The Megabit Bomb

The Megabit Bomb

From the pollution of the information environment and the fraying edges of knowledge

The title of this essay, which was taken from the 1964 book "Summa Technologiae", has expanded in importance a little over time. At that time, I was thinking of the exponential growth of the accumulating data from science, especially the exact sciences, ie physics, astrophysics, biology, geology, anthropology and so on. Even the equally spontaneous and probably irreversible as fundamentally unforeseen emergence of computer networks, which electronically weave the earth with different density of connections, demands to look again at the avalanche-like growth of information.

This is not information that is frozen or frozen in libraries, university institutes, military headquarters or stock exchanges and banks, but rather information that is constantly moving through the thickets of networks that make up the World Wide Web, that is, in the web of communication wandering about, which continuously increases their performance potential. You could build a taxonomy by distinguishing between the micro, macro and mega variants or types of information. The ever-increasing vast amounts of knowledge gathered by humanity, even in the form of most radical summaries, have long surpassed the spiritual capacity of an individual. The simplicity of access (not just on the net) to any data has in no way improved the situation of the "knowledge hungry". The worsening situation is influenced by several factors.


The information environment is polluted by a terrible amount of nonsense and lies. This nonsense owes its spread to the terrestrial and orbital television networks, through which it is broadcast from the increasingly numerous satellite dishes. It seems that in the future either a "dismemberment" of certain areas of the television mission will occur, which already happens in part, or the state legislature could be forced to carry out a selection of stupidities. Currently, only visualizations of some of the most pathological and unworthy types of human sexual activity (with pedophilia at the top) and the publication of political and military secrets are prohibited. On the other hand, jokes are typical, ranging from extrasensory phenomena such as telepathy or telekinesis to clairvoyance and astrology with their already often proven fictionality of attractive lies. Then there are the television programs from the SF area, which originate from the USA. According to them, the universe should be understood as space simply filled with intelligent, but mostly silly, alien civilizations. If they are contacted by the Earth during conflicts, it can easily lead to a "Star Wars".

In general, the universe is presented to the earthly audience as a hyperspace in intercultural clashes, with pseudo-scientific devices playing the role of the former innocent props that are simply invented: the "tractor" in "Enterprise" and destructive rays as well the specially designed fairy tales (Superman, Batman, Spiderman, etc. with female "anti-sexist" variants). In addition, there is the popular area of ​​criminal investigations, where you "start with the corpse" and in which it is about drug smuggling, robberies, kidnappings or the search for explosives that are (often) explode remotely. The repertoire is entirely determined by the audience ratings, whose wishes are controlled by analyzes, as in Germany.

The number of puzzles and secrets to investigate would be huge on Earth as well as in space, but they do not attract producers or scriptwriters because people are supposed to want only flying saucers and criminal extraterrestrials. Because the market dictates the approach to filmmakers and the cash register is the queen on the market, the writers' imagination has narrow limits. Everyone works with a view to the cash register and not to the mind or at least to the innocent fairytale mythology. Television itself has become an incredible shark, processing venerable legends and fairy tales, sending them, hurled through the simplification centrifuge, into the orbits of the satellites that are bombarding us out of space. I am of the opinion that the weak protests from the mouth of the few psychosociologists will do nothing. Of course, the foresight of such innovation of opinions based on experimental results is difficult, and one can hardly understand "prognostic intuition" as something that could be taught. The fact that "not everything" is a story of lies seems a matter of course, but a nut that is as hard as it is hard to crack.

Shortly before the turn of the century, new cosmogonic and cosmological hypotheses began to emerge which are difficult to accept by the "sound mind". However, nearly one million years ago, this understanding was shaped by the first generations of anthropogenesis, so that it is not suitable for understanding the whole. That's why I called the mathematical methods, to which we owe a lot of overthrows, the "white stick of a blind man." It now appears that after many attempts at the formation of human-like organisms that lasted many millennia, we have emerged from primates, i. from the superfamily of hominoids. This superfamily includes anthropoids and hominids, but I am not one hundred percent sure that the taxonomy we have created will remain incontrovertible. At present one can distinguish the differences between the genera - Neanderthal - Pithekanthropus - Homo habilis - Homo sapiens u.ä. - thanks to new methods, the genome can be reconstructed on the basis of paleontologically preserved, albeit fossilized metamorphic remains of excavated skeletons, even though there are specialists who deny the security of the pedigrees exclusively on the basis of paleontological data.

