Can We See the Near Future--Year 2025? (我們能不能預測不久的未來 -- 2025 A.D.?)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/12)
Can We See the Near Future--Year 2025?
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, there was an empire called the Soviet Union, and there were no kids surfing the Internet. Twenty-five years from now, what familiar institutions will be extinct and what unexpected innovations will have emerged? From artificial intelligence to genetic engineering, will our burgeoning technology make our lives happy or gloomy, content or confused? Will there be more political freedom in the world, or less? Will there be more cultural and ethnic fragmentation, or a world more integrated and unified? What about competitiveness, confrontations, conflicts, wars? What breakthroughs lie ahead? What surprises are in store? In great part, we could not have successfully predicted the changes of the past twenty-five years. Can we do any better with the next twenty-five? We recruited five forecasters to be our time-travelers to the year 2025. Let's see how they do.
PARTICIPANTS
Edward de Bono, the author of Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, teaches creativity in schools and corporations around the world. Edward hopes that new educational techniques will bring about a better future.
Dr. Edward Feigenbaum, a pioneer in expert systems, is co-scientific director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. His 1963 book Computers and Thought helped launch artificial intelligence. Ed believes that machines will become our valuable assistants.
Graham T.T. Molitor, author of numerous articles and books on the future, is vice president of the World Future Society. Graham sees, along with an enormous increase in the global population, an increase in knowledge and prosperity over the next twenty-five years.
Dr. Bruce Murray, a professor of planetary science and geology at Caltech, is a co-founder, with the late Carl Sagan, of the Planetary Society, which fosters public interest in space exploration. Bruce is concerned about unprecedented global stress and seeks sustainability and world governance.
Dr. Bart Kosko, professor of electrical engineering at USC, is the author of the science-fiction novel Nanotime. Bart's not-all-rosy vision of the future is stamped by computer chips outpowering and outthinking the human brain.
ROBERT: Bruce, you've stated that the greatest drama in man-the-toolmaker's unprecedented evolution awaits us in this new century. Haven't people always said that the time they live in is the most important? Why are we so special?
BRUCE: We're special because these circumstances will never happen again. I'm sure it may have seemed that way in the past. But never have we as a species been surging so out of control. There have been times when whole civilizations have been eliminated, there have been droughts and other natural disasters, but never has the globe as a whole been so stressed. There are objective indicators. Never has the globe held anywhere near as many people as it does now. Never has the globe had this tremendous technological progress you just mentioned. There is an unprecedented use of fuel, and the like. If you were an alien looking down at planet Earth now, you could detect our presence simply from the gases in the atmosphere, from the changes in plant life that you could see from space at great distances. It's this combination [of technological progress and overpopulation] that makes the present time unprecedented--and also unsustainable: the planet can't go on like this--and therefore we can't predict the future.
ROBERT: Bart, Nanotime is a World War III futuristic thriller, in which--thirty years from now--computer chips begin to replace brains. How seriously should we take your fiction?
BART: I'd take it with a big fuzzy grain of salt. But the concept behind Nanotime will come to pass--in the next twenty-five or thirty years, the power of computer chips will exceed that of the human brain. Whether we can get chips and brains to interact is the question we'll be exploring within the next decade.
ROBERT: Ed, what is artificial intelligence, and what will it be doing for us, or to us, in the next twenty-five years?
ED FEIGENBAUM: We're going to see artificial intelligence techniques ride on top of other waves that are pushing the information revolution along--the wave of communications, the wave of increased computer power, and especially the wave of connectedness. The connectedness generates a great deal of what you might call information clutter in our world--clutter that artificial intelligence techniques may help to sort out for us.
ROBERT: Graham, you're a leading futurist, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the Future. What are the major trends of the next twenty-five years?
GRAHAM: There are so many that it's hard to choose among them. Population is critical. Auguste Comte, the great sociologist, stated that demography is destiny. Truly it is. In the time span we're looking at, there will be a tremendous increase in population. I think the global population ultimately will go as high as sixty billion. The density in this country is about seventy-five people per square mile. In other countries, it's almost a thousand, [but] there's plenty of room for lots more people.
ROBERT: Edward, as a pioneer in creative thinking, can you help us do some creative thinking here? What's the role of education in the next twenty-five years?
EDWARD DE BONO: I want you to imagine a ship on the high seas, in which the engines keep stopping, the lights keep flickering, the crew's very demoralized, and things aren't good. Then we helicopter in a new captain, new senior officers, we fix the engines, the lights don't flicker, morale goes up, but the ship's still going in the wrong direction--and that's education. Education in most countries is really a disgrace. Three key things need to be taught in society. The first is how value is created; this is not taught now. The second is the relevant skills; these are not taught. The third is basic thinking; again, not taught. Education is helplessly out of date.
ROBERT: Bruce, let's get back to the planet. You talk about global sustainability, generational equity, intervention versus market forces. Unify these thoughts for us. What's the ultimate outcome?
BRUCE: The primary impact will be on governance, not government--we'll see a decline in the power of central governments. That's already happened in China, it's happened in Japan, it's happened in Western Europe.
ROBERT: What are the underlying causes?
BRUCE: Increased communications is a big one. And as this decentralization is going on, global challenges are rising: we have to keep order, we have to provide populations with food and supplies. So we have to invent, for the first time, a system of planetary governance that doesn't depend upon an imperial boss or a ruling party or something like that. That's the big challenge.
ROBERT: Is that a pipe dream?
BRUCE: No. It will happen, well or poorly.
BART: Bruce, how can you argue that the power of central governments has decreased? The IMF--the International Monetary Fund--keeps statistics on how much [the governments of] the major countries spend of their gross domestic product. In the 1870s, it was about twelve to fifteen percent, and it's risen nonstop, so that at the end of the twentieth century the average large government is spending about forty-seven percent of its country's GDP. There's been no decline whatsoever. Governments seem only to grow over time.
BRUCE: I guess we're looking at different measures. Certainly you can't argue that the Soviet Union hasn't been decentralized.
ROBERT: What about the surge in nationalism, ethnicity, commercial enterprises, social fragmentation?
BRUCE: Right. The fact is that the world is a more diverse place than it was before 1989. In China, economic reform has diversified the society. In Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party collapsed and has not been replaced by a working majority. In Western Europe, there have been minority governments continually for about the last ten years.
ROBERT: If we agree that decentralization is being energized through political processes, the rise of nationalism, and the Internet, what's the end result?
BRUCE: There's a natural tension between a retreat into hatred--a narrowness that shows up in religion and in politics--and a global vision that's sweeping the planet, with people really identifying with people in other parts of the world. These are the two competing pressures.
EDWARD DE BONO: I would say they're not pressures. They're two opposite directions that can coexist. You see the fractionalization of geographic segments into smaller regions, cities, and so on. At the same time, you see unification, like the European Union. Both trends are happening simultaneously. I think nationalistic hatred is a phase that will pass; it won't be a major factor in the future.
ROBERT: You don't think that's Pollyanna-ish?
EDWARD DE BONO: No. What's happening now is that people in most countries--most communities, like the business community--are working toward similar goals, have the same values. Nationalism and ethnic conflicts are remnants, the dying embers of our traditional hatreds.
ROBERT: Bart, what are some myths of forecasting the future?
BART: One myth is the assumption of military stability. It's now becoming cheaper to attack than to defend. I call this a smart war, and it's something new in military history. It always used to cost a lot more to attack; the Greeks had to launch a thousand ships to attack Troy, whereas the Afghan rebels could take a relatively inexpensive stinger missile and shoot down a multimillion-dollar Soviet helicopter. Now as cruise missiles get smarter, as we shift into information warfare, it's easier to attack and it costs less. The average real cost of a cruise missile today is somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars, and as chip densities continue to shrink and other economic efficiencies increase, that real cost will fall in a decade or so to about ten thousand dollars--less than the price of a car. How do you defend against cheap cruise missiles? Just as it's very difficult to find a hidden land mine; land mines cost about three dollars to make and about three hundred dollars to find. All this, I think, will be extremely destabilizing. Maybe there won't be big wars, but one country could decide that it's easier and cheaper to launch a smart attack than to resort to diplomacy.
ROBERT: A multiplicity of countries divided by ethnicity feeds further destabilization.
ED FEIGENBAUM: At the end of the twentieth century, there were some hundred and eighty-five member countries in the United Nations. I would think, as countries continue to divide along ethnic and language lines, that by 2025 there will be more like four hundred.
ROBERT: Other estimates of the number of nations in twenty-five years?
EDWARD DE BONO: It depends whether you call them nations or semi-autonomous regions.
ROBERT: The defining characteristic is that they're independently governed.
EDWARD DE BONO: I would say about five hundred.
ROBERT: Or that could mobilize their own armies--I think that's the best definition.
EDWARD DE BONO: No, I wouldn't say that. Five hundred able to be pretty independent, OK--but not necessarily to mobilize their own armies.
ROBERT: How many nations will be able to mobilize their own armies?
EDWARD DE BONO: Much lower--because why would people want their own armies?
ROBERT: Why is sadly irrelevant; they just do.
GRAHAM: You have to keep in mind the size of the countries we're talking about. Some of these nation states have only forty thousand people. Some of them have territories smaller than the neighborhood I live in. Certainly more countries will be coming. After the close of World War II, there were something like seventy-eight nations. Now there are about two hundred and twenty, depending on who's counting, and it will grow.
BART: Some countries are artificial--they contain different peoples, languages, religions--and they could fragment. Some have borders drawn by colonial powers, particularly the British, hundreds of years ago. The Indian subcontinent. Parts of Africa. Perhaps even China.
ROBERT: Why are wars not included in most studies of the future?
ED FEIGENBAUM: Because futurists are just too optimistic. They're too hopeful; they adopt a positive vision in hopes that that will make it more likely to happen.
BRUCE: And I think it's a big mistake. The reason you study alternative scenarios is not to predict--because you can't predict--but to look at the range of outcomes so that you then can get insight into what's likely to be the big driver. And this range of outcomes includes some very messy, unpleasant kinds of worlds ahead of us, even within twenty-five years. Mexico could be out of control; that would be serious for us. The Balkans could lead to a larger conflict.
ROBERT: There are many opportunities for unpleasant surprise.
EDWARD DE BONO: But advancing age is on our side. A lot of people running these countries have grown up in time of war, and their thinking remains that way, but the next generation won't necessarily think that way.
ROBERT: That's been an unfulfilled hope for generations. Let's shift gears. Ed, how do you see artificial intelligence in twenty-five years? Take two fields with which you've dealt, business and medicine.
ED FEIGENBAUM: I just want to start out by saying that I disagree a bit with your opening statement about how difficult it has been to predict the future. The general rule of thumb is, if you want to know what will be out there twenty-five years from now, look in the research laboratories of major universities and corporations. The best example is Moore's Law [that computing capacity doubles every eighteen months]; we've had a curve to follow ever since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The bang for the buck in a microchip doubles approximately every eighteen months. Sometimes the rate accelerates to fourteen months; sometimes it slips to twenty-four months.
ROBERT: What's another example?
ED FEIGENBAUM: In the mid-1940s, Roosevelt's science advisor Vannevar Bush published an article in the Atlantic Monthly about a machine he called a memex, which has a great deal in common with today's personal computers. And there's [pioneer computer scientist] J. C. R. Licklider's wonderful 1962 essay [with W. Clark, "On-line Man-Computer Communication"] about a so-called "galactic network"--his tongue-in-cheek term for what we now call the Internet. So we can indeed make predictions.
ROBERT: So predict. We're putting you on the spot.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Right. In the artificial intelligence world, I think you'll see the use of large knowledge bases to [help us negotiate] the World Wide Web. We're deluged with data on the Web. When we request something from a search engine, a ton of stuff comes out that we don't want. Now, if we could only inject some knowledge of the real world into that search engine, it could answer the query that we're really asking--which is for just a small number of relevant items. This will be the major contribution of artificial intelligence to the business world. It will make the use of the World Wide Web for electronic commerce and for individual interaction a great deal more plausible, pleasurable, tangible and accessible for the average person. In medicine, you have a different story. There you're looking at expert systems, and the question is, Can we gain medical knowledge from practicing experts any faster than we've done in the past? That's been the chief bottleneck in creating expert systems: How do we model human expertise? And here the prediction would be that we're going to see automatic methods to do that. Just as the more knowledge you have the better you can perform a task, similarly the more knowledge you have the easier it is to acquire more. We can use this acceleration effect in learning [software]--for example, programs to read the medical literature and extract knowledge that can be useful in these artificial-intelligence reasoning programs.
ROBERT: Graham, as you forecast world economics, do you see the robust, steady climb continuing?
GRAHAM: There are several things to consider here. One is the extraordinary change since the 1920s, when only several hundred thousand people were in the stock market. In 1999, forty-three percent of Americans were in the market, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, pension plans, and retirement accounts. The amount of equity that average householders have in the stock market exceeds the value of the equity of their homes and real property. So what's driving this? Well, it's the baby-boom generation, which has about another nine years to work its way through its most prolific spending years--upscale houses, second homes, luxury cars, exotic vacations, the furnishings and collectibles, and all that goes with it. The stock market will probably double or triple within the twenty-five-year time frame.
BART: What happens when the baby boomers cash out?
GRAHAM: When they cash out, there's a fantastic series of things that come along. Think about this: the mega-expenditures of the average individual in a lifetime have increased radically. It's expensive to have children these days: it costs about $179,000 to $359,000 to raise a child through age seventeen. Then every kid has to have further schooling, because, as Edward [De Bono] says, educational is pivotal.
EDWARD DE BONO: Is it pivotal or pitiful?
GRAHAM: It's pitiful, but it's also pivotal--both. And that education costs $50,000 to $250,000. Then don't forget that baby boomers are darn sure to give their kids lavish weddings; that's another $10,000 to $100,000.
BRUCE: But you're not talking about everybody in the United States. You're talking about an important group with a lot of money. But there are other groups that aren't so privileged.
GRAHAM: Forty-three percent of the population are in the market.
BRUCE: How do you deal with the poorly educated?
ROBERT: Doesn't the increasing disparity between rich and poor provoke greater fragmentation in society?
BRUCE: It's happening. It's a fact--society is becoming more fragmented.
ROBERT: And that generates serious social pressures.
BRUCE: Right, and in the long run it makes the system unstable, unless you figure out a way--
GRAHAM: I totally disagree. You know, a rising tide raises all boats. The growth trajectory for linchpin industries is in place, and it will produce a very powerful economy.
BART: In a few years, the disposable income of workers could buy all the stock on all the exchanges.
EDWARD DE BONO: I think in twenty-five years the stock market will just be dead. It's a giant Ponzi scheme.
GRAHAM: That's Social Security you're talking about.
BART: The stock market grows because earnings grow.
BRUCE: What happens when this show is seen in the houses of many Mexican Americans, African Americans, immigrants, other people who are not part of this economic boom. They'll say, "What are we hearing? These guys must be from another planet." To ignore the fact that a significant fraction of the people in this country are not sharing in our material success or getting the tools to be effective in the future is delusional.
ROBERT: The accumulation of wealth can exacerbate divisions in society.
BRUCE: Right, and remember, we're in a particularly favorable time. Those tensions are not nearly as manifest as they've been at other times and will be again in the future.
EDWARD DE BONO: That's why education is so important. If it weren't for education, these people would just be playing catch-up. But if we can really improve education--which we can--they'll become much more productive and much less dependent. Without a change in education, though, we're just going to repeat the steps that got us where we are today.
ROBERT: Let's go into space. Bruce, for decades you've been a leader in the American space program. What can we look forward to in the next twenty-five years? Any practical applications?
BRUCE: There'll be a series of utilitarian benefits--there already are. Satellite communications are so common that people take it for granted. What's becoming equally embedded in our social infrastructure is the fixing of locations by GPS--global positioning satellites. It's become another utility.
BART: It's something, by the way, that you could jam during a war.
BRUCE: But it's commercial.
BART: No, the military has to deal with them.
GRAHAM: Even more of a problem when you have thousands of satellites.
BRUCE: Well, you can also set off nuclear bombs [in the atmosphere] and knock out a country's electrical power systems--but that hasn't happened.
BART: Information warfare will undermine these communication structures.
BRUCE: If you go to war, it doesn't make a lot of difference whether you do it on the earth or above the earth. But the real issue about space is not utilitarian; the issue is what it can do for our spirit, not so much for our bodies--how space can inspire humanity.
