Do computers change how we think (compute)? And should we change how computers think?
The short answer is that using computers has revolutionized almost every aspect of how human beings function on a daily basis. There are so many ways to approach this subject, from the impact of computers on our language, to our thinking, and even changing our eating and sleeping habits.
Have you ever tried to do something on a computer and it simply wouldn’t (listen). You’re insisting that it does something your way, and it keeps insisting that it can’t, or that there’s an ERROR. It’s at times like these that you wish your computer could either read your mind, or you could just say: Look, I’m trying to do this one simple thing. Can you just go ahead and do it so I don’t have to do it manually. Is an ‘automatic’ computer possible, or put in another way: if computers could talk, what would they say?
Alan Turing defined what has been widely accepted as an ‘intelligent computer’: the computer is supposed to engage a person via an email conversation but here’s the catch – without revealing its identity as a machine. Without a few fundamental changes to how we program and code and even think about computers (and ourselves), that goal appears to be some way off yet.
I read an article (from the Boston Globe) on this subject, and specifically Artificial Intelligence. The writer quoted Shakespeare: ‘What a piece of work is a man…How infinite in faculty…’ As marvelous as computers are, they lack some of the skills we take for granted: imagination, intuition and of course, emotional response.
So in an effort to decide how to make computers more like us (rather than the other way round) let’s start with something simple. Vocabulary. Here are some common words that come to us out of our everyday use of computers:
- users
- delete
- filter
- shortcut
- log on
- connect
- password
- paste
- cancel
- escape
This lexicon may not seem exceptional at first, until we consider some of their functional consequences. A user, for example, in the ordinary way we’d think of the word, is someone who manipulates or piggybacks on someone else. It has a negative connotation. No such connations in computer speak. A user is simply what you are. And often, as someone on a network, you use (and are required to use) resources such as bandwidth, memory, network printers etc. In this sense, being a consumer of resources is seen as both a mixture of ordinary functionality and identity. Just this has some extraordinary implications when we think of what is going on in the world: take climate change. The last thing the world really wants (and I mean the world as the recipient of human action, not the world as ‘ours’) is ‘another’ user. So to blatantly identify oneself as a ‘user’ is quite ignorant, and even insulting from a particular point of view. The same applies to our consumption of fossil fuels. The last thing we want are more users. So to tag oneself in this way is in a sense interesting, and in another sense disconnected from some obvious realities.
Delete means to erase, but it has more significance, because it removes, it obliterates information so that it no longer exists. The point is that when you erase, say, on paper, the thing erased still has some traces of itself. When you delete from a computer, no trace remains. This makes real war games on computers a frightening prospect, because potentially when an enemy is wiped out, even on paper, even the record of existence disappears. I mean, if you delete something, who wants a record of something that doesn’t exist.
Filter. This means to sort through details,and on the face of it it may seem pretty harmless. But imagine you’re dealing with people who filter a lot of information as a job. Perhaps they’re in human resources or something. And then they filter you. Perhaps one detail about your life doesn’t quite fit the profile, and then you get filtered out. Computers work that way, why shouldn’t the people who use them? And we do. When we go shopping, we’ll pass the products we’re about to buy through our own filters, be they prices, quality, image whatever. Filters are useful, but we run the risk of becoming too automated as human beings.
Other word acquire interesting new meanings, which collude to create a world within our world. It’s a world, from a certain point of view, without consequences. We can log on, or connect, paste or cancel, and while these may seem harmless, and mostly appear harmless in Computer World, well, sometimes they can do a tremendous amount of harm. While much of the time the ‘connections’ we make on computers aren’t important, sometimes they are ‘good’ and sometimes they are ‘harmful’ or ‘dangerous’. We may allow other software to intrude into our world, we may unwittingly allow viruses into our systems, when we chose whether or not to cancel we hold the fate of our time and resources in our hands. And it may be easy at times to cancel in the real world. Cancel a date, cancel a booking, cancel an appointment. In the computer world it may be fairly harmless to cancel the changing or saving of a file. We do it so often that the word ‘cancel’ may seem eventually to be almost benign. But of course, it has consequences.
