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Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Stanisław LemMegabyte Bomb
Stanislaw Lem's Megabyte Bomb is a collection of philosophical essays that deal with the dangers resulting from the volatile growth of contemporary information technology. As it says on the cover: " Stanislaw Lem provides sharp insights into scientific and technological issues that are being spawned right before our eyes, the objects of the most current debates. He investigates the potential for the further growth of the internet, the effects of global computerization, and the potential for creating artificial intelligence, as well as into the nature of thinking, reason, and consciousness."
I have particularly strong sentiments about Lem's work. If every translation is a door to a new world, then you can imagine what an experience it is to go into this unusual and highly intellectualized world, which can be reached only by following the mental paths of a master. What satisfaction! What a wealth of new, broader, and simply unbelievable horizons of the human - I mean, of the Lem-esque - imagination! It seems really impossible to me for his work to be the invention of an average human intelligence, an average imagination. What Stanislaw Lem creates is, in my opinion, an emblem of our time, of all humanity, marked by a genius.
Megabyte Bomb
Should Reason Be Replaced?
Although they have now gone on for more or less half a century, all efforts at and methods of creating artificial intelligence have been in vain. The technology of thinking or of understanding has somehow lost its impetus. Innovations intended to furnish mankind with true intellectual support (and not only for purposeless fun, or in order for something hidden from view to simulate intelligence and therefore pass the Turing test) have been shouldered aside by the technology, which continues to develop without any major hiccups, of "slavish data processing" - in other words, computers that work at higher and higher speeds and that are encroaching steadily into regions that were once considered "exclusively human." The technology of connectivity has become the newest addition to, or reinforcement of, this trend. I am, of course, thinking of all sorts of networks. Systematic segments that are specialist in nature are beginning to emerge (as I, and not only I, predicted) from a network that aspires to globalization (and primarily to Anglo-Americanization). To put it in simple terms, scientific institutions are connecting with other such institutions, banks with banks, stock markets with stock markets. Aside from this "civilian" anthill, we catch glimpses of connected circuits in which the shared specialization is military, extending from general staffs down to the units under their command. In turn, these differentiated specialist networks can enter into connectivity with each other: medicine with pharmacology, for instance, or collective expert systems from one domain with information rescued - like Eurydice- from the entanglements of another domain. This can be done to whatever degree seems potentially sensible to the people who control the networks and their gates. The criterion is one of informational (or simulational, diagnostic, anamnestic, or economical) fecundity.
This entire process is clearly taking place under conditions of "pararational" acceleration. I want to make it clear that no network, no nodes of any network, or systems or hierarchical arrangements, not even those used "only" for games or entertainment, can thinkin and of themselves. Here and there, they may sound as if they are "thinking," thanks to the fact that experts have learned to discover - to the degree that this is at all possible - "emulators" of thought, at least in partial terms. These are "outcroppings" of syntax (formal grammar) within the semantic universe, or the cosmos of sense. It is these emulators that are the subject matter of controversies over Artificial Intelligence. Two opposed camps have sprung up: those who acknowledge the possibility of "machine" (and not necessarily electronic) thinking, and those who believe that such a possibility is eternally unrealizable.
The sides in the war over the "Chinese room" and its "occupant" - who does not understand Chinese at all but nevertheless produces ("together with the room and the additional information") output that seems to indicate a comprehension of input in Chinese-can be reduced (but not limited) to these two opposed camps. I have already written about this and do not intend to return to a discussion of the merits. The arguments on either side will convince some and fail to convince others. It all shows the degree to which answers to questions about artificial intelligence have become QUESTIONS OF FAITH (of the belief that it is, or that it isn't).
Translated by William Brand
Stanislaw LEM (b.1921) - is a writer and essayist who redefined the traditions of science fiction.
Polish edition by Wydawnictwo Literackie
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