ROBERT: And what space exploration says about us as human beings. There's no way you can justify going to Mars on an economic basis.
BRUCE: That's right. And obviously one answer to that is pure science. Another is earth science. The more we learn about planetary environments, just as we did on earth, the more it helps us overall. And that's certainly true with Mars or Venus or other places.
ROBERT: Do you send carbon [humans] or silicon [robots]?
BRUCE: We've been sending silicon, because that's all we can send. I'm not going to answer your question about twenty-five years from now. You know that I'm advocating and trying to make it possible for humans to go to Mars, somewhat the way we first went to Antarctica. But there may be another trajectory. Just as Moore's Law operates in terms of computation speed, it also operates with respect to communications. Communications is an enterprise that's doubling in power about every two and a half years. And it's not the result of government efforts; it's going to happen regardless. So whereas human beings stay about the same--our physical bodies are no better than those of the early polar explorers--there will be more and more capacity on the robotics side. And a fusion between humans and far more sophisticated machines is going to emerge that will be unlike anything we've ever seen before, and that's the way most of us are going to see the solar system.
ROBERT: Will that help our collective spirit?
BRUCE: So far it has. I'm the president of the Planetary Society [planetary.org], and we survive at the pleasure of a hundred thousand people who send in their dues every year. We don't have any big aerospace companies backing us, and we don't have any government grants. We survive because we represent hope. We represent a link to the possibilities of the future. We will continue, provided that our space systems bring back new stuff--stuff that's interesting and, most important, interactive. The new phase of space exploration will see humans interacting with robotic systems operating on Mars and other such places.
EDWARD DE BONO: What space illustrates to me is our ability to deal with linear, predictable systems and our inability to deal with nonlinear loop systems. The more we put our efforts into, say, bigger rockets, better robots, and so on, the more we move away from and neglect the more complex social systems, behaviors, and interactions--poverty and crime, and so on. If we put as much intellectual and financial resources into those areas as we do into the linear systems, we'd make a better world.
BRUCE: You should feel good; we're doing exactly that. We're reducing both the absolute and the relative expenditures on space exploration in this country and in every other country.
BART: And spending more on prisons than ever before.
BRUCE: We're also spending more on consumption, on commercial products.
ROBERT: This contrast marks our human heritage, reaching for the stars while living in the dirt. As Bruce [Murray] said, space exploration feeds our spirit more than our body.
BRUCE: It's an old argument. It's the argument of the sixties. Societies have made their judgments; part of it is decentralization of services, and there's less going into space.
EDWARD DE BONO: You're misunderstanding what I said. I didn't say that there should be less going into space; I said that we should put more into other areas.
BRUCE: Look, the gross national product is doubling every ten years; the space fraction is going down; obviously, resources are going somewhere else.
EDWARD DE BONO: They're not. That's my whole point. If you're spending less on meat, it doesn't mean that you're spending more on milk.
BRUCE: But you're spending on something.
EDWARD DE BONO: If society would give the same priorities to poverty and crime and education as we gave to space, it would make a huge difference.
ROBERT: I think we're all just a bunch of narrow-minded technocrats. Where are the humanists, the theologians, the philosophers who can guide us through the next twenty-five years?
ED FEIGENBAUM: Hey, I'd like to defend the technocrats. I'm a technocrat myself. Take the example of life extension. Average life span increased little by little, until [Scottish bacteriologist Alexander] Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, until the advent of sulfa drugs, and then there was a dramatic increase in life span from about fifty-nine years to about seventy-two years.
ROBERT: That's a real discontinuity.
ED FEIGENBAUM: We need to look for such discontinuities during the next twenty-five years.
EDWARD DE BONO: Living longer doesn't necessarily improve quality of life. If one old lady living in a small town gets mugged, the quality of life for every old lady in that town is seriously impaired. Being free from the fear of crime--that is quality of life. Just achieving technological extensions of life is like being bombarded with useless information by E-mail. That's not quality of life.
BRUCE: Let me jump in, because I think the issue of being technocrats is justified. I feel uneasy about this, but the problem is that the people who specialize in understanding social behavior or history tend to be backward-looking. Let me tell you what I think is the most important diagram of our times. It plots world population from 1750 to 2150, with the explosion starting in the early twentieth century. And I argue that this geometric increase in people is transforming not just the surface of the earth but also--and partly due to technological change--the way we think.
ROBERT: Creating a kind of global consciousness?
BRUCE: Right. We're immersed in a new kind of culture. We're talking here as though we're external from earth, speculating what life will be like "over there" in 2025. The most radical change going on is not the increase in human life span but the changing cultural and social attitudes.
ROBERT: What's happening to privacy amid all this change?
BART: It's diminishing.
ROBERT: Despite all the clever gadgets cluttering up our kitchens and cars and so forth, doesn't the erosion of privacy depress our quality of life?
BART: We leave ever more footprints to be picked up by digital devices manned by friendly and unfriendly sources alike. The government has twelve underground acres of computers at Fort Meade just to crack certain kinds of codes that people don't even know about. We've taken it for granted that we can have a conversation in a supermarket, or on a street corner, that won't be recorded. Soon we won't be able to do that.
EDWARD DE BONO: Why do you care who's listening, unless you've got something to hide? Why does it matter?
BART: Let's put a camcorder into your living room.
ED FEIGENBAUM: If privacy mattered, people would turn on the encryption feature of their browsers when they send E-mails--and nobody does. How many of you have ever sent or received an encrypted E-mail?
BART: I have, and I think more people will, as they learn how to do it.
ROBERT: We don't appreciate how much personal information is being gathered and used already; people aren't sufficiently sensitive to that yet.
BRUCE: Look, instead of saying how we feel about privacy, we ought to agree that it's important to our society and that we have a body of law concerned with it. Other societies don't. Privacy is one of our culturally dependent mores, and it's probably going to be much more difficult to maintain. The Western tradition of privacy is not a free good, and it is certainly at risk.
ROBERT: But is privacy a fundamental human right?
EDWARD DE BONO: Not at all.
BRUCE: No, it's not fundamental in the sense that there are many societies that don't [privilege privacy].
ROBERT: Would you give up privacy in exchange for more gadgetry, more technological comforts?
BRUCE: Not me, but others might.
ROBERT: Twenty-five years from now, looking back, what's the biggest surprise unforeseen today?
BRUCE: The biggest surprise will be something we probably can't appreciate now, because our descendants will have changed in a way we wouldn't recognize. Just as my grandfather and I are separated forever by cultural and psychological differences.
EDWARD DE BONO: I'll be wearing face jewelry. [Note: In fact, Edward did wear face jewelry on this one television show--a large silver safety pin that was attached prominently to his nose. None of us knew quite what to say or do, which, no doubt, was Edward's point.]
GRAHAM: I think what will come to pass are extraordinary advances in human intellect and understanding, with information doubling every five years and knowledge every two and a half years--six to eighteen months in some disciplines--and the ability to acquire knowledge and use it efficiently and effectively for the cause and the course of humanity.
ED FEIGENBAUM: The biggest surprises are going to be biological: on the positive side, gene therapy to cure a range of human diseases, and on the negative side, a very scary future for biological warfare.
BART: I agree; we'll soon be able to manipulate our genes, at least to some degree. There will be artificial eyes. At the social level--on the small level, we'll have mail on Sunday--and drugs will be legalized, so this massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to drug dealers will be gone.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
EINSTEIN once said, "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." One prediction I'm sure about: the future is coming quicker and sooner. Does the year 2025 seem forever in the future? For many of us, the year 1975 seems hardly in the past. The safest way to forecast the future is a standard extrapolation, which means taking what has happened and projecting it forward at the same rate to predict what will happen. For example, since the world is becoming tightly wired, if economic prosperity continues, educational equality will ultimately come to all nations and peoples. But in 1943, Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM, said that the world market for computers would be "maybe five." So much for extrapolations. The theory behind the study of the future is that if you plan for the future--even if your plans are wrong--you get two benefits: you can more likely influence the flow of events and you can more quickly react to surprise. Yet here's a hunch; I give it, say, one in twenty that something unexpected--really unexpected--will have occurred by the year 2025. As for me, I hope still to be doing this show, with less hair and more makeup, amused at how naive I was twenty-five years before. And finally, after all that time, I may find myself closer to truth.
Editor's Translations:
BRUCE: The fact is that the world is a more diverse place than it was before 1989. In China, economic reform has diversified the society.
[事實是, 世界比在1989年之前是一更多元化的地方。 在中國大陸, 經濟改革已經把社會多元化。]
ROBERT: What's the end result?
[最後結果呢?]
BRUCE: There's a natural tension between a retreat into hatred--a narrowness that shows up in religion and in politics--and a global vision that's sweeping the planet, with people really identifying with people in other parts of the world.
[狹隘性宗教和政治仇視別人的心態跟認同全世界人類的宏觀思維在拔河。]
EDWARD DE BONO: I think nationalistic hatred is a phase that will pass; it won't be a major factor in the future.
[我認為國家主義仇恨是一個會過去的階段; 將來不會是一個主要因素。]
ROBERT: You don't think that's Pollyanna-ish?
[您不認為這過度天真樂觀? ]
EDWARD DE BONO: No. What's happening now is that people in most countries--most communities, like the business community--are working toward similar goals, have the same values. Nationalism and ethnic conflicts are remnants, the dying embers of our traditional hatreds.
[不。 在多數國家, 多數社區裡的人士, 像工商業界, 都在往同樣的目標努力, 都有同樣的價值觀。 國家主義和種族衝突不過是殘餘, 是我們傳統仇恨垂危的炭燼。]
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: Can We See the Near Future--Year 2025?
Illustration(s): Edward de Bono, Edward Feigenbaum, Graham Molitor, Bruce Murray, Bart Kosko, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/technologysociety/106/106transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Thursday, August 7, 2003
How Does Technology Transform Thinking? (科技如何改變思想?)
How Does Technology Transform Thinking? (科技如何改變思想?)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/07)
How Does Technology Transform Thinking?
I GET cranky when there's a ten-second delay in downloading a Web site. A few years ago, I was thrilled to receive same-day letters by fax, and a few years before that, snail mail that arrived within the week was just fine. It's not time that's accelerating; it's our thinking. Technology has produced multitudes of machines with alluring functions, features, and options--machines that benefit our lives. But what is the real impact of technology? Don't let the superficial glitz of flashy gadgets and light-speed information deceive you. Acquiring knowledge and making decisions--both for individuals and institutions--has been altered forever. The real impact of technology is not on the design of electronic apparatus but on human cognition; the true transformation is in the way we think. How do advances in technology affect our modes of thought? How is thinking changing, and how do we adapt to those changes? We invited five accomplished thinkers to reflect on the deeper consequences of technology.
PARTICIPANTS
Dr. Francis (Frank) Fukuyama, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, is an international authority on social and political thought. Frank discusses how trust works in a high-tech society and what happens to decision-making under pressure of time.
Dr. Bart Kosko, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, is the author of The Fuzzy Future. Bart explains how the uncertainties of fuzzy logic and the process of pattern recognition can help our thinking.
Dr. George Kozmetsky, co-founder of Teledyne and an early investor in Dell Computers, was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Clinton, for building business incubators where young companies can grow. George discusses how technology creates wealth and prosperity.
Dr. Marvin Minsky, the longtime director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is the author of The Society of Mind. Marvin talks about some of the social consequences of burgeoning technology and shows how artificial intelligence can explain and improve human thinking.
Dr. Bruce Murray, a professor of planetary science and geology at Caltech and a former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is president of the Planetary Society, in Pasadena, which fosters public interest and participation in space exploration. Bruce reflects on the relationship between communications technology and human development.
ROBERT: George, for fifty years you've participated in the technology revolution. You've been president of the Institute of Management Sciences, and you've assisted in developing over a hundred technology-based companies, including Dell. For fifteen years, you were dean of the Graduate School of Business of the University of Texas at Austin. Give us an overview of the progress of technology and how it affects our thinking.
GEORGE: When our current technology started coming in, we could stop using paper-and-pencil methods. We could formulate complex equations, which is the scientific way, and solve them electronically. We believed that we'd get more time to think, but what we discovered was that technology just made it easier to find things--we could replace an hour of searching with fifteen minutes of reading. But then we found that our horizons were expanding faster than we could collect data, and so we realized that we needed to get into artificial intelligence and other techniques.
ROBERT: Speaking of artificial intelligence, Marvin, you are professor of media sciences and arts at MIT and a pioneer, of course, in artificial intelligence. Your book, The Society of Mind, combines insights from developmental child psychology and computer systems. What's the basic theory behind the book?
MARVIN: Well, it's to try to figure out how the mind works without the traditional belief that somewhere inside the mind there's a "self" in control and commanding everything. So the question is, How do you get mindlike behavior from the brain? The brain is really made of about four hundred different computers. They do different things, they don't agree on everything--so how do you get reasonable, commonsense behavior out of such a system?
ROBERT: And the concept of a "society" means that all of these brain systems are working together?
MARVIN: Right. It's not like human society, where a person does pretty well independently.
ROBERT: And how has the impact of technology affected human thinking?
MARVIN: I don't know that technology has changed thinking very much yet, but we're just at the threshold. Computers only got going around 1950. We still don't know how to program them to do commonsense kinds of things, just technical things. But that's going to happen, sometime in the near or far future. Then our thinking will change.
ROBERT: Frank, you're the author of an acclaimed book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. What do you mean by trust?
FRANK: Trust is basic to any human activity, which is almost always social, involving the cooperation of two or more people. Trust is simply the ability of people to interact with each other in the expectation that they're going to be honest, they're going to reciprocate, they're going to make good on their commitments.
ROBERT: And how is trust affected in a society dominated by technology?
FRANK: It doesn't become less important. In a way, it becomes more important. Take something like the Internet. You can deal with anybody anywhere in the world--that's the potential--but can you trust them? The real core of the problem in creating E-commerce or socializing over the Net is, How do people come to share values, not just bytes and bits?
ROBERT: Bart, your books on fuzzy thinking sanction contradiction, endorses ambiguity, and demands that we get comfortable with uncertainty. What is fuzzy logic, and how does it affect our thinking?
BART: Fuzzy logic or fuzzy thinking is trying to see things in shades of gray as we reason. For example, when does life begin? At conception? In the first trimester? When does a teenager become an adult? Is it exactly on the first second of the eighteenth birthday? The law says it is, but such precision isn't real or practical. So fuzzy logic has been trying to capture the grayness of inherent uncertainty in our reasoning and thinking processes. Capture it in mathematics, and then endow that structure in computers to make them a bit smarter.
ROBERT: Bruce, how can the concept of space exploration help human beings think about themselves in new ways?
BRUCE: Well, it already has. The seminal effect of the first images of Earth taken from orbit and from the moon, back in the sixties, revolutionized our global self-perspective and led to the environmental movement. Similarly, when Voyager took pictures of the earth as a pale blue dot embedded in the vastness of the solar system, it had the secondary effect of reminding people that the universe doesn't revolve around the earth, doesn't even revolve around the star we call the sun. And so space has already changed our frame of reference, to say nothing of what may lie ahead.
ROBERT: Was the environmental movement actually triggered by those pictures of Earth?
BRUCE: Yes, that really happened, and that's why it spread so rapidly--because the catalyst was those images, spread by television, which was our medium of global communication at that point.
ROBERT: Let's broadly look at how technology affects thinking, because some say that it's nothing less than a shift in worldview. George [Kozmetsky] was talking about how something that used to take an hour now takes fifteen minutes. What does that do to the way we make decisions, the way we reflect or meditate?
MARVIN: Again, I have mixed feeling about questions like that, because I think we still think in pretty much the same way. Our brains haven't been changed, but the tools that we have are immensely better. If somebody asks me a question of fact, I can usually either fail or succeed in finding the answer from the Web pretty fast. As for computing, we can solve problems numerically and analytically--
ROBERT: Aren't there pressures to be less reflective and make decisions faster, because facts are coming at us faster and are more readily at our disposal, and people expect faster answers?
MARVIN: Well, there are a lot of problems like that. Sometimes we're under pressure to decide faster; sometimes, with the great leverage of technology, a decision can affect more people and in a shorter time. One of the most dangerous things is the rapid communication in political affairs: you might have a TV network asking, "What does the public think?" and five minutes later they'll say that seventy percent of the American people think such-and-such, and so forth.
