Virtual competition: Garry Kasparov on his way to losing against Deep Blue, IBM’s
chess playing computer .
According to Moore’s Law, computing power doubles every two years. By around 2020,
a personal computer will have exactly the same processing power as a single human
brain |
Galloping
advances in information technology promise to give us instant access to all the world’s
knowledge. But how will human memory fare against the rise of the super-machine?
If the architects of
technology’s next great leap forward are to be believed, all knowledge may soon be
shrunk to vanishing point. Nanotechnology, or computing carried out at the scale
of atoms, is their byword for the future. With its awesome potential, scientists
at IBM have recently argued, around 11 million 400-page volumes—the entire contents,
say, of France’s National Library—could be stored and primed for instant viewing
on a device the size of a human palm.
The ink may still be fresh on these blueprints, but the elixir of portable omniscience
no longer seems so far away. Seemingly cast-iron laws of ever increasing computer
power, along with the rise of powerful new technologies, appear to point to a horizon
where all that can be known and remembered can be transferred to machines with which
human beings then interact at will. And it is a future that for some is already spelling
big trouble for the brain.
Surveys point to yawning gaps in general knowledge “Computers not only distract us
from contemplation of deeper values; they discourage us from contemplation itself,”
declares Stephen Bertman, a classics professor at Canada’s University of Windsor,
and author of the recent book Cultural Amnesia. In his opinion, society’s love affair
with fast and far-reaching machines—online computers, palm-tops and mobile phones,
all just for starters—leads inexorably to memory loss rather than gain.
As surveys repeatedly show, knowledge of history, literature, geography and even
current affairs seem to be on a steep decline: 60 percent of adult Americans cannot
recall the name of the president who ordered the dropping of the first atomic bomb,
just as 77 percent of young Britons are perplexed by the words Magna Carta. The day
of the nano-shrunk library could soon come, but will any of its users be able to
remember a single line of poetry?
The connection between these yawning gaps in general knowledge and information technology
is by no means established, but a host of thinkers in different fields are sure the
issue is one that will shortly become all too pertinent. “External support for our
memory has a direct effect on our memory,” argues Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, a leading
neuro-scientist based in Paris’ Pierre et Marie Curie University. “At the same time
as it helps us and extends our physical capabilities, it diminishes our individual
faculties. This is a vital question, one which has been around for a long time. Even
Plato speaks in the Phaedrus of writing being both a good and an evil for our memory.”
Good or evil, writing has nevertheless formed one of the main tools in the evolution
of human memory. Indeed it is civilization’s unrelenting hunger for placing memory
in external stores—cave-paintings, then manuscripts, libraries, printed works and
finally computers—that has supported the entire march of the species. As the Canadian
neuropsychologist Merlin Donald has observed, each of these new technologies has
helped humans “off-load” their memories. Pre-literate societies, for instance, depended
on oral tradition for their expertise—a practice undermined by the flaws of overworked
brains, though fertile ground for epic poetry. Through the written word, memories
were freed from the head: knowledge could be stored for retrieval in books, and then
recrafted into the sort of novel and complex codes on which modern society is founded:
“examples might include the servicing manuals for a rocket engine, the equations
proving the Pythagorean theorem, a corporate income tax handbook, or the libretto
and score for Eugene Onegin,” states Donald.
Becoming
good memory managers
The
benefits of storing memory outside the brain are unquestionable, but the invention
of printing over 500 years ago followed by the post-war onset of computing have added
a new note to the process: that of thundering acceleration. One simple equation has
come to embody this. Known as Moore’s Law after its inventor Gordon Moore, the co-founder
of Intel, it stipulates that computing power—defined in terms of capacity and speed
per unit cost—doubles every two years. The trend has held for the last 40 years.
Should it continue as expected to around 2020, a personal computer by that year will
have exactly the same processing power as a single human brain. Add the promised
marvels of nanotechnology, optical and quantum computing, and machines might reach
utterly daunting proportions. “One penny’s worth of computing circa 2099 will have
a billion times greater computing capacity than all humans on Earth,” breezily announces
Ray Kurzweil, an American supremo of artificial intelligence, in his book The Age
of Spiritual Machines.
Kurweil may well be too confident in his predictions, but the quandary remains: if
computers become so quick, so mighty, so cheap, then where will the relatively impoverished
human mind fit in? Three years ago, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat the world’s finest
flesh-and-blood chess player, Garry Kasparov, over the course of six games. If human
functions ultimately resemble moves of chess, then must the brain and its stores
submit to the superior wisdom of the microchip?
For many cognitive scientists, relations between mind and machine are already undergoing
drastic reconfiguration. “Distributed intelligence” is the new maxim, encapsulating
all systems in which individuals and computers mesh to carry out a collective task,
whether it be landing an aircraft or tracking share prices. The Internet is so far
the crowning glory—a system that in principle might combine individual users into
a potent “group mind.” For Norman Johnson from the Symbiotic Intelligence Project
at the Los Alamos Laboratory, New Mexico, the collective power unleashed by such
a system could solve problems far beyond any individual’s capacity.
All of this may sound abstract, but the effects on memory are being felt now. Facts
and figures no longer take pride of place in school curricula. Within the past two
years, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong—havens of rote learning—have debated
plans to axe huge swathes of standard classroom study. Experts in education stress
that students must learn to be adaptable, skilled in manipulating symbols, able to
respond to new situations; in short, ready to deal with the new economy, a realm
where the computer is king.
“We will need a lot of new skills,” declares the neuro-psychologist Donald. “We have
to become good memory managers—we’ve moved away from managing a lot in our heads
to managing memory devices. We have to devote more space to this executive control
and less to rote memory storage.”
Nurturing
imaginative thinking at school
As
he acknowledges, the result is an inevitable reduction in “individual presence.”
It is a form of mental life that has unsurprisingly earned bitter recriminations.
Earlier this year the Alliance for Childhood joined the fray by publishing a report
entitled Fool’s Gold attacking the numbing effects of computers at school, above
all primary school: “A heavy diet of ready-made computer images and programmed toys
appears to stunt imaginative thinking. Teachers report that children in our electronic
society are becoming alarmingly deficient in generating their own ideas and images.”
While proponents of the electronic future insist on the liberating, elevating potential
of machines—Kurzweil even suggests that we could “port” our minds onto super-powered
computers for an intellectually and sensually richer life—suspicion continues to
fester. As Ganascia observes, human memory is much more than simple information processing.
There are, for instance, at least five systems of human memory, making up an inordinately
rich web of self-reflexive, interweaving recollection that no computer has even come
close to imitating. But if memory is increasingly stored in machines that we then
manage for our learning, work and leisure, then how will these systems in the brain
fare? And how will imagination, intelligence and understanding—all of which depend
on an efficiently functioning memory—be affected? The simple answer is: we still
do not know.
Yet one image stalks the debate. It is not the old science fiction fear of a malevolent
computer (the HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey perhaps), but of a citizen without a personal
memory to speak of. Bertman, for one, is convinced that boundless electronic information
may be the deadliest enemy of human knowledge. “It’s not just enough to remember
where we live, what our birthday is, and the name of our wife—there’s more to human
personality and identity than just the details we can find inside our wallet.” |
