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Journalism of Courage
Finally, the nightmare comes true, at least 150 years after it was foretold. Ever since the time of Babbage8217;s adding machine, the forerunner of the pocket calculator, man has always expected to be beaten at his own game by his own creation, the machine. With Kasparov leaving the board, flapping his arms in unconcealed angst, it has finally happened. Or has it, really? Was there a decisive victory or decisive defeat in New York? IBM chose to focus its research on chess specifically because it is a game that computers can easily comprehend. Big Blue would have serious doubts over its ability to make a machine that could beat man at games that are really his own 8212; politics, say, or tax evasion. Machines think in a way that is completely nonhuman, following the logical system created by George Boole. They can decide the quickest route to take on the London Underground in nanoseconds, but they would be driven to catatonic despair if they were asked to surmise if a bus ride would not be nicer. They can work out the elaborate algorithms needed to swat a fly accurately. Whether the swatting is morally defensible, or whether the resulting mess might not be more unpleasant than the attention of the live fly, are issues that would cause a mental breakdown.
But the fear of the machine is as old 8212; older, indeed 8212; as the fear of little green men, and Deep Blue8217;s triumph will only fuel it. In the Eighties, an American group announced that it had discovered the Devil in his lair. He apparently lived in five huge interconnected computers scattered across the world. The group had performed some elaborate mathematics on the addresses which resemble telephone numbers of these computers and had come up with 666, the number of the Beast of Revelations. Today, that network of computers is called the Internet. The very name of the group has been forgotten in the meantime. They were discredited because they used that same network of machines to announce the imminence of Armageddon. But they could have been right. Since they prophesied the beginning of the end, computers have insinuated themselves into every aspect of our lives. They run the entire telecommunications network of the world.