ROBERT: And maybe it was thirty percent just two days earlier.
MARVIN: That's right. And if you wait a week, maybe it'll settle down. But very few of these media people are aware that such sampling is unstable and very dangerous--opinions can spread like an epidemic. The general populace seems to think that if a lot of people believe something, then they should, too. It's called a flip-flop, and in computers it leads to the destruction of information rather than the increasing of it.
ROBERT: Bart, do you find that your own decision-making processes have been speeding up?
BART: Well, to some degree--which is a typical answer of a fuzzy theorist. In the early days of radio, we could hear a story; later we could see it on television; now we can experience it with interactive, multimedia effects on the Internet and perhaps in theaters in the future. I'd like to advance a thesis, though. How does technology, in the broadest terms, increase our ability to recognize more and more complex patterns? Bruce mentioned a good example--we finally saw Earth as a small blue sphere. In the 1940's, science fiction movies cast the earth as gray. As recently as the American Revolution, say, weather was still a mystery. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to work out the concept of weather fronts--something we take for granted when we look at that nightly weather map. Our perspective takes on ever larger scales, going back into geological time; with each step of technology, we recognize more patterns, process more patterns, make more connections, in an ever richer way.
ROBERT: Frank, let's explore the impact of technology--from how you write your books to how institutions make decisions.
FRANK: For me, technology makes things easier. If I had to deal with typists, with gathering information, and the other kinds of headaches that you have in writing a book, it would not be possible to publish what I do. I think there are certain institutions and situations where the impact of technology is even greater. For example, in foreign policy, there's no question that officials are under pressure to make decisions faster. That's the big impact of worldwide telecommunications--the CNN effect, which has been talked about in the media. When vast audiences see immediate images of refugees, or a captured soldier being dragged through the streets of a foreign city, it forces policy makers to react immediately, which they wouldn't have had to do in an earlier generation. And it seems to me that speed doesn't necessarily improve the quality of their decisions. On the other hand, you have this huge impact in terms of sympathy. You see somebody starving to death in Africa--if you'd seen it in newsprint, it would have been an abstraction. But when you see these same images on television, it becomes something that's much harder to push aside.
ROBERT: How do you assess instant telecommunications? Do you worry about the manipulation of public opinion?
FRANK: Overall, the immediacy is probably a good thing, but it can certainly be mismanaged. As Marvin [Minsky] was saying, poll numbers going up can lead to instantaneous decisions--you've got to do something--when a more reflective kind of thought process would have allowed you to think of possible counterproductive results, things that you hadn't thought about before. So I think this is something that needs management.
BART: It certainly doesn't make for a stable state of mind. Doubt is very hard for us to cope with. We like rounding things off in a binary, yes-or-no way--with them or against them--particularly in response to graphic images on TV. Or in polls. It's hard living with uncertainty, but the world's full of it.
ROBERT: So you're teaching us how to put up with doubt and uncertainty?
BART: I usually find myself saying that there's nothing uncertain about uncertainty if you're very certain you don't know something. Or you're not sure. And you learn to live with it.
GEORGE: Let me put the issue in political terms. I remember worrying, when we were first developing information technology, that in a democracy people could vote out of their kitchens, right? Push a button--give your opinion on any issue you like. We've been seeing some of that--for example, initiatives in California. We're reacting so quickly! And boy, have we created a new uncertainty that we'd better be afraid of! I'd rather have the old uncertainty, where I knew it was uncertain and I'd have to think about it.
BRUCE: It's always helpful to view problems not just over the last year or two but over the last century, or many centuries. There's been what I like to term a symbiotic relationship between human development and communications technology. Go back to Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press. That was the first major way for propaganda or new ideas to be circulated to the masses. And that led to the development of a whole set of religious and cultural transformations. More recently, there was radio, especially battery-powered portables with earphones, which revolutionized the Middle East, Africa, and other such areas, because people who were mixing religion and politics could reach the masses. Otherwise there was no way to reach them. It was cheap, it worked, and it revolutionized the second half of the twentieth century. Now we have television, where we're absorbing images, and the relationship between fact and fantasy can be very difficult. Technology has almost made the word "thinking" obsolete.
ROBERT: This can be dangerous. The potential for mass manipulation is frightening.
BRUCE: We're reacting. We're dealing with tremendous sensory inputs and producing outputs in shorter and shorter time frames.
ROBERT: You may get a hundred E-mails a day, and you have to react to them.
BRUCE: But that's good, because I have to react to the content. What's very bad is seeing images, or hearing sounds or the opinions of celebrities, which I don't evaluate. There I'm just reacting--
ROBERT: --emotionally, not analytically.
BRUCE: This is not some academic exercise in logical thinking. What really happens to people when they're bombarded with this kind of input? That's the big, scary question.
ROBERT: Let's talk about interdisciplinary thinking, a critical characteristic of technology. George, you've pioneered getting academia, business, and government to work together.
GEORGE: You need a focus to all this. When I started out, I came up with the question: "How do you generate wealth and prosperity and share it at home and abroad?" And I wondered, Gosh, is it possible to get the three sectors to work together? The academic sector working with the business sector, and both working with the government sector? And I found that if you have a crisis, it's easier to do. But how do you do it without a crisis? I'd like some ideas on that.
ROBERT: Tell us about your pioneering work with business incubators, where numerous new companies have been "hatched," often in association with universities or government labs.
GEORGE: Most innovations are bottom-up, not top-down. You have to have laboratories to do that. But how do you convert innovations into wealth and prosperity? I said, "Hell, I'm just going to have real companies try it and see what happens." But then I found that that wasn't enough by itself. We needed a physical place where these newly born companies could be housed [i.e., incubated] and get all the administrative and business services easily and efficiently, so they could concentrate on their new products or services. And we know that venture capital doesn't do much for start-up companies--people with venture capital like to invest when you're a long way downstream. So I started a capital network--just simply matching investors with entrepreneurs, like a TV dating game.
ROBERT: Had any successful marriages?
GEORGE: We've now learned how to place about $150 million to $200 million a year.
FRANK: There are many forces in the modern academy that are pushing in the opposite direction. The complexity of technology and the volume of it result in this disciplinary specialization that exerts a kind of tyrannical influence over the way people are trained. You'll never find anyone more intimidated than a young professor without tenure, because his or her discipline exerts this absolute control over any kind of thinking outside the box. There are a lot of institutional obstacles to interdisciplinary thinking.
ROBERT: Marvin, do you see institutional pressures against interdisciplinary thinking?
MARVIN: I'm not sure there are any good generalizations to make. There are so many different kinds of personalities in young professors. Some may be intimidated--they want security and they get what they want. But some aren't.
ROBERT: Have you ever felt intimidated?
MARVIN: I don't care much what other people think about me. So it's hard to intimidate me, unless you're [Caltech physicist and Nobel Laureate] Richard Feynman--
ROBERT: And he's dead.
MARVIN: Well, it doesn't matter that he's dead. I have a very good copy of him, and if I say something too speculative, I can hear him say, "Well, what would be the experiment for that?" I think young academics need attachments--peers, people who imprint them, self ideals. We all have imprints from a bunch of people. Sometimes, when I'm writing, I hear the voice of another dead scientist, [artificial intelligence pioneer] Warren McCullough, and he says, "Oh, that's very nice" or "that's pretentious." What I'm afraid of is, given the advance of the media, who are the internal mentors built into the minds of our citizens? It's ninety-eight percent sports idiots, actresses, actors. Why are actors heroes? Because they're good liars. That's what it takes to be an actor.
ROBERT: Not to mention hosts.
MARVIN: Well, I actually like some of the hosts. But we have this strange celebrity thing, and instead of children being attached to and getting values from the right people, they get it from people who have the gift of pretending to be charismatic. Celebrities are celebrities because they somehow make people trust them. They have to get you to trust them, when they're playing a role.
BART: You can even become president, if you play your cards right.
MARVIN: That particular president was a pretty smart one. He did all of those things.
ROBERT: Before technology, you couldn't have chosen him.
BRUCE: But before technology was your high priest, somebody else was--and I don't know whether we're still in the same frying pan or a different one. You have to be careful not to take a two-to-five-year period and extrapolate it to the past or the future. I grew up at the end of World War II. I was too young to serve, but I was old enough to understand what Buchenwald meant, what Hitler meant--the atom bomb was a real thing to me. You go another generation and all that's gone--that's history in the history books; none of that experience is there. Like my father's experience in the Great Depression--he never got over it; it colored his whole view of things. Vietnam was personally threatening to young people who feared they would get drafted, and it did lead to some intellectual development. Then you have Ronald Reagan saying, "Self-centered consumerism is good." That was the new ethic and it worked, producing the "Now Generation." So, with all these trends going on, we have to be careful when we generalize, because we're all very strongly imprinted by the culture--the things that were going on--when we were thirteen years old.
ROBERT: Frank, as an undergraduate you majored in classics; your doctorate is in political science. Does this give you a different perspective on technology from that of a scientist or engineer?
FRANK: Well, your perspective, in a way, is that the whole technological mindset, and modern natural science, is something that was deliberately chosen by human societies four hundred or five hundred years ago, but it's not the only way of approaching social organization and the pursuit of a good life. Science and technology is the way we've chosen, but it's not a necessary one. I think a lot of people assume that technology has to exist, that technological progress is inevitable and basically a good thing, and they don't go back and examine the premises of this attempt to conquer nature--whether conquering nature is really doable, and whether it will provide the kind of meaning that people think it will.
ROBERT: What about technology's impact cross-culturally? You've compared different cultures--for example, Asian and American.
FRANK: Technology is homogenizing everybody, for better or worse. Technology produces modern economic societies, enhanced production possibilities--that's really what you mean when you say that liberal democracy and markets are the only way to go. For the kind of technological world we live in, where information is critical for technological advancement, you have to have political democracy and decentralized economic decision-making--and there are few cultures that can stand up against that.
ROBERT: Marvin, I'm fascinated by the power that people have. I often go to a Web site created by a person, not a company, because that one person has better insight. How do you see technology empowering people?
MARVIN: We could call it the popular-power paradox, because with this capability of setting up a great Web site, one person can make a huge difference. But then the next thing is, "Well, everybody can make a huge difference," and so they all somehow cancel one another out.
ROBERT: Frank, isn't that the essence of markets, where everything is competing and the best emerge?
FRANK: That's right: the best have to emerge at the end, but you also need filters and some way of picking the winners and allowing them to emerge.
ROBERT: Does education fulfill this role in a high-tech society?
FRANK: That's one of the real transformations that has come about. You cannot survive in a high-tech society without a much more substantial education, and education really changes the way people interact. There's much less regimentation in a university department than in old-style factory, where everyone had less than a high school education. This is a major change.
ROBERT: George, you've pioneered educational transformation.
GEORGE: Yes. The first thing we found out in California and Texas is that forty to sixty percent of today's high school students can't apply for a job that's technology based. Which led us to the conclusion that in the twenty-first century, knowledge that creates understanding will be called "education" and knowledge that creates value will be called "training." It doesn't make any sense to me to force everyone to get a college degree.
BART: We have a high level of scientific illiteracy in this country. There's the notorious poll data showing that over half of American adults don't even know that the earth takes a year to go around the sun.
GEORGE: When is education going to come up with some fresh ideas? There's no good theory in education today--certainly not in K through 12--about how to teach science and mathematics. Or the understanding of technology. Are we to do it with science fiction, which is not taught yet?
BRUCE: That gets into another dimension--critical thinking, critical evaluation. As the amount of stuff that the media bombards us with grows, most of it driven by commercial or political considerations, the need for the individual to be able to filter and assess and make critical comparison also grows. So maybe the word "education" will become obsolete. Training is extremely important, because the jobs are not manual labor anymore--you're not born with the ability to fill those jobs. You have to know how things work, but most important is the ability to think critically about the information you're exposed to.
ROBERT: Bart, regarding critical thinking, what happens to religion in a high-tech society?
BART: Science has often hoped that religion would go away. It certainly hasn't. It's a very adaptive belief system, and I'm sure it will adapt to the times, even when we evolve into different types of information creatures. I think religion will be just as virulent as ever. It tends to be the basis of large conflicts around the world, and as countries splinter into ever finer groups and communicate on the Internet, that [sectarianism] will only increase.
MARVIN: Bruce [Murray] has put his finger on it, because one thing we need in order to understand things well is critical thinking. If somebody tells you something, you ask, "Well, what's the evidence for that?" In most religions, the idea is that, well, there are certain questions we can't decide in any such way, and so it's important to have faith. And if you're very good at having faith, it means you're not very good at critical thinking. Some people seem to be able to tolerate both, but in general I think if people put emphasis on believing a set of rules that come from an authority figure, then we're in terrible danger. Does the structure of the authority you're not allowed to question undermine understanding and progress?
ROBERT: You think faith and critical thinking are mutually exclusive?
MARVIN: I do. Some people say that faith and critical thought are concerned with such different subjects that they're not incompatible. But I don't think so.
FRANK: As offensive as faith-based thought may be to scientists, it seems to me that it's extremely important, and it's not likely to disappear. It's the basis for civil society--
MARVIN: It's not the only basis.
FRANK: It socialized physics [i.e., provided the initial social structure in which physics could develop], it's what creates community, and I think one of the reasons people have returned to religion is precisely that they're lonely, and that religion gives them a way of--
MARVIN: You don't see a downside?
FRANK: Of course there's a downside.
MARVIN: What about the religious wars, and the ethnic divisions, and so forth?
FRANK: We haven't fought any religious wars in the United States in a long time.
BRUCE: During the last thirty to forty years--during the time of this extraordinary technological revolution all over the whole world--the fundamentalist elements in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have all been on the rise. Now why is that?
ROBERT: Isn't that fascinating?
BRUCE: It's fascinating, but it's also significant. That's real information, being fed back by real human societies. And the answer is that there's a need for belief systems and explanations that the populace is not receiving from the technological revolution.
MARVIN: But I think we see some of the needs. One is that people don't know how to think critically.
BRUCE: But critical thinking is not going to help you with death.
MARVIN: Oh, yes it is. Bart [Kosko] said you can learn to live with doubt, and you don't need someone to tell you, "Here's the answer." That's the kind of critical thinking we lack.
BRUCE: But people aren't little automatons with no emotions. When you deal with death, or obviously bad things that have no rational explanation, there has to be a context for real human beings to deal with it.
MARVIN: Well, I disagree. I think death has a rational explanation. If it weren't for religion in the two thousand years during which science didn't develop, we wouldn't have death. We would have longevity. You could live as long as you want. The belief in the afterlife is why we don't live forever. The fundamental paradox is that religion has deprived us of our immortality.
BRUCE: I wish we could settle this question empirically.
MARVIN: I think there will be some big biological advances, and one of them will be longevity. Nobody knows why we die when we do. We live twice as long as the chimpanzees, which are the mammals most similar to us, and they live twice as long as most other mammals. So we've already extended our life spans. It may be that it takes only five or ten genes to make people live a hundred years, two hundred years, four hundred years. Nobody knows. And I'll bet you'll find out pretty soon--within the next century. So, some people who are alive now may live three hundred years.
ROBERT: Marvin, you're working on a new book, The Emotion Machine--I read a little of the first chapter, on love. How do you understand love, perhaps the strongest human emotion, in an increasingly technological age?
MARVIN: Well, people don't like the idea of understanding emotions, because there are all sorts of surprises. That particular chapter starts by describing a person who comes in and says, "I've fallen in love with a wonderful person--incredibly beautiful, unbelievably sensitive! I'd do anything for that person!" And then I translate that emotion and it turns out that all those sentences aren't positive things about the other person but negative things about you. You say "incredible," "unbelievable"--meaning no rational person would believe this. "I'd do anything for that person" means "I've decided that none of my own goals are worthwhile." So then you have to ask, What is the nature of this emotion and how does it work? And it seems to me as though a switch is thrown and you're a different computing machine, you're a different thinking machine, and you're using different resources and ways to represent the world. You're seeing things differently. My picture is that there are a couple of hundred systems in your brain, and for each of one of them you might have five different ways of seeing things, five ways of representing knowledge, and five ways of saying what's good, changing your goals. And emotions are big switches that evolved over five hundred million years.
ROBERT: But do you see something as human as love changing because of technology?
