Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1997
Homepage > Publication & Opinion > Hard Drive
Fear of machines is all in the mind
EVERYBODY cheered when Sigourney Weaver slid into the exo-skeleton "man magnifier" in the final act of Alien 2, and prepared to do battle with the horrific creature. Here was a lone woman pitched against a creature of far superior strength, agility and killing power. But the nth generation back hoe digger (man magnifier) enhanced her strength and abilities more than tenfold, and she was more than a match for this out-of-water shark. Here the ingenuity of the human overcame a formidable foe by the amplification of basic muscular capabilities through technology. How strange then, as Deep Blue took out Garry Kasparov you could hear the gasp of horror. Machine beats the chess grand master - sidelined by the silicon beast. Conversely, we wouldn't think of entering a weight-lifting competition against a crane. Why is it that physical leverage is OK, but the intellectual equivalent is not? Most of us flip a light switch, control a lift, use a pocket calculator, drive a car, cook a pizza, make a phone call, without giving a thought to the technology controlling the process. Who cares? Yet, the prospect of machines smarter than people instantly worries most. Why? No one would try arm wrestling an assembly line robot, or for that matter, try to compute and manipulate graphics faster than a Mac. But then again, we no longer perceive these as a threat, they are not seen to be smart, intelligent, or potential rivals. But don't they do their job with more accuracy and efficiency than the humans they displaced? Probably a science fiction industry that continually depicts technology as predominantly threatening, evil and malevolent has a lot to do with the public perception. Curiously, Commander Data and the Shape Shifters of Star Trek do not fill us with horror despite their obvious superiority. On the other hand, Terminator can make your skin creep. So is it merely a matter of form? Some threshold of appearance and action that signals a level of humanity that makes an entity acceptable to us? Even HAL in 2001 seemed menacing through voice and words alone. Computers are already the most effective and powerful mind magnifiers we have produced, and they look set to continue to encroach further. Their past claim to fame was control, memory and raw number-crunching. Today this has expanded to analysis, modelling, visualisation and decision support. They are now set to enter our previously exclusive territory of logic, reason and rationale. As with previous encroachments, they will help us discover new ways of solving problems and understanding phenomena. Remember, without computers we would not understand the detail of chaos, weather systems, epidemiology, DNA, the turbulent flow of air over an aircraft wing, or our own genome, and very much more. Perhaps to make all this acceptable, the quality we will have to build into future machines will be magnanimity and tolerance to our inadequacies and foibles. Apparently it is OK to compute numbers faster than us, but not to reason.
Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk