Counting the cost

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Life is full of strange numbers.  But mostly we ignore the subtle groupings and structures that shape the way we think our world.  How many of us are aware of the effort of putting 60 individual seconds into each minute, or of the seven-dayness of the week?  Has no one noticed that four always seems to divide into 12 but never 13?  As our daily acquiescence in the world's fictive homogeneity shows, by learning to count so glibly we have lost the rich granularity of existence.  We are numb to numbers.

Anthropology lets us retrace the gradual erosion in awareness which took place as civilisation evolved.  The simplest societies count one, two, many.  Earliest humans probably found only one.  Each object in their world was unique: it did not surrender its specialness by being rudely classed as like another.  The pebbles on a seashore were not numberless; instead, they were individual components of an immense experience we have now forgone.  Instead, we see only a beach.

As society progressed, the successful warriors and rising merchant classes demanded bigger numbers to cope with more cattle, more bags of wheat.  Already the sense of what five or fifty entailed was bleeding out of the words: fifty became a rich man's flock.  By the time a hundred thousand Persians marched against Greece, the concept of a soldier, a man, one, had been hopelessly damaged.

The loss of the purity of numbers went hand in hand with the rise of money.  Objects were converted to values which soon had only a weak and arbitrary sense of quantity:  one shilling was twelve pence, but how many is a penny?  With money came the need to manipulate figures by themselves; hitherto they had been regarded as incommensurable entities rooted in real things.  Mathematics was born the day six sheep first equalled six goats.

The Roman number system proved hopelessly inadequate: you cannot multiply DCIII by XLIV.  The logic of the Arabic system which supplanted it led to  revolutionary concepts like zero and negative numbers.  With the arrival of a notation for less than an absence of cattle, the last links between numbers and their origins in the external world had been cut.

Commerce was quick to seize the opportunities opened up by this untethered arithmetic.  Freed from any grounding in physical objects, numbers became amoral.  The abstract intricacies of double-entry book-keeping allowed ingenious frauds - literally unthinkable for the Sumerian clerks drawing up their inventories in cuneiform.  Present-day trading in currency futures is only the latest manifestation of counting's promiscuity and perversion.

In the computer, the neutral number attains its acme.  The whole world - its sights and sounds, our thoughts and emotions - can be reduced to a seamless string of 0s and 1s.  Paradoxically, there is now no sense of number in anything, even though everything is a number.  And ironically, the hidden figure that lies at the heart of all experience is 1, just as it was at the very beginning.  But on the way back we have lost entirely the richness of that original, particular vision.

(1987)

Download CC0-licensed text file.

Contents

The finite brain

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

We do not like to think about our brains.  When we look at the world we conveniently gloss over the sensation that the living person who sees seems to be located behind our eyes, in that cranial bowl of inert, grey paste.  Our niceness in this respect even shows itself in our eating.  The idea of eating brains is repulsive to most, which is strange given the other glands and organs we dine off - what are kidneys used for?  But eating it would confront us with the fact that the brain really is an organ, and physical.  From the inside it feels neither of these things.

Unfortunately the advent of computers has given us some troublesome metaphors and analogies.  In earlier days of pre-lapsarian computer innocence, we might accept the brain's workings as mysteries too deep to fathom, or even comprehend.  Now, though, we are almost forced to articulate concerns which were perhaps better left unspoken.

For example, all computer users know that you can never have enough memory.  When you run out - as always happens - you either upgrade your capacity, or you throw away old files to make room for new data.  The brain too stores data, though how is not clear in detail.  An obvious question poses itself: does the brain ever run out of memory?  Or, equivalently: just how finite is the brain?

As we blithely go through life, experiencing, learning, remembering, we assume that this state of affairs will continue until we die.  The idea that the brain might at some point become full, become incapable of learning or remembering any more, is terrifying.  But not ridiculous: the brain evolved in hominids whose life expectancy was around 35 years, not 70, and who moreover led a relatively simple and uneventful life.  Today, people probably experience more new sensations and ideas in a month than their distant forebears did in their entire lives.  Has the brain enough spare capacity to cope with this excess?  

If it hasn't, what will happen - given that there are, as yet, no upgrades for the brain?  The best we can hope for is that the brain will dump old memories and knowledge just as we delete old files.  We might lose treasured moments and hard-won skills from the past, but at least we would have room for the future.  This does, in any case, clearly happen: nobody remembers all their childhood, and the older you get, the less you recall from long ago.

Worse would be the situation where we simply forget everything we see or do or learn beyond a certain time.  If this were proved to happen, our whole attitude to life would alter.  No longer would we thoughtlessly be hungry for new knowledge and experiences; we would need to ration them, to apportion them year by year.  We would become parsimonious with our brain, costive with its valuable capacity.  Of course just as some poor fools now smoke and drug themselves heedless of the eventual damage, so we would have info addicts who gorged themselves on facts today, reckless of tomorrow.  For the rest of us there would be anti-education programmes, even government mental health warnings on books, art, music, on everything offering a new idea or experience.  It makes you think, doesn't it?

(1989)

Download CC0-licensed text file

Contents

Digital reality

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

A few hundred years from now the world currency will be the Tera. Short for Terabyte, it represents a million million bytes of digital information. Roughly speaking this corresponds to half a million printed books. The data contained in a Tera will be arbitrary but meaningful: it will be the equivalent of a random selection of a twentieth of the British Library's present holdings. Within such a deluge there will be countless useful facts as well as countless useless ones. The sheer volume will ensure that there are enough of the former in every Tera to provide near parity in value with all other Teras of random structured information.

Surprisingly, a Tera is a small unit. A human being processes about two Teras every hour; multiply that by a world population of tens or hundreds of billions and you have millions of billions of new Teras every year. Add in the billions of computers and their information, as well as the countless billions of Teras from the past, and the quantity becomes unimaginable.

Billions of computers because by this time they will be ubiquitous. The basic models will be as small, cheap, and easy to use as a pen or pencil. Like pencils, they will be thrown away after a couple of uses. But where writing implements can be said only in a metaphorical sense to offer half a million English words or the ability to perform operations in calculus, the pen-sized computers will possess these skills literally, as well as providing myriad other functions.

But nobody will bother using them, any more than people use slide rules or log tables today. The real, state-of-the-art computers will be invisible. They will be the chair you sit in, the wall you lean against, the ground you walk on. The chair will not have a computer as such: it will be one. Or rather, every aspect of it - its shape, its colour, its position - will be the output from one.

Such environmental computers will no longer model reality through simulations: instead, they will offer an infinitely detailed alternative version that merges seamlessly into the old, physical variety. Potentially, every aspect of our world will be formed by computers capable of creating every experience.

Most people will be hooked on this drug of artificial, digital reality. Unlike the already addictive arcade games and television serials of today - which are flint tools in comparison to this future technology - digital reality will not just be a temporary substitute for real life, it will replace it totally, until the latter has no independent meaning. Like all junkies, digital addicts will habituate and constantly demand fresh stimulation in the form of new, manufactured experiences. To provide them, the billions of environmental computers must feed ravenously and unceasingly off the only source of experience's raw material, the Teras of structured data held around the planet. Their competing demands for a limited resource will valorise it; information will become society's most sought-after commodity, its invisible gold, its weightless coinage. Those that control that information, the data lords, will rule the world.

(1989)

Download CC0-licensed text file

Contents