IT: Control vs/and communication (was Aunt Reet)

[Monte Davis]

Tore quotes Janos quoting GR:

> > "Someday there will be computers for all this"
> >
> > A fake after-the-fact forecast quite similar to a fake prophecy
> > written down around 1970, projected back to 1945:
> >
> > "Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information 
> machines. You are 
> > the wave of the future." (GR 258)
> 
> Even though the prophecy in GR is also projected back in 
> time, I don't think it is as 'fake' as the one in IV. Even in 
> 1970, it wasn't all done by information machines, and even 
> though the ARPAnet u.s.w. came into being at that time, I 
> still tend to see Semyavin's words as genuinely 
> prophetic, as opposed to the 'prophecies' in late Pynchon.

There's a telling difference between GR's early-1970s retrodiction set in
1945 and IV's late-2000s retrodiction set in 1970. The former was written
when very few had hands-on experience with computers and reflects a broad
"electronic brains will take over" anxiety. The latter, written well into
Internet time, is a more ambivalent "*we* will be able to get information"
[about real estate or whatever].

Many of us have been through this. In 1967 I ran some math for a college
chemistry project on a  Digital PDP-5 (-7?) minicomputer. It was a cute
little thing compared to the "glass house" mainframes, but its operations
were still scheduled and its capabilities parceled out (time-sharing via
terminal) by an expert priesthood. By the time I got my hands on a personal
computer around 1979, and plunged into CompuServe and local bulletin-board
systems a year or two later, "peer to peer" interaction (both technical and
social) was entering the mix. By now, we're less worried about an UberBrain
running the world than about some 17-year-old Bulgarian whiz kid's virus
cutting us off from YouTube and the P-list. It's a lot more democratic --
not to say anarchic -- than anyone expected circa 1973, and ain't it grand?


The best prophecies are those whose fulfillment you bring about, e.g.
Leonard Kleinrock's: "[In 1961-62] I was a Ph.D. student at M.I.T. looking
for a research project, and I was surrounded by computers. And it was clear
to me that not long from then they would have to talk to each other."
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/onceandfutureweb/database/seca/case5-artifacts/video2
.html

On 29 October 1969 his lab at UCLA was where that happened: see item # 2
(complete with laboratory log) at:
http://www.bspcn.com/2008/07/30/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-internet
/

-Monte