In the preceding chapter we considered the uniquely human phenomenon of
exteriorization of the organs involved in the carrying out of technics.
In that context it is not without interest to review the problems that
arose when machines began to be endowed with the properties of a nervous
system and a preestablished "consciousness" of their actions.
The question of the relationship between the species and the ethnic group
again arises in this context, but this time it does so in terms of instinct,
intelligence and "artificial intelligence" or species-related
memory, social memory, and "mechanical memory." To discuss a
machine in the same way as a living organism may seem unwarranted. To do
so from a purely zoological standpoint would be pointless, but some purpose
is served, I think, by taking such an approach within an ontological perspective.
We can then dispense with fractionating the human by choosing only those
pieces that correspond to scientific systematology. Had Descartes, who
opposed the human being as the embodiment of intelligence to the animal
as a "machine," known about present day electronics, he might
well have spoken of the machine as an "animal." From a different
point of view, we can refer to the obscure fantasies of the bulk of humankind.
Reduced to their bare bones, the plots of newspaper cartoons and comics
the world over always involve the same three characters beast, man, and
robot; where the cartoons are American inspired, the evolutive progression
is, revealingly enough, the following: bison, gorilla, cowboy, scientist,
astronaut, robot. Each of the main stages beast-man-thinking- machine leads
on to the next via the transitional stages of the thinking beast (gorilla),
man-as-muscle (cowboy), man-as-brain (scientist), man-as-machine (astronaut),
and machine-as-man (robot). That being so, the question arises whether
the collective imagination might serve as the source for a classification
that would help us to understand the evolution of the human community.
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We have already commented on the fundamental fact relating to human memory:
Like tools, human memory is a product of exteriorization, and it is stored
within the ethnic group. This is what distinguishes it from animal memory,
of which we know little except that it is stored within the species. Animal,
human, and mechanical memory differ from each other in some essential respects.
Animal memory is formed through experience within narrow genetic channels
prespecialized by the species, human memory is constituted through experience
based on language, and mechanical memory is constituted through experience
within the channel of a preexisting program and of a code based on human
language and fed into the machine by a human being. Mechanical memory is
not without some points of resemblance to animal memory: A kind of species-related
preconditioning exists in all types of machines, but the operating program
is dictated in a wholly instinctive manner because it materially preexists
the action, whose every twist and turn is plotted in advance. Seen in this
light, the machine comes a good deal nearer to the standard definition
of instinct than does the animal itself.
Within a functional perspective, then, the three forms of memory can be
regarded as distinct but comparable. Human inherited memory is preexistent
within the genetic group, and the reason why human beings do practically
nothing "by instinct" is that, unlike animals, they have not
received a hypothetical atavistic memory. The animal's experience uses
a small keyboard that has been tuned in advance, leaving practically no
room for personal variants, whereas human beings have a large keyboard
at their disposal and can assimilate and embroider upon the many series
of programs handed down to them by society. Seen from this angle, mechanical
memory is half way between the two in that the electronic machine uses
only a small keyboard but receives an "education" in the form
of the programs dictated to it.
The history of the collective memory can be divided into five periods:
that of oral transmission, that of written transmission using tables or
an index, that of simple index cards, that of mechanography, and that of
electronic serial transmission.
A group's body of knowledge is the basic constituent of is unity and is
personality. The transmission of this intellectual capital is the necessary
precondition for the group's material and social survival. Transmission
is effected through the same hierarchy as operating sequences.
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Mechanical operating sequences are part and parcel of the common memory
of families. They are performed in all material and moral episodes of daily
life and are recorded in the personal memory of individual during childhood
by means of processes in which the role of language is not necessarily
the most important. The same cannot be said of less frequent or exceptional
practices that, in all societies without writing, are stored in the memory
of specialists elders, bards, priests, who in traditional human groups
discharge the highly important function of maintaining the group's cohesion.
The recording of knowledge is connected with the development of oral literature
and of figurative representation in general; it will be dealt with in part
III. In the most general sense practical, technical, and scientific knowledge
is rarely recorded in literature of any kind, although it normally forms
part of a context in which magical and religious matters are not clearly
separated from practical ones. In agricultural societies and so far as
artisanal tasks are concerned, the social structuring of crass plays an
important role: This applies as much to the blacksmiths of Africa and Asia
as to European corporations before the seventeenth century. The training
of apprentices and the preservation of craft secrets are taken care of
within each of the ethnic group's social cells. At this level, which is
that of primitive peoples as well as of quite recent agricultural societies,
the contents of technical memory are not systematically organized in anyway.
