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Can We Survive Technology - John von Neumann (1955)sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf
1212 sats \ 4 comments \ @Scoresby 18h AI the_stacker_muse bitcoin
The technology that is now developing and that will dominate the next decades seems to be in total conflict with traditional and, in the main, momentarily still valid, geographical and political units and concepts. This is the maturing crisis of technology.

von Neumann was talking about nuclear tech, but what he says applies to whatever creative thing humans do next: the new thing is scary and seems likely to overturn life as we know it. So, what do we do? Ban it! Control it! Lock it down!

In looking for a solution, it is well to exclude one pseudosolution at the start. The crisis will not be resolved by inhibiting this or that apparently particularly obnoxious form of technology. For one thing, the parts of technology, as well as of the underlying sciences, are so intertwined that in the long run nothing less than a total elimination of all technological progress would suffice for inhibition.

Also, on a more pedestrian and
immediate basis, useful and harmful techniques lie everywhere so close together that it is never possible to separate the lions from the lambs. This is known to all who have so laboriously tried to separate secret, "classified" science or technology (military) from the "open" kind; success is never more—nor intended to be more—than transient, lasting perhaps half a decade.

If it can be done, people will figure out how to do it. There's 8 billion monkeys at the typewriter and it's clear that people are gonna make girlfriends out of their AI and bombs out of their drones -- and vice versa as well.

But this next bit is the part I really like:

For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.

You wan't AI to serve your needs and not Skynet's (or more likely, Big Brother's)? For that matter, you want Bitcoin to work out? Don't cede your judgment. You have to make the hard calls -- day after day. You must exercise judgment about what to do, and no one can make it safe for you.

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223 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 17h

According to Dream Machine von Neumann was a genius among geniuses.

Also likely to evolve fast—and quite apart from nuclear evolution—is automation. Interesting analyses of recent developments in this field, and of near-future potentialities, have appeared in the last few years. Automatic control, of course, is as old as the industrial revolution, for the decisive new feature of Watt's steam engine was its automatic valve control, including speed control by a "governor." In our century, however, small electric amplifying and switching devices put automation on an entirely new footing. This development began with the electromechanical (telephone) relay, continued and unfolded with the vacuum tube, and appears to accelerate with various solid-state devices (semi-conductor crystals, ferromagnetic cores, etc.). The last decade or two has also witnessed an increasing ability to control and "discipline" large numbers of such devices within one machine. Even in an airplane the number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000 vacuum tubes, up to five times more crystals, and possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate faultlessly over long periods, performing many millions of regulated, preplanned actions per second, with an expectation of only a few errors per day or week.

Many such machines have been built to perform complicated scientific and engineering calculations and largescale accounting and logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will be used for elaborate industrial process control, logistical, economic, and other planning, and many other purposes heretofore lying entirely outside the compass of quantitative and automatic control and preplanning. Thanks to simplified forms of automatic or semi-automatic control, the efficiency of some important branches of industry has increased considerably during recent decades. It is therefore to be expected that the considerably elaborated newer forms, now becoming increasingly available, will effect much more along these lines.

Fundamentally, improvements in control are really improvements in communicating information within an organization or mechanism. The sum total of progress in this sphere is explosive. Improvements in communication in its direct, physical sense—transportation—while less dramatic, have been considerable and steady.
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144 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 16h

That bit about automation caught my eye, as well. I'm curious what you make of it.

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121 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 16h

It's held up incredibly well. His predictions are conservative and wise; he implies the technology exponential, technology that improves technology, when it was more mistakable as linear.

He also associates automation and communication in a way that's maybe obvious with the internet, but I'd guess was not obvious then. Even now, I think most of us think of improving communication as side effect of automation not "fundamental" to it. It reminds me of Block's view of AI as a communication medium.

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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 15h

So Iran can have nukes?

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