Os riscos e os limites do avanço da computação – Observatório Itaú Cultural (2019)

[Music] the advance of compute power together with our ability to define algorithms turns the computer into a machine that can make decisions which means that the system is math it's much faster in calculating things and making decisions based on calculations what happens is that we start to assume that these decisions are better decisions which is not right but we we assume it so we sort of assign rationality to what computer system is doing and by that we challenge the position of the human being because the history of the Western world is a history of the

human being being a rational thing or rational species so through this there is a challenge to our self understanding to our role in the world to our who are we we tend to say cogito ergo sum so I use my brain so I exist and that puts a sort of above all the animals with with a computer system taking over such a role this is a big challenge to our self understanding the point is to following computers are much better and faster in doing calculations so when a decision is based on a calculation like you

look at your bank account and they try to understand does it make sense to move money from this type of investment to that type of investment the computer is more rational in the sense that it just calculates numbers calculates probabilities and then comes up with the sort of correct decision so wherever we we talk about calculation as part of the decision then computer is much better at doing this when we talk about decision making in terms of a human decision making like how do you how do you handle an employee who has done something you

should not have done then a computer is useless because there is no way of calculating whether firing the employee or keeping the employee is better or worse that's a human decision so whenever it comes to calculation it's good to rely on computers it's good to say ok they they're much faster in calculating what the consequence is the numerical consequences might be but everything else it's better if you have a human person make that decision what we see is decision making for a computer is it's easy when you play chess or you you play go because

these are very simple games with very simple rules and they've the main thing you have to do is you have to calculate possibilities on the other hand where computers are really bad at is lawmaking or making a decision or prediction of what a judge might decide in in the legal case because the point is that there you cannot calculate the law as such is not rational it's not you cannot calculate a legal decision when people say that computers will replace lawyers for example that's not really very clever because legal decisions are not calculated they are

made by human beings what happens when you look at the literature abroad about brain research is that we always tend to interpret our brain in terms of the technology that is currently available so we were discussing about the brain as being a tabula rasa when the means of writing that we had was was tablets so tablets in a sense yeah and we started to talk about the brain as being an electrical engine when we started to understand electricity today we we tend to understand the brain as being something very similar to a computer so we

say ok it's activated it sends a signal what we do is we basically transfer our technology to our understanding of the brain so the question is not for me so much would in Iran be able to challenge the decision of firing or not firing the question mainly is is a neuron actually working as a computer and I believe the answer is fairly open because we do not understand enough of neurons and of the brain such to give an answer to that question we know that our brain depends on the body as much as we tend

to think that the brain is sort of steering everything the the brain is fed by the body and by all the input that the body gives to the brain I think we we have to see that the brain together with the body is is a system that has a certain functionality and has certain features and certain power in a sense while the computer is only the compute power so it can only calculate it doesn't get any input now you could argue that we could give input to to the brain and then we would have to

talk about something completely different if we were to add sensors to a computer in such a way that the computer would get that same feeling as you would call it about its body that we have about our own body when you look at the training of children not the formal training that we do at school but the training which children get by just experimenting and trying things out and my my son is one year old and so what he does is he grabs everything he tries to eat everything and is touching and and manipulating that's

a good word because manipulating means doing something with shame manipulating actually gives so much information to your brain that your brain starts to sort of create basics which you then have to have to be able to do logical thinking and I was very much impressed when when I was told by brain experts but also by by people working with young children that you need this type of manual experience of basic experience with modern we've seen and with cross and with everything for your brain to be able to learn to create something which we call abstraction

and to be able to talk and be able to understand mathematics and all these very high-level very abstract things so there is a relation between something which is very basic and something which we consider to be very high level it is difficult to make predictions in that field because what we see happening is that we we start to adapt to a situation like five years ago we were discussing that in Germany in car industry many people would lose their jobs because robots would take over and everything could be done automatically and you would have to

replace all the people who would carry bits and pieces around or putting things together what happened was the opposite what happened was the people were trained to work with robots they were trained to work with automated systems and as of today we have more people working in that field because because the system started to adapt now the question is how much of adaptation we can see in other fields since computers can calculate we definitely have to think about banks and insurances the question is how much can these people adapt to a situation where the calculation

is done by the computer and decisions or at least technically financial decisions are made or at least prepared by the computer the question is how well can these people or these branches of our economy adapt to such a situation because what happens is if you take the computer and a human being you dramatically increase the value we tend to think and all these people who say a lot of jobs will going away they'd have to think in terms of ok this is what we do today and if you bring in a computer we can replace

the human being but that's not the purpose of a computer the purpose of the computer is to create an added value so you take the person and the computer and then you can do much more than you did before so this is extremely difficult to predict where the jobs will actually be gone and people lose their jobs or whether these branches of our economy will start to understand ok what is it that I can give to my customer or how can I improve my product in quality if I use this systems and the knowledge of

the people working in that field the problem is that most people tend to think that we have to add some new subject to the curriculum and then there is a there is a big fight at least in Europe which is should they learn about how to use the system or should they learn about how to program the system now what I think is that should learn how to handle this system which means you have to understand what the system is doing you have to understand the logic behind that system and you have to be able

