Muggles in the world of Androids

Science, having overcome many superstitions of the past, did not make the world less mysterious. Future discoveries promise to be even more amazing, even more far from domestic common sense. Will the human mind cope with the challenges of the future? Astrophysicist, Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Popov 1 think about this .

The famous statement of Arthur Clark says that a sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is applicable not only to the fantastic situation of the PaleoContakte or the story like “the Yankee at the court of King Arthur”, not only when contacting modern civilization with a small tribe lost in forest wilds or living on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Any of us is almost daily with devices or processes whose actions we do not understand enough. It can be a cell phone or navigator, there may be a medicine or medical procedure. We simply don’t think about much: how strong plastic or alloy used in our car is obtained, how information is read from the camera matrix, which made it possible to make a long -preserved cupcake that does not lose softness; How the search engine so quickly processes the request or how the machine translation program works.

Try to take two pairs of sunscreens and polyaroids and show the child how the light will completely disappear, if you look at two glasses immediately, turning them in a certain way, and then appears back when you turn one of the points by 90 °. You can have fun with only glasses if you sit in front of the monitor or take a cell phone. LCD screen gives polarized light. Accordingly, wearing polarizing glasses, you can, tilting your head, see how the screen fades (I once found it for a long time quite by accident and at the first moment was frightened, thinking that I was losing consciousness). Finally, you can even do without glasses. Take an electronic clock and a cell phone, go to the dark room and shut up on the clock. The LCD screen, giving polarized light, illuminates the cliced ​​crystal dial of the clock. Again, rotating the clock or phone, it can be achieved that the dial will be black despite the bright light. Isn't it a focus? Now try to tell your child why all this is happening. And if you try to explain how it turns out that in a modern multi -Lolyoline lens, the light is almost not lost due to the so -called enlightened optics, then often in the case of an adult interlocutor you will come across a misunderstanding, or rather, some rejection of chattering information: how so, they applied extra films, but it has become more transparent.

Moreover, most often in our collision with “Magic Technology” we are not talking about the very forefront of science. An explanation of the polarization of light is the XIX century (and it was discovered in general in the 17th century), and an enlightened optics for more than a hundred years! With rare exceptions, the most fresh fundamental results are very slowly falling (if this happens at all) in the field of interest of applied research and development of mass products. But ultramodern ideas are often used in the creation of methods and devices to obtain new scientific results. This is what allows science in recent years to develop at a very rapid pace. As a result, the work of many experimental attitudes looks partly “magical” even for scientists themselves who are not engaged directly in this study. Methods of work of gravitational-wave detectors and analyzing their data, many ways to study exoplanets, experiments in order to register particles of dark matter-all this causes a legitimate sense of surprise and admiration for those who do not do this directly.

In the modern world, a good attempt to name seven wonders of the world should lead to the allocation of seven scientific attitudes, and not the largest statues, television tombs or bridges. Surely, such a list would be a large adron collider and LIGO and Virgo installations, the James WebB International Space Station and the Telescope, the fastest supercomputers and powerful laser systems, DNA research and manipulations with genetic material. It is in the individual super -protruded scientific devices that humanity is capable of.

Note that ancient miracles delighted contemporaries primarily with a technological complexity (and some still think that the pyramids built aliens). True, then it was rather gigantic objects, the difficulty of creating which we would now call quite mechanical. But after all, another science did not exist! The ancient world is the world of mechanics. Now, a miracle could rather become the highest skyscraper, but some kind of chip or nanorobot, fitting not only in the palm of your hand, but at the tip of the finger. It is not important, it is important how much creative intellectual work was invested in the development, including what was invested in the creation of funds that make it possible to create this miracle. Therefore, an effective vaccine is more like a modern miracle than the largest frying pan.

Today, such a situation is quite possible. There is a large scientific installation in which many technically complex nodes are connected, and almost each of them uses new non -trivial solutions. And besides, specially designed advanced algorithms are used to analyze the results. And the scientific task itself, for the solution of which the device was created, is an extensive section of advanced science. As a result, there is not a single specialist who in detail would understand the entire amount of the methods used in the project. This is fine. After all, there are no doctors who could at the highest level engage in all diseases and organs: to transplant the liver, and to do a neurosurgical operation, and correctly diagnose any infectious disease, and much more. Even Dr. House needed a team from different specialists. If you try to figure it out in the details yourself, then there is simply not enough time.

Nature is not simpler than man. Indeed, the effects of the general theory of relativity are not important in the work of the body; The doctor does not need to know how physics works outside the standard model to make the correct diagnosis; There are no ultra -ceiling liquids and superconducting ceramics in us. Can we completely figure out how nature works? Is this only a matter of time or can we face more fundamental difficulties?