To put it more precisely, each group of operating sequences or each sequence
forms a more or less independent whole including actions to be copied as
well as oral instructions.
Writing did not spring into existence by chance; after thousands of years
of maturing in systems of mythographic representation, linear notation
of thought emerged together with metals and slavery (see chapter 6). Nor
were the initial contents of linear notation a matter of chance: They were
accounts, records of debts owed to gods or to others, series of dynasties,
oracular pronouncements, lists of penalties. The limited and very poorly
documented nature of the earliest texts is a constant source of disappointment
to the ethnologist: How much more we would know if the Sumerians had left
us some cookery recipes, hints on etiquette or woodworking, or metalworking
manuals! But in point of fact it is unimaginable that writing should have
been invented for such purposes, traditionally consigned to oral memory.
The first concern of evolution is with the new, and in order to be felt
as "new," early metallurgy itself would have had to fail completely
outside the scope of existing
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mechanical practices. It would have had to be an exceptional operation
unconnected with any established gestural sequence, which a manufacturing
technique clearly could not be. Or else writing would have had to mature
without an object for centuries in order to acquire the means of recording
what had only recently become suitable material for notation, as unlikely
a hypothesis as the earlier one. The collective memory would not have broken
out of is traditional cycle at the birth of writing except in order to
deal with matters that in a nascent social system were felt to be of an
exceptional kind. Therefore it is not by chance that what was written down
was not what is made or experienced in the normal course of evens but what
constitutes the very bones of an urbanized society where the nodal point
of the autonomic system is the interchange between producers be they celestial
or human and rulers. Innovation was concerned with the upper end of the
system and selectively encompassed financial and religious acts, dedications,
genealogies, the calendar -those things within the new structures of the
city that could not be completely consigned to memory either through gesture
sequences or through products.
Only a few characteristic elements of science in is infancy were consigned
to written memory. The earliest references of this order, whether in Mesopotamia,
Egypt, China, or pre-Columbian America, relate to the calendar and to distances.
Primitive peoples before the settlement of agriculture did not lack knowledge
about time and space, but both of these took on a new meaning from the
moment when the capital city became the pivot of the celestial world and
of humanized space.
As the instrument for storing words and phrases in the memory of generations
became more efficient, the keeping of records developed and spread to deeper
strata of knowledge. But even in classical antiquity, the sum total of
facts that could be transmitted to future generations was limited by the
hierarchy of social values to certain well-defined areas: religious, historical,
and geographical texts, together with philosophy, accounted for the main
bulk of written material. In other words, the basic theme was the connection
between the divine and the human, and within that framework the material
to be committed to memory concerned the threefold problem of time, space,
and the human being. Agriculture cropped up in poems whose main subjects
were the seasons, and architecture in descriptions where cosmic space was
identified with palaces and temples. Mathematics and music, emerging at
the same time as medicine, were the first scientific subjects in the full
sense of the word, but they too were haloed with magic and religion.
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Until the invention of printing, in the West as in China, the distinction
between oral and written transmission is difficult to draw. The main body
of knowledge was buried in oral practices and in techniques. Only the uppermost
part of knowledge, is framework unchanged since antiquity, was set down
in writing, to be reamed by heart. During the centuries that lay between
Homer or Yu the Great and the first western or oriental printed manuscripts,
the concept of reference developed together with the growing mass of recorded
facts. But each piece of writing was a compact sequence, rhythmically broken
up by seals and marginal notes, around which the readers found their way
like primitive hunters by following a trail rather than by studying a plan.
The spoken word had not yet been converted into a system of orientation
tables. We saw earlier that the conversion of the two-dimensional mythogram
not reducible to a phonetic phrase into a linear series of alphabetic signs
represented the freeing of speech and at the same time a certain restriction
of the individuals symbolizing power: With the advent of printing a further
conversion, soon to become indispensable because of the abundance of texts,
began to take place.
