Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!iuvax!uceng!dmocsny
From: dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: illiterate society
Summary: Rationing scarce intelligence; Society *as* mind
Message-ID: <3873@uceng.UC.EDU>
Date: 3 Mar 90 20:23:53 GMT
References: <808@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> <34666@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: College of Engg., Univ. of Cincinnati
Lines: 76

In article <34666@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> marie@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Marie desJardins) writes:
>    - Consider, as you mention, the invention of the pocket 
>      calculator.  Yes, in a way, we have come to depend on
>      the calculator to do even relatively simple calculations.
[...]
>    - Consider also the invention of the printing press.  Prior
>      to the widespread availability of printed texts [...] Educated 
>      people were expected to memorize literature, poetry,
>      famous speeches, and so forth.  That skill was simply
>      supplanted by other skills when it became superfluous.

Until we find some way to increase human intelligence, the capacity of
a given person can think is essentially fixed. Since intelligence is a
necessary ingredient in the individual's ability to generate wealth,
the only way the individual can generate more wealth with this finite
resource is to progressively engineer away the need to think. People
can do this in four main ways:

1. Build machines that can replace some of the mechanical aspects of
thinking, and relegate mental tasks to them.

2. Engineer society to support wealth creation with less thought.  For
example, consider transportation technology. The problem of
negotiating a rough trail requires much more thought than the problem
of traversing a smoothly paved road. The greater thought required to
grade and pave the road pays off in the thought saved during its
repeated use. The next step up from the road is the railroad, upon
which large vehicles may be safely directed with least thought of all.

Standards are another essential aspect of engineering society to
reduce thought requirements. A little reflection shows this to be
obvious. E.g., consider how much extra thought you must waste when you
move repeatedly back and forth between several computer terminals with
spuriously variable keyboard layouts. The computer industry, of course,
is today imposing thought requirements on society that are vastly in
excess of what is necessary. In other words, horizontal fragmentation
in the computer industry is destroying wealth on the scale of a large
natural or artificial disaster.

3. Multiply the consequences of thought by scaling up industrial
processes. For example, in chemical engineering, you can design
a 1000 ton/day process with the same labor (i.e., thought)
requirement as a 100 ton/day process. It's a little bit harder
than simply multiplying everything on the blueprint by a capacity
of 10, but not much harder. If you build a 10 m^2 mixing tank, you
must hire a worker to watch it. The same worker can as well watch
a 100 m^2 tank.

4. Fragment thought requirements into narrow domains and permit each
person to specialize in just one or few. People think much more
effectively after long practice. Since no one person can yet master
all the skills necessary to maintain a complex technological society,
we have no choice but to divide labor. (This relates to point 3; each
specialist must multiply her/his effectiveness by a large enough
factor to make up for the thousands of other people who do not have
her/his skills.)

>Here's a question, then: can anybody else envision a communication
>method that could completely eradicate the written word?

Of course. You already satisfy *many* or your
information/communication requirements with such a system. How does
your motor cortex communicate with your musculo-skeletal system
(muscles, motor neurons, proprioceptors, etc.) to allow you to walk
across the room without falling down? Hint: it isn't by composing
written reports and minutes and shipping them off to its "branch
offices."

Obviously, however, your question pertains to the difficult task of
coupling autonomous intelligent entities into an organic, symbiotic
whole, when they have no built-in organic links. I suppose we should
look to the human nervous system for guidance here. No matter how
efficient you may be at generating, distributing, and assimilating
text, that can never be as good as *just* *knowing*.

Dan Mocsny
dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu