Silicon Insider: Computing Desire
B U R L I N G A M E, Calif., Dec. 12, 2000 -- We can measure the wink of a quark and the glimmer of quasar, but to plumb the depths of the mind of a man or woman is still beyond our reach.
As the endless presidential election has dragged on towards what appearsto be its culmination, much has been written about how this has been awonderful civics lesson for us all. That may be true, but an equallyimportant lesson for our time has been largely overlooked. It is theuncomfortable, ultimately impossible, fit of the digital age into thenatural world.
In an election fraught with ironies, here is one more: Al Gore, theputative inventor of the Internet, when faced with the perfect test of hisbelief in empirical solutions to the world’s problems, immediately threw outobjective, electro-mechanical vote counting in lieu of the most subjectiveof measurement schemes — teams of politically biased observers peering atincreasingly mangled paper ballots.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush, a man whohas spent his career in the most unpredictable industries imaginable, oilexploration and baseball, suddenly becomes the advocate of the cut-and-driedmachine solution to a complex and subtle problem well beyond the tolerancesof the machines in use.
Analog World, Digital Tools
Lying behind this debate, which is being resolved as you read thiscolumn, is a fundamental question about how we face the world. This is notan exaggeration, as you can see by the fact that the most powerful job onEarth — and perhaps all of our fates — is suddenly at the mercy of justthat question.
The problem is this: The world is analog, but our most powerful toolsare not. The universe has always existed with indeterminacy at its heart.As Plato noted, nothing in the natural world is pure, including events. Itis impossible for us to perfectly describe the state of anything at anytime.
We can build mathematical models to render a simplified description of,say, liquid in a vessel, but to completely describe it with mathematics wouldrequire an infinite number of variables. This is true for everything atevery moment in the history of the universe. The universe is analog, fieldstransforming in fields with no distinct steps in between.
A New Form of Measurement
We lived within this analog reality, and built our lives on it, from thebeginning of humanity. All that began to change a century or so ago withthe discovery of Boolean algebra and the construction of the first moderncomputing machines. Suddenly we not only had a new form of measurement,reducing events to the binary combination of 1s and 0s, but a pathway(ultimately described by Moore’s Law) to making that measurement ever-moreprecise.
Whereas analog measurement — in the form of slide rules,micrometers and electronic meters — increasingly hit a wall due to thelimitation of human beings to capture the result, digital could just keep ongetting more and more accurate. Try to measure the area of a Frisbee withwooden blocks and the answer is pretty coarse, but do the same thing with 10billion grains of sand and you can get pretty damn accurate.
Moreover, withdigital you can also move that information around without losing it in thesurrounding noise, as often happens with an analog signal. And best of all,you can just keep making the process more and more accurate.
With ever-greater precision (processing speed) and transportability(bandwidth), the triumph of digital was complete. The history of the lastfifty years can be read as one long struggle to move more and more parts ofhuman existence under the hegemony of the digital world.
And for goodreason: once you get a discipline — medicine, business, design, publishing,entertainment, etc. — into that sphere, it accelerates out of sight.Capability rockets up, while price and size falls; the combined metricsimproving, as Moore’s Law predicts, by a factor of two every couple years.
Cortext Conundrum
It has been an exhilarating run, producing more change in daily life inthe last half-century than humanity has known in the combined four thousandyears before it. But there is still that one pesky problem: the universeremains annoyingly analog. And nothing is more so than the most complicatedstructure we know of in the universe, the human brain.
There’s the dilemma. Ultimately, it all comes back to us. We can decide — as some cyber-extremists seem to suggest — to give up our irrationalityand emotion and subjectivity and become more like our digital machines — human computers.
That is not only personally horrifying for most of us, butalso seems profoundly wrong-headed: The universe spent 10 billion yearsbuilding this thing in our heads, and we’re going to surrender it? Thenwhat was the point?
But if we stick with our messy, analog cortexes, then we have a different problem. It is that our brains will often be at odds with our increasinglyprecise digital tools. A microprocessor already experiences more events inone second than we will face in our entire lifetimes. Our technology nowinhabits a timescape we literally cannot imagine.
That’s a good thing. It means that we can build airplanes and fetalmonitoring systems and space shuttles to tolerances and levels of reliability heretofore thought impossible. We can test scenarios on computers far beyond anything we would risk in real life.
But even as we built airplanes and cars and weapons of astounding reliability and precision, they are still at themercy of a madman with a gun, or a moron with the wrong fuel, or jerk withpoor judgment.
Computers for a Real World
That brings us back to the vote in Florida. There we have the perfectanalogy to the paradox of modern life. We have grown so accustomed to ourtools being nearly perfect that we are shocked when we find ourselves in theno man’s land beyond their level of precision.
No voting machine in theworld, being mechanical so it can be operated by the human hand, can achievethe accuracy we are demanding of it in this election. (A computer might, but they are vulnerable to another kind of human irrationality: hacking). Wehave grown accustomed to getting the “right” answer, and now discover it issimply beyond our reach.
So, stunned and betrayed by the realization that our machines aren’tperfect, we have embraced the subjective — manual counting. A century ofresearch into how human perception can be distorted by environment, bias and desire, and here we are with teams of election officials staring at dimpledchad.
But even worse, and perhaps this is the whole point of this column, we are also trying to determine the intent of voters that filled out the rest of the ballot, but apparently did not select a president. Vote the straightRepublican ticket? Then you must have voted for Bush, even if it doesn’tshow on the ballot.
In other words, we are treating people as if they weren’t subjective, but instead were machines. And the party shouting loudest for this perspectiveis the one most associated with allowing for human diversity.
Is there a way out of this? Not this time. We’ll have to muddlethrough, with just about everybody unhappy with either the result or how itwas achieved.
The good news is that analog technology is undergoing aRenaissance. It is increasingly obvious that digital computers are verybright, but deaf, dumb and blind. It is time to connect them to the realworld — and that means new generations of sensors, robotics and digitalsignal processing.
We may never plumb the full intentions of the man or woman preparing topull the lever in a voting booth. But in the next decade we may at least grow more comfortable with the result.
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” is editor of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised. For more, go to Forbes.com. And you can talk back to Silicon Insider via e-mail or through an ongoing bulletin board.