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The Net, a carrier for the Mind
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The Net, a carrier for the Mind
Looked at globally, telephone lines resemble the dendrites of neurones of an enormous brain growing at different points around the world. They irrigate the new technological system transporting financial flows and on an international scale there is already a rapport between the wealth of nations (income per inhabitant) and the density of telephone lines.
An unprecedented situation
From the end of this century humanity will find itself in a completely new situation never experienced before in history, the ability to instantaneously communicate from one end of the world to the other.
The whole of civilization is changing shape. Around 1983 the two hundredth anniversary of the first flight of man the following all became widely available at around the same time :
- artificial vision (CCD cameras able to recognize shapes)
- artificial hearing (speech recognition chips)
- artificial sound (laser discs and numerical telephones)
- artificial design (computer assisted design on microcomputers, within means of small businesses)
Images and sound are becoming a form of writing as reliable as classic linear graphics or ideographics as in China. But you may say what's so important about all that ? Writing was the fundamental link in the chain of civilization. It was used to set down boundaries, to record transactions, to lay down the laws of the city. Anyone interfering with the Tables of the Law (in Greece the tablets) could be sentenced to death.
Mankind at last possessed something that was indelible, an indisputable memory exterior to their own body.
All their social organizations rely on this memory. So if writing is affected, so is civilization.
Perhaps, you might reply but these are only generalizations. Grand words such as "civilization" and "memory" awaken scepticism. What have they got to do with everyday life? My answer is : "every instant requires you to use your memory. Every second you are either acting to integrate yourself in civilization or to deviate from civilization."
Transversal Languages
Language is for communicating but also acts to protect us from communication. The new "Berlin Walls" are inside our heads, walls of invisible, forbidden words replacing yesterday's frontiers. The diversity of technology in itself is equal to the combined expanse of other subject matters. Economics, sociology and geopolitics possess specialist vocabularies of a few thousand words. Complete languages such as English, French, Tamil and Mandarin Chinese consist of approximately 60,000 words. However, a single car contains more than two thousand components while there are more than ten thousand articles on the shelves of a large supermarket. Big stores such as Harrods handle four hundred thousand references. The inventory list for spare parts for the American army consists of four and a half million items. A description of the complete range of modern technology requires six million references, or a hundred times more words than a language. The only domain comparable in size is the complexity of Life itself; there are between five and thirty million animal and plant species according to the latest estimations. So technology is a hyper language within which sub-vocabularies solidify themselves, forming many linguistic bastions. The three thousand traditional languages spoken on earth are in the process of disappearing, as only a handful of them are recognized world-wide and these are progressively reducing the others to an inferior status. However, at the same time our technical vocabulary is undergoing explosive growth with the rapid increase in specialities. The human species used to be structured in proud and sovereign, independent tribes. It is now being reorganised into professional, delocalized tribes, a diaspora of specialists. Consequence : the emergence of transnational organizations. To the degree that professional communications are spinning their spiders web over the world, the organization of societies is imperceptibly changing. As multi-membership gains ground, behaviour also changes. Professional values become more important : to be competent, keep one's promises, know ones limits, provide a quality service within a prescribed period, pay on time. Yet how many newcomers believe that the only shared value of the market economy is greed, taught by incompetent shamans singing their hymns to the glory of profit ?
This is to confuse the measuring instrument with the object being measured. What a mistake! The only reference should be the true choice of the consumer. And wherever this cannot be exercised (because of the realities of power or brain washing) the economy is being thwarted. The most powerful enemy of capitalism is not socialism, but itself when it is debased into a corrupt capitalism.
The landscape of world institutions is reshaping. It used to be dominated by nation states which are now diminishing in importance while other entities, especially firms, are becoming more prominent. This applies not only to multinationals which it was believed would end up dominating the world but even more to the myriad of small firms, each based on someone's talent. Nowadays one can be multinational without the clumsiness of massive structures. This is true for the foremost fashion designers and talented craftsmen and designers. NGOs are also becoming more important and taking charge of fulfilling our more general concerns (Amnesty, Greenpeace, Médecins sans Frontières). Finally, state-based structures are being dismantled; communication companies, once fiercely nationalistic, have been deregulated and throw themselves into the conquest of the world market as have other public utility operators e.g. water distribution, electricity, railways, metros.
