Technical Challenges & Changes

When Kurzweil talks about machines that calculate at human speed, he isn’t talking about computers that total the receipts from all the world’s McDonald’s at breakneck speed; computers can already do that. What he foresees is a computer that doesn’t look like a computer, that can screen your calls, that can decide what questions to ask so it gets all the necessary information, and that can determine whether to pass along a message immediately, hold it for a later time, or even handle the issue itself without bothering you at all. Ultimately, Kurzweil is talking about a machine that – upon receiving a message that your Great-Aunt Ida has passed away – will not only decide the best time and place to tell you, but will use the tenor of your voice, the pauses in your speech, and even the specific wording of your responses to casual questions to help it calculate how to break the news to you in the most compassionate manner. And, naturally, these machines will be doing more than passing notes. Hayles defines the posthuman visions of Kurzweil and other theorists by noting that “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (3).

The fly in Kurzweil’s ointment, of course, is a dilemma that is essentially the computational equivalent to the physical problem of moving faster than the speed of light: no one knows for sure if this kind of speed is possible in machines. Potential barriers to human-ness, after all, include not only engineering issues, but programming ones as well. The question of whether we can actually be out-evolved by our own creation still remains.  Suppose computers will be able to calculate possibilities faster than we can, that they will be able to reach into internationally-linked databases and access more information than we can, that they will absorb and analyze data like vocal intonations or body language without having their own emotions interfere with their “interpretative computations” – even if they could theoretically do all this, would our limitations as human beings allow us to program for human speed? More to the point for our discipline, will we be able to write for them or understand how they should be written for? Will we be able to compose the volume of text needed to allow a machine to operate at this level? If we are currently entering an age of imitation artificial intelligence and functional artificial intelligence is only a generation away, then what forms and genres of writing should we be exploring to support this revolution? The trick becomes, then, not designing a state-of-the-art approach to writing for hypertext, but discovering how the media is used, and then learning and teaching an understanding of how the media is evolving and how to design for a mindset that changes at the speed of Moore’s Law.