Nevertheless, mathematics is not - and not only in my opinion - a method of investigation capable of leading us to the "definitive truth". In fact, neither the 61 elementary particles are explained because they can not be "peeled out" of any single theory and lastly the neutrino has also been "multiplied", e.g. there is already a "Neutralino". We still do not know if the search for a single theory is a search for a black cat in a dark room, but you do not know if the cat is even there. Even the classic model of cosmogony with the Big Bang and the phase of inflationary expansion has encountered difficulties. On the margins of the wrestling of cosmologists with the problem of the "initial state" one can modestly remark that mathematicalization, even if it allows to foresee with structural accuracy phenomena that will occur first, must give no guarantee of truth, because one can mathematize approximations that sometimes also prognostically fertile. However, they can also be predictive, but only partially fruitful, and further progress can turn them into anachronisms. An example: the world of Newton. the world of Einstein. I see no end to this path, i. I see no end to science.

In addition, get in the way:

a) the non-linear or little linear chaos theory (from a small initial deviation an incomprehensibly large (end) scattering arises)
b) the already controversial catastrophe theory
c) the neo-Darwinian theory of natural evolution, which is repeatedly supplemented by improvements.

Weight has the following conclusion from these upheavals: The people always proceeded from a simple and aesthetically acceptable assumption and were then forced in the continuation of the cognitive march again and again to complicate the assumed original image. The complexity grows continuously in all areas of science, sometimes as boring and barren as the humanities "fashions". Recently, I was astonished to see a philosopher's conversation with a theologian, who wondered where the individual human sense of identity came from, where the "I" came from. The neurology, supported by pathological investigations, can already say a lot, if not everything, on this topic. However, the two interlocutors seemed to completely overlook the empirical findings on this topic. Thomas Aquin could follow her early medieval rhetoric with full understanding. Meanwhile, the soul is slowly beginning to succumb to erosive naturalism similar to medical, neurological and psychiatric pathology. Openly naive boast, on the other hand, is the more and more frequently published explanations that soon a robotic cat will be built, from which the way to the intelligent robot should not be terribly far. That is not true. A robot cat will certainly not limp, but no one will make a pie from the mice he will not catch. Strangely enough, our present loves the cheapest stories of lies and poor art such as the packing of cathedrals, towers and bridges. If you can present everything as art, then you can not find art anywhere.

So, the accelerated detonation of the megabit bomb in front of my horrified eyes turns into a gigabit or terabyte explosion in which the small pieces of "irrefutable truth", e.g. the mortality of people, rising like bubbles in the sky. One hundred billion neurons are supposed to catch the "essential" in humans. And that is the magical mirror in which the whole world should reflect. No one has to be ashamed of the ignorance of basic data, especially no philosopher hiding in the deep past of our species. After all, the demographic bomb will not explode because the birth rate in the world is falling. In contrast, the information technology bomb has already exploded and is in full splinter flight. The communication network will not help you. And "Artilekte" (Are we building gods or our possible exterminators?)? The artificial intelligence, adorned with new names or nicknames, does not yet exist, as we note, and when it does emerge, then quickly in a variety of variants. Maybe it's better that they do not exist at the moment.

We might urgently need a new edition of the work entitled Encyclopaedia of Ignorance as a guide to the mainstream of science: the first issue, which by the way is not quite outdated - dating back to the '70s - is on the table. Here questions were discussed that we do not yet have an answer to, or there were questions that were put wrong. But it is also the problems that have been completely eliminated that are noteworthy because you can learn from mistakes. I once mentioned the erroneous evidence of "transcomputability" for computers of arbitrary computing power by H. Bremmerman: this impossibility, which he proved to be confirmed by the constants of solid state physics and solid mathematics, was proven by the biogenomic, that is refuted by an algorithmic derivation from natural evolution. Manfred Eigen told me that one should never "never say" in science. But one can speak about the indestructibility of what is possible in the abstract. I believe that humanity will never unite, and this would be the necessary precondition for the idea which the Dominican P. Dubarle took up in 1948 in "Le Monde" after the publication of "Cybernetics" by Norbert Wiener, namely for the construction of a Machine "for the governance of the entire world" (crossroads of information). With such a lord of the earth, neither ordinary people nor, a fortiori, would the politicians agree, for whom the complexity of human existence has outgrown their thinking and leadership qualities. What has diminished neither their ambitions nor their desire to govern in the least.