MARVIN: I think that when we understand these things, we might be able to make other kinds of choices. And of course somebody will ask, "Well, what's the right choice?" And I don't know--
ROBERT: I'd be scared if you did.
MARVIN: No, but I like the idea of having more options rather than less. There are all sorts of ways that humankind could end up forever locked in some particular way of looking at things, but none of them seem very good. That's why we need progress and understanding. There must be something better than all the things humans have done so far.
ROBERT: Let's look ahead a hundred years and ask a summary prediction question. What kinds of changes will technology make in human thinking?
GEORGE: I think human thinking is going to make changes in technology.
FRANK: Oh, we'll probably be smarter in a lot of ways. Just as we're taller and healthier and live longer. Technology will directly affect our thinking, getting right into human cognition and emotions.
BART: We'll be smarter because we'll have implanted computers into our brains, and later we'll replace our brains with chips--and then we'll have the irony of thinking fuzzy thoughts in a discrete, digital medium.
ROBERT: That may be "smarter" for you.
BRUCE: I'll give an outrageous answer. I think the term "we" may mean something different, because we are going to be connected in so many ways, to so many other people, both past and present, that the question will have to be answered in a very different way. My guess, not prediction, is that the coming century will be the one in which we transform as a social organism through communication, interactive as well as passive, into a different kind of species.
MARVIN: I think you're all correct. I agree with everybody. But what Bart says is very important. When we learn how parts of our brains work, maybe you could stick in a million little electrodes as a little module--the way you buy memory for your home computer.
ROBERT: But love will still be there?
MARVIN: Ah, love will still be there, but you can decide whom you'll be in love with, instead of letting it decide for you. When you like things, you never know whether you're choosing what you like or some little tiny machine in your head is doing it.
ROBERT: A rather depressing, mechanistic world you propose there.
MARVIN: But now we're just kicked around by things we don't understand.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
FEW people get what's really going on here. The change in mental process is nothing less than a shift in worldview. Technology is radically transforming our thinking in at least three new ways: (1) information is freely available, and therefore interdisciplinary ideas and cross-cultural communication are widely accessible; (2) time is compressed, and therefore reflection is condensed and decision-making is compacted; (3) individuals are empowered, and therefore private choice and reach are strengthened and one person can have the presence of an institution. So what kind of new thinking is technology engendering? Notice what happens. With an increasing number of diverse ideas circulating freely and widely, and with people more empowered but with less time to assess value, and with vast communications amplifying opinions, this new thinking is at once creative and innovative, volatile and turbulent. We have to face such complexity to keep closer to truth.
Editor's Comments:
Among the roundtable sessions hosted by Dr. Kuhn, I must confess I found this one the least palatable. Most (though not all) of the panel members share a dangerously deluded "scientific" hubris -- precisely the kind of overconfident mindset Mary Shelley warned against in her cautionary tale, "Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus." Nevertheless I have included it here as a negative example, for contrast and for reference.
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: How Does Technology Transform Thinking?
Illustration(s): Francis Fukuyama, Bart Kosko, Marvin Minsky, Bruce Murray, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/111/111transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/07)
How Does Technology Transform Thinking?
I GET cranky when there's a ten-second delay in downloading a Web site. A few years ago, I was thrilled to receive same-day letters by fax, and a few years before that, snail mail that arrived within the week was just fine. It's not time that's accelerating; it's our thinking. Technology has produced multitudes of machines with alluring functions, features, and options--machines that benefit our lives. But what is the real impact of technology? Don't let the superficial glitz of flashy gadgets and light-speed information deceive you. Acquiring knowledge and making decisions--both for individuals and institutions--has been altered forever. The real impact of technology is not on the design of electronic apparatus but on human cognition; the true transformation is in the way we think. How do advances in technology affect our modes of thought? How is thinking changing, and how do we adapt to those changes? We invited five accomplished thinkers to reflect on the deeper consequences of technology.
PARTICIPANTS
Dr. Francis (Frank) Fukuyama, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, is an international authority on social and political thought. Frank discusses how trust works in a high-tech society and what happens to decision-making under pressure of time.
Dr. Bart Kosko, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, is the author of The Fuzzy Future. Bart explains how the uncertainties of fuzzy logic and the process of pattern recognition can help our thinking.
Dr. George Kozmetsky, co-founder of Teledyne and an early investor in Dell Computers, was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Clinton, for building business incubators where young companies can grow. George discusses how technology creates wealth and prosperity.
Dr. Marvin Minsky, the longtime director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is the author of The Society of Mind. Marvin talks about some of the social consequences of burgeoning technology and shows how artificial intelligence can explain and improve human thinking.
Dr. Bruce Murray, a professor of planetary science and geology at Caltech and a former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is president of the Planetary Society, in Pasadena, which fosters public interest and participation in space exploration. Bruce reflects on the relationship between communications technology and human development.
ROBERT: George, for fifty years you've participated in the technology revolution. You've been president of the Institute of Management Sciences, and you've assisted in developing over a hundred technology-based companies, including Dell. For fifteen years, you were dean of the Graduate School of Business of the University of Texas at Austin. Give us an overview of the progress of technology and how it affects our thinking.
GEORGE: When our current technology started coming in, we could stop using paper-and-pencil methods. We could formulate complex equations, which is the scientific way, and solve them electronically. We believed that we'd get more time to think, but what we discovered was that technology just made it easier to find things--we could replace an hour of searching with fifteen minutes of reading. But then we found that our horizons were expanding faster than we could collect data, and so we realized that we needed to get into artificial intelligence and other techniques.
ROBERT: Speaking of artificial intelligence, Marvin, you are professor of media sciences and arts at MIT and a pioneer, of course, in artificial intelligence. Your book, The Society of Mind, combines insights from developmental child psychology and computer systems. What's the basic theory behind the book?
MARVIN: Well, it's to try to figure out how the mind works without the traditional belief that somewhere inside the mind there's a "self" in control and commanding everything. So the question is, How do you get mindlike behavior from the brain? The brain is really made of about four hundred different computers. They do different things, they don't agree on everything--so how do you get reasonable, commonsense behavior out of such a system?
ROBERT: And the concept of a "society" means that all of these brain systems are working together?
MARVIN: Right. It's not like human society, where a person does pretty well independently.
ROBERT: And how has the impact of technology affected human thinking?
MARVIN: I don't know that technology has changed thinking very much yet, but we're just at the threshold. Computers only got going around 1950. We still don't know how to program them to do commonsense kinds of things, just technical things. But that's going to happen, sometime in the near or far future. Then our thinking will change.
ROBERT: Frank, you're the author of an acclaimed book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. What do you mean by trust?
FRANK: Trust is basic to any human activity, which is almost always social, involving the cooperation of two or more people. Trust is simply the ability of people to interact with each other in the expectation that they're going to be honest, they're going to reciprocate, they're going to make good on their commitments.
ROBERT: And how is trust affected in a society dominated by technology?
FRANK: It doesn't become less important. In a way, it becomes more important. Take something like the Internet. You can deal with anybody anywhere in the world--that's the potential--but can you trust them? The real core of the problem in creating E-commerce or socializing over the Net is, How do people come to share values, not just bytes and bits?
ROBERT: Bart, your books on fuzzy thinking sanction contradiction, endorses ambiguity, and demands that we get comfortable with uncertainty. What is fuzzy logic, and how does it affect our thinking?
BART: Fuzzy logic or fuzzy thinking is trying to see things in shades of gray as we reason. For example, when does life begin? At conception? In the first trimester? When does a teenager become an adult? Is it exactly on the first second of the eighteenth birthday? The law says it is, but such precision isn't real or practical. So fuzzy logic has been trying to capture the grayness of inherent uncertainty in our reasoning and thinking processes. Capture it in mathematics, and then endow that structure in computers to make them a bit smarter.
ROBERT: Bruce, how can the concept of space exploration help human beings think about themselves in new ways?
BRUCE: Well, it already has. The seminal effect of the first images of Earth taken from orbit and from the moon, back in the sixties, revolutionized our global self-perspective and led to the environmental movement. Similarly, when Voyager took pictures of the earth as a pale blue dot embedded in the vastness of the solar system, it had the secondary effect of reminding people that the universe doesn't revolve around the earth, doesn't even revolve around the star we call the sun. And so space has already changed our frame of reference, to say nothing of what may lie ahead.
ROBERT: Was the environmental movement actually triggered by those pictures of Earth?
BRUCE: Yes, that really happened, and that's why it spread so rapidly--because the catalyst was those images, spread by television, which was our medium of global communication at that point.
ROBERT: Let's broadly look at how technology affects thinking, because some say that it's nothing less than a shift in worldview. George [Kozmetsky] was talking about how something that used to take an hour now takes fifteen minutes. What does that do to the way we make decisions, the way we reflect or meditate?
MARVIN: Again, I have mixed feeling about questions like that, because I think we still think in pretty much the same way. Our brains haven't been changed, but the tools that we have are immensely better. If somebody asks me a question of fact, I can usually either fail or succeed in finding the answer from the Web pretty fast. As for computing, we can solve problems numerically and analytically--
ROBERT: Aren't there pressures to be less reflective and make decisions faster, because facts are coming at us faster and are more readily at our disposal, and people expect faster answers?
MARVIN: Well, there are a lot of problems like that. Sometimes we're under pressure to decide faster; sometimes, with the great leverage of technology, a decision can affect more people and in a shorter time. One of the most dangerous things is the rapid communication in political affairs: you might have a TV network asking, "What does the public think?" and five minutes later they'll say that seventy percent of the American people think such-and-such, and so forth.
ROBERT: And maybe it was thirty percent just two days earlier.
MARVIN: That's right. And if you wait a week, maybe it'll settle down. But very few of these media people are aware that such sampling is unstable and very dangerous--opinions can spread like an epidemic. The general populace seems to think that if a lot of people believe something, then they should, too. It's called a flip-flop, and in computers it leads to the destruction of information rather than the increasing of it.
ROBERT: Bart, do you find that your own decision-making processes have been speeding up?
BART: Well, to some degree--which is a typical answer of a fuzzy theorist. In the early days of radio, we could hear a story; later we could see it on television; now we can experience it with interactive, multimedia effects on the Internet and perhaps in theaters in the future. I'd like to advance a thesis, though. How does technology, in the broadest terms, increase our ability to recognize more and more complex patterns? Bruce mentioned a good example--we finally saw Earth as a small blue sphere. In the 1940's, science fiction movies cast the earth as gray. As recently as the American Revolution, say, weather was still a mystery. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to work out the concept of weather fronts--something we take for granted when we look at that nightly weather map. Our perspective takes on ever larger scales, going back into geological time; with each step of technology, we recognize more patterns, process more patterns, make more connections, in an ever richer way.
ROBERT: Frank, let's explore the impact of technology--from how you write your books to how institutions make decisions.
FRANK: For me, technology makes things easier. If I had to deal with typists, with gathering information, and the other kinds of headaches that you have in writing a book, it would not be possible to publish what I do. I think there are certain institutions and situations where the impact of technology is even greater. For example, in foreign policy, there's no question that officials are under pressure to make decisions faster. That's the big impact of worldwide telecommunications--the CNN effect, which has been talked about in the media. When vast audiences see immediate images of refugees, or a captured soldier being dragged through the streets of a foreign city, it forces policy makers to react immediately, which they wouldn't have had to do in an earlier generation. And it seems to me that speed doesn't necessarily improve the quality of their decisions. On the other hand, you have this huge impact in terms of sympathy. You see somebody starving to death in Africa--if you'd seen it in newsprint, it would have been an abstraction. But when you see these same images on television, it becomes something that's much harder to push aside.
ROBERT: How do you assess instant telecommunications? Do you worry about the manipulation of public opinion?
FRANK: Overall, the immediacy is probably a good thing, but it can certainly be mismanaged. As Marvin [Minsky] was saying, poll numbers going up can lead to instantaneous decisions--you've got to do something--when a more reflective kind of thought process would have allowed you to think of possible counterproductive results, things that you hadn't thought about before. So I think this is something that needs management.
BART: It certainly doesn't make for a stable state of mind. Doubt is very hard for us to cope with. We like rounding things off in a binary, yes-or-no way--with them or against them--particularly in response to graphic images on TV. Or in polls. It's hard living with uncertainty, but the world's full of it.
ROBERT: So you're teaching us how to put up with doubt and uncertainty?
BART: I usually find myself saying that there's nothing uncertain about uncertainty if you're very certain you don't know something. Or you're not sure. And you learn to live with it.
GEORGE: Let me put the issue in political terms. I remember worrying, when we were first developing information technology, that in a democracy people could vote out of their kitchens, right? Push a button--give your opinion on any issue you like. We've been seeing some of that--for example, initiatives in California. We're reacting so quickly! And boy, have we created a new uncertainty that we'd better be afraid of! I'd rather have the old uncertainty, where I knew it was uncertain and I'd have to think about it.
BRUCE: It's always helpful to view problems not just over the last year or two but over the last century, or many centuries. There's been what I like to term a symbiotic relationship between human development and communications technology. Go back to Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press. That was the first major way for propaganda or new ideas to be circulated to the masses. And that led to the development of a whole set of religious and cultural transformations. More recently, there was radio, especially battery-powered portables with earphones, which revolutionized the Middle East, Africa, and other such areas, because people who were mixing religion and politics could reach the masses. Otherwise there was no way to reach them. It was cheap, it worked, and it revolutionized the second half of the twentieth century. Now we have television, where we're absorbing images, and the relationship between fact and fantasy can be very difficult. Technology has almost made the word "thinking" obsolete.
ROBERT: This can be dangerous. The potential for mass manipulation is frightening.
BRUCE: We're reacting. We're dealing with tremendous sensory inputs and producing outputs in shorter and shorter time frames.
ROBERT: You may get a hundred E-mails a day, and you have to react to them.
BRUCE: But that's good, because I have to react to the content. What's very bad is seeing images, or hearing sounds or the opinions of celebrities, which I don't evaluate. There I'm just reacting--
ROBERT: --emotionally, not analytically.
BRUCE: This is not some academic exercise in logical thinking. What really happens to people when they're bombarded with this kind of input? That's the big, scary question.
ROBERT: Let's talk about interdisciplinary thinking, a critical characteristic of technology. George, you've pioneered getting academia, business, and government to work together.
GEORGE: You need a focus to all this. When I started out, I came up with the question: "How do you generate wealth and prosperity and share it at home and abroad?" And I wondered, Gosh, is it possible to get the three sectors to work together? The academic sector working with the business sector, and both working with the government sector? And I found that if you have a crisis, it's easier to do. But how do you do it without a crisis? I'd like some ideas on that.
ROBERT: Tell us about your pioneering work with business incubators, where numerous new companies have been "hatched," often in association with universities or government labs.
GEORGE: Most innovations are bottom-up, not top-down. You have to have laboratories to do that. But how do you convert innovations into wealth and prosperity? I said, "Hell, I'm just going to have real companies try it and see what happens." But then I found that that wasn't enough by itself. We needed a physical place where these newly born companies could be housed [i.e., incubated] and get all the administrative and business services easily and efficiently, so they could concentrate on their new products or services. And we know that venture capital doesn't do much for start-up companies--people with venture capital like to invest when you're a long way downstream. So I started a capital network--just simply matching investors with entrepreneurs, like a TV dating game.
ROBERT: Had any successful marriages?
GEORGE: We've now learned how to place about $150 million to $200 million a year.
FRANK: There are many forces in the modern academy that are pushing in the opposite direction. The complexity of technology and the volume of it result in this disciplinary specialization that exerts a kind of tyrannical influence over the way people are trained. You'll never find anyone more intimidated than a young professor without tenure, because his or her discipline exerts this absolute control over any kind of thinking outside the box. There are a lot of institutional obstacles to interdisciplinary thinking.
ROBERT: Marvin, do you see institutional pressures against interdisciplinary thinking?
MARVIN: I'm not sure there are any good generalizations to make. There are so many different kinds of personalities in young professors. Some may be intimidated--they want security and they get what they want. But some aren't.
ROBERT: Have you ever felt intimidated?
MARVIN: I don't care much what other people think about me. So it's hard to intimidate me, unless you're [Caltech physicist and Nobel Laureate] Richard Feynman--
ROBERT: And he's dead.
