FY@SU-AI.ARPA (03/13/84)
From: Frank Yellin <FY@SU-AI.ARPA>
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
n066 1529 12 Mar 84
BC-BOOK-REVIEW Undated
(Culture)
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
c.1984 N.Y. Times News Service
TURING'S MAN. Western Culture in the Computer Age. By J. David
Bolter. 264 pages. University of North Carolina Press. Hard-cover,
$19.95; paper, $8.95.
J. David Bolter, the author of ''Turing's Man: Western Culture in
the Computer Age,'' is both a classicist who teaches at the
University of North Carolina and a former visiting fellow in computer
science at Yale University. This unusual combination of talents may
not qualify him absolutely to offer a humane view of the computer
age, or what he refers to as the age of Turing's man, after Alan M.
Turing, the English mathematician and logician who offered early
theoretical descriptions of both the computer and advanced artificial
intelligence.
But his two fields of knowledge certainly provide Bolter with an
unusual perspective on contemporary developments that many observers
fear are about to usher in an age of heartless quantification, if not
the final stages of Orwellian totalitarianism. In Bolter's view,
every important era of Western civilization has had what he calls its
''defining technology'' which ''develops links, metaphorical or
otherwise, with a culture's science, philosophy, or literature; it is
always available to serve as a metaphor, example, model, or symbol.''
To the ancient Greeks, according to Bolter, the dominant
technological metaphor was the drop spindle, a device for twisting
yarn into thread. Such a metaphor implied technology as a controlled
application of power. To Western Europe after the Middle Ages, the
analogues to the spindle were first, the weight-driven clock, a
triumph of mechanical technology, and later, the steam engine, a
climax of the dynamic. In Bolter's subtly developed argument, the
computer - obviously enough the present age's defining metaphor - is
an outgrowth of both the clock and the steam engine. Yet,
paradoxically, the computer also represents a throwback.
Everything follows from this. In a series of closely reasoned
chapters on the way in which the computer has redefined our notions
of space, time, memory, logic, language and creativity, Bolter
reviews a subtle but recuing pattern in which the computer
simultaneously climaxes Western technology and returns us to ancient
Greece. He concludes that if the ancient ideals were balance,
proportion and handicraft (the use of the spindle), and the Western
European one was the Faustian quest for power through knowledge
(understanding a clockwork universe to attain the dynamism of the
steam engine), then Turing's man combines the two.
''In his own way, computer man retains and even extends the Faustian
tendency to analyze,'' Bolter concludes. ''Yet the goal of Faustian
analysis was to understand, to 'get to the bottom' of a problem,''
whereas ''Turing's man analyzes not primarily to understand but to
act.''
He continues: ''For Turing's man, knowledge is a process, a skill,''
like the ancient arts of spinning or throwing a pot. ''A man or a
computer knows something only if he or it can produce the right
answer when asked the right question.'' Faustian depth ''adds nothing
to the program's operational success.''
Now in portraying Turing's man, Bolter may seem to be overburdening
a few simple metaphors. Yet his argument is developed with remarkable
concreteness. Indeed, if his book has any fault, it lies in the
extent to which he has detailed the slightly repetitious and
eventually predictable pattern of argument described above.
Yet what is far more important about ''Turing's Man'' is its success
in bridging the gap between the sciences and the humanities. I can
only guess at how much it will inform the computer technologist about
philosophy and art, but I can vouch for how much it has to say to the
nonspecialist about how computers work. The inaccessibility of the
computer's inner functioning may well be a key to the author's case
that Turing's man is returning to the ancient Greek's satisfaction in
the surface of things, but after reading Bolter's book, this reader
found the computer far less mysterious. Not incidentally, the book
makes us understand why computers aren't really all that good at
doing mathematics (they can't get a grip on the notion of infinity);
and it far surpasses Andrew Hodges's recent biography of Alan Turing
in explaining Turing's Game for testing artificial intelligence.
But most provocative about this study is what it has to say about
the political implications of the computer age. Will Turing's man
prove the instrument of Orwell's Big Brother, as so many observers
are inclined to fear? Very likely not, says Bolter:
''Lacking the intensity of the mechanical-dynamic age, the computer
age may in fact not produce individuals capable of great good or
evil. Turing's man is not a possessed soul, as Faustian man so often
was. He does not hold himself and his world in such deadly earnest;
he does not speak of 'destiny' but rather of 'options.' And if the
computer age does not produce a Michelangelo and a Goethe, it is
perhaps less likely to produce a Hitler or even a Napoleon. The
totalitarian figures were men who could focus the Faustian commitment
of will for their ends. What if the will is lacking? The premise of
Orwell's '1984' was the marriage of totalitarian purpose with modern
technology. But the most modern technology, computer technology, may
well be incompatible with the totalitarian monster, at least in its
classic form.''
Indeed, according to Bolter, Turing's man may be more inclined to
anarchy than to totalitarianism. This may be whistling past the
graveyard. But in Bolter's stimulating analysis, it also makes a kind
of homely sense.