The 21st century will be different than the numerous prophecies predict today, adorned with jewels of strange ideas. It may also be crueler than the bloody century we just left. What global power will take over is difficult to anticipate - such as the collapse of the USSR, the triumphs of biotechnology or the communicative networking of the world. Maybe the world actually has no edges, but we ourselves will create the abysses, including the edges.

The Internet and Medicine

The Internet and Medicine

Can more information replace intuition and your own perception?

The profession of a doctor in the person of a so-called general practitioner included the whole human being about a hundred years ago in the then leading countries or the wealthy states. The division into specialties began only then. The division into therapists who take after the knife (surgeons), and those who avoid it, was one of the first such delineations. Slowly came to such subjects as obstetrics, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurology; and behind them, like a still rather modest multiplied tail of the comet, was the field of secondary research. Around the middle of our century, the number of medical specialties began to increase.

After the then general practitioner, a so-called all-around man, often a friend of the house, looked after all family members from the babies to the great-grandparents, followed by a period that could be called collective specialization. It consisted of arranging a consultation at the hospital bed in cases that clearly required good expertise that the all-rounder might not have. The result was different. Sometimes a surgeon, who wanted to intervene with a sharp intervention in the diseased organism, competed with a preventive internist. The extension of the additional investigations has created the ever more lavishly technologically equipped laboratories.

Nowadays, the doctor is no longer in the joking scheme of military medicine, according to which proverbial laxatives, cold or hot envelopes (mostly from barley) were. Or the diagnosis was according to the most flush saying: dementia praecox up to the age of forty, and then dementia senilis. After the breakthrough of electrocardiography, after the first dichotomy (electrocardiography - encephalography) there was a strong increase in its potential applications. Added to this were microscopic, ie histological and electrophysiological examinations, as well as differential diagnostics, which became such a strong domain that it seemed impossible to put the learned and practiced medical knowledge into the head of a doctor.

As usual with progress, it has a bright and darker side. Hardly any disease unit can do without a selection of additional examinations. On the one hand, it supports the doctor, on the other hand, he begins to concentrate his technical attention on an isolated body system. Therefore, it happens that the treatment of a part of the body obscures or removes from the medical field of vision the organic whole which constitutes the human organism. It is not always good for the patient.

As you know, the Internet is not just a duplicated and expanded means of communication, but to a certain extent an information technology sucker whose countless branches can be found in various databases. In this sense, dissecting the state of the organism is possible for a physician who is willing to trust a statistically interpreted vast amount of routine adjunctive examinations, and perhaps will create competition for the physician. As American research has shown, a diagnosis made by a versatile review of patient data stored on the Internet can already compete with the diagnosis and treatment indication of medical professors.

The Internet can, therefore, if used and used properly, especially support a prospective doctor. It may also be misleading, however, because the quality which medicine prided itself on in the heyday of medical individualities, namely the intuition which revealed its power of recognition in direct contact with the patient, and which represents an almost inalienable knowledge and ability, is Network cannot be transferred. That immediacy of the image of a patient with his personality, his character, with a multitude of difficult-to-describe details of the disease situation that an under-experienced physician can easily escape will become, and possibly will, for a long time for Internet diagnostics and therapy stay out of reach.

When it comes to a good analysis of diagnostic examinations, e.g. As the electrocardiograms go, databases accessible via the Internet can help a specialist poorly oriented in this field. However, it sometimes happens that the findings, which are based only on electrocardiographic data, do not have perfect enlightenment. Today, such aids as tomography, ultrasonography, 24-hour Holter recordings, positron emission tomography, and finally molecular biology are used, applying new types of investigation for physiological and pathological phenomena. Although we are dealing with both the anamnestic and the diagnostic details, which provide additional information, thanks to the latest technologies, we should be aware that there is progress in health care, including the tendency, is to liquidate medicine as an art and to introduce here the detail of the already almost algorithmic analyzes.