MARVIN: Well, it doesn't matter that he's dead. I have a very good copy of him, and if I say something too speculative, I can hear him say, "Well, what would be the experiment for that?" I think young academics need attachments--peers, people who imprint them, self ideals. We all have imprints from a bunch of people. Sometimes, when I'm writing, I hear the voice of another dead scientist, [artificial intelligence pioneer] Warren McCullough, and he says, "Oh, that's very nice" or "that's pretentious." What I'm afraid of is, given the advance of the media, who are the internal mentors built into the minds of our citizens? It's ninety-eight percent sports idiots, actresses, actors. Why are actors heroes? Because they're good liars. That's what it takes to be an actor.
ROBERT: Not to mention hosts.
MARVIN: Well, I actually like some of the hosts. But we have this strange celebrity thing, and instead of children being attached to and getting values from the right people, they get it from people who have the gift of pretending to be charismatic. Celebrities are celebrities because they somehow make people trust them. They have to get you to trust them, when they're playing a role.
BART: You can even become president, if you play your cards right.
MARVIN: That particular president was a pretty smart one. He did all of those things.
ROBERT: Before technology, you couldn't have chosen him.
BRUCE: But before technology was your high priest, somebody else was--and I don't know whether we're still in the same frying pan or a different one. You have to be careful not to take a two-to-five-year period and extrapolate it to the past or the future. I grew up at the end of World War II. I was too young to serve, but I was old enough to understand what Buchenwald meant, what Hitler meant--the atom bomb was a real thing to me. You go another generation and all that's gone--that's history in the history books; none of that experience is there. Like my father's experience in the Great Depression--he never got over it; it colored his whole view of things. Vietnam was personally threatening to young people who feared they would get drafted, and it did lead to some intellectual development. Then you have Ronald Reagan saying, "Self-centered consumerism is good." That was the new ethic and it worked, producing the "Now Generation." So, with all these trends going on, we have to be careful when we generalize, because we're all very strongly imprinted by the culture--the things that were going on--when we were thirteen years old.
ROBERT: Frank, as an undergraduate you majored in classics; your doctorate is in political science. Does this give you a different perspective on technology from that of a scientist or engineer?
FRANK: Well, your perspective, in a way, is that the whole technological mindset, and modern natural science, is something that was deliberately chosen by human societies four hundred or five hundred years ago, but it's not the only way of approaching social organization and the pursuit of a good life. Science and technology is the way we've chosen, but it's not a necessary one. I think a lot of people assume that technology has to exist, that technological progress is inevitable and basically a good thing, and they don't go back and examine the premises of this attempt to conquer nature--whether conquering nature is really doable, and whether it will provide the kind of meaning that people think it will.
ROBERT: What about technology's impact cross-culturally? You've compared different cultures--for example, Asian and American.
FRANK: Technology is homogenizing everybody, for better or worse. Technology produces modern economic societies, enhanced production possibilities--that's really what you mean when you say that liberal democracy and markets are the only way to go. For the kind of technological world we live in, where information is critical for technological advancement, you have to have political democracy and decentralized economic decision-making--and there are few cultures that can stand up against that.
ROBERT: Marvin, I'm fascinated by the power that people have. I often go to a Web site created by a person, not a company, because that one person has better insight. How do you see technology empowering people?
MARVIN: We could call it the popular-power paradox, because with this capability of setting up a great Web site, one person can make a huge difference. But then the next thing is, "Well, everybody can make a huge difference," and so they all somehow cancel one another out.
ROBERT: Frank, isn't that the essence of markets, where everything is competing and the best emerge?
FRANK: That's right: the best have to emerge at the end, but you also need filters and some way of picking the winners and allowing them to emerge.
ROBERT: Does education fulfill this role in a high-tech society?
FRANK: That's one of the real transformations that has come about. You cannot survive in a high-tech society without a much more substantial education, and education really changes the way people interact. There's much less regimentation in a university department than in old-style factory, where everyone had less than a high school education. This is a major change.
ROBERT: George, you've pioneered educational transformation.
GEORGE: Yes. The first thing we found out in California and Texas is that forty to sixty percent of today's high school students can't apply for a job that's technology based. Which led us to the conclusion that in the twenty-first century, knowledge that creates understanding will be called "education" and knowledge that creates value will be called "training." It doesn't make any sense to me to force everyone to get a college degree.
BART: We have a high level of scientific illiteracy in this country. There's the notorious poll data showing that over half of American adults don't even know that the earth takes a year to go around the sun.
GEORGE: When is education going to come up with some fresh ideas? There's no good theory in education today--certainly not in K through 12--about how to teach science and mathematics. Or the understanding of technology. Are we to do it with science fiction, which is not taught yet?
BRUCE: That gets into another dimension--critical thinking, critical evaluation. As the amount of stuff that the media bombards us with grows, most of it driven by commercial or political considerations, the need for the individual to be able to filter and assess and make critical comparison also grows. So maybe the word "education" will become obsolete. Training is extremely important, because the jobs are not manual labor anymore--you're not born with the ability to fill those jobs. You have to know how things work, but most important is the ability to think critically about the information you're exposed to.
ROBERT: Bart, regarding critical thinking, what happens to religion in a high-tech society?
BART: Science has often hoped that religion would go away. It certainly hasn't. It's a very adaptive belief system, and I'm sure it will adapt to the times, even when we evolve into different types of information creatures. I think religion will be just as virulent as ever. It tends to be the basis of large conflicts around the world, and as countries splinter into ever finer groups and communicate on the Internet, that [sectarianism] will only increase.
MARVIN: Bruce [Murray] has put his finger on it, because one thing we need in order to understand things well is critical thinking. If somebody tells you something, you ask, "Well, what's the evidence for that?" In most religions, the idea is that, well, there are certain questions we can't decide in any such way, and so it's important to have faith. And if you're very good at having faith, it means you're not very good at critical thinking. Some people seem to be able to tolerate both, but in general I think if people put emphasis on believing a set of rules that come from an authority figure, then we're in terrible danger. Does the structure of the authority you're not allowed to question undermine understanding and progress?
ROBERT: You think faith and critical thinking are mutually exclusive?
MARVIN: I do. Some people say that faith and critical thought are concerned with such different subjects that they're not incompatible. But I don't think so.
FRANK: As offensive as faith-based thought may be to scientists, it seems to me that it's extremely important, and it's not likely to disappear. It's the basis for civil society--
MARVIN: It's not the only basis.
FRANK: It socialized physics [i.e., provided the initial social structure in which physics could develop], it's what creates community, and I think one of the reasons people have returned to religion is precisely that they're lonely, and that religion gives them a way of--
MARVIN: You don't see a downside?
FRANK: Of course there's a downside.
MARVIN: What about the religious wars, and the ethnic divisions, and so forth?
FRANK: We haven't fought any religious wars in the United States in a long time.
BRUCE: During the last thirty to forty years--during the time of this extraordinary technological revolution all over the whole world--the fundamentalist elements in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have all been on the rise. Now why is that?
ROBERT: Isn't that fascinating?
BRUCE: It's fascinating, but it's also significant. That's real information, being fed back by real human societies. And the answer is that there's a need for belief systems and explanations that the populace is not receiving from the technological revolution.
MARVIN: But I think we see some of the needs. One is that people don't know how to think critically.
BRUCE: But critical thinking is not going to help you with death.
MARVIN: Oh, yes it is. Bart [Kosko] said you can learn to live with doubt, and you don't need someone to tell you, "Here's the answer." That's the kind of critical thinking we lack.
BRUCE: But people aren't little automatons with no emotions. When you deal with death, or obviously bad things that have no rational explanation, there has to be a context for real human beings to deal with it.
MARVIN: Well, I disagree. I think death has a rational explanation. If it weren't for religion in the two thousand years during which science didn't develop, we wouldn't have death. We would have longevity. You could live as long as you want. The belief in the afterlife is why we don't live forever. The fundamental paradox is that religion has deprived us of our immortality.
BRUCE: I wish we could settle this question empirically.
MARVIN: I think there will be some big biological advances, and one of them will be longevity. Nobody knows why we die when we do. We live twice as long as the chimpanzees, which are the mammals most similar to us, and they live twice as long as most other mammals. So we've already extended our life spans. It may be that it takes only five or ten genes to make people live a hundred years, two hundred years, four hundred years. Nobody knows. And I'll bet you'll find out pretty soon--within the next century. So, some people who are alive now may live three hundred years.
ROBERT: Marvin, you're working on a new book, The Emotion Machine--I read a little of the first chapter, on love. How do you understand love, perhaps the strongest human emotion, in an increasingly technological age?
MARVIN: Well, people don't like the idea of understanding emotions, because there are all sorts of surprises. That particular chapter starts by describing a person who comes in and says, "I've fallen in love with a wonderful person--incredibly beautiful, unbelievably sensitive! I'd do anything for that person!" And then I translate that emotion and it turns out that all those sentences aren't positive things about the other person but negative things about you. You say "incredible," "unbelievable"--meaning no rational person would believe this. "I'd do anything for that person" means "I've decided that none of my own goals are worthwhile." So then you have to ask, What is the nature of this emotion and how does it work? And it seems to me as though a switch is thrown and you're a different computing machine, you're a different thinking machine, and you're using different resources and ways to represent the world. You're seeing things differently. My picture is that there are a couple of hundred systems in your brain, and for each of one of them you might have five different ways of seeing things, five ways of representing knowledge, and five ways of saying what's good, changing your goals. And emotions are big switches that evolved over five hundred million years.
ROBERT: But do you see something as human as love changing because of technology?
MARVIN: I think that when we understand these things, we might be able to make other kinds of choices. And of course somebody will ask, "Well, what's the right choice?" And I don't know--
ROBERT: I'd be scared if you did.
MARVIN: No, but I like the idea of having more options rather than less. There are all sorts of ways that humankind could end up forever locked in some particular way of looking at things, but none of them seem very good. That's why we need progress and understanding. There must be something better than all the things humans have done so far.
ROBERT: Let's look ahead a hundred years and ask a summary prediction question. What kinds of changes will technology make in human thinking?
GEORGE: I think human thinking is going to make changes in technology.
FRANK: Oh, we'll probably be smarter in a lot of ways. Just as we're taller and healthier and live longer. Technology will directly affect our thinking, getting right into human cognition and emotions.
BART: We'll be smarter because we'll have implanted computers into our brains, and later we'll replace our brains with chips--and then we'll have the irony of thinking fuzzy thoughts in a discrete, digital medium.
ROBERT: That may be "smarter" for you.
BRUCE: I'll give an outrageous answer. I think the term "we" may mean something different, because we are going to be connected in so many ways, to so many other people, both past and present, that the question will have to be answered in a very different way. My guess, not prediction, is that the coming century will be the one in which we transform as a social organism through communication, interactive as well as passive, into a different kind of species.
MARVIN: I think you're all correct. I agree with everybody. But what Bart says is very important. When we learn how parts of our brains work, maybe you could stick in a million little electrodes as a little module--the way you buy memory for your home computer.
ROBERT: But love will still be there?
MARVIN: Ah, love will still be there, but you can decide whom you'll be in love with, instead of letting it decide for you. When you like things, you never know whether you're choosing what you like or some little tiny machine in your head is doing it.
ROBERT: A rather depressing, mechanistic world you propose there.
MARVIN: But now we're just kicked around by things we don't understand.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
FEW people get what's really going on here. The change in mental process is nothing less than a shift in worldview. Technology is radically transforming our thinking in at least three new ways: (1) information is freely available, and therefore interdisciplinary ideas and cross-cultural communication are widely accessible; (2) time is compressed, and therefore reflection is condensed and decision-making is compacted; (3) individuals are empowered, and therefore private choice and reach are strengthened and one person can have the presence of an institution. So what kind of new thinking is technology engendering? Notice what happens. With an increasing number of diverse ideas circulating freely and widely, and with people more empowered but with less time to assess value, and with vast communications amplifying opinions, this new thinking is at once creative and innovative, volatile and turbulent. We have to face such complexity to keep closer to truth.
Editor's Comments:
Among the roundtable sessions hosted by Dr. Kuhn, I must confess I found this one the least palatable. Most (though not all) of the panel members share a dangerously deluded "scientific" hubris -- precisely the kind of overconfident mindset Mary Shelley warned against in her cautionary tale, "Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus." Nevertheless I have included it here as a negative example, for contrast and for reference.
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: How Does Technology Transform Thinking?
Illustration(s): Francis Fukuyama, Bart Kosko, Marvin Minsky, Bruce Murray, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/111/111transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
Wednesday, August 6, 2003
How Did We Think in the Last Millennium? (我們前一千年的的思想)
How Did We Think in the Last Millennium? (我們前一千年的的思想)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/06)
How Did We Think in the Last Millennium?
WHAT will the new millennium bring? To forecast the future, we should process the past. The last thousand years have been astonishing in their extremes. Humanity was wondrously transformed--from knights on horseback to kids on computers--but the price paid was very high. So much collective suffering; so much individual agony. If how we think helps to define how we live, then it should be useful to look at the thought processes that led to the triumphs, as well as the ravages, of civilization. Our future may depend on our ability to think, and perhaps think differently than we have in the past. So let's attempt to understand the nature of thinking itself--rational versus creative thinking; deductive versus inductive thinking; logic versus perception; analysis versus synthesis; game theory, heuristics, algorithms, the "expert systems" of artificial intelligence. What does each contribute to our intellectual and material advancement, and how do they further (or inhibit) our personal, social and political relations? If we can think more clearly, shouldn't we be able to live more happily? Understanding thinking--its categories and applications--is the specialty of our panel. What's particularly interesting is how the diversity of their fields affects the direction of their thinking.
PARTICIPANTS
Edward de Bono, author of over fifty books, including Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step and De Bono's Thinking Course, is an international authority in both creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking. Edward calls for design, synthesis, and creativity in human thinking.
Dr. Edward Feigenbaum, a professor of computer science at Stanford, is often called the father of expert systems, which are software programs that incorporate the best human thinking. Ed explains how artificial intelligence can assist our thinking.
Graham T.T. Molitor, a prolific author about the future, is vice president and legal counsel of the World Future Society. Graham believes that our brains will ultimately be enhanced through advances in genetics and neuroscience.
Dr. Sherwin (Shep) Nuland, a surgeon and medical ethicist at Yale University School of Medicine, is the author of How We Die, a poetic book describing the end of the human lifecycle. Shep sees human beings as mostly irrational by nature.
Dr. Brian Skyrms, a professor of philosophy and social science at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of Evolution of the Social Contract. Brian examines the nature and tools of thinking.
ROBERT: Edward, you've taught creativity and thinking to schools and corporations throughout the world. What are your notions about how we handled these matters over the last millennium? Why such extremes?
EDWARD DE BONO: On the whole, our thinking has been rather disastrous. The three Greeks--Plato, Aristotle, Socrates--really wrecked Western thinking, which has been concerned only with truth, analysis, judgment, argument. This type of thinking has led to persecutions, wars, discrimination, pogroms. What we've left out is "What can be?" thinking. "What can be?" thinking is design, creativity, synthesis--putting things together to achieve something new. We've had a very limited thinking system--a system excellent in itself, but only as the front left wheel of a motor car is excellent. By itself, it's inadequate.
ROBERT: Ed, how can so-called expert systems help us understand human thinking?
ED FEIGENBAUM: Expert systems are part of a field in computer science called artificial intelligence, wherein scientists and engineers are attempting to create models of human thinking, primarily the models of thinking that Edward [De Bono] was just calling "the front left wheel" of the automobile--namely, logical thinking. Expert systems are attempts to model the knowledge and the expertise of first-class human professionals [for example, physicians], who are practicing their professions at very high levels of performance. This relates to the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence: to generate programs that are extremely intelligent--that is, beyond human capability.
ROBERT: Brian, as a philosopher you've explored the concepts of decision making and rational choice. What is a "social contract" and how can it help us understand the collective thinking of the last millennium?
BRIAN: The social contract is a metaphor for a kind of tacit agreement, or deal, that people make in order to form a society and live together in it. A lot of philosophers try to justify ethical rules by saying that they would be part of an ideal social contract. But we can also think about how the actual social contract of real institutions arises from evolutionary and learning processes. That's the sort of thing I'm interested in.
ROBERT: Shep, you're a surgeon who has written two extraordinary sensitive books, How We Die and How We Live. Do you see a shift in human thinking as we enter a new millennium?
