There's an interview in Suncay's NYT Magazine
with Gary Kasparov.
He criticizes IBM for making such a big
thing of Deep Blue beating him in 1997,
instead of treating it as a scientific experiment.
I'm sure there is some "sour grapes" in this,
and that, had Kasparov won, he might not have
been so dispassionate about it either, but,
nonetheless, I think he is basically
right that the sun had already set on IBM,
which no longer was interested in science
but only in the bottom line and bullsh-t
advertising.
I think Kasparovb spells out clearly the
issue of man vs computer:
"Either humans will be stronger in creativity,
or computers will win with brute force of calculation."
This echoes Joseph Weizenbaum's still very fine book:
_Computer Power and Human Understanding: From judgment to
calculation_.
Perhaps the only thing that Kasparov forgot is that
the world's Stalins and Curchills and Bushes et al.
will always boss both the creative people and the
computers around. (Please notice that I
exercised due diligence in not repeating the
recent error of a German government minister
and mentioning the two words Hitler and Bush in the same sentence
irrespective of the semantic relation between the two!).
--
So I cite Kasparov's quote in favor of my ever stronger
conviction that education needs to be radically
restructured to be transparent: no more tests with
hidden answers. No more the student trying to guess
what the teacher has hidden from him or her.
There remains only one criterion of human achievement
(as opposed, of course, to human sacrifice!):
What have you come up with today that nobody
else in all human history has ever conceived of
to the best of our collected social knowledge?
Unless you have a positive bottom line at the end of
the day, at the end of the week, at the end of each
month, year and decade of your life, then
you (OK, I -- others may not feel this is
an appropriate criterion of judgment, just like
some persons think Edmund Husserl was just another
Romantic, etc.) are at best a banausos [craftsperson
who makes the stuff that machines cannot
yet make to reproduce individual and species
life], and it's only a matter of time before
a computer obsoletes you (well, if you are a
neurosurgeon, it may be a fairly long time,
and obviously you will get a high hourly pay rate
in the interim).
But this is only step one. Step two is to
evaluate each of these ideas in the
encompassing context of our shared social and
personal life. Creativity without good sense
is a loose cannon on the deck, and, the more
creative, the more the explosive potential.
I wonder if AlQaeda uses standardized tests....
--
And, as long as my train of thought is gravitating
back to the free market: When will General Motors face up
to the challenge that the vehicle of choice for
the Taliban is the Toyota Land Cruiser (Mullah Omar
had 8 of them). How can we win market share away
from ther Japanese and get these people to buy
Cadillac Escalades instead?
Cheers!
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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