It is no coincidence that obesity happens to coincide, not absolutely, but to a large extent with especially people who have access to computers, and especially the internet. In our generation we have the peculiar statistic that more people in the world are obese than those starving of hunger. Well, who are these people? They’re burger munching, keyboard tapping, mouse clicking computer addicts. Many of them are, simply because a computer allows you do a lot, without doing anything. So if this is an obvious symptom, where does it all start.
Human beings are visually stimulated. That’s why most of us aren’t entertained by walks through a botanical garden, or a night at the opera. Music matters of course, but what matters more than anything is pictures. Is it any wonder that Microsoft call their Operating Systems: Windows. And Vista. Because if there is anything that excites a computer user, whether a gamer, or someone in an office, it’s a nice easy to use display. Those icons are what make it work. Those icons are what make it interesting. Appearances make the world go round: magazine covers sell magazines, first attractive and then intelligent actors sell us on movies.
By clicking on an icon, we link to whatever it we want to link to. It’s called a shortcut. And probably, many of us use shortcuts a great deal on computers. We don’t think anything of it. I know a programmer who uses shortcuts in her programming all the time. It makes her job easier. But she says she finds herself searching for shortcuts in everyday life too. A shortcut has something of that significance of the Rabbit and the Tortoise. It may seem easy at first, and probably it is, but somewhere along the line, especially getting into the habit of employing short cuts (where in driving, working whatever), a short cut is not only not going to pay off, it is going to get you into trouble.
Much of the world today is based on efficiency, and efficiencies are designed over shortcuts. Does any thought go into critical outcomes that are unknown? The quickest and easiest design is preferred, until it’s discovered why, for example, for hundreds of years, houses were not built within a certain range of a river.
Computers are filled with iterative processes that are based on either something being:
1 or 0.
That may seem logical.
Then, built over this assumption are these:
If X, then Y.
Once again. This may appear to be the most logical place to start, but for every choice there are many implications. I won’t explore more than a couple here.
In the world, few things are either a 1 or a 0. If 1 is for Body, and 0 is for Mind, what represents the Spirit? If 1 is War, and 0 is Peace, what is crime? If Day is 1 and 0 is Night, what is twilight, dawn, a solar eclipse etc. If 1 is Male, and 0 is Female, what is someone with combined genitalia, or a transvestite? The point is, using a 1 and a 0 to code may be effective, but it doesn’t quite translate (compute) for the simple reason that there are exceptions. There is a higher order in the universe than a dichotomy. It’s a trinity. It may appear to be a strange analogy, but what we’re dealing with are the most basic paradigms of a computer. Either it fires or it doesn’t. Either it’s on or it’s off. And based on this, sure, one can program subtleties, and help the computer to feel it’s way, but it’s DNA is still structured around a dual process. Yes or no, on or off, save or delete.
We do tend to think in the same way, with our stereotypes and labeling. After all, people write computer code, and computers are built by people, for people. So there’s something of Alice and Looking Glass in there. When we look at computers, we’re seeing a mech version of our own logical processes. They may be logical, they may not be simple, but perhaps they are too simplistic.
Perhaps in future, computer code will go beyond 1’s and 0’s. DNA may consist of two strands, but these strands are bonded together by the enzymes and proteins within the helix. Thus there are not really two structures involved, but three. Thus the third dimension for computer code perhaps be represented by simply pressing the space bar. Something has happened, but what it is is unknown, but not necessarily unknowable.
If we can fully associate ourselves with machines, and machines can be intelligent enough to maneuver through grey areas (such as voice recognition), perhaps we can begin to look at the world in a new way. Perhaps then for the first time we can remain aware of our connections, without there necessarily being overt evidence to prove it. If computers could be taught this skill, this insight, of knowing how all things are connected, perhaps we can begin to engineer the systems required to harmonize ourselves with the other forces at work in the world.
