PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

1. SCIENCE AND FORETELLING
Humans versus Machines
Invariants characterize a natural equilibrium. The average human sleeps
during one third of the day-night cycle. Similarly, the optimum amount
of time spent traveling daily is seventy minutes. It seems reasonable,
then, that there should also be a balance between the amount of physical
and the amount of intellectual work carried out during a day. In a loose
comparison of computers to living organisms, software can be likened
to intellect and hardware to body, and there appears to be an invariant
emerging in the world of computers that contradicts the best judgment
of some information technology experts.
People feel insulted when they are compared to animals. Yet,
strangely, they take pride in themselves when they do something as well
as a machine, perhaps because they believe this resemblance cannot be
taken seriously. From the discovery of the wheel to the transistor, history
is punctuated with milestones marking the appearance of machines
that relieved humans from repetitive burdens. Industrialization featured
mostly muscle-surrogate inventions, but that did not significantly decrease
the number of working hours. Allowing eight hours for sleep and
a fair amount for personal matters, the time available for work cannot
be far from eight to ten hours per day. At the same time, human nature
is such that working much less than that is poorly tolerated.
Soon after the introduction of computers, the need for software gave
rise to a thriving new industry, because a computer is useless until programmed
to do a task. The fast growth of successful software
companies triggered speculation among computer manufacturers that
someday computers might be given away free; all revenue would be
made from services and software. This meant that the computer industry’s
major effort would ultimately become the production of software.
Such a trend actually began to develop. In the 1970s, large research
institutions built computer-support departments heavily staffed with
programmers. Hordes of them devoted their youth and talent to writing
thousands of lines of FORTRAN to offer scientists the possibility of
making graphs, histograms, and computer-generated drawings. That
situation soon became intolerable, not necessarily consciously, and
graphic capabilities were progressively transferred to the hardware. Today
video terminals provide artwork without even bothering the central
processing unit of the computer with such menial tasks. Meanwhile,
30