Dette er hentet fra kapittel 17 - The Tale of the Big Computer i boka "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe" av George Dyson.
Alt som ikke er direkte avskrift fra boka, og mine bemerkninger er satt i Trebuchet, mens avskrift er satt i Georgia. Alle lenker er naturligvis mine.
Kapitlet handler i stor grad om den svenske fysiker Hannes Alfvén (Nobelpris i 1970 for sitt arbeid innen magnetohydrodynamikk).
Hannes Alvén skrev også (under psevdonymet Oluf Johannesson - vedlegg) en Science-Fiction-roman som er oversatt til engelsk: The Tale of the Big Computer: A Vision.
Følgende fra George Dyson's bok viser at Hannes Alfvén på 1960-tallet ikke manglet visjoner:
"I was Scientific Advisor to the Swedish government, and had access to their plans to restructure Swedish society, which obviously could be made much more efficient with the help of computers, in the same way as earlier inventions had relieved us of heavy physical work", he added, explaining how he came to write the book. In Alfvén's vision, computers quickly eliminated two of the world's greatest threats: nuclear weapons and politicians. "When the computers developed, they would take over a great deal of the burden of the politicians, and sooner or later would also take over their power," he explained. "This need not be done by an ugly coup d'état; they would simply systematically outwit the politicians. It might even take a long time before the politicians understood that they had been rendered powerless. This is not a threat to us."
"Computers are designed to be problem solvers, whereas the politicians have inherited the stone age syndrome of the tribal chieftains, who take for granted that they can rule their people by making them hate and fight all other tribes", Alfvén continued. "if we have the choice of being govered by problem generating trouble makers, or by problem solvers, every sensible man of course prefer the latter".[1]
The mathematicians who were designing and programming the growing computer began suspect that "the problem of organizing society is so highly complex as to be insoluble by the human brain, or even by many brains working in collaboration." The subsequent proof of the "Sociological Complexity Theorem" led to a decision to turn to the organization of the human society, and the management of its social networks, over to the machines. ALl individuals were issued a device called "teletotal" connected to a global computer network with features similar to Google and Facebook of today. "Teletotal trew a bridge between the thought world of the computer - which operated at the speed of nano-seconds - and the thought world of the human brain, with its electrochemical impulses", Alfvén explained. "Since universal knowledge was stored in the memory units of computers and was thus easily accessible to one and all, the gap of those who knew and those who did not was closed ... and it was quite unnecessary to store any wisdom at all in the human brain."
Teletotal was followed by a miniaturized, wireless successor known as "minitotal", later supplemented by "neurototal", an implant kept "in permanent contact via VHF with the subject's minitotal" and surgically inserted into a nerve channel for direct connection to the brain. Human technicians maintained the growing computer network, with the computers, in return, looking after the health and welfare of their human symbionts as carefully as the Swedish government do today. "Health factories" kept human beings in good repair, cities were abandoned in favor of a decentralized, telecommuting life, and "shops became superfluous, for the goods in them could be examined from the customer's home ... if one wanted to buy something ... one pressed the purchase button." [2]
George Dyson's references:
1. Unpublished Preface to the Tale of the Big Computer, 1981.
Manuskriptet finnes i:
The Register of Hannes Alfven Papers
1945 - 1991
MSS 0225
Mandeville Special Collections Library
Geisel Library
University of California, San Diego
Writings of Hannes Alfven, Box 10, Folder 13
2. Hannes Alfvén (Oluf Johannesson): The Tale of the Big Computer, New York: Coward McCann, 1968