Human-Assisted

Science-Fiction writer Thomas Pynchon reviews C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture at Cambridge University. Published by the New York Times in 1984, Pynchon's review is not very subtly biased towards the "humanist camp's" point of view but is nonetheless an interesting read from an intelligent author. October 28, 1984; The New York Times Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? By Thomas Pynchon As if being 1984 weren't enough, it's also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, ''The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,'' notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ''literary'' and ''scientific'' factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the

We want to explain intelligence as a combination of simpler things. This means that we must be sure to check, at every step, that none of our agents is, itself, intelligent. Otherwise our theory would end up resembling the nineteenth century "chessplaying machine" that was exposed by Edgar Allan Poe to actually conceal a human dwarf inside*. Accordingly, whenever we find that an agent has to do anything complicated, we'll replace it with a subsociety of agents that do simpler things. Because of this, the reader must be prepared to feel a certain sense of loss. When we break things down to their smallest parts, they'll each seem dry as dust first, as though some essence has been lost. -M. Minsky * N.b. IBM built a machine late in the twentieth century, "Deep Blue", which beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in a set of five matches. No "human dwarves" were harmed in the process. The following is an excerpt of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern

"A day of dappled seaborne clouds." The phrase and the days and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue; sunrise gold, the russet and the green of apple orchards, azures of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours; it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied that from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? J. Joyce The following is an excerpt of M. Minsky's The Society of Mind. pp. 112-14. Touchstone Books, 1988. ISBN 0-671-65713-5. It forms part of my research and I include it in this article un