The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 129

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Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference.

According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.

ADA’S LASTING LESSON: POETICAL SCIENCE

That leads to a final lesson, one that takes us back to Ada Lovelace. As she pointed out, in our symbiosis with machines we humans have brought one crucial element to the partnership: creativity. The history of the digital age—from Bush to Licklider to Engelbart to Jobs, from SAGE to Google to Wikipedia to Watson—has reinforced this idea. And as long as we remain a creative species, this is likely to hold true. “The machines will be more rational and analytic,” IBM’s research director John Kelly says. “People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.”³⁵

We humans can remain relevant in an era of cognitive computing because we are able to think different, something that an algorithm, almost by definition, can’t master. We possess an imagination that, as Ada said, “brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations.” We discern patterns and appreciate their beauty. We weave information into narratives. We are storytelling as well as social animals.

Human creativity involves values, intentions, aesthetic judgments, emotions, personal consciousness, and a moral sense. These are what the arts and humanities teach us—and why those realms are as valuable a part of education as science, technology, engineering, and math. If we mortals are to uphold our end of the human-computer symbiosis, if we are to retain a role as the creative partners of our machines, we must continue to nurture the wellsprings of our imagination and originality and humanity. That is what we bring to the party.

At his product launches, Steve Jobs would conclude with a slide, projected on the screen behind him, of street signs showing the intersection of the Liberal Arts and Technology. At his last such appearance, for the iPad 2 in 2011, he stood in front of that image and declared, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” That’s what made him the most creative technology innovator of our era.

The converse to this paean to the humanities, however, is also true. People who love the arts and humanities should endeavor to appreciate the beauties of math and physics, just as Ada did. Otherwise, they will be left as bystanders at the intersection of arts and science, where most digital-age creativity will occur. They will surrender control of that territory to the engineers.

Many people who celebrate the arts and the humanities, who applaud vigorously the tributes to their importance in our schools, will proclaim without shame (and sometimes even joke) that they don’t understand math or physics. They extoll the virtues of learning Latin, but they are clueless about how to write an algorithm or tell BASIC from C++, Python from Pascal. They consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be Philistines, yet they might merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, or an integral and a differential equation. These concepts may seem difficult. Yes, but so, too, is Hamlet. And like Hamlet, each of these concepts is beautiful. Like an elegant mathematical equation, they are expressions of the glories of the universe.

C. P. Snow was right about the need to respect both of “the two cultures,” science and the humanities. But even more important today is understanding how they intersect. Those who helped lead the technology revolution were people in the tradition of Ada, who could combine science and the humanities. From her father came a poetic streak and from her mother a mathematical one, and it instilled in her a love for what she called “poetical science.” Her father defended the Luddites who smashed mechanical looms, but Ada loved how punch cards instructed those looms to weave beautiful patterns, and she envisioned how this wondrous combination of art and technology could be manifest in computers.

The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media.

This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.

I.?A neuron is a nerve cell that transmits information using electrical or chemical signals. A synapse is a structure or pathway that carries a signal from a neuron to another neuron or cell.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the people who gave me interviews and provided information, including Bob Albrecht, Al Alcorn, Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, Stewart Brand, Dan Bricklin, Larry Brilliant, John Seeley Brown, Nolan Bushnell, Jean Case, Steve Case, Vint Cerf, Wes Clark, Steve Crocker, Lee Felsenstein, Bob Frankston, Bob Kahn, Alan Kay, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Andy Grove, Justin Hall, Bill Joy, Jim Kimsey, Leonard Kleinrock, Tracy Licklider, Liza Loop, David McQueeney, Gordon Moore, John Negroponte, Larry Page, Howard Rheingold, Larry Roberts, Arthur Rock, Virginia Rometty, Ben Rosen, Steve Russell, Eric Schmidt, Bob Taylor, Paul Terrell, Jimmy Wales, Evan Williams, and Steve Wozniak. I’m also grateful to people who gave useful advice along the way, including Ken Auletta, Larry Cohen, David Derbes, John Doerr, John Hollar, John Markoff, Lynda Resnick, Joe Zeff, and Michael Moritz.

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