SHEP: Not essentially. To me, human thinking is unfortunately irrational. We retreat to magical thinking at every opportunity. As much as I applaud attempts to make thought processes coherent and complete--to put four wheels on that automobile--I think ultimately we're dealing with a flawed creature and a flawed way of putting information and memories together.
ROBERT: Can't we improve our thinking?
SHEP: We certainly can improve it. That's what this is all about.
ROBERT: Good, we'll give it a shot. Graham, as a futurist, you usually look forward. But start by looking backward.
GRAHAM: The last thousand years had some extraordinary benchmarks. We came out of the depths of the Dark Ages and we launched this world of ours into the era of the Enlightenment. We spawned great scientists and inventors, like Leonardo Da Vinci--many of the things he conceived became reality. Then in the last two hundred years came the development of mechanization, mass production, electricity, nuclear energy--all of these powerful mechanisms that drive society and provide the foundations of our economy and the basis of our livelihoods.
ROBERT: But in what direction are these mechanisms taking us? Let's explore the nature of thinking by comparing those left and right front wheels--rational thinking and what we might call postrational thinking. Let's start with rational thinking. Brian, talk about some of its components, such as deductive and inductive thinking.
BRIAN: Deductive thinking, or deductive logic, is the kind of logic used in pure mathematics--that is, how we think about mathematical objects and their relations to one another. You don't have to know anything about the real world to understand deductive thinking.
ROBERT: It's like tenth-grade geometry, where we used axioms and rules of logic to develop proofs of theorems.
BRIAN: That's part of it, of course. But if you want to look at the real world and try to confirm your scientific theories or your medical diagnoses or what you think is the truth of a legal case, then you have to use inductive logic and inductive thinking. Inductive thinking deals with evidence.
ROBERT: It starts with data, the messy stuff in the world around us, and then we develop theories to explain that data, always testing the theories by doing experiments and making predictions.
BRIAN: In the real world, you cannot know the truth of any theory with the absolute certainty of formal logic.
ROBERT: Ed, in the work you've done in artificial intelligence, there are two concepts you use which I'd like you to define for us: heuristics and algorithms.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Well, first I should say that I see thinking as a discovery process, not a deductive process--discovery in a very large space of possibilities. Heuristics are those pieces of knowledge--tricks and rules of thumb--that allow us to prune that space of possibilities in order to get to acceptable solutions in a reasonable amount of time. These acceptable solutions aren't necessarily optimal, aren't necessarily the best, but they're good enough. Herbert Simon, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, coined the word "satisficing" to distinguish the process from optimizing. Now that's where algorithms come in. Algorithms are structured pieces of mathematical and logical thinking that computer scientists and mathematicians use that lead you step by step to an answer that is guaranteed to be the correct answer, but it could take a very long time to get there. Heuristics are shortcuts; you could call them elements of the art of good guessing, the knowledge that goes into pruning that big space of possibilities. It's what expert chess players know that novice chess players don't.
ROBERT: Chess is a wonderful field for analyzing algorithms and heuristics. You might think that since there are only sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces, a supercomputer could consider all the moves in a normal game. But if this supercomputer were required to consider all the legal moves in a forty-move game of chess before making its first move, the universe would burn out before that first move could be made.
ED FEIGENBAUM: That's right. The total number of possibilities at the opening of a chess game is 1 followed by 120 zeros. It's impossible to calculate, so chess players use all kinds of heuristics. Here's one, for example: In the opening of a chess game, don't move the pawns at the edges of the board; focus on control of the center.
ROBERT: Edward, let's check the right wheel of your mental motor car--the other side of logic, analysis, and judgment.
EDWARD DE BONO: Something like ninety percent of all errors in thinking are errors of perception--this is indicated by work done by David Perkins at the Harvard Graduate School of Education--yet culturally we focus on logic. But logic can't even begin to be applied until there are concepts with which the logic can work, and these concepts are rooted in perception. Historically, we focused on logic because we assumed that the perceptions were given and obvious, but only in some cases is this true.
ROBERT: What is your perception of "perception?"
EDWARD DE BONO: Perception is a different system from logic. Perception works as a self-organizing information system. Logic works in what I call a passive surface system. And the differences are huge. I'll give you a practical example of the differences. Imagine the bottom of a diamond mine in South Africa, with illiterate workers who have never been to school in their lives, who come from seven different tribes, and so on. They used to have two hundred and ten major fights, disputes, grievances every month. So we started teaching them how to think. Those two hundred and ten fights a month dropped to just four. It made a huge difference to their lives: productivity is up, absenteeism is down, safety is up. One can teach thinking very directly. I'm involved in schools in many countries now, doing just that.
ROBERT: What's the theory underlying lateral thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: Lateral thinking tells you that if you look at self-organizing information systems--how we think--they form patterns that are asymmetric, meaning that from the end of the pattern you can see all the way back to the beginning, but from the beginning of the pattern you cannot see all the way forward to the end. Lateral thinking is [a way to deal with this asymmetry], and it's based on the process of provocation--and we've coined a new word, "po," which means "provocative operation." For instance, in the case of river pollution, you put in a provocation by stipulating that factories should use their own pollution. It sounds illogical, but from that comes an idea which is now the law in many countries--that if you build a factory on a river, your water input has to be downstream from your own output, so that you're the first to get your pollution.
ROBERT: Provocations are intermediate steps for creating new ideas; they are deliberately unsettling and disturb the current equilibrium.
EDWARD DE BONO: Provocations allow us to jump from one equilibrium to another. Once you're there, you see in hindsight that such new ideas are of course obvious. There are various techniques of lateral thinking--random input is another; they're all based on asymmetric patterns in self-organizing systems.
ROBERT: How do hypotheses figure in your system of thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: We can talk about testing hypotheses, but where do the hypotheses come from? Hypotheses are creative possibilities, and progress always comes from creating new possibilities. Indeed, Chinese culture, which was way ahead of the West two thousand years ago, came to a dead end, because they never developed the possibilities of hypotheses.
ROBERT: How do you break out of the normal, or traditional, way of thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: You need to look at thinking as the operation of a self-organizing system. There are various tools, such as attention-directing tools. Let's give an example. One of the simplest tools we use in school is called the PMI--Plus, Minus, Interesting. I asked a class of thirty kids, "Would it be a good idea if you were paid to come to school every week?" Thirty out of thirty said, "Great we'd love it; we can buy candy, chewing gum, comics." I didn't argue with them; I didn't ask, "What about this, what about that?" Instead, we introduced the PMI, and they thought about my question in terms of plus points, minus points, and interesting points. At the end of the session, twenty-nine out of thirty had changed their minds. On their own, they had conducted a little perceptual scan; there was a bigger picture to see, and as a result their perceptions changed and their decision changed. Emotions changed, too, and that's key. If you change perception, you change emotions. Logic will never change emotions; perceptions will.
ROBERT: Brian, let's talk about game theory. This is a relatively new area of thinking that is often used in behavioral science.
BRIAN: Game theory is a misnomer. It's really the theory of strategic interaction. It was called game theory because games like chess are special examples of strategic interaction. But of course there are many such examples: war, international politics, coalition formation, oligarchies controlling prices, and so forth. These are all situations where what's good for me depends on what the other guys do. And what's good for them depends on what I do. You can't optimize your position without worrying about how the other guys are optimizing their positions.
ROBERT: So this kind of thinking doesn't occur in isolation; you have to be concerned about what the other person is thinking.
BRIAN: You have to model the other person's thinking, you have to model his thinking about your thinking, and so on. It can get very complicated.
ROBERT: But this is closer to the real world?
BRIAN: This is closer to the real world. The question is, How many levels up do you have to model before you can get a sufficiently good answer? Game theory is a kind of deep dynamic analysis that explains how people grope their way to a solution, so that when they are finally at a solution point, each is happy with what the other thinks, and with what the other thinks you think, and with what each is doing. These strategic interaction problems are solved not only by people but also by animals in all kinds of interactive systems.
EDWARD DE BONO: But there's an underlying point here, which is if you set out a strategy of "win-lose"--that is, I'll win because I'll make you lose--then your strategic thinking will follow that design. But if you set out a strategy of "win-win"--in other words, how can we both benefit?--your whole thinking structure will be different. It all depends on the underlying assumption.
BRIAN: Win-win is not always easy, because there may be different ways to win-win. If we want to coordinate something--say, if I want to meet you someplace, but we haven't decided where--win-win is when we both get to the same place. But I still have to worry about going to the place that you think I'm going to, and the same is true for you.
EDWARD DE BONO: Sure. But I meant that underlying game theory was the notion that one person wins and one person loses.
BRIAN: That was in the 1940s, when game theory was originally devised.1
{FOOTNOTE}1 Game theory is a new branch of mathematics that was conceived by John von Neumann, a mathematician, and Oskar Morgenstern, an economist, to solve problems in economics (e.g., optimum pricing strategies). Since then, game theory has been applied in politics (e.g., coalition building), military planning (e.g., strikes and counterstrikes), business (e.g., product positioning or plant locations)--situations in which there are a number of decision-making players who have similar, opposed or mixed interests.
But now, modern game theory deals mostly with situations of win-win or partial conflict and partial cooperation.
ROBERT: Graham, how much of the future is dependent upon ways of thinking? Wouldn't different mechanisms of thinking lead to different futures?
GRAHAM: Well, yes. But I think that the key to assessing the long-range future is recognizing that there are a thousand tiny threads that tie the tapestry of tomorrow together, and one must look back carefully to see what the precedents and benchmarks are. I take a little different approach to thinking. One gross measure has it that we use only approximately one to three percent of our brains. We may use no more than ten percent--which means that we can move up the scale, so that we can use, say, as much as ninety-seven percent of our brain capacity. Will we do that? I think the answer is yes. I go back and look at the crude surrogate for intellect--which is basically average brain size, the cubic centimeter measurement. For the first [hominids], it was about 500 cubic centimeters, and it's about three times that today. By the year 3000, with advances in genetics, my feeling is that the size of the human brain will increase drastically, up to as much as 2,000 cubic centimeters.
ROBERT: That three-percent brain utilization idea sounds to me like a popular misconception. And I question the wisdom, if not the ultimate technology, of brain enlargement.
SHEP: Wait. Why should brain size increase, if we're only using three to ten percent? Wouldn't cultural evolution simply mean that we'll begin using ten to fifteen to twenty percent, and therefore there's no evolutionary need for brain size to increase?
EDWARD DE BONO: The pinheads will be happy.
SHEP: Furthermore, the last significant evolutionary change in human brain size occurred twenty-five thousand to forty thousand years ago, and in spite of the enormity of the input that humanity has been subjected to, our brain size hasn't changed one bit since.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Graham [Molitor]'s argument completely ignores the growth of artificial intelligence. When computers are doing a great deal of our thinking, there will be no evolutionary pressures to increase our biological brains' capacity.
GRAHAM: Well, I'll go a step further. Right now, we can augment our visual and auditory capabilities through implants. There will be a lot more of that--and I agree with you a hundred percent that this is another technological trend.
EDWARD DE BONO: You can simulate a brain with only five neurons on a computer; that brain is capable of fifty billion thoughts. Five neurons, fifty billion thoughts. We've got a hundred billion neurons. So brain size, I think, is irrelevant. It's how we use what we've got that counts.
GRAHAM: Well, I said it was a crude surrogate. There's also the long-standing conundrum about whether genetics or environment is the controlling factor [in intelligence]--I say that both are.
ROBERT: I agree with that. But are you saying that evolution will not proceed in its normal way--that through genetic enhancements we'll be able to increase brain size?
GRAHAM: Well, the historical data tell us that we now have a brain roughly three times the size of our hominid predecessors. But several other things have to happen here. You have to increase the bone structure to support a larger head. You have to increase the size of the pelvis, to allow the head to pass through the birth canal.
ROBERT: But I don't think that brain size has any relationship to what we do with our brains. If we need amplification or artificial intelligence, it's right there. What we're doing with our current brain size has not been all that good.
EDWARD DE BONO: We need better software for our brains.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Exactly. As Robert mentioned earlier, there has been an enormous transformation in the past millennium, but not any in brain size or function; that is, there has been no change in the hardware--what we call the wetware. What has changed has been the introduction of an enormous number of new knowledge artifacts into our collective culture--artifacts that we store and use and build upon, such as new concepts, new vocabulary, new technologies, and so on.
EDWARD DE BONO: Here's an example of what I mean by better software. Our normal argument mode is a primitive and often barbaric method of thinking and should be supplanted by parallel thinking. Parallel processing in humans, not machines. One large corporation, using a framework I designed for parallel thinking, reduced discussion time on a national project from twenty days to two. Two days! Huge increases in productivity, just from using better thinking software.
ROBERT: What about the role of emotions and feeling in the thinking process? Aren't we leaving these out?
SHEP: Emotion--that brings me back to the notion of perception. It seems to me that perception, as Edward [De Bono] is describing it, is really the interpretation of observations; and the way we perceive comes from our background, the memories we have, our emotional state, the stake we have in observing something one way or another. The result is that the same observation will be interpreted, or perceived, in many, many different ways. For example, the Greeks noted that people with cancer became depressed, so they were certain that depression was the cause of cancer. Although [coincidentally] they may turn out to be partially right, this was a mistake in interpreting observation, which is a mistake in perception. How do we solve the problem of what people bring to the perception in the first place?
EDWARD DE BONO: That's the point; you're right. Perception is the aggregate of experience, emotions, momentary attitudes, and the like. We can develop methods of changing perceptions--for example, by encouraging different ways of looking at the same situation.
ROBERT: Are there dangers of programming thinking so carefully?
EDWARD DE BONO: No, no. These are just tools that open up a broader scan, and as a result your emotions change. So I agree that perceptions are the result of upbringing, background, chemical levels at the moment, but they're not immutable.
SHEP: The historical progress of science has been made on the basis of changed perceptions of the same observations or data.
EDWARD DE BONO: A hypothesis is a perceptual change. And it's sad that even in leading universities where I've been--Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, London--so little time is spent on generating hypotheses. A senior executive in the CNRS--the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, in Paris--once said to me, "I want you to help my scientists generate hypotheses. They've been told that science is the analysis of data, and deductive conclusions. But without hypotheses, you can't get anywhere."
ROBERT: You're talking about inductive thinking.
EDWARD DE BONO: It's more. It's what you bring to the data. The analysis of data won't produce new ideas. The brain can see only what it is prepared to see. It's your hypothesis, your speculation, that says, "Let's look at this situation from this viewpoint; now what do we see?"
BRIAN: Hypothesis guides induction, but inductive logic doesn't give you the hypothesis.
ROBERT: Inductive logic evaluates the hypothesis.
EDWARD DE BONO: Exactly.
ROBERT: Ed, are you a closet reductionist? Do you believe that thinking is completely knowable?
ED FEIGENBAUM: I'm not in the closet. I'm an out-front reductionist. Edward [De Bono] has said that thinking is software. I would say that thinking is software plus knowledge, running on an information-processing device. This device is the brain, and it can be understood, or known, at various levels. It's known at psychological levels; it's known at neurophysiological levels; it's known at molecular levels. It's complex, and although it's not completely known, it's completely knowable. There is no magic in our heads.
EDWARD DE BONO: I agree with that entirely. But one of the difficulties is that the universe changes. If you're looking at a passive information universe, the things you can know are very different from the things you can know if you're looking at a self-organizing information universe. Now, we know a lot about self-organizing systems. For instance, we know that provocation is a necessity, otherwise you get bogged down at a local equilibrium and you can never get more global.
ROBERT: If you have a self-organizing system with high complexity and emergent properties, it may be impossible to provide predictable explanatory mechanisms below the observable level, no matter how much analysis you do.
EDWARD DE BONO: You can analyze the behavior; you might be able to predict consequences, but you may not be able to predict exactly.
BRIAN: There are still dynamics that you can study. And there is still no magic.
ROBERT: We can't logically exclude the possibility that there may be other things that exist in the nature of reality that affect human thinking. There are religious views, spiritual views, other nonreductive theories of mind that deny that thinking can ever be totally reduced to computer programs. Do you believe that human-level thinking can be totally reducible to computer programs?
EDWARD DE BONO: No. Not computer programs, because computers don't work that way yet.
ROBERT: Yet? But ultimately, will they? This is the key question.
EDWARD DE BONO: Yes, sure.
