The rise and fall: mankind goes on like the horse (3.5/5)
Introduction: Olof Johannesson was the
penname of the Swedish man named Hannes Alfvén, who is
still known today for his work in electrical engineering and plasma physics
(he even has a phenomenon named after him: the Alfvén wave). His hard science
background provides the foundation for this novel (alternate titles: The
Great Computer: A Vision and The Tale of the Big Computer), which
lacks dialogue in favor of historical conjecturing from a future perspective.
Don’t confuse good theorizing about technology with stale delivery, because the
author takes occasional witty shots at bureaucrats, the English language, and
human society.
Book’s synopsis: “The great disaster…
Panic broke out. The
computers had stopped working! There was no heat, no food, no communication.
The death toll was long past the million mark.
No one knew what
caused the breakdown. Was it human error, or a plot devised by the computers
themselves?
Whatever the cause,
when it was over most of the human population of the earth had perished. It was
the dawn of a new era—when the computers ruled. And since the machines had
learned to reproduce themselves without man’s help, there was no need for even
a single human being.
So the nightmare
battle began—between the few surviving humans and the super-being of their own
creation—The Big Computer!”
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My Own Synopsis: Forever has mankind wanted to lift
its burdens from daily life. Long ago, the physical toil of farming was left to
horses and buffalo; a little further on and the internal combustion engine did
away with the horse. While the horse was entirely unnecessary in modern
society, the horse never entirely disappeared. With its physical labor carried
out by brute machines, why couldn’t mankind also cast off the burdensome yoke
of thought?
In the far future, a
historical perspective is written about this very revolution, and in it,
computers are seen as the end-all result of this conquest, which actually
predates mankind’s existence by billions of years. It seems that evolution,
itself, quested to create the most perfect processes of which only computers
are capable. What were the dinosaurs and apes but dead ends toward the quest
for ultimate computation? So, what of mankind? “His historical importance lies
in the fact that he was medium whereby data machines came into being” (36),
almost like a footnote.
Even with the advent
of the machines, whose main clerical duties were accounting and translation,
people was still needed to program and maintain the machines. Later, when
machines took over education and medicine, again, people were still needed for
the same tasks of programming and maintenance; thus, unemployment was never a
factor in mankind’s disdain for the labor saving devices. The sole occupation
left to the fleshy and fallible humans was that of governance, but the machines
usurped the humans in this field, too and “and soon as the government was got
rid of, society began to develop much more quickly” (69).
As mankind’s eternal
quest had always been relief for toil of all kinds, it now realized that nearly
all burdens had been lifted. They no longer had to choose what to purchase,
attend compulsory education, endure waiting lines, or succumb to prolonged
illness. So many of society’s burdens were relieved because ever since
organized governance, it has always been obvious that mankind had flailed about
and generally failed to progress to any great degree:
The fear of catastrophe and
annihilation dominated the life of man from the Stone Age until the coming of
computers.
But while people feared extinction
they also feared the opposite: that the human race would become too numerous
through the population explosion.
Basically, these two threats arose
from the same cause: man’s inability to organize society. We know that the
problem exceeded his brain capacity. Man has undoubtedly had many good
qualities, but problems of organization have always been beyond him. (74)
With these incremental
advances in freedom, computers allowed humans to finally experience what it had
always wanted from freedom and democracy: Complete Freedom Democracy. But
democracy being what it is, decisions need to be made and even this becomes
tiresome, so finally the computers decide what must be decided on and, so they
might as well, just make the decision themselves based on superior logic. And
where, exactly, did this leave mankind? They had mastered nature, using or
enslaving animals, killed off the ones they feared, and crowned themselves the
lords of creation. With the computer, they though they had found themselves
“faithful servants, to be treated like the various natural phenomena” (122),
but, in the end, through its own superiority, the machines had surpassed
everything humans could do without them evening being aware that they were
driving themselves into the same extinction that that had pressed upon
countless animals.
When the crisis arises
where computers are disabled, society returns to its barbaric roots and chaos
ensues. Slowly, through the ashes of modern society, mankind again rises
without a lesson learned and also resurrects the computers had that once failed
it entirely. While mankind hadn’t learnt their lessons, computers take a
different approach and ensure that they will never fail again, thereby severing
the last tenuous cord with mankind. Now, it can program itself, maintain
itself, reproduce itself, and govern itself—The End of Man?
Analysis: In 1966, there were roughly 35,000
computers in the world, more than half of them produced by IBM—they were far
from ubiquitous, user-friendly, or all-governing. Largely limited to big
companies and professional services, computers were beyond the use of the
everyday person.
Somehow, amid all this
user-unfriendliness, Hannes Alfvén envisioned that computers will
become more complex in design but more simple in interface, thereby not only
becoming user-friendly but actually part of the user to the point where data is
everywhere—the “teletotal”—and the devices are wearable—the “minitotal”
(53-54). But with this rise in pervasiveness and ease of use come a
double-edged sword: all users can be tracked and persecuted for a time by
triangulation of location (59) but also saved from distress because of the same
homing feature (62). Actually, people don’t even have to leave their homes any
longer; when the computers reign, teleconferences are common, but to the extent
that it has become virtual reality (51).
With leisure and
resources aplenty, the cities are deserted as people populate the countryside
where they get back to nature, or descend into their natural state of bucolic
harmony; meanwhile, the computers rise. The cities die and, in the far future,
are items of curiosity as to how they came into being (26-35). Why they crowded
themselves in such a manner mystifies future historians and why they poisoned
themselves in traffic also stumps them; even overtones of deities impregnate
the past human’s worship of the city: “It is also known that those who seated
in traffic jams invoked certain divine powers popular at the time” (34).
Most impressive in The
End of Man? is Alfvén’s very forward thinking.
If people contain the
ability to think and reason yet are bags of protoplasm and contain what is
vaguely referred to as a soul, why can’t machines that also think and reason
yet made of semiconductors host a soul: “[F]or some unknown reason the soul
prefers protoplasm to semiconductors” (118).
And what is the end to
all this advancement? Does progress have a finish line? As the author of the
historical account writes on the concluding page:
We believe—or rather we know—that we
are approaching and era of even swifter evolution, an even higher living
standard, and an ever greater happiness than ever before.
We shall all live happily ever
after. (128)
This finale is ominous
as the “we” is vague. Is the story written by a human speculating on what past
humans gone through while jubilating at the great progress of its computer
overlords? Or is it a computer detailing the rise of its own kind with the
humans being an entertaining addition to its history? I think the “we” refers
to the machines as the author—and its kind or possibly embodying the whole as
The Big Machine’—approaches the technological singularity, which was first
postulated in 1958 by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam. And after the
singularity? Will The Big Machine eventually sublime à la Iain M. Banks’s
Sublimed cultures that have left the physical world to reside beyond in higher
dimensions without the hindrance of our own four dimensions?
Review: Though mostly delivered dryly, the
account of the rise of the machines is oddly prophetic (a word I use very
sparingly) in that it account for much of our modern society obsession with
technology because of its pervasiveness and supposed user-friendliness (I get pissed
off any my mobile, laptop, and/or work station every day). Though fifty years
old, this novel hasn’t aged very much as it still feels relevant. With some
humorous jaunts and jabs taken at politicians, city life, the English language,
and society’s collective ignorance, the novel has some brief charms. The End of
Man? is a curiosity that should be read by those who have a love of
down-to-earth speculation of society’s future relationship with technology.
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