Digitalitis

Digitalitis

Is it possible to be happy without a computer?

In a nutshell, but with some malice, one could say that nowadays communication is everything and mind is nothing. Various network specialists delight in the enumeration of the number of bits and their transmission speed on a global scale. As is usually the case with major technological innovations, everything seems to be sunny first, but then spots appear on that Sun.

I confess that I have computerized under the pressure of more convincing facts and tendencies and have bought myself a fax and a modem. I also own a mailbox somewhere for electronic mail. It's just that electronic communications are gaining in importance because they are much cheaper than telephones, especially for long-distance connections.

The number of journals devoted to the digital era at whose threshold we are supposedly located is growing. Maybe you should start with the spots on this new sun. All types of counterfeiting, collusion, fraud, speculation, and intrusion into the most thoroughly and expertly controlled databases find very comfortable beds and hiding places on the Internet because it is easier than anywhere else to preserve the anonymity of the sender. Of course, also stupidities and nonsense can spread thanks to the Internet in a flash.

In Poland, we are only at the beginning of all these crossroads, mainly because network communication, like any other electronic communication, depends to a large extent on the reliable availability of the country's infrastructure. I still remember my arrival in Moscow at midnight at the time when Andrei Tarkovsky started filming my novel Solaris. In the supposedly first-class hotel, we went to, you could only order vodka, wholewheat bread, and black caviar as a meal. It seemed to me then that all standards of nutrition in hotel restaurants were turned upside down.

Attempts to introduce some form of censorship online are being pursued in many states with questionable, if not almost futile, successes. It is safe to protect yourself from the invasion of content, images, and texts of any intensity of pernicious immorality, but it is very difficult because the basic principle in building the networks was and remains their lack of center. Thus, the network was to become insensitive to information technology shocks, which of course was not about saving from pornography, but espionage and military attacks. This puts us in the position of a sorcerer's apprentice who unleashed powers that he is no longer able to master.

As is the case with any universally accessible innovation, breaking into the depths of the nets can plunge the user into a manic dependency - and that actually happens. Without leaving the chair in front of the computer, you can lose a fortune in a virtual casino or even on the stock market. Reality is set up so that inverse effects, ie to acquire assets in an aforementioned way, are less likely. There is a lot of talk about less dangerous sides of digital mania, for example, the renaissance of the writing culture is underlined thanks to electronic mail (email). In fact, many letters are written, and they can literally be sent in all directions at lightning speed, which, however, does not make the contents of these letters a whitewash of letters scribbled on bad paper.

The absence of computer minds and even more the nets is compensated by stored data enabling movement in the chosen direction within the mazes of the nets: for a "digital human" there are approximately 1017 bits accumulated by mankind , According to American fragmentary data, a lady who lacked funds to finance her children's study earns eighty thousand dollars a month. The golden rain that the Internet brought her was simply due to sex. Her database, which revolves around the mentioned topic, contains more than fifteen hundred pornographic offers. Newspapers claim that users of both this offer of contact and the supply of images bring her one million dollars a year.

It is not so much about sex. The major publishers such as Bertelsmann are eager to transfer their copyrights into digital space. This room has already created about thirty new occupations and it is underlined that the best users or operators are minors, ie children. If these children at least corresponded with each other, that would not be the worst, because American research has shown that the little ones, who have been spending a lot of time in front of the television since their early years, have a high degree of deficiency in their mother tongue. These are the passive victims of their brains constantly bombarding image information delivered by the TV. So, linking the networks to education, especially those that activate thinking, is desirable.

There were also various virtual creatures (phantoms) to light, such as the existing exclusively in the computer virtual animals. On the other hand, I do not mention the fears created by the temptation offered by countless single and multi-person games, because many books have already been devoted to the danger of the new mania.

From the network, the user can now derive great benefits similar to the computer. I think of sophisticated programs that can mimic intelligence as well as understanding what one says or write about these programs, and that perhaps even one of these programs could succeed in the Turing test. When talking about such achievements, it is all about the so-called good framework contingency, within which one can seem to move freely. Allow me to explain the matter with a simplified example.

Anyone starting a journey from a large train station has a huge jumble of converging and diverging tracks, switches, and turntables. Usually, this is so many that it seems to someone who is naive, such as a child, that in view of the variations made by the number of omnidirectional tracks, he can go in any direction whatsoever. Of course, it is not so, no matter how many ways are opened by the number of tracks. However, if somebody wants to know how and when he can travel from Bonston to Paris at the lowest price - here I am leaving the example - it has been made by the computer, also with a synthetic human voice and at the same time with images on the monitor or as an expression , possible to represent all optimal variants of travel connections.

The person asking for advice is not always aware that, in fact, no one had answered him, he is often inclined to answer: I thank you for the detailed information. It makes as much sense as thanking a chair for not collapsing under the weight of our body. There are already programs that recognize the voice and the language and adapt to individual characteristics of pronunciation. The error rate is getting smaller. There are still many potential possibilities, and perhaps the connections of connections, that is, large constellations of modules that lexical data and their syntactical compilations will lead to the imitation of understanding, which one can hardly distinguish from a real understanding by a layman. In this way, a kind of gray misty zone emerges, behind which a ray of intelligence based on thought begins to shine. However, what covers the surrogates of comprehension, as it seems, still does not encompass the authentic capacity of the human intellect. You could say that in the net or computer, even with the best linguistic program, we are still in a perfect wax museum that has a fairly large behavioral autonomy. So, in the end, the process of reviving Galatea could eventually succeed. However, we are currently a long way from this culmination of the specialists' general efforts.

It is inevitable that Internet opponents come to the fore, who are not necessarily and not always simply regressive. Surely you can be happy without a computer. The best proof is that I wrote a few dozen books on a simple mechanical typewriter without any electronics.

The English dramatist John Osborne said: "The computer represents a logical extension of human development: intelligence without morality". It is true that computers do not know anything about morality because they do not understand anything and therefore can not be placed under moral principles. Let's end with the words of Brigitte Bardot, who said, "Computers are unattractive that they can only say yes or no, but they can not 'maybe' say."Time, however, continues inexorably, and the moment when Mrs. Bardot's words had the aftertaste of a prudent aphorism has already passed. Computers that have operating programs based on probabilistic accounting already exist, but a computer that provides its user with only probabilistic statements will hardly make anyone happy.