Forms of organization are evolving. The old structures once thought of as eternal are now revealed as mortal. The death of companies is provided for by our laws, through receivership and bankruptcy. The business system accepts death i.e. the laws of life - and is therefore more robust than the system of state structures. There is no method for allowing state administrations to perish even when in deep coma.
Conversely, to organize the Olympic Games we construct a powerful institution destined to fade away once they are over. Never mind! The memory of the event has been recorded, an indelible impression of eternal moments. Firms themselves are becoming less hierarchical and more neuronal. As their task is to process information, they are adapting to this by organising themselves in an analogous manner to neurones in the brain. Out of our 10 billion neurones, there is not one neurone which controls all the others. There is no boss in the brain and yet it functions, as we all witness by our presence. However, there are functionalities and specializations, and a method of linkage which is still to be elucidated.
The Hallucinogenic Industries
However, in certain circumstances the telephone can also become an instrument of power. The communication system of Mitsui, the second largest import-export firm in Japan, taps a turnover of over 150 billion dollars. Its world map has more than 120 subsidiaries spread around the world constituting its own private network. This network makes 120,000 telephone calls daily. When stretched out, the length of this network would circle the world 15 times. Any small firm can bring along its product to this "shosha" and if it is accepted it will be marketed throughout the world by the next day, via the network. And if Mitsui does not want it, there are another 8 companies providing the same service for a 3 to 5% margin, which is very little indeed.
A few years ago while dining in town, Mitsubishi's representative in France (Mitsubishi is another large "shosha") overheard a conversation about a semi confidential tender which people are very good at reserving for their own friendly suppliers. He made enquiries and got in touch with his network during the night. The next morning when the offices opened, he lodged a printed and priced reply to the tender in question.That is the industrialization of information, it is not about reserved places, roped off areas, monopoly of access, quotas, agreements to share the market, a guaranteed income for this or for that. It is about being the quickest in handling data. Mitsui receives a telex from Thailand which states : "Bearing in mind that Mr so and so has been elected to such and such a position, we are going to set the price of rice at such and such a level. Please confirm instructions". This is how the Japanese survived all the supply crises of the 70s without any great difficulties. Whether its for raw materials, foodstuffs or finished products they are everywhere in the position of buyers and sellers. There are no emperors in this global "empire of signs" which is being woven beneath our feet. No one possesses information and we can neither own it nor confiscate it. Its only value is in its movement and the winners are those who enable it to circulate better. Old instincts of seizure will have to be overcome. The era of the industrial juggler has arrived.
Telematics functions as an intermediary in the control of people by other people. In the last century Marx denounced the exploitation of economic weakness but we are now entering the era of exploitation of psychic weakness where machines will be programmed to overwhelm our systems of perceptions, embody our fantasies and direct our hallucinations. Consider virtual reality headsets. The subject is wearing gloves or perhaps a one piece overall filled with sensors and manipulates a virtual object stored within the computer's memory. His headset furnishes him with an image of his body within an environment which does not actually exist, except within the machine's memory.
This type of device has a potential fascination which is somewhat disquieting. Alan Kay in California has invented the vivarium , an immense aquarium, also just in a machine's memory - it does not exist, its virtual - where one can control an animal, for example a shark. If one gives instructions to the shark which don't fit in with its ethology or its instincts, it changes them or refuses to carry them out. So you swim around as a shark for an hour or two and when you go back out on the street you move around obstacles in a different way. The teaching ability of these machines is impressive but so is their capacity for behavioural conditioning. These types of machines are already being used to train pilots and engine drivers while in the near future they'll train surgeons and other hazardous manual professions. But they will also be used to befuddle and condition the population. This will be the best of all worlds and the worst; high powered, fantastically efficient teaching of the masses but also idiotic video games, turning our children into zombies.
But will this make any difference to our everyday lives, and in what way? The characteristics of the new system will be progressively revealed; however two strands can be discerned already:
- The first is hyperchoice as depicted by Alvin Toffler : The inflation of artificial memories, the diversity of goods and opportunities puts us in the position of Buridan's ass who cannot decide between two alternatives. To choose requires an increased effort.