to describe whatever you want the system to do in technical abstract terms and the interesting thing is that we used to have this in Europe in the Middle Ages at a university there was something which was called the Trivium the three basics and part of that was logic and part of that was grandma and that's exactly what we're talking about we're talking about you being able to logically logically describe what you want to take the computer to do if you're able to do that if you're able to define in an abstract way in an algorithm

which is just a series of steps that you have to do to solve a problem if you have that ability then you can use the computer you could either write a program so your specialize in writing a program or you could just be a user of that what our children have to learn is something which is sort of trivial Trivium yeah which we did in the Middle Ages which we gave up because we said it's no longer important we all very much focus now on language and not on the grammar of language or on the

logic of language we are more focused on the content of language we have to go back to that structure and say ok we all know how to speak we all know language we need to understand is that for the computer the focus of language is on Swint acts on logic and not so much on a semantics in the first place so if we go back to syntax we will start to understand now my personal training in that field was that I learned Latin and with the logic that you learn when you learn this old language

that nobody ever uses with the exception of the Catholic Church probably you are well trained to use a computer and program a computer so it's not that we should have a new subject like computer science where we you have to have is logic in the curriculum that could be math that could be in physics but that could also be in languages the Utopia is always connected to the dystopia because there is always there is always a point where something good turns and something very bad and it's very difficult to understand or and to foresee which

of them you will have like you look at the the Internet of Things and you say my father is 18 now so he had a stroke two years ago and now he has a pacemaker and everything and and so the system could actually control his health by doing that and a utopian view would be that we never have any serious incidents because whenever there is something even a car accident and the system will immediately make sure that you get support in everything the utopian view would be that the system supports you in every way that

you would like to have it you don't have to cook anymore because the machines do that for you and they take away all the things that you don't like if you like to cook then okay you do it but if you don't like it it's done for you and the dystopian view is that at a certain point this utopian world in which you say that's so nice and if I need a car it's just there and it's autonomous and it takes me to some point a dystopian view is that this utopian situation turns into something

which takes away your humanity from you in a sense that you get you lose the connection to reality which takes us back to the question of your brain working only if your body has experience and things like that it's difficult to say whether this is a utopian view I think these systems will support us and if you're an optimist II would say great they will take away so many things from me and if you're a pessimist you would say wait a moment there is a danger that it takes away too much from us that would

be my forward-looking statement I don't call it utopian or dystopian I just think that we we get into a situation where we sort of have to recalibrate I had a discussion with for sure knowledge analysts about the impact of digitalization and I said when when you read about what philosopher or Doorn or said about television it basically could replace television by the Internet and it would be that same story and we adapted to television nothing of the dystopian view of us just sitting in front of a TV and and stopping the thing nothing of that

actually happened but part of this actually happened so some people yes they are sort of addicted to watching TV and it's the same with the Internet and what we what we saw what we see in history is there mister when we started to have writing and alphabet letters what happened was that we did no longer have to learn to memorize things when you think about the ileus in the Odyssey they were not written down in the first place it's stories that were handed over to the next one and you had to memorize it now once

you have enough abet and you can write it down you lose that ability because it's no longer necessary so you start to adapt and what you get is the ability to express your thoughts in in a written form and hand it over to someone else and then someone else can read it and you you yourself can read the thoughts of someone who is not here so all of a sudden we we are getting into a completely new situation Seneca wrote a nice book about the private art Evita it is called about the shortness of life

and what he says is that our life is so full with the lives of other people because we can read their books even if they are dead for 200 years so what is it that we lose we lose this ability to memorize and fill our brain with ideas that we then move on to someone else or hand over to someone else but what we get is another ability the ability to note our own thoughts write them down probably even correct them modify them over time hand it over to someone else and even give it to

people who will be born once we're dead and we can rewrite other people wrote before we were even born with the computer in the internet we are getting into a similar situation our our standard process of acquiring information by reading books and our ability to read 400 pages of 500 pages we are going to lose that ability because what the Internet does is it gives us small pieces of information you usually don't browse through a web page with 500 pages it's two three four or five but on the other hand what happens is that now

we move from a situation where you write the book and you hope that it's published and you hope that some people get to read it but it's a cumbersome process it takes a time and it takes an effort it takes a lot of money we move on to a situation where you can publish this video with little cost and everybody can look at it worldwide so you reach a new level of openness and this will turn us in to some in interspecies that is permanently communicating potentially with everyone what we reach now is called the

Global Village when the term Global Village was first coined that was in his 60s it was not true because television is not a global village but the Internet is a global village because now you're talking actually to everybody and you potentially know about everybody because you can communicate so we're going to lose something we're going to win something and that means we have to recalibrate you have to say okay it's not bad or good the question is what we make of it as trivial as this may sound it's simple it's the same story over and

over again look at look at Cervantes Don Quixote you can read it as a strange story but you can read it as a story of an old man who is sort of confused or you can read it as a book about a situation where you see a change in the media management or in the media that influence your life because what what Cervantes story is about is that you have a person who is heavily influenced by some new media and that new media was Romans so with the printing press appearing in the late 15th century

and then becoming more active in the 16th century or we see all of a sudden is that people get to read books that never before were able to read books because handwriting is expensive what he was talking about was a mass media phenomenon and he was making a joke about it that's behind Tonka shot as much as there is existentialist forts in that it is also a story about a change in our conservation of media and that means we always had that in our history we always have [Music] [Applause] [Music]