SHEP: The discredited vitalist philosophers believed that no biological function was ultimately knowable. We now believe that all biological function is ultimately knowable. Human thought, just like human biology, is all ultimately explainable. I'm the ultimate reductionist.
BRIAN: The physical system is all that exists. The question is whether we can ever actually write down the state of the physical system in complete detail, and then write down the equations that govern it--so that we can predict what you'll be thinking five minutes from now. It's not at all clear that that will ever happen.
EDWARD DE BONO: I agree. I'd make an analogy to the relationship between the dancer and the dance. The dancer is the biological system, the dance is the performance. You can't necessarily predict the dance from the nature of the dancer, but the dance is dependent directly and solely on the dancer. Similarly, you can't necessarily predict thinking from the nature of the biological system, but thinking is dependent directly and solely on the biological system.
SHEP: Otto Loewi, who discovered acetylcholine, the chemical transmitter that excites muscle cells [and enables neurons to communicate in the brain], is supposed to have said, during a concert by the Guarneri String Quartet, that "there must be more to this than just a little acetylcholine." But that doesn't make the function unknowable at all. But speaking of transphysical things, let me ask Graham [Molitor] a question. Since all thought is value-tinged, and we're talking about methods of thinking, is there a role for philosophy, for theology, for examining the values of our society as we develop new methods of thinking?
GRAHAM: Well, philosophy and theology are regulatory mechanisms for controlling what is abroad in society. They are key, and they're responsible for major jumps--what scientists like to call paradigm shifts--in our values and our lifestyle. The most recent of these shifts occurred during the Renaissance, and we're in the middle of another one, which is mainly driven by computer science and artificial intelligence--all these things we've been talking about. If you think you're the ultimate reductionist, I'm probably the penultimate. We'll crack the genetic code, we'll understand how to encode life, and I see the same kind of principles applied to neural technology, to enhancing the brain. It will take a long time, but it will come.
ROBERT: I'll bring it back to the "perceptions" with which we started. Those of us schooled in science naturally come at the question of the contemporary relevance of philosophy or theology from a different perspective than do philosophers or theologians--or most ordinary people for that matter. We have to ask ourselves, Is our scientific method of thinking the sole system for accessing truth? Is our way the only way to view the world, examine reality, and understand thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: Let's go back to the moral point. In England there's a school that accepts kids who are too violent to be taught in ordinary schools. When this school started teaching them broad perceptual thinking, the level of violence dropped to one-eighth of what it had been previously.
ROBERT: Let's take a prediction. One hundred years from now, what has happened to thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: Every school in the world will be teaching my thinking methods. Kids will be much more productive, much more tolerant of one another, much more able to create value for themselves and for society.
BRIAN: We'll have better theories about some things. We'll have new tools that we can use. Look at the computing power you have on your desk right now, just running a word processor. You can analyze dynamical systems that nobody could analyze twenty years ago. Assisted thinking will lead to better and better predictions of complex systems.
SHEP: I think there'll be increasing recognition of the basic irrationality of human thought processes, and of the necessity for the kinds of changes that we've been talking about here.
GRAHAM: No matter how much we talk about the subjective or theoretical dimensions of existence, the basic sciences are what drive society. And by the year 2100 certainly, and probably before, the life sciences--particularly genetic engineering--will dominate society. It's the opening of a new era--with Dolly [the cloned sheep] and the complete description of the human genome being the major benchmarks--in which humankind will control its own evolution.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Not only will we have very powerful artifacts in the form of computers, and pattern-recognition machines to handle perception, but the construction of those machines will lead to a science of thought which is every bit as rigorous and useful for prediction as what we have now in chemistry and physics.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
SO how do we assess the last millennium? Often the smarter we got, it seems, the stupider we acted. Rational, linear thought produced the most efficient social advancement, but also the most destructive human debasement. This is what happens when value-free analysis serves the capricious whims of conventional human nature. You get amplification: good gets better but bad gets worse. Genocide has frequently occurred alongside the most advanced science, several of the worst examples in our own twentieth century. So if we continue to be arrogant, bigoted, greedy and jingoistic, then rational thinking will continue to generate maximal trauma. Rational thinking makes good technology, but our cognitive processes must grow in order for humanity to prosper. Human thinking must change. We need novel, original ideas that can enable us to leap beyond the traditional boundaries of inquiry and establish new standards of value creation. We need synergy and harmony between rational and postrational thinking, the left and right wheels of our mental motor car working together. Our thinking must become creative and holistic as well as analytic and diagnostic. Try this combination of both kinds of thinking in your personal life, and your decision making will undoubtedly improve. It is the best thinking that brings us closer to truth.
Editor's Translations:
"On the whole, our thinking has been rather disastrous. The three Greeks--Plato, Aristotle, Socrates--really wrecked Western thinking, which has been concerned only with truth, analysis, judgment, argument. This type of thinking has led to persecutions, wars, discrimination, pogroms. What we've left out is "What can be?" thinking. "What can be?" thinking is design, creativity, synthesis--putting things together to achieve something new. We've had a very limited thinking system--a system excellent in itself, but only as the front left wheel of a motor car is excellent. By itself, it's inadequate."
[總體上, 我們的思想是相當慘敗的。 三個希臘人-- 柏拉圖, 阿里斯多德, 蘇格拉底-- 真正地擊毀了西方思想˙ 西方思想只關心真相, 分析, 評斷, 論據。 這類型思想導致了迫害, 戰爭, 歧視, 屠殺。 我們忽略了"什麼是可能的?" 思想。 "什麼是可能的?" 思想是設計, 創意, 綜合-- 彙集創新。 我們的思想系統非常有限-- 本質上可說是很優秀, 就像一個汽車的前面左輪子很優秀。 單獨, 它是不夠的。]
--- Edward DeBono
"Hypotheses are creative possibilities, and progress always comes from creating new possibilities. Indeed, Chinese culture, which was way ahead of the West two thousand years ago, came to a dead end, because they never developed the possibilities of hypotheses."
[假設是創意的可能性˙ 進展總來自創意可能性。 中國文化二千年前遙遙領先, 可是來到了死角, 因為他們從未發展假設的可能性。]
--- Edward DeBono
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: How Did We Think in the Last Millennium?
Illustration(s): Edward de Bono, Edward Feigenbaum, Graham T.T. Molitor, Bruce Murray, Sherwin Nuland, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/208/208transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/06)
How Did We Think in the Last Millennium?
WHAT will the new millennium bring? To forecast the future, we should process the past. The last thousand years have been astonishing in their extremes. Humanity was wondrously transformed--from knights on horseback to kids on computers--but the price paid was very high. So much collective suffering; so much individual agony. If how we think helps to define how we live, then it should be useful to look at the thought processes that led to the triumphs, as well as the ravages, of civilization. Our future may depend on our ability to think, and perhaps think differently than we have in the past. So let's attempt to understand the nature of thinking itself--rational versus creative thinking; deductive versus inductive thinking; logic versus perception; analysis versus synthesis; game theory, heuristics, algorithms, the "expert systems" of artificial intelligence. What does each contribute to our intellectual and material advancement, and how do they further (or inhibit) our personal, social and political relations? If we can think more clearly, shouldn't we be able to live more happily? Understanding thinking--its categories and applications--is the specialty of our panel. What's particularly interesting is how the diversity of their fields affects the direction of their thinking.
PARTICIPANTS
Edward de Bono, author of over fifty books, including Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step and De Bono's Thinking Course, is an international authority in both creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking. Edward calls for design, synthesis, and creativity in human thinking.
Dr. Edward Feigenbaum, a professor of computer science at Stanford, is often called the father of expert systems, which are software programs that incorporate the best human thinking. Ed explains how artificial intelligence can assist our thinking.
Graham T.T. Molitor, a prolific author about the future, is vice president and legal counsel of the World Future Society. Graham believes that our brains will ultimately be enhanced through advances in genetics and neuroscience.
Dr. Sherwin (Shep) Nuland, a surgeon and medical ethicist at Yale University School of Medicine, is the author of How We Die, a poetic book describing the end of the human lifecycle. Shep sees human beings as mostly irrational by nature.
Dr. Brian Skyrms, a professor of philosophy and social science at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of Evolution of the Social Contract. Brian examines the nature and tools of thinking.
ROBERT: Edward, you've taught creativity and thinking to schools and corporations throughout the world. What are your notions about how we handled these matters over the last millennium? Why such extremes?
EDWARD DE BONO: On the whole, our thinking has been rather disastrous. The three Greeks--Plato, Aristotle, Socrates--really wrecked Western thinking, which has been concerned only with truth, analysis, judgment, argument. This type of thinking has led to persecutions, wars, discrimination, pogroms. What we've left out is "What can be?" thinking. "What can be?" thinking is design, creativity, synthesis--putting things together to achieve something new. We've had a very limited thinking system--a system excellent in itself, but only as the front left wheel of a motor car is excellent. By itself, it's inadequate.
ROBERT: Ed, how can so-called expert systems help us understand human thinking?
ED FEIGENBAUM: Expert systems are part of a field in computer science called artificial intelligence, wherein scientists and engineers are attempting to create models of human thinking, primarily the models of thinking that Edward [De Bono] was just calling "the front left wheel" of the automobile--namely, logical thinking. Expert systems are attempts to model the knowledge and the expertise of first-class human professionals [for example, physicians], who are practicing their professions at very high levels of performance. This relates to the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence: to generate programs that are extremely intelligent--that is, beyond human capability.
ROBERT: Brian, as a philosopher you've explored the concepts of decision making and rational choice. What is a "social contract" and how can it help us understand the collective thinking of the last millennium?
BRIAN: The social contract is a metaphor for a kind of tacit agreement, or deal, that people make in order to form a society and live together in it. A lot of philosophers try to justify ethical rules by saying that they would be part of an ideal social contract. But we can also think about how the actual social contract of real institutions arises from evolutionary and learning processes. That's the sort of thing I'm interested in.
ROBERT: Shep, you're a surgeon who has written two extraordinary sensitive books, How We Die and How We Live. Do you see a shift in human thinking as we enter a new millennium?
SHEP: Not essentially. To me, human thinking is unfortunately irrational. We retreat to magical thinking at every opportunity. As much as I applaud attempts to make thought processes coherent and complete--to put four wheels on that automobile--I think ultimately we're dealing with a flawed creature and a flawed way of putting information and memories together.
ROBERT: Can't we improve our thinking?
SHEP: We certainly can improve it. That's what this is all about.
ROBERT: Good, we'll give it a shot. Graham, as a futurist, you usually look forward. But start by looking backward.
GRAHAM: The last thousand years had some extraordinary benchmarks. We came out of the depths of the Dark Ages and we launched this world of ours into the era of the Enlightenment. We spawned great scientists and inventors, like Leonardo Da Vinci--many of the things he conceived became reality. Then in the last two hundred years came the development of mechanization, mass production, electricity, nuclear energy--all of these powerful mechanisms that drive society and provide the foundations of our economy and the basis of our livelihoods.
ROBERT: But in what direction are these mechanisms taking us? Let's explore the nature of thinking by comparing those left and right front wheels--rational thinking and what we might call postrational thinking. Let's start with rational thinking. Brian, talk about some of its components, such as deductive and inductive thinking.
BRIAN: Deductive thinking, or deductive logic, is the kind of logic used in pure mathematics--that is, how we think about mathematical objects and their relations to one another. You don't have to know anything about the real world to understand deductive thinking.
ROBERT: It's like tenth-grade geometry, where we used axioms and rules of logic to develop proofs of theorems.
BRIAN: That's part of it, of course. But if you want to look at the real world and try to confirm your scientific theories or your medical diagnoses or what you think is the truth of a legal case, then you have to use inductive logic and inductive thinking. Inductive thinking deals with evidence.
ROBERT: It starts with data, the messy stuff in the world around us, and then we develop theories to explain that data, always testing the theories by doing experiments and making predictions.
BRIAN: In the real world, you cannot know the truth of any theory with the absolute certainty of formal logic.
ROBERT: Ed, in the work you've done in artificial intelligence, there are two concepts you use which I'd like you to define for us: heuristics and algorithms.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Well, first I should say that I see thinking as a discovery process, not a deductive process--discovery in a very large space of possibilities. Heuristics are those pieces of knowledge--tricks and rules of thumb--that allow us to prune that space of possibilities in order to get to acceptable solutions in a reasonable amount of time. These acceptable solutions aren't necessarily optimal, aren't necessarily the best, but they're good enough. Herbert Simon, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, coined the word "satisficing" to distinguish the process from optimizing. Now that's where algorithms come in. Algorithms are structured pieces of mathematical and logical thinking that computer scientists and mathematicians use that lead you step by step to an answer that is guaranteed to be the correct answer, but it could take a very long time to get there. Heuristics are shortcuts; you could call them elements of the art of good guessing, the knowledge that goes into pruning that big space of possibilities. It's what expert chess players know that novice chess players don't.
ROBERT: Chess is a wonderful field for analyzing algorithms and heuristics. You might think that since there are only sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces, a supercomputer could consider all the moves in a normal game. But if this supercomputer were required to consider all the legal moves in a forty-move game of chess before making its first move, the universe would burn out before that first move could be made.
ED FEIGENBAUM: That's right. The total number of possibilities at the opening of a chess game is 1 followed by 120 zeros. It's impossible to calculate, so chess players use all kinds of heuristics. Here's one, for example: In the opening of a chess game, don't move the pawns at the edges of the board; focus on control of the center.
ROBERT: Edward, let's check the right wheel of your mental motor car--the other side of logic, analysis, and judgment.
EDWARD DE BONO: Something like ninety percent of all errors in thinking are errors of perception--this is indicated by work done by David Perkins at the Harvard Graduate School of Education--yet culturally we focus on logic. But logic can't even begin to be applied until there are concepts with which the logic can work, and these concepts are rooted in perception. Historically, we focused on logic because we assumed that the perceptions were given and obvious, but only in some cases is this true.
ROBERT: What is your perception of "perception?"
EDWARD DE BONO: Perception is a different system from logic. Perception works as a self-organizing information system. Logic works in what I call a passive surface system. And the differences are huge. I'll give you a practical example of the differences. Imagine the bottom of a diamond mine in South Africa, with illiterate workers who have never been to school in their lives, who come from seven different tribes, and so on. They used to have two hundred and ten major fights, disputes, grievances every month. So we started teaching them how to think. Those two hundred and ten fights a month dropped to just four. It made a huge difference to their lives: productivity is up, absenteeism is down, safety is up. One can teach thinking very directly. I'm involved in schools in many countries now, doing just that.
ROBERT: What's the theory underlying lateral thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: Lateral thinking tells you that if you look at self-organizing information systems--how we think--they form patterns that are asymmetric, meaning that from the end of the pattern you can see all the way back to the beginning, but from the beginning of the pattern you cannot see all the way forward to the end. Lateral thinking is [a way to deal with this asymmetry], and it's based on the process of provocation--and we've coined a new word, "po," which means "provocative operation." For instance, in the case of river pollution, you put in a provocation by stipulating that factories should use their own pollution. It sounds illogical, but from that comes an idea which is now the law in many countries--that if you build a factory on a river, your water input has to be downstream from your own output, so that you're the first to get your pollution.
ROBERT: Provocations are intermediate steps for creating new ideas; they are deliberately unsettling and disturb the current equilibrium.
EDWARD DE BONO: Provocations allow us to jump from one equilibrium to another. Once you're there, you see in hindsight that such new ideas are of course obvious. There are various techniques of lateral thinking--random input is another; they're all based on asymmetric patterns in self-organizing systems.
ROBERT: How do hypotheses figure in your system of thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: We can talk about testing hypotheses, but where do the hypotheses come from? Hypotheses are creative possibilities, and progress always comes from creating new possibilities. Indeed, Chinese culture, which was way ahead of the West two thousand years ago, came to a dead end, because they never developed the possibilities of hypotheses.
ROBERT: How do you break out of the normal, or traditional, way of thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: You need to look at thinking as the operation of a self-organizing system. There are various tools, such as attention-directing tools. Let's give an example. One of the simplest tools we use in school is called the PMI--Plus, Minus, Interesting. I asked a class of thirty kids, "Would it be a good idea if you were paid to come to school every week?" Thirty out of thirty said, "Great we'd love it; we can buy candy, chewing gum, comics." I didn't argue with them; I didn't ask, "What about this, what about that?" Instead, we introduced the PMI, and they thought about my question in terms of plus points, minus points, and interesting points. At the end of the session, twenty-nine out of thirty had changed their minds. On their own, they had conducted a little perceptual scan; there was a bigger picture to see, and as a result their perceptions changed and their decision changed. Emotions changed, too, and that's key. If you change perception, you change emotions. Logic will never change emotions; perceptions will.