Actually, now almost every of us may encounter the fact that a full-fledged understanding of some sections of science is so that he can get new results in them-he can’t do it: there is not enough mind. I came across this and come across, and I will not say that I was discouraged - the effect is clear and expecting - but this causes some discomfort. Having produced this, we can express the following hypothesis. Starting from a certain level for an adequate description of reality, intellectual capabilities that are superior to human ones may be required. It can be the actual cognitive difficulties. There may be problems of operating with large volumes of information. But one way or another, it is possible that from some point further advance along the path of scientific progress will not be able to the simple Homo sapiens .

If your computer is no longer “not pulling”, then a natural output is a replacement or upgrade. At the first stage, it would be extremely seductive at least expanding the amount of our memory (we would add RAM to the computer and replaced the HDD with a larger volume), and then “connect the brain to the Internet”. It is possible that something similar in the distant future can be done. And this, of course, will already be a noticeable help in the development of science by man. However, as we know, people with phenomenal memory are not always (but rather rarely) went down in history as great scientists. Having learned by heart a big spelling and explanatory dictionaries, not to become a good poet. Even having learned the largest and most complete English-Russian and Russian-English dictionaries, not to become a good literary translator. This is not enough.

You can fantasize about a formal increase in brain speed. True, it is not very clear how to do it. But it seems that this is a rather useless thing in itself. If the memory has already been expanded, then the ability to quickly read and remember will not bring so much benefit. The ability to quickly consider anyone a great mathematician. Of course, performance will help to find the necessary information rather. But that's all. This gives little from the point of view of the development of fundamental knowledge. We may need Einstein 2.0.

Thus, we want a supermoza to solve the superfalls. And it is not at all the fact that this can come to this by improving a person. For a long time, many science fiction writers (and not only) tend to think that the future is behind artificial intellect. That a person is the first view on Earth, which with his own hands (and brains) will create the one who replaces him.

“Fronts” is not necessary to perceive in the sense of the complete disappearance of mankind. Just a person can stop being "the most intelligent on earth." And first of all, this is related to who on our planet will be responsible for scientific progress. Maybe after hundreds of years all leading theoretical physicists and mathematicians on Earth will be non-controlled?

If in the future the activity of scientific comprehension of the world will be transferred to an artificial mind, then we (humanity) can be in a strange situation. Not people, but artificial intelligence will continue to develop science. New theories will be created, new theorems are proved, new technologies will develop. Everything seems to be fine. For example, it will not be necessary to dig a tunnel in the hill with your hands - it will make cars, and we will be proud to follow the built road in a fast machine created at a completely robotic factory. But in a situation with science, knowledge, a rather unpleasant turn of affairs is possible. In the course of progress in the knowledge of the world, the very concept of “understanding” can radically change, if the artificial brain works differently (on completely different principles in comparison with ours). Or just “the quantity will go into quality”: we will not be able to study the sufficient amount of existing knowledge to understand the new one. That is, one way or another, but a person will not even be able to adequately realize, to learn this new knowledge and fully understand how new technologies work.

By the way, now you can encounter the fact that many calculations (including analytical) are a noticeable share of modern students, graduate students and even specialists cannot reproduce, since, say, integral or is calculated in numerically, or a program like Mathematica or Maple will deal with it. I recall some old scientific and fantastic novel, where a similar situation has gone far enough and with a global failure of all computing systems, no one is able to conduct life-important computing on paper, not because they go beyond human capabilities, but because they stopped studying and teaching this. But we are still interested in the case when superhuman capabilities are needed to obtain or complete understanding of new scientific results.

I repeat, at the level of an individual there is no great novelty. The vast majority of us cannot run a hundred -meter faster than 10 seconds. And this is not a matter of training. Even if we had been doing this since childhood, the majority would not have happened anyway. The same thing happens not only with height jumping or pushing the nucleus, but also with the writing of great novels, the creation of key fundamental theories and, often to hide, often with an understanding of these theories. No need to deceive yourself with the thought that "if I were very interested, then I would completely deal with what Perelman did." Maybe they would have figured it out, or maybe not. But it’s nice to think that someone else can. And in the future, the thing may turn so that no one can understand in its entirety, what and how the non-state mathematician proved 1616fg#7687765 and what is the essence of the new theory of the theory-theoretical 8747LD@8785780.

Then, in fact, all human knowledge itself in the natural science (as well as, possibly, mathematical) region will become “popular science”, that is, incomplete, simplified, adapted . New devices will look “magical” for everyone, since none of the people can give a complete description of technology. They will be successfully controlled verbally (oral teams), or “hands with their hands”, or a mental order, and they will “somehow work”, fulfilling our desires. Popularizers will also be non -controlled. People will continue to write poetry and paintings, play the violin and football.

In the meantime, in principle, you can figure out everything if you spend some (possibly significant) time. The entire amount of knowledge cannot be covered, but each specific question can almost always be disassembled if there is time. Do not lose it!

Sergey Popov

1 This article is part of the project that the author is currently working on.