Okay, I watched my usual Friday night one-two last night: Farscape and Stargate SG-1, back-to-back. I don't know how I made it through. I couldn't pause the show or go back and replay interesting bits, I couldn't zip forward through the commercials (that Arby's commercial with the news anchorman going nuts got old real fast), and I desperately wanted to go back and play on the 'net and watch the show later.
You see, my Tiverino went kerflooey while I was out of town, and its currently on its way back to the Philips mothership for repair or replacement. And I had forgotten just how unpleasant watching regular TV could be without it.
Yeah, I do own a VCR, and I could have programmed it to tape the shows for me. What part of "Lazy" do you not understand? Besides, that's just one show. I elected to skip my weekly Rukeyser fix, and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 rerun the next morning, because it just wasn't worth it.
Okay, so there must be some deeper philosophical point to make here, so that I'm not just bitching about my appliances going belly-up like some kind of spoiled yuppie. Think, think ... ah, got it.
One perennial worry about the future of technology is that we'll someday create an artificial intelligence, and it will replace us, the next stage in evolution (whereupon it send a robot back in time to kill Linda Hamilton before she got preggers, but you know how that one ends). It's not just a Hollywood plotline; serious people thinking serious thoughts about the future take this idea, um, seriously. One version of Vernor Vinge's Singularity is that human history ends because history is being made by someone (or someTHING, daa-dummmm) other than humans at that point. Eric Raymond gave a talk touching on this at last year's Open Source Software Conference, and this notion's been bugging me ever since.
It bugs me because it's wrong. Intelligence is easy to create; it can, in fact, be created by unskilled labor, and often by accident. (Condoms do break, you know.) Why would we need to create more?
What's coming down the pike is not artificial intelligence, but artificially augmented human intelligence.
I had little-to-no access to the Internet on a couple of recent trips out of town, and the experience was surprisingly unpleasant. I am used to having an encyclopedic memory for movies and TV shows; no more. I am used to knowing the definition of any word I come across; no more. I am used to knowing what movies are playing, where, and when, how to get to any address in town, and what's going on in the world at large; I am used, in fact, to having in-depth knowledge of any topic that crosses my mind.
Sitting at my parents' house, playing Solitaire on a 486 PC that lacked even a modem connection, I didn't just feel cut off; I felt stupid.
And in a very practical sense, I was. No, techically, the Internet doesn't truly make me smarter, any more than a hammer really makes me stronger, or a bicycle really makes me faster. But in evolution, there's no such thing as "cheating"; results are all that count. Elephants have strength, lions have a deadly attack, birds have flight -- and humans have the brains and hands to make tools. Tools that make us stronger than any elephant, deadlier than any lion, and faster and higher-flying than any bird.
And smarter than humans of previous generations. I have seen the next stage of human evolution, and it is called "Google".
Just to close the circle: digital cable television, satellite receivers, VCRs, and Tivo have made us much more adept at watching television, compared to the benighted troglodytes of ancient times whose TVs had black and white nine-inch screens, and only received three channels. And being able to watch reruns of "Forever Knight" whenever you want, wherever you want, commercial-free, is of course what really matters in life.
Posted by Kevin Shaum at August 03, 2002 10:03 PM