The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Read Online Free PDF Page A

billions of years that the evolution of life-forms required to get started.
    Like the evolution of life-forms, the pace of technology has greatly accelerated over time. 14 The progress of technology in the nineteenth century, for example, greatly exceeded that of earlier centuries, with the building of canals and great ships, the advent of paved roads, the spread of the railroad, the development of the telegraph, and the invention of photography, the bicycle, sewing machine, typewriter, telephone, phonograph, motion picture, automobile, and of course Thomas Edison’s light bulb. The continued exponential growth of technology in the first two decades of the twentieth century matched that of the entire nineteenth century. Today, we have major transformations in just a few years’ time. As one of many examples, the latest revolution in communications—the World Wide Web—didn’t exist just a few years ago.
 
    WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
     
    As technology is the continuation of evolution by other means, it shares the phenomenon of an exponentially quickening pace. The word is derived from the Greek tekhnē, which means “craft” or “art”, and logia , which means “the study of.” Thus one interpretation of technology is the study of crafting, in which crafting refers to the shaping of resources for a practical purpose. I use the term resources rather than materials because technology extends to the shaping of nonmaterial resources such as information.
    Technology is often defined as the creation of tools to gain control over the environment. However, this definition is not entirely sufficient. Humans are not alone in their use or even creation of tools. Orangutans in Sumatra’s Suaq Balimbing swamp make tools out of long sticks to break open termite nests. Crows fashion tools from sticks and leaves. The leaf-cutter ant mixes dry leaves with its saliva to create a paste. Crocodiles use tree roots to an- ♦ chor dead prey. 15
    What is uniquely; human is the application of Knowledge-recorded knowledge-to the fashioning of tools. The knowledge base represents the genetic code for the evolving technology. And as technology has evolved, the means for recording this knowledge base has also evolved, from the oral traditions of antiquity to tne written design logs of nineteenth-century craftsmen to the computer-assisted design databases of the 1990s.
    Technology also implies a transcendence of the materials used to comprise it. When the elements of an invention are assembled in just the right way, they produce an enchanting effect that goes beyond the mere parts. When Alexander Graham Bell accidentaly wire connected two moving drums and solenoids (metal cores wrapped in wire) in 1875, the result transcended the materials he was working with. For the time, a human voice was transported, magically it seemed/to a.remote location.Most assemblages are just that: random assemblies. But when materials-and in the case of modern technology,information-are assembled in just the right way, transcendence occurs. The assembled object becomes far greater than the sum of its parts.
    The same phenomenon of transcendence occurs in art, which may properly be regarded as another form of human technology. When wood, varnishes, and strings are assembled in just the right way, the result is right way, there is magic of another sort: music. Music goes beyond mere sound. It evokes a response-cognitive, emotional, perhaps spiritual-in the listener, another form of transcendence. All of the arts share the same goal: of communicating from artist to audience. The commucation is not of unadorned data, but of the more important items in the phenomenological garden: feelings, ideas, experiences, longings. The Greek meaning of tekhnē logia includes art as a key manifestation of technology.
    Language is another form of human-created technology. One of the primary applications of technology is communication, and language provides the foundation for Homo sapiens