ROBERT: Brian, let's talk about game theory. This is a relatively new area of thinking that is often used in behavioral science.
BRIAN: Game theory is a misnomer. It's really the theory of strategic interaction. It was called game theory because games like chess are special examples of strategic interaction. But of course there are many such examples: war, international politics, coalition formation, oligarchies controlling prices, and so forth. These are all situations where what's good for me depends on what the other guys do. And what's good for them depends on what I do. You can't optimize your position without worrying about how the other guys are optimizing their positions.
ROBERT: So this kind of thinking doesn't occur in isolation; you have to be concerned about what the other person is thinking.
BRIAN: You have to model the other person's thinking, you have to model his thinking about your thinking, and so on. It can get very complicated.
ROBERT: But this is closer to the real world?
BRIAN: This is closer to the real world. The question is, How many levels up do you have to model before you can get a sufficiently good answer? Game theory is a kind of deep dynamic analysis that explains how people grope their way to a solution, so that when they are finally at a solution point, each is happy with what the other thinks, and with what the other thinks you think, and with what each is doing. These strategic interaction problems are solved not only by people but also by animals in all kinds of interactive systems.
EDWARD DE BONO: But there's an underlying point here, which is if you set out a strategy of "win-lose"--that is, I'll win because I'll make you lose--then your strategic thinking will follow that design. But if you set out a strategy of "win-win"--in other words, how can we both benefit?--your whole thinking structure will be different. It all depends on the underlying assumption.
BRIAN: Win-win is not always easy, because there may be different ways to win-win. If we want to coordinate something--say, if I want to meet you someplace, but we haven't decided where--win-win is when we both get to the same place. But I still have to worry about going to the place that you think I'm going to, and the same is true for you.
EDWARD DE BONO: Sure. But I meant that underlying game theory was the notion that one person wins and one person loses.
BRIAN: That was in the 1940s, when game theory was originally devised.1
{FOOTNOTE}1 Game theory is a new branch of mathematics that was conceived by John von Neumann, a mathematician, and Oskar Morgenstern, an economist, to solve problems in economics (e.g., optimum pricing strategies). Since then, game theory has been applied in politics (e.g., coalition building), military planning (e.g., strikes and counterstrikes), business (e.g., product positioning or plant locations)--situations in which there are a number of decision-making players who have similar, opposed or mixed interests.
But now, modern game theory deals mostly with situations of win-win or partial conflict and partial cooperation.
ROBERT: Graham, how much of the future is dependent upon ways of thinking? Wouldn't different mechanisms of thinking lead to different futures?
GRAHAM: Well, yes. But I think that the key to assessing the long-range future is recognizing that there are a thousand tiny threads that tie the tapestry of tomorrow together, and one must look back carefully to see what the precedents and benchmarks are. I take a little different approach to thinking. One gross measure has it that we use only approximately one to three percent of our brains. We may use no more than ten percent--which means that we can move up the scale, so that we can use, say, as much as ninety-seven percent of our brain capacity. Will we do that? I think the answer is yes. I go back and look at the crude surrogate for intellect--which is basically average brain size, the cubic centimeter measurement. For the first [hominids], it was about 500 cubic centimeters, and it's about three times that today. By the year 3000, with advances in genetics, my feeling is that the size of the human brain will increase drastically, up to as much as 2,000 cubic centimeters.
ROBERT: That three-percent brain utilization idea sounds to me like a popular misconception. And I question the wisdom, if not the ultimate technology, of brain enlargement.
SHEP: Wait. Why should brain size increase, if we're only using three to ten percent? Wouldn't cultural evolution simply mean that we'll begin using ten to fifteen to twenty percent, and therefore there's no evolutionary need for brain size to increase?
EDWARD DE BONO: The pinheads will be happy.
SHEP: Furthermore, the last significant evolutionary change in human brain size occurred twenty-five thousand to forty thousand years ago, and in spite of the enormity of the input that humanity has been subjected to, our brain size hasn't changed one bit since.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Graham [Molitor]'s argument completely ignores the growth of artificial intelligence. When computers are doing a great deal of our thinking, there will be no evolutionary pressures to increase our biological brains' capacity.
GRAHAM: Well, I'll go a step further. Right now, we can augment our visual and auditory capabilities through implants. There will be a lot more of that--and I agree with you a hundred percent that this is another technological trend.
EDWARD DE BONO: You can simulate a brain with only five neurons on a computer; that brain is capable of fifty billion thoughts. Five neurons, fifty billion thoughts. We've got a hundred billion neurons. So brain size, I think, is irrelevant. It's how we use what we've got that counts.
GRAHAM: Well, I said it was a crude surrogate. There's also the long-standing conundrum about whether genetics or environment is the controlling factor [in intelligence]--I say that both are.
ROBERT: I agree with that. But are you saying that evolution will not proceed in its normal way--that through genetic enhancements we'll be able to increase brain size?
GRAHAM: Well, the historical data tell us that we now have a brain roughly three times the size of our hominid predecessors. But several other things have to happen here. You have to increase the bone structure to support a larger head. You have to increase the size of the pelvis, to allow the head to pass through the birth canal.
ROBERT: But I don't think that brain size has any relationship to what we do with our brains. If we need amplification or artificial intelligence, it's right there. What we're doing with our current brain size has not been all that good.
EDWARD DE BONO: We need better software for our brains.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Exactly. As Robert mentioned earlier, there has been an enormous transformation in the past millennium, but not any in brain size or function; that is, there has been no change in the hardware--what we call the wetware. What has changed has been the introduction of an enormous number of new knowledge artifacts into our collective culture--artifacts that we store and use and build upon, such as new concepts, new vocabulary, new technologies, and so on.
EDWARD DE BONO: Here's an example of what I mean by better software. Our normal argument mode is a primitive and often barbaric method of thinking and should be supplanted by parallel thinking. Parallel processing in humans, not machines. One large corporation, using a framework I designed for parallel thinking, reduced discussion time on a national project from twenty days to two. Two days! Huge increases in productivity, just from using better thinking software.
ROBERT: What about the role of emotions and feeling in the thinking process? Aren't we leaving these out?
SHEP: Emotion--that brings me back to the notion of perception. It seems to me that perception, as Edward [De Bono] is describing it, is really the interpretation of observations; and the way we perceive comes from our background, the memories we have, our emotional state, the stake we have in observing something one way or another. The result is that the same observation will be interpreted, or perceived, in many, many different ways. For example, the Greeks noted that people with cancer became depressed, so they were certain that depression was the cause of cancer. Although [coincidentally] they may turn out to be partially right, this was a mistake in interpreting observation, which is a mistake in perception. How do we solve the problem of what people bring to the perception in the first place?
EDWARD DE BONO: That's the point; you're right. Perception is the aggregate of experience, emotions, momentary attitudes, and the like. We can develop methods of changing perceptions--for example, by encouraging different ways of looking at the same situation.
ROBERT: Are there dangers of programming thinking so carefully?
EDWARD DE BONO: No, no. These are just tools that open up a broader scan, and as a result your emotions change. So I agree that perceptions are the result of upbringing, background, chemical levels at the moment, but they're not immutable.
SHEP: The historical progress of science has been made on the basis of changed perceptions of the same observations or data.
EDWARD DE BONO: A hypothesis is a perceptual change. And it's sad that even in leading universities where I've been--Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, London--so little time is spent on generating hypotheses. A senior executive in the CNRS--the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, in Paris--once said to me, "I want you to help my scientists generate hypotheses. They've been told that science is the analysis of data, and deductive conclusions. But without hypotheses, you can't get anywhere."
ROBERT: You're talking about inductive thinking.
EDWARD DE BONO: It's more. It's what you bring to the data. The analysis of data won't produce new ideas. The brain can see only what it is prepared to see. It's your hypothesis, your speculation, that says, "Let's look at this situation from this viewpoint; now what do we see?"
BRIAN: Hypothesis guides induction, but inductive logic doesn't give you the hypothesis.
ROBERT: Inductive logic evaluates the hypothesis.
EDWARD DE BONO: Exactly.
ROBERT: Ed, are you a closet reductionist? Do you believe that thinking is completely knowable?
ED FEIGENBAUM: I'm not in the closet. I'm an out-front reductionist. Edward [De Bono] has said that thinking is software. I would say that thinking is software plus knowledge, running on an information-processing device. This device is the brain, and it can be understood, or known, at various levels. It's known at psychological levels; it's known at neurophysiological levels; it's known at molecular levels. It's complex, and although it's not completely known, it's completely knowable. There is no magic in our heads.
EDWARD DE BONO: I agree with that entirely. But one of the difficulties is that the universe changes. If you're looking at a passive information universe, the things you can know are very different from the things you can know if you're looking at a self-organizing information universe. Now, we know a lot about self-organizing systems. For instance, we know that provocation is a necessity, otherwise you get bogged down at a local equilibrium and you can never get more global.
ROBERT: If you have a self-organizing system with high complexity and emergent properties, it may be impossible to provide predictable explanatory mechanisms below the observable level, no matter how much analysis you do.
EDWARD DE BONO: You can analyze the behavior; you might be able to predict consequences, but you may not be able to predict exactly.
BRIAN: There are still dynamics that you can study. And there is still no magic.
ROBERT: We can't logically exclude the possibility that there may be other things that exist in the nature of reality that affect human thinking. There are religious views, spiritual views, other nonreductive theories of mind that deny that thinking can ever be totally reduced to computer programs. Do you believe that human-level thinking can be totally reducible to computer programs?
EDWARD DE BONO: No. Not computer programs, because computers don't work that way yet.
ROBERT: Yet? But ultimately, will they? This is the key question.
EDWARD DE BONO: Yes, sure.
SHEP: The discredited vitalist philosophers believed that no biological function was ultimately knowable. We now believe that all biological function is ultimately knowable. Human thought, just like human biology, is all ultimately explainable. I'm the ultimate reductionist.
BRIAN: The physical system is all that exists. The question is whether we can ever actually write down the state of the physical system in complete detail, and then write down the equations that govern it--so that we can predict what you'll be thinking five minutes from now. It's not at all clear that that will ever happen.
EDWARD DE BONO: I agree. I'd make an analogy to the relationship between the dancer and the dance. The dancer is the biological system, the dance is the performance. You can't necessarily predict the dance from the nature of the dancer, but the dance is dependent directly and solely on the dancer. Similarly, you can't necessarily predict thinking from the nature of the biological system, but thinking is dependent directly and solely on the biological system.
SHEP: Otto Loewi, who discovered acetylcholine, the chemical transmitter that excites muscle cells [and enables neurons to communicate in the brain], is supposed to have said, during a concert by the Guarneri String Quartet, that "there must be more to this than just a little acetylcholine." But that doesn't make the function unknowable at all. But speaking of transphysical things, let me ask Graham [Molitor] a question. Since all thought is value-tinged, and we're talking about methods of thinking, is there a role for philosophy, for theology, for examining the values of our society as we develop new methods of thinking?
GRAHAM: Well, philosophy and theology are regulatory mechanisms for controlling what is abroad in society. They are key, and they're responsible for major jumps--what scientists like to call paradigm shifts--in our values and our lifestyle. The most recent of these shifts occurred during the Renaissance, and we're in the middle of another one, which is mainly driven by computer science and artificial intelligence--all these things we've been talking about. If you think you're the ultimate reductionist, I'm probably the penultimate. We'll crack the genetic code, we'll understand how to encode life, and I see the same kind of principles applied to neural technology, to enhancing the brain. It will take a long time, but it will come.
ROBERT: I'll bring it back to the "perceptions" with which we started. Those of us schooled in science naturally come at the question of the contemporary relevance of philosophy or theology from a different perspective than do philosophers or theologians--or most ordinary people for that matter. We have to ask ourselves, Is our scientific method of thinking the sole system for accessing truth? Is our way the only way to view the world, examine reality, and understand thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: Let's go back to the moral point. In England there's a school that accepts kids who are too violent to be taught in ordinary schools. When this school started teaching them broad perceptual thinking, the level of violence dropped to one-eighth of what it had been previously.
ROBERT: Let's take a prediction. One hundred years from now, what has happened to thinking?
EDWARD DE BONO: Every school in the world will be teaching my thinking methods. Kids will be much more productive, much more tolerant of one another, much more able to create value for themselves and for society.
BRIAN: We'll have better theories about some things. We'll have new tools that we can use. Look at the computing power you have on your desk right now, just running a word processor. You can analyze dynamical systems that nobody could analyze twenty years ago. Assisted thinking will lead to better and better predictions of complex systems.
SHEP: I think there'll be increasing recognition of the basic irrationality of human thought processes, and of the necessity for the kinds of changes that we've been talking about here.
GRAHAM: No matter how much we talk about the subjective or theoretical dimensions of existence, the basic sciences are what drive society. And by the year 2100 certainly, and probably before, the life sciences--particularly genetic engineering--will dominate society. It's the opening of a new era--with Dolly [the cloned sheep] and the complete description of the human genome being the major benchmarks--in which humankind will control its own evolution.
ED FEIGENBAUM: Not only will we have very powerful artifacts in the form of computers, and pattern-recognition machines to handle perception, but the construction of those machines will lead to a science of thought which is every bit as rigorous and useful for prediction as what we have now in chemistry and physics.
ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT
SO how do we assess the last millennium? Often the smarter we got, it seems, the stupider we acted. Rational, linear thought produced the most efficient social advancement, but also the most destructive human debasement. This is what happens when value-free analysis serves the capricious whims of conventional human nature. You get amplification: good gets better but bad gets worse. Genocide has frequently occurred alongside the most advanced science, several of the worst examples in our own twentieth century. So if we continue to be arrogant, bigoted, greedy and jingoistic, then rational thinking will continue to generate maximal trauma. Rational thinking makes good technology, but our cognitive processes must grow in order for humanity to prosper. Human thinking must change. We need novel, original ideas that can enable us to leap beyond the traditional boundaries of inquiry and establish new standards of value creation. We need synergy and harmony between rational and postrational thinking, the left and right wheels of our mental motor car working together. Our thinking must become creative and holistic as well as analytic and diagnostic. Try this combination of both kinds of thinking in your personal life, and your decision making will undoubtedly improve. It is the best thinking that brings us closer to truth.
Editor's Translations:
"On the whole, our thinking has been rather disastrous. The three Greeks--Plato, Aristotle, Socrates--really wrecked Western thinking, which has been concerned only with truth, analysis, judgment, argument. This type of thinking has led to persecutions, wars, discrimination, pogroms. What we've left out is "What can be?" thinking. "What can be?" thinking is design, creativity, synthesis--putting things together to achieve something new. We've had a very limited thinking system--a system excellent in itself, but only as the front left wheel of a motor car is excellent. By itself, it's inadequate."
[總體上, 我們的思想是相當慘敗的。 三個希臘人-- 柏拉圖, 阿里斯多德, 蘇格拉底-- 真正地擊毀了西方思想˙ 西方思想只關心真相, 分析, 評斷, 論據。 這類型思想導致了迫害, 戰爭, 歧視, 屠殺。 我們忽略了"什麼是可能的?" 思想。 "什麼是可能的?" 思想是設計, 創意, 綜合-- 彙集創新。 我們的思想系統非常有限-- 本質上可說是很優秀, 就像一個汽車的前面左輪子很優秀。 單獨, 它是不夠的。]
--- Edward DeBono
"Hypotheses are creative possibilities, and progress always comes from creating new possibilities. Indeed, Chinese culture, which was way ahead of the West two thousand years ago, came to a dead end, because they never developed the possibilities of hypotheses."
[假設是創意的可能性˙ 進展總來自創意可能性。 中國文化二千年前遙遙領先, 可是來到了死角, 因為他們從未發展假設的可能性。]
--- Edward DeBono
-- Bevin Chu
Explanation: How Did We Think in the Last Millennium?
Illustration(s): Edward de Bono, Edward Feigenbaum, Graham T.T. Molitor, Bruce Murray, Sherwin Nuland, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/208/208transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect
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