Ideas & Information Review

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Ideas & Information ReviewInspiration as opposed to instruction. Mind as opposed to machine...
Read any physics text or popularization of the past thirty-five years and you are virtually certain to encounter Arno Penzias. He received the Nobel Prize for physics by detecting the cosmic microwave background radiation that George Gamow had predicted two decades earlier. Theorists sometimes suggest that Gamow's Nobel somehow landed accidentally in Penzias' empirical lap. One imagines that Penzias might be tempted to barrow a line from Rodney Dangerfield: "I tell ya, I don't get no respect." He doesn't do that.
Anyway, when I spotted this book in a used bookstore I happily nabbed it. The author's theme in this volume is computability -- how it works, what it is, and what it isn't. The book is highly readable and makes for a sound introduction to what computer software is, and to how artificial intelligence and human intelligence are, foundationally, two very different things. The strong AI types don't want to hear this stuff and will likely complain that Penzias' book is "dated." I will say that only the author's examples/ allegories are dated. Technological gadgetry changes quite a bit in 14 years, but the examples are only examples. Programming is still programming; it is still a process of numerical reduction. It is still something far different than human intuition. With a modicum of updates, Penzias' thesis might easily read as a more current set of arguments and observations.
Consider this book a springboard into the work of Roger Penrose (uh-oh, you'll be mixing empirical guy and theoretical guy!).
Penzias says, "If you don't want to be replaced by a machine, don't act like one." Machines are quite useful, but your mind is not a mere machine. Use it to its strength -- be creative, be non-linear. This empirical guy sounds a lot like a theoretical guy. Somewhere an ardent reductionist is cringing.Ideas & Information OverviewIn one human generation, the world's work has moved from muscle to machines that move information rather than goods. Driving the information revolution is the computer, a machine of unquestioned power but questionable intelligence. Arno Penzias, whose Bell Laboratories stands at the center of electronic innovation, explores here the relationship of human beings to the new electronic world. What, for instance, is information besides an assemblage of symbols, of numbers and words and pictures? When processing this information, how do machines extract meaning? How close can a machine come to human competence? How smart are computers likely to become? What does this mean for the human role in modern economic life? These are cutting-edge questions of technology and society answered here by the author, who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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