. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the brain uses simple digital signals or that it could be construed as running "software".
Plato and Cyberspace
Another source of concern for Jonscher -- and not just for him -- is the immaterial nature of information in cyberspace. He points out there is a kind of law of the conservation of information which states that information, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed during processing. The same digital image can be filtered and processed endlessly without any loss of information and, for most purposes, without any cost. This is a weird and disturbing idea: when we think about about a digital image, we are thinking of the persistent, immaterial pattern of bits. It is a pure form quite independent of its physical instatiation on paper or in silicon. This is because we actually conceive of information as non material.
In the "Republic", Plato suggests that the essence of the world is made of ideal pure forms to which we have no access. Our actual experience is realized as an imperfect and unstable projection of these ideal forms. Jonscher is afraid that we will confuse inhuman cyberspace with this Platonic ideal world and replace physical and sensual reality with digital substitutes. This would lead to the erosion of human values in favour of software substitutes. He provides several hints that his concern has a religous motivation, citing with approval the ideas of Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. Whatever his motivation, Jonscher is making an important point. Today digital images are becoming the point of reference in many areas, perhaps the most striking is the fashion business. The supermodel craze is due in no small measure to the fact that most of us only ever see these women via print or television, where cosmetics and skillful photography lend them an unreal beauty. Who will be the "real" Claudia Schiffer as her physical body diverges from her idealized digital form?
Computers & Productivity
Jonscher's most interesting contribution is his analysis of the real impact of computers on economic growth and productivity. He is able to cite a series of studies (by Strassmann, Landauer, Brynjolfsson and others) showing that the widespread introduction of IT into business has had almost no impact on productivity. He shows that while the number of workers using IT has grown to more than 50%, these workers actually spend most of their time in offline activities. Futhermore, when these workers do make heavy use of IT the value-added in very low. In other words, the impact of IT directly is simply to automate basic mechanical tasks and free workers to move up a skill level.
But this movement up the knowledge scale results in even lower contribution of IT to productivity. He also argues, fairly convincingly, that IT makes only a minor contribution to the world of engineering and manufacturing. At the same time, the many claims that AI and other advances in software would empower knowledge work have failed to delivered. Last but not least, IT technology itself is heading for maturity and slowing growth.
These negative results encourage Jonscher to a very reductive view of the future contribution of IT to the real economy. His belief that computers are incapable of higher level processing sharply limits their potential impact on the real economy. He also points out that the consumer digital economy itself has serious problems of growth and productivity. Since the reproduction and distribution of knowledge and other digital goods (music, books, films, e-mail etc.) is essentially costless, while re-distribution is extremely difficult to control, the resulting value-added is low. Worse still, digital goods have a serious problem of over-supply.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From carbon to silicon... humans and digital technology, October 29, 1999
This review is from: The Evolution of Wired Life: From the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip -- How Information Technologies Change Our World (Hardcover)
This is a great read for Lawyers and other "fuzzy" information-economy thinkers! Better yet, it's a great read for IT professionals, who are introducing technological solutions into human situations! This book will keep you grounded in reality.
Charles Jonscher, through an entertaining examination of centuries accumlation of philosophy... science and technology, shows the disconnects between the they way humans interact, and the way digital technology works.
In short, being digital ain't the same as being human. It ain't warm, fuzzy -- and more importantly ain't ANALOG.
The beauty of ANALOG is the key to Jonscher's book. Analog thinking is by nature, superior to digital. Using mathematics and physics vis-a-vis bio-chemistry and psychology, Jonscher reveals that the human brain is analog. On the other hand, computers are digital, and hence 'inferior'.
For example, Jonscher talks about Deep Blue, the computer that beat the pants off the best Chess player in the world.
While the media hailed this as a significant step towards the evolution of 'computer intellegence' Jonscher puts this (off the wall) assertion into perspective. He argues that if a fire broke out during the chess match, even a lowly bumble bee would have enough "common sense" to leave the building, whereas Deep Blue would continue to play the game and burn to crisp in the flames.
By tracing the path of natural evolution, Jonscher shows readers that all things natural use "analog" senses produced and guided by complex chemical reactions. While digital uses logic and mathmatics. Grounding his argument in such scientific breakthroughs as Quantum Physics, that shows that there is chaos in logic, mathmatics physics ... and (GASP) nature ... Jonscher explodes the myth of Computer Intelligence at its roots.
In simple terms, Jonscher shows readers with concrete evidence that it is physically and scientifically impossible to use digital technologies to create intelligence.
Computers will only be able to assist humans in matters of logic -- they cannot help your wife to decide on whether to have a hot mochachino or Orange Crush ... or tell you your neighbour is really upset that your dog just did a do-do on their front-lawn. Only human interaction via analog senses of sight, taste, smell, hearing, touch, can detect these nuances of interaction.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Human Brain's Upper Hand, September 24, 2000
By A Customer
With his argument that humans, rather than technology, will always have the upper hand, Jonscher begins a fascinating unravelling of where the "digital age" has sprung from, with all its limitations and possibilities. While lauding the technology which could now record every moment of a human life by means of a tiny bit of silicon implanted in the brain - the apocryphal "soul-catcher" chip - he points out that the human brain has 20 billion neurons, and that: "the intelligence of a single-celled organism less evolved than a neuron, such as a paramecium, is such that it can navigate towards food and negotiate obstacles, recognise danger and retreat from it. How does your PC compare?" After a delve through the scientific theories lying behind the evolution of IT, he goes on to trace its development, with its impact on and creation of multimedia and the Internet, economic progress and the technologies of tomorrow. For anyone who has ever asked what the IT revolution is all about, and how it will affect them, this readable and authoritative account, with its occasional dashes of dry humour, will fill some of the gaps.
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