The whole picture is to be recognized as part of the process that greatly complements the battle with the disease and increases the lifespan, but at the same time it appears that the diseased person is being dissected into an ever-increasing number of not always and not necessarily compatible circumstances, because where we have a lot of results that only consider statistically detectable factors, these results can collide with each other. For this reason, it is not easy to judge whether the Internet evidence and aids are only blessings or labyrinthine complications for medicine. By the way, the same process has transformed the pharmacists - as masters of the composition of beneficial chemical substances - into sellers of nearly always finished preparations.

A characteristic indicator of acceleration in the general medical field may be the fact that the pharmacological compendia just published a few years ago are at the same time being supplemented by streams of novel drugs marketed by large pharmaceutical companies, while at the same time each year newer editions of these compendiums are being added Drugs disappear because they have dangerous side effects or because they have gone out of fashion, since even the medicine is subject to the changeability of fashion.

Americans recently discovered, with their popular statistic, that two million people treated with medications prescribed by doctors have become seriously ill due to the side effects of these medicines and that as many as 106,000 of the patients treated have died as a result of these side effects! The globalization of communication networks and the duplication of content-changing databases can not counteract such oppressive phenomena because this whole domain is led by statistics. Metaphorically speaking, one could translate Lenin's "who-who" into health care by asking whether the medically expanding Internet only supports or supplants the profession, which traditionally has always been practiced by humans becomes.

The Internet represents a child of technology, in this case, biotechnology growing into a giant. However, the ambivalence of any technology that brings new evil along with new well-being is undisputed. Specialists suggest that we are carriers of genes whose harmful effects can only be revealed at an advanced age; and that is why these genes, which at least partially contain the effects of mutations and are no longer subject to natural selection, because their effect begins only after fertility, in the course of the prolongation of individual life as cause of us yet unknown, therefore untreatable Indispositions and feelings of indisposition are revealed. The Internet, which we currently control and maybe self-programming in the future, will certainly have to deal with new concerns and complaints of human existence.

Summing up and complementing all that has been said so far, I think, based not on certain knowledge but on the subjective assumption that the Internet as a system of communication with the databases, which is above all statistically valuable, is easier to adapt to the needs of diagnosis for the systems that can be accurately described, ie the mechanical devices such as airplanes, cars or computers, as for the area with which medicine has been dealing for centuries, ie with the ailments of the human body.

It seems unlikely to me that this body of knowledge, which the doctor, aided by all additional examinations, could be replaced with mechanical and algorithmic procedures from the network resources. This is especially true of rare and extreme cases because it is the easiest to recognize what is most characteristic in terms of frequency of occurrence. Rarer cases are not recognized remotely. In a word, one can hardly expect diagnostic or therapeutic flawlessness from the Internet.

The limit of development would be a state in which the technological means and services we create will form an almost independent environment, which will be more helpful in the treatment of deviations and diseases than the human mind. So far, there is nothing to suggest that the globalization of the Internet, that is, the interconnectedness of the resources of medical knowledge accumulated, will trump the people working under the Hippocrates' oath because, in the end, emotional and ethical factors play a significant role in medicine. Even the most perfect communication technologies will hardly be able to replace them.

The Way without Reversal

The Way without Reversal

If hell exists, it will be computerized

For a long time, I resisted the computerization. When I already had a computer, I had to get myself a printer. A modem had to be installed on the computer. The fax was on the verge of a sort of forced and incidentally incurred. That's exactly the way that there is no turning back. Beginnings are harmless and seem to bring us only new comfort. The sequel may not be an entry into hell, but it's certainly computerized as soon as hell exists.

The latest computer is aging so fast that after a few years it's just junk. Generations of new computers push the previously built and praised into an uncertain abyss: Americans who are in love with statistics claim computer life is short. His life lasts between three and five years. The population of these devices, which no one had even thought about half a century ago, today counts hundreds of millions worldwide.

