The Evolution of Wired Life

Charles Jonscher

Description

"Thoughtful and erudite... Intelligent and readable...Will appeal to people who enjoyed Longitude by Dava Sobel or Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh." -The San Diego Union Tribune
"Most engaging."-The Boston Globe
"An optimistic and reassuring assertion that no matter what wonders we invent, human beings . . . remain infinitely more complex and interesting."-The Economist
A lively, informative examination of the computer revolution-and why the top-performing information-processing device is still the human brain.

If we believe the forecasts of many computer enthusiasts, a wave of amazing devices will soon fundamentally change our lives, and the "thinking machine" is just around the corner. In this authoritative and entertaining book, critically acclaimed author Charles Jonscher presents the other side of the argument: while communication developments have changed society, they also have their limits. He shows us that in order to understand the true transformative powers of the new technologies, we must know about the long history of their development-and why no calculating machine can match the creative power of the human mind. Rich in insights from literature, philosophy, and history, The Evolution of Wired Life offers a fascinating look at the development of the digital era, from the invention of the first alphabetic language to the printing press to the World Wide Web.

Sujets

• Social Aspects
• Sciences et techniques
• Technology
• Engineering

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 août 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620459416
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Evolution of Wired Life
The Evolution of Wired Life
From the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip- How Information Technologies Change Our World
CHARLES JONSCHER
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 1999 by Charles Jonscher. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, [phone], fax [phone], email: [e-mail].
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged is rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jonscher, C.
The evolution of wired life : from the alphabet to the soul-catcher chip- how information technologies change our world / Charles Jonscher.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-471-35759-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-471-39298-7 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Informational technology-Social aspects. 2. Information society. I. Title.
T58.5.J66 1999
303.48 33-dc21 99-43426
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my mother and father
Contents
Acknowledgments

