The Information Revolution

Claim: The information revolution is a more profound transformation to humankind that the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution.

Machines, the outgrowth of the industrial revolution affected manual work: the machines had more brawn than humans. People could move more earth, more ore, more water than before; they could fly and move faster than ever. Machines provided a model for understanding nature and society: the functioning of the celestial bodies or of the human body or of society was explained as the functioning of a machine. In a benevolent view, machines were seen as extending the physical reach of humankind, allowing us to explore the earth and, ultimately, the skies. In a less benevolent view, the mechanization of society was seen as a threat -- think of "Metropolis", by Lang or "Modern Times" by Chaplin-- with humans becoming subservient to dehumanizing machines in large mechanical factories or machine like cities. Finally, men progressively lost his central place in the universe, as the earth stopped being the center of the universe, with the Copernican revolution and the human race became just a race like any other, with the Darwinian revolution. "Manufacturing" stopping meaning the same as "Hand made", and "hand made" became a label of quality justifying higher prices.

Thinking machines, in a benevolent view, extend our cognitive abilities: they allow us to collect and process more information and to better communicate. They profoundly affect the Information economy -- which is, increasingly, the larger chunk of our economy. But they also are profoundly threatening. In a not too far future, machines will have "more brains' than human; they already do so, in many specific domains: They outcompute us, and outplay us in chess. They will do so in more and more cognitive domains. Machines will be able to ingest data, analyze it and take decisions faster than human beings, so that the "human in the loop" will be a weak spot that slows decision making and add risks, as it is already becoming in tasks such as flying aircrafts. Eventually, "brain thought" will acquire a similar connotation as "hand made": a song or a movie made the old way, by a sentient human, will have extra value as compared to the cheaper and better finished computer product. This will dethrone the human race from the last place were it is still at the center of the known universe; namely the area of intelligence, of cognitive abilities. The mechanization of thought will be seen as a threat in a world were humans become subservient to machine thinking -- think of the movie War Games, where a computer threatens to start World War III, believing it is playing a computer game.

Computer Scientists must be very aware of this risk, as a Luddite movement is quite likely. We need to ensure that the beast is under control: that we know how to ensure that software does what it is suppose to do, that robots obey the three laws of Asimov.