A sketch of Pynchonian politics

[Doug Millison]

Pynchon would seem, in his Luddite essay,  to be talking about trends
("artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics")  that he notes
in the real world and not just playing word games in this New York Times
essay, in which he discusses the Luddite response to earlier real-world
technology trends. 

AI is a buzzword that you don't hear much any more in industry (along with
"expert systems" which was also current in the '80s), but the practice of
capturing expertise and knowledge and building it into software systems that
help people perform tasks is very much alive, and accomplishing much of the
program that was originally touted under the AI rubric. 

The science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, also a professor of computer
science at UC San Diego I believe, has written a lot about what he calls
"computer-aided intelligence" -- essentially, powerful computer workstations
connected to information repositories (accessed over the Internet or
locally), with querying tools that let them quickly find answers to
questions and otherwise solve problems. (Querying tools that grow out of the
projects to develop computers that could understand and translate natural
language, which was in fact one of the key drivers, along with  computations
related to long-range missiles, for the computer developments of the 40s,
50s, and 60s, and since.) These are in fact the kinds of systems currently
used by engineers and researchers in genetic engineering, robotics,
nanotechnology, etc. In his science fiction, Vinge extrapolates from current
capabilities (which he has described in an essay I saw online sometime last
year; I expect a Google search might turn it up) to describe systems he
imagines may be used in the future. 

Whether Turing was right or wrong is a question I'll leave to the armchair
philosophers. It's worth noting that a relatively simple personal computer
software program called Eliza managed to convince more than a few people, in
the early 80s, that it was in fact a human psychological therapist and not a
computer. IBM's Deep Blue chess program has defeated human chess masters.

Certainly Pynchon is a prescient observer and synthesizer of technical,
economic, and political trends. His vision as expressed in GR in particular,
of a world economy controlled by corporations and cartels powerful enough to
influence governments and media, and able to establish a branch office in
every person's head was accurate:  otherwise how to explain the election of
a puppet like the current occupant of the White House?


Doug Millison, Senior Editor
Knowledge Management magazine
(415) 348-3054
DougMillison at ftmg.net
www.destinationKM.com