The short answer is that using computers has revolutionized almost every aspect of how human beings function on a daily basis. There are so many ways to approach this subject, from the impact of computers on our language, to our thinking, and even changing our eating and sleeping habits.
Have you ever tried to do something on a computer and it simply wouldn’t (listen). You’re insisting that it does something your way, and it keeps insisting that it can’t, or that there’s an ERROR. It’s at times like these that you wish your computer could either read your mind, or you could just say: Look, I’m trying to do this one simple thing. Can you just go ahead and do it so I don’t have to do it manually. Is an ‘automatic’ computer possible, or put in another way: if computers could talk, what would they say?
Alan Turing defined what has been widely accepted as an ‘intelligent computer’: the computer is supposed to engage a person via an email conversation but here’s the catch – without revealing its identity as a machine. Without a few fundamental changes to how we program and code and even think about computers (and ourselves), that goal appears to be some way off yet.
I read an article (from the Boston Globe) on this subject, and specifically Artificial Intelligence. The writer quoted Shakespeare: ‘What a piece of work is a man…How infinite in faculty…’ As marvelous as computers are, they lack some of the skills we take for granted: imagination, intuition and of course, emotional response.
So in an effort to decide how to make computers more like us (rather than the other way round) let’s start with something simple. Vocabulary. Here are some common words that come to us out of our everyday use of computers:
- users
- delete
- filter
- shortcut
- log on
- connect
- password
- paste
- cancel
- escape
This lexicon may not seem exceptional at first, until we consider some of their functional consequences. A user, for example, in the ordinary way we’d think of the word, is someone who manipulates or piggybacks on someone else. It has a negative connotation. No such connations in computer speak. A user is simply what you are. And often, as someone on a network, you use (and are required to use) resources such as bandwidth, memory, network printers etc. In this sense, being a consumer of resources is seen as both a mixture of ordinary functionality and identity. Just this has some extraordinary implications when we think of what is going on in the world: take climate change. The last thing the world really wants (and I mean the world as the recipient of human action, not the world as ‘ours’) is ‘another’ user. So to blatantly identify oneself as a ‘user’ is quite ignorant, and even insulting from a particular point of view. The same applies to our consumption of fossil fuels. The last thing we want are more users. So to tag oneself in this way is in a sense interesting, and in another sense disconnected from some obvious realities.
Delete means to erase, but it has more significance, because it removes, it obliterates information so that it no longer exists. The point is that when you erase, say, on paper, the thing erased still has some traces of itself. When you delete from a computer, no trace remains. This makes real war games on computers a frightening prospect, because potentially when an enemy is wiped out, even on paper, even the record of existence disappears. I mean, if you delete something, who wants a record of something that doesn’t exist.
Filter. This means to sort through details,and on the face of it it may seem pretty harmless. But imagine you’re dealing with people who filter a lot of information as a job. Perhaps they’re in human resources or something. And then they filter you. Perhaps one detail about your life doesn’t quite fit the profile, and then you get filtered out. Computers work that way, why shouldn’t the people who use them? And we do. When we go shopping, we’ll pass the products we’re about to buy through our own filters, be they prices, quality, image whatever. Filters are useful, but we run the risk of becoming too automated as human beings.
Other word acquire interesting new meanings, which collude to create a world within our world. It’s a world, from a certain point of view, without consequences. We can log on, or connect, paste or cancel, and while these may seem harmless, and mostly appear harmless in Computer World, well, sometimes they can do a tremendous amount of harm. While much of the time the ‘connections’ we make on computers aren’t important, sometimes they are ‘good’ and sometimes they are ‘harmful’ or ‘dangerous’. We may allow other software to intrude into our world, we may unwittingly allow viruses into our systems, when we chose whether or not to cancel we hold the fate of our time and resources in our hands. And it may be easy at times to cancel in the real world. Cancel a date, cancel a booking, cancel an appointment. In the computer world it may be fairly harmless to cancel the changing or saving of a file. We do it so often that the word ‘cancel’ may seem eventually to be almost benign. But of course, it has consequences.
