"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Basically, we're messing up memory, aren't we?
Presumably, the way to know what happens next is to be one of those who makes it happen. At least, I’m guessing that’s what Elon Musk would say. And he’d be right.
If you have the brainpower and energy to be a mover and shaker there are few constraints on your action. Technology now advances so blindingly fast that, paradoxically, you can ignore it. Don’t ask if something can be done. Of course it can be done. The trick is to know what should be done in any particular circumstance. Technical means exist or can be found to realize virtually any end for which you see a purpose.
Seventy-seven years ago, on 23 December 1947, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, three chaps called William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated a new widget called a transistor - it’s a semiconductor device that can amplify or switch electrical signals.
These little gems can be combined: the more transistors on a chip, the more complex the functions that can be performed, and the faster and more energy-efficient they can be.
They were an instant success and by 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder at Intel, was able confidently to predict that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would roughly double every couple of years. That scale of multiplication adds up to some eye-watering numbers in a relatively short time.
In fact, today’s answer to Doctor Scholasticus’s philosophical question is that 2.6 trillion angels can dance on the head of a pin1. And, no doubt, should you require it, the Busby Berkeley avatar can be called up to do the choreography.
Those of us who were vaguely sentient in the run-up to the millennium can remember it as a time when, although computing science may have been advancing rapidly, computing memory was still extremely limited and costly. That all changed after the millennium. The availability of memory soared. The price plummeted.
However, in parallel with the phenomenal advances in computing technology, confidence and memory, it seems to me that there has been a corresponding collapse in human independence, confidence and memory.
These two outcomes are not necessarily direct results of one another but they must surely be linked in some subtle ways?
Look at it this way …
The participants in a society are the unconscious assemblers of its recorded and remembered history. Every concept, every contact, every contract, every discussion, every opinion, every decision, every action and transaction in the conduct of that society leaves behind its imprint in some format or other.
When the Library of Alexandria was sacked by Omar’s faithful in 642, six-tenths of a million manuscripts were reduced to ashes in the 4,000 baths of the city. A nine centuries aggregation of Hellenic and Semitic scholasticism was lost. But the torrent of information generated by any modern society during even a few years of activity makes the Alexandrine parchments dwindle into insignificance numerically, if not culturally.
Theoretically, today, this heritage cannot be lost, for burn, shred or wipe though anyone may, somewhere on earth within or without society’s walls, the immortal ghost of every file is resurrectible from silicon limbo. Therefore the government information, social information, news media, and other outputs that a society generates have a significance beyond the specific purposes of their brief topical lives. They are the audit trail not only of a particular sequence of actions but of the whole progress of a society through time.
Why, then, as computing capabilities and memory capacity have soared, has our faith in historical memory been undermined to the point where, often it seems, we just chuck aside the need to remember or sheepishly swallow some newly crafted, fictional version of both past and recent events? Or, worse still, don’t even bother to pay any heed whatsoever but, rather, carry on scrolling for ever more distraction?
The headline to this piece is from Milan Kundera (1929-2023)2. It seems to me to be both true and a salutary warning.
Basically, we’re messing up memory, aren’t we?
Big mistake.
Thanks for reading.
The image at the top is from Shutterstock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebras
The Wafer Scale Engine 2 by Cerebras apparently features 2.6 trillion transistors. That’s 2,600,000,000,000!
Milan Kundera. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting 1979)