Who wrote this?
“But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. … Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”
Answer: Theodore Kaczinski.
Does the name sound familiar?
He was the Unabomber. A murderous psychopath who made it his mission to kill those who would lead the world into a future ruled by machines. Sounds a bit like Sarah Connor in The Terminator, except that real life is so much more complex and messy and far less attractive than blockbuster science-fiction movies. He was a freak, but what if there’s a germ of truth in his warnings? It would be foolhardy of us not to consider the possibility. In the NYT, Richard Dooling suggests that human over-reliance on computers led to the current financial crisis. Did the geniuses of Wall Street really understand derivatives? No, they left it to their machines.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 13th, 2008 at 08:05
The number crunching may have been done by the computers, but the financial models were still constructed by humans. Their aim was to spread around (and therefore minimize) risk, but in the process, they increased the entropy (i.e. hidden information) of the financial system to the point that it can no longer be trusted.
October 13th, 2008 at 09:58
Pretty insightful for a homicidal maniac.
Well, we are still many years away from a Terminator-like computer, but I don’t mind that machines are becoming an indispensable tool in the modern world. The fear that they will take over the world is mainly aroused from countless science-fiction novels and movies. They have, in a sense, taken over completely our daily lives with no signs of the apocalyptic doom occurring. From now on, all human progress will be dependent on these machines. That’s actually a good thing.
Speaking of the financial crisis, if every Wall Street analyst ran these financial models on their computer (as all of them do), it would produce dubious results. Not everyone can make a profit.
Economic crashes are as natural as forest fires and volcanic eruptions. It is destructive initially, but it also provides new growth and opportunity. Therefore, it is futile to finger-point the government, predator-lenders (aka Sarah Palin), capitalism, or HAL 9000 for the economic meltdown. We just came out of the Asian crisis- now it’s their turn.