If You Get Deep Enough, You Get

Back In The 1980s, When The Internet Was Only Available To A Small Number Of Pioneers, I Was Often Confronted By People Who Feared That The Strange Technologies I Was Working On, Like Virtual Reality, Might Unleash The Demons Of Human Nature. For Instance, Would People Become Addicted To Virtual Reality As If It Were A Drug? Would They Become Trapped In It, Unable To Escape Back To The Physical World Where The Rest Of Us Live? Some Of The Questions Were Silly, And Others Were Prescient.

Once You Can Understand Something In A Way That You Can Shove It Into A Computer, You Have Cracked Its Code, Transcended Any Particularity It Might Have At A Given Time. It Was As If We Had Become The Gods Of Vision And Had Effectively Created All Possible Images, For They Would Merely Be Reshufflings Of The Bits In The Computers We Had Before Us, Completely Under Our Command.

I'm Not In Any Sense Anti-facebook.

A Fashionable Idea In Technical Circles Is That Quantity Not Only Turns Into Quality At Some Extreme Of Scale, But Also Does So According To Principles We Already Understand. Some Of My Colleagues Think A Million, Or Perhaps A Billion, Fragmentary Insults Will Eventually Yield Wisdom That Surpasses That Of Any Well-thought-out Essay, So Long As Sophisticated Secret Statistical Algorithms Recombine The Fragments. I Disagree. A Trope From The Early Days Of Computer Science Comes To Mind: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Criticism Is Always Easier Than Constructive Solutions.