It is no coincidence that obesity happens to coincide, not absolutely, but to a large extent with especially people who have access to computers, and especially the internet. In our generation we have the peculiar statistic that more people in the world are obese than those starving of hunger. Well, who are these people? They’re burger munching, keyboard tapping, mouse clicking computer addicts. Many of them are, simply because a computer allows you do a lot, without doing anything. So if this is an obvious symptom, where does it all start.
Human beings are visually stimulated. That’s why most of us aren’t entertained by walks through a botanical garden, or a night at the opera. Music matters of course, but what matters more than anything is pictures. Is it any wonder that Microsoft call their Operating Systems: Windows. And Vista. Because if there is anything that excites a computer user, whether a gamer, or someone in an office, it’s a nice easy to use display. Those icons are what make it work. Those icons are what make it interesting. Appearances make the world go round: magazine covers sell magazines, first attractive and then intelligent actors sell us on movies.
By clicking on an icon, we link to whatever it we want to link to. It’s called a shortcut. And probably, many of us use shortcuts a great deal on computers. We don’t think anything of it. I know a programmer who uses shortcuts in her programming all the time. It makes her job easier. But she says she finds herself searching for shortcuts in everyday life too. A shortcut has something of that significance of the Rabbit and the Tortoise. It may seem easy at first, and probably it is, but somewhere along the line, especially getting into the habit of employing short cuts (where in driving, working whatever), a short cut is not only not going to pay off, it is going to get you into trouble.
Much of the world today is based on efficiency, and efficiencies are designed over shortcuts. Does any thought go into critical outcomes that are unknown? The quickest and easiest design is preferred, until it’s discovered why, for example, for hundreds of years, houses were not built within a certain range of a river.
Computers are filled with iterative processes that are based on either something being:
1 or 0.
That may seem logical.
Then, built over this assumption are these:
If X, then Y.
Once again. This may appear to be the most logical place to start, but for every choice there are many implications. I won’t explore more than a couple here.
In the world, few things are either a 1 or a 0. If 1 is for Body, and 0 is for Mind, what represents the Spirit? If 1 is War, and 0 is Peace, what is crime? If Day is 1 and 0 is Night, what is twilight, dawn, a solar eclipse etc. If 1 is Male, and 0 is Female, what is someone with combined genitalia, or a transvestite? The point is, using a 1 and a 0 to code may be effective, but it doesn’t quite translate (compute) for the simple reason that there are exceptions. There is a higher order in the universe than a dichotomy. It’s a trinity. It may appear to be a strange analogy, but what we’re dealing with are the most basic paradigms of a computer. Either it fires or it doesn’t. Either it’s on or it’s off. And based on this, sure, one can program subtleties, and help the computer to feel it’s way, but it’s DNA is still structured around a dual process. Yes or no, on or off, save or delete.
We do tend to think in the same way, with our stereotypes and labeling. After all, people write computer code, and computers are built by people, for people. So there’s something of Alice and Looking Glass in there. When we look at computers, we’re seeing a mech version of our own logical processes. They may be logical, they may not be simple, but perhaps they are too simplistic.
Perhaps in future, computer code will go beyond 1’s and 0’s. DNA may consist of two strands, but these strands are bonded together by the enzymes and proteins within the helix. Thus there are not really two structures involved, but three. Thus the third dimension for computer code perhaps be represented by simply pressing the space bar. Something has happened, but what it is is unknown, but not necessarily unknowable.
If we can fully associate ourselves with machines, and machines can be intelligent enough to maneuver through grey areas (such as voice recognition), perhaps we can begin to look at the world in a new way. Perhaps then for the first time we can remain aware of our connections, without there necessarily being overt evidence to prove it. If computers could be taught this skill, this insight, of knowing how all things are connected, perhaps we can begin to engineer the systems required to harmonize ourselves with the other forces at work in the world.
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