Of course, one wonders what happens to the millions of outdated computers? They die? Do you have your own cemeteries? Or do you end up on the dumps? Where can you find their bodies? There are hardly any camps for deceased computers as a junk room. I have to admit that in my cellar there is an Apple computer packed in 1984, which I bought for my son when he attended American International School in Vienna. In his time he was powerful, but I do not dare to confess what kind of performance and storage capacity he had. At least he succeeded: nobody threw him away somewhere. It may not have been many years, but it is about the same as the current generation of average computers, like a satellite to a morse code transmitter.

However, I would like to repeat the question of what happens to computers displaced by newer generations. I hear from the American press that they are stacked as fate wants it: in the camps, cellars, in the attics ... But they are not cannibalized. They are outdated. The heart of the computer is the hard drive, its perfusion or perhaps the innervation is represented by the processors. The equation of these centers with the human or animal brain is a significant exaggeration.

Here, my thought suddenly and unexpectedly makes a turn for me. Everyone knows that a willful poisoning or contagion of a thinking system, such as the brain, is punishable. On the other hand, you can infect a computer, and this can be done insidiously with viruses, without having to be afraid of the court or even of the jail, unless it is an act that is considered an offense or offense against significant public Values ​​apply, as is the case for every bank and every general staff in their fortified seats. Tracing the hackers who are capable of damaging the computer's memory by deliberate action from one terrestrial hemisphere on the other employs the special investigative services only exceptionally. At present, cipher art is spreading and evolving significantly, the art of delegitimizing the information sent to someone else by someone else, not just as a branch of cryptography, but rather as a veritable baobab grown from it. While some are trying to program antivirus filters and locks, others are trying to track down any virus spreaders, especially on the routes over which financially important information travels.

If you look at the global nature of this struggle, it turns out that we are dealing with a process that is slipping away from the power and will of its original creators. Their first intention was to create a communication network that had no center at all, so that an enemy, possibly nuclear attack could not paralyze such an organized communication link as a whole. The way of thinking that gave rise to this decentralization, which at first was the origin of the internet and other networks, is due to the strategy of the Cold War. I am convinced that none and none of the developers of this project has come up with the idea that they unconsciously play the role of sorcerer's apprentices who awaken powers that can no longer be mastered.

The nets have grown all over their heads. The networks have not spread any content relevant to military and political issues, but sexual and perverse ones. For sure, no one in the epoch of ENIAC thought that the pedophile pandemic was possible, which cannot be trampled on or extinguished like a constantly stifled, reoccurring conflagration. The point is that effective and effective censorship of all content worldwide would mean destroying the web. It has now penetrated into military, economic, political, and moral subjects, and has been linked to millions of private affairs. A successful expulsion of pornographic iconography from the net, which focuses on everything that even taboos the most permissive culture, is, to be honest, just an unrealizable dream.

The human coronary arteries have a network of additional, over time decreasing connections, caused by the inevitable aging of the vessel walls, which ultimately leads to heart attacks. Infarcts in the electronic network can also happen, but they happen simply as a result of the IT-related congestion. Therefore, the networks need more, not yet blocked by the news excess connections. In this way arise over the old newer levels of the network. So something of the kind of specialization comes to the fore when banks communicate with banks, universities with universities, television stations with other stations, and so on. At the same time, the address abbreviations of the individual internauts must always be longer. Frightening, how long the addresses will turn out when the network has to render the all-round communication of billions of senders and receivers.

At present, the growth, fight, and competition processes are in full swing. I dare not predict if the Net in 100 years will not be our main enemy and maybe our killer, as the global motorization. It is well known that people agree with what they feel like or what they consider necessary. More Americans died in traffic accidents in the US than during the Vietnam War. The death of the soldier, however, aroused despair and disgust, while the victims of traffic accidents are mourned by no one but the families. This comparison may seem pathetic, but it is nothing more than a summary of facts that have set the world in motion and accelerated, and that are heading in an uncertain direction with us. Of course, it is easiest to cover the matter with a new name: the twenty-first century will be a century of computer science. However, this name does not explain anything. We do not know if the electronic Juggernaut will prove to be a technology-built tree of knowledge that the Bible told us in a non-technological way.