The indecisive will suffer but so will the elderly and handicapped. Faced with uncertainty people take refuge in the past (fundamentalism and tribalism) or allow themselves to be carried along by the vicissitudes of life like a cork bobbing on the waves. Laxity, an attitude of wait and see and fatalism spread.
In fact, modern technology is too often presented as fate. We bemoan that the working man has to compete with robots. We wonder whether genetic manipulations will lead to the manufacture of superbeings or subhumans. We fear that virtual reality universes will take over our thoughts and that overuse will create an addiction and function socially as a drug. These hazards lead to fears but what's new is that the risks are so enormous that humanity is forced to make a collective choice. But who chooses? For instance looking at drugs, if it is the community, this results in the rise of criminal organizations, as happened during prohibition. If it is the individual, s/he still has to be able to acquire the psychological defences necessary to resist temptation. Thus modern technology forces ethical considerations to the fore and makes people give up their ideology of comfort to take themselves back in hand.
- The second characteristic is existential. Faced by either a spineless, worried population or an inflexible, backward looking one, individuals arise who give a meaning to life. They represent only themselves. Old authorities are discredited. These people stand out through the quality of their destiny and their living defiance of the tormented uncertainty of our era. They are righteous beings. The heroes of the next century will not be like Che Guevara, who served as an excuse for so many terrorists but more probably the conscientious judge executed by the Mafia or entertainers (Coluche, Sting, Bob Geldorf), scientists (Cousteau) or humanitarians (Mother Teresa). They are all, in their own way, entrepreneurs, people who have themselves created their vocations and who have made life shine brightly in places where it was threatened.
Much is at stake at the beginning of the 21st century. The issue of awareness will be central both because of its fragility and because our field of vision is expanding, despite of and also in reaction to tremendous illusions.
The Cognitive Sciences
This leads to the central issue of the next century. What is living and what is not. All living beings have within them tiered processes of recognition. An amoeba knows how to recognise its food and distinguish poisons or else it would not survive. As humans we have much more sophisticated recognition processes which we use to think, but also much more primitive ones at a molecular level concerned with the mechanisms of immunity. But is life limited to what we normally consider as being alive ? Instead of adopting an approach based on matter i.e. organic molecules and the different "medium" they constitute we now need to refer to functions, i.e. a set of tiered processes of recognition and reproduction which can be "incarnated" chemically as beings who we would normally refer to as living, but also perhaps "incarnated" in other contexts.
By doing this we could get away from our customary, materialistic approach and pose the principle of another approach, looking at the functioning of what we are bound to call conscience. This point of view naturally leads to posing certain provocative questions such as the following : if we define life by recognition shouldn't the club of living beings include other entities which were not an issue previously? For example, computer viruses and other auto-reproductive programmes but also perhaps those "moral entities" which the human species secretes and animates?
In business speech we often say : "IBM thinks that..." But what is it that IBM thinks? Philosophically IBM cannot think, anymore than any other institution. However, we behave as if IBM does think .. So what is a thinking being and how does it function. This is a crucial question posed by the cognitive sciences, which will be the key scientific discipline of the next century.
Since the onset of the 80s, neurophysiologists studying the brain, computer specialists attempting to construct "artificial intelligence", linguists and philosophers asking themselves how words and concepts are formed and ethnologists and psychologists who study behaviour and try to discern its origin and meaning have found themselves asking the same question, what is knowledge? This question has remained speculative due to a lack of methodology and instruments to measure it. However, comparing the organization and capabilities of living beings with those of robots means that we can now make some tentative advances. A new approach to the truth is nestling at the juncture of the artificial and the real.
But scientific knowledge is only one aspect of knowledge and both its foundations and the way it is spread will be called into question by the cognitive sciences.
As an example it is difficult to perceive mathematical objects and the way the subject is taught is often off-putting. A large percentage of the population rejects mathematics as a result of their early learning misadventures. Combining virtual reality universes and cognitive sciences could allow everyone to visualize and handle them. If personalized in this way, they could become as familiar as dogs or cats. The interaction of humans with artificial intelligence can either destroy or reconstruct the universe of the mind.
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