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Quite by accident, I stumbled yesterday across a reference to Lem's
SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE. I forget what I was searching for. (its coming
back now ... I was exploring longevity and sequoia
trees) Anyway, I stumbled into something that I should
have come across a long long time ago. Boom ... it landed in my
lap, or rather I landed into the ubiquitous cyberlap. I landed
in 'Pasquill on the evolution' territory. As I was readying to
takeoff and
forget the in-surf, something
caught my eye. In
the section The
autoevolutionary machine what appeared to be a sleazy
discussion on computer dating stopped
me cold in my
tracks. The section in
question "For a couple of years, computers - only a few,
for the time being - have been working in the U.S. which are
programmed for marriage-broking. A "machine matchmaker" chooses the
couples which fit best together with respect to physical and mental
properties. According to the (still rather sparse) data the duration
of these relationships which were formed by a machine
is about two times
larger than that of
usual marriages."
My first reaction 'just another
factoid' ... but then a little gnawing feeling ... no, this is not
just another factoid ... there may be something quite profound here.
"the duration of these relationships which were formed by a
machine is about two times larger than that of usual
marriages". According to Stan (Stanislaw) Summa
technologiae was written in 1963. Its almost
2003. OK, maybe I shouldn't have seen this until 1973.
But a 30 year lag ... how could this happen ... Is it because "Stan
the Man" is Polish and Summa was published in Polish? Google returns
25,500 hits for "Stanislaw Lem". DMOZ returns 21. His science
fiction book "Solaris" has been made into a movie 1972
by legendary Russian film director Tarkovsky; as of 2001 it
appears that Steven Soderbergh, of “Sex, Lies and Videotape”, “Erin
Brockovich”, “Traffic”, and “Ocean’s Eleven" fame,
is authoring the screenplay treatment
and directing the movie remake. George Clooney apparently agreed to play main character Kris
Kelvin while Natasha McElhone (“The Truman Show”) will
impersonate Harey, Kris’s tragic love. ... AGAIN - WHAT IS GOING ON
HERE? Hello ... how did we miss this? Is it just
me?
Back to matchmaking
...
Stan states (I need to examine
current stats - will report on this later) " Over the last few years, the
average age of the partners in a marriage has been decreasing, but
marriages are divorced within 5 years in 50% of the cases,
such that there are a lot of ...children without normal parental
care." This is getting interesting now. THATS THE
GRABBER ... not
the marriage partners per
se ... but the
children ... "No replacement
for parental upbringing has been invented yet, since this is not
merely a question of financial means to support the corresponding
institutions (day-nurseries); there is no substitution for
parental feelings, and their early and lasting absence does not only
cause negative childhood experiences, but the formation of possibly
irreversible defects ...." (my emphasis) ...
this is what caught my eye. Machine
matchmaking has the potential to reduce negative childhood
experiences .... Think about this
... what is the payoff of substuntially reducing
negative childhood experiences? How about less crime down the
road? How about a more creative and uplifting social
environment? How about all around better citizens? Is there
anything you might imagine
as a result of
positive rather than negative
childhood experiences?
Stan provides a number of more
detailed technical arguments ...
At the direct level
...
"This is
the current situation. People form pairs in random ways, which one
could call "Brownian" - for they join together after a number of
brief contacts, when they finally meet the "right" partner, which is
seemingly confirmed by mutual attraction. However, this realization
really is rather accidental (since is turns out to be erroneous in
50% of all cases). "Machine matchmakers" will change that state of
affairs. Appropriate investigations equip the machine with knowledge
about the psychosomatic properties of the candidates, after which
this machine will choose pairs which fit together optimally. The
machine does not remove the freedom of choice, since it does not
point out only one single candidate. Acting probabilistically, it
suggests a choice from a selected group within a certain reliability
interval, where the machine can assemble such groups choosing
from m i l l i o n s of people, whereas the individual,
acting traditionally, by "random methods", will be able to meet a
few hundred people at most during his whole
life.
"
At the macro level
...
"Those
"machine matchmakers" may have very serious consequences for our
species. When the personal genotypic repertory is deciphered
and stored in the machine's memory, together with the established
"psychosomatic personality profiles", the task of the matchmaker
will be to make a choice which not only fits a person to another,
but also one genotype to another. Thus there will be a two-step
selection. First the machine separates classes of partners which
correspond psychosomatically, and thereafter it subjects them to a
second-level sifting, rejecting those candidates for which there is
a considerable
probability of producing children
which are unwanted in
some respect."
Obviously, beyond the standard
issues, there are a number of ethical issues involved ...
So how does this relate to
KNOWLEDGE .... well there's the factoid and speculative
aspects ... of what can we do with machine matchmaking if we regard
it as a serious tool ... and then there's a realization about
METAKNOWLEDGE ... We still are missing a lot of available
knowledge.
The index entries for SUMMA
suggests that among others, the following topics are explored:
Cosmic Civilizations, Statistics of cosmic civilizations,
Metatheory of miracles , The uniqueness of Man, Intelligence: chance
or necessity? Hypotheses, Votum separatum, Perspectives,
Intellectronics, Return to earth, The megabit bomb, The
big game, Myths of science, The intelligence amplifier, The black
box, On the ethics of homeostates, The dangers of electrocracy
Cybernetics and sociology, Belief and information, Experimental
metaphysics, Beliefs of electrobrains, The spirit in the machine,
Problems with information, Doubts and
antinomies, Prolegomena to omnipotence,
Before chaos, Chaos and order, Scylla and Charybdis, i.e., on
moderation, The silence of the Designer, Insanity with method, A new
Linneus, i.e., on systematics
Models and reality, Plagiarisms
and creations, The area of imitology, Phantomology, The basics
of phantomology , The phantomatic machine, Marginal and central
phantomology, The limits of phantomology, Cerebromatics,
Teletaxation and phantoplication, Personality and
information, The creation of worlds, Introduction, Information
growing, Language engineering, Engineering of transcendence,
Cosmogonic engineering, Pasquill on the
evolution, Reconstruction of the species
The construction
of life , The construction of death, The construction of
consciousness, Error based constructions, Bionics and cybernetics,
The reconstruction of Man, Cyborgization, The autoevolutionary
machine.
These are accessible only to
those fluent in Polish and German. Clearly there's a
disadvantage to those who don't master these fine continental
languages .... This is a serious problem ... perhaps there's a piece
of knowledge or speculation there that is a huge missing
link in some towering intellectual edifice ... perhaps we've
been delayed unnecessarily ... perhaps we're using up
resources that might not need to be used up. All becuase of
a nail ... a missing nail in this case.
There's more to the story ...
but there's not much more of this night left .... so ... Mańana
...
in the meanwhile ... I've
assembled a sampler of Lem titles in English (see
below)
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