Prologue
1 The Soul-Catcher Chip
2 The Ancient Mystery of Human Knowledge
3 Wiring the Planet
4 The Chip, Master Logician
5 But Are Computers Like Us? The Rise and Fall of Artificial Intelligence
6 Creating Cyberspace: Multimedia and the Internet
7 Looking for Results: Computers and Economic Progress
8 Back to the Real World: Digital Technologies of Tomorrow
9 Who Are We in the Digital Age?
Epilogue
Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgments
A book distils what the author has learned over the years from teachers, colleagues and friends. My largest debt is to Ithiel de Sola Pool of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was to me all three of those; his death robbed this field of one of its foremost scholars.
A base away from the daily workplace is invaluable for putting one s ideas in order, and my thanks go to Anthony Oettinger and John LeGates for providing one at the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy, and also for reviewing and improving the text.
Other colleagues who have discussed with me the various ideas which helped to formulate this text include Michael Tyler, John Clippinger, Paul Strassmann, Russell Neuman, Michael Scott-Morton and Richard Solomon. Peter Fudakowski has given generously of ideas and time from the start. Marek Zebrowski, Anthony Gottlieb, Jim Gorman, Kanwarjit Singh and Alex Reid have provided thoughtful comments and suggestions on the text, as have Anton Smith, Roger Penrose and, through several drafts, Tomasz Pobog-Malinowski. To all these I owe thanks, while taking sole responsibility for the shortcomings of the book.
Publishing is now big business but - a theme which crops up in this book - the soul of a business is still its people; those involved in this project have been marvellous. It was Michael Sissons, my agent, who persuaded me to go for this as a book for the general readership and Patrick Janson-Smith of Transworld who, metaphorically, bought it . I must thank both for their support. Many authors recall warmly their interaction with editors, and I am no exception: Sarah Westcott and Paul Barnett - and, early on, Richard Brzezinski - gave creative input and ideas to make each chapter and verse better. My colleagues at Central Europe Trust have been most understanding - Ola Folkierska supportive as always.
Finally, there are times in the writing of a book when its author is poor company; for accepting these with such grace, my thanks go to my wife Renata.
Prologue
My maternal great-grandmother, Janina Suchorzewska, spent her early childhood in the city of Krakow. By the standards of the time, the 1870s, Krakow was a flourishing town, a busy seat of commerce and manufacture within the Austro-Hungarian empire, and a former capital of Poland. Yet the conditions in which people lived - reading by oil-lamp, bathing in water pumped by hand from a well, travelling about only on foot or by horse-carriage - had changed little in hundreds of years. Life there, as elsewhere in Europe and North America, could still pass for medieval in many of its daily routines.
She was to live through a period of technological change more dramatic than has been experienced by any other generation, before or since. As she approached the age of ten, electricity came into practical use; in 1879 Thomas Alva Edison invented the lightbulb in New Jersey and Ernst von Siemens built the first electric streetcar in Berlin. By the time of Janina s fifteenth birthday, German engineers had put gasoline engines into vehicles. Henry Ford, pioneer of mass production, began manufacture in the USA in 1896, and by 1900 powered automobiles started to replace horse-carts in large quantities. Just three years later the Wright brothers made the first powered flight, fulfilling a dream which had fascinated mankind since the earliest times.
The outbreak of World War One in 1914 brought horrifying confirmation of the rate of technological change. Aeroplanes fought in the sky and huge factories churned out munitions and chemical weapons for a conflict which, in terms of human cost, had no precedent. The ensuing years brought further breakneck developments in science and technology. Plastics appeared commercially in the 1920s, as did mass-produced steel. Skyscrapers began to dominate city skylines. Electricity was fed to every city house, providing power for lighting, pumps, kitchen appliances and the first electronic radios and sound systems.
In the 1950s, in the boom years following the end of World War Two, most of the remaining elements of modern industrial life were put in place. Domestic appliances from washing machines to vacuum cleaners became ubiquitous. The countryside was crisscrossed with asphalt highways on which travelled cars at up to and over 150 kilometres per hour, the best of them equipped with power steering, electrically adjusted seats, air suspension and automatic transmission. The first commercial jet was in service by 1952, and intercontinental air travel became routine. In 1959 the Soviet spaceprobe Lunik 2 reached the moon. Technology had advanced from horse-drawn carts to space travel in a single lifetime.
The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century had been a period not only of great technological change but also of unprecedented political and social upheaval. In the still peaceful 1890s, Janina Suchorzewska went to Munich to study art and the piano - universities offered only genteel topics to women in those days. In the early 1900s, with military stormclouds gathering over Europe and with her beloved Poland under foreign annexation, she returned to Krakow. Caught running weapons, she was tried and faced the death penalty, but was pardoned. Surviving also World War One, she earned a doctorate in philosophy; later, when the doors of the profession were finally opened to women, she gained another degree, in medicine. She ended her working life a practising physician, determined to use the medical sciences to repay society for the considerable privileges which it had bestowed on her in her youth.
She was still healthy and active at the age of 94 when she died after a street accident outside the apartment she had occupied for most of her eventful near-century of life.
The sense in the mid-twentieth century was that technological progress would march on uninterrupted. By the year 2000, it was assumed, the life of the modern urban dweller would be mechanized, accelerated and streamlined to as yet unthought-of levels. There would be no traffic jams. The modern citizen would travel around the city by a variety of exotic means: ultralight electric runabouts for inside the house and within the immediate neighbourhood, and jet-powered vehicles for highway travel. The home of the future would be dramatically transformed by technology; the family would sit back and relax as self-propelled devices discreetly cleaned the rooms and prepared the meals.
Hopes were high for our ability to deliver material comforts to all and to overcome the problems of poverty and sickness. The US physician Lowry H. McDaniel typified the sentiments of the time when he wrote in 1956 that, by the end of the century, starvation and famine will be prevented by synthesis of foodstuffs . Likewise, he argued, infectious disease would have been eliminated and cancer successfully treated.
None of this has happened. In Paris and New York, the patterns of day-to-day life are broadly unchanged. Some new architectural styles and models of cars have appeared, but traffic still tails back, as it has for decades, at the approaches to the cities. People walk along the same streets and avenues, between offices and apartment blocks, coffee shops and restaurants. The infrastructures supplying gas, electricity and water still date in large part from the first half of the century.
Our lifestyles have not been transformed by rocket travel, magne