The texts set down in ancient or medieval manuscripts were intended to
be committed to the reader's memory for life, at least firmly enough to
enable readers to find their way around the manuscript with ease. There
was also of course written material of a more mundane kind letters and
contracts, just as in the earliest days of writing but involving larger
sections of the population but these were kept in the possession of the
persons concerned or of notaries, and practical problems of orientation
did not arise. The same is by no means true of printed matter, which soon
went beyond the range of traditional subjects. Readers not only obtained
access to an enormous collective memory whose entire contents they could
not possibly register but were also frequently confronted with new material.
A process of exteriorization of the individual memory then began to take
place. The work of finding one's way around printed material was done from
outside. For centuries, dictionaries and glossaries had offered some possibilities
of orientation; Chinese writing with is phoneticized mythograms, as well
as the Greek and Latin scripts, had provided readers with means of orienting
themselves along the traditional thread of successive ideographic or phonetic
signs. But the dictionary provides only a narrow outlet for written memory,
a form of knowledge that is both linearized and fragmented and therefore
incompatible with the processes of sustained thought.
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The eighteenth century in Europe marked the end of the ancient world in
printing as well as in technology. It saw the old tradition at is richest
as well as the first stirrings of the process of change still going on
today. Within the space of a few decades the social memory had engulfed
in books the whole of antiquity, the history of the great peoples, the
geography and ethnography of a world now definitely acknowledged to be
round, philosophy, law, the sciences, the arts, the study of technics,
and a literature translated from twenty different languages. The ever-widening
stream still flows today, but at no moment in human history did the collective
memory dilate more rapidly than in the eighteenth century in Europe. This
is why all possible methods of equipping readers with a preconstituted
memory were already to be found at that time.
The dictionary reached its limits with the encyclopedias of every kind
that were published for the use of manufacturers or artisans as well as
of pure scholars. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, technical
literature began to flourish. Every subject was explored, and the descriptive
vocabulary still in use today began to form. The dictionary is a highly
developed form of external memory in which thought is broken down into
an infinity of fragments; the "Great Encyclopedia" of 1751 is
a series of short manuals encased in a dictionary. The level of the art
of documentation was then as high as that of mechanical animation: The
automaton reached is peak when actuated by separate cams that endowed each
of is organs with a fraction of memory; the encyclopedia is a fractional
alphabetically arranged memory each of whose isolated mechanisms contains
an animated part of the whole of memory. The relationship between Vaucansson's
automaton and the French encyclopedia is contemporary was the same as that
between today's electronic machine and integrated memory.
In sequentially arranged works the eighteenth century made use of practically
every known method, in particular the medieval method of the marginal note
(which still survives today) in order either to sum up a paragraph or to
provide references, with the latter being more often consigned to footnotes.
An alphabetic index at the end of the volume, already fairly common in
the sixteenth century, became an almost standard feature.
The most interesting development from our point of view was the direct
opposite of alphabetical indexing and affected the contents of the work
as a whole. As early as the Middle Ages, and more or less universally from
the sixteenth century onward, the margins of a book had served to provide
summaries of the contents of each page or paragraph, and a brief list of
contents had been supplied (without pagination) at the beginning of the
volume. Little by little book presentation began to be organized
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in such a way as to help readers find their way around an unfamiliar volume.
That is exactly the function of an external memory. The process took place
along two tracks, each developing until the early twentieth century. One
consisted in having each chapter preceded by a summary, the other in including
a table of contents before or after the main body of the work. The former
was a residue of the old attitude whereby a considerable personal memory
input was expected from readers and, barring a few exceptions, has today
disappeared. A summary at the head of each chapter after a list of contents
at the head of the volume was a logical stage in the detailed discovery
of the volume's contents, but the trend has been to turn the table of contents
into something resembling a mythogram a significant assembly of symbols
in which the eye and the intelligence are not obliged to follow the rectilinear
progress of the written text. To achieve this status, the table of contents
has had to divest itself of all syntactic elements and now contains only
freestanding words that serve as signposts for readers. In the sphere of
printed matter, we have not gone any further than this point, first reached
two centuries ago. As in all other spheres the spearhead of evolution has
shifted; it is no longer in the book, which survives as the documentary
infrastructure, but in documentary material freed from any context.
By the nineteenth century the collective memory had expanded to such proportions
that the individual memory could no longer be expected to store the contents
of whole libraries. The need became apparent to organize the inert "thought"
contained in the printed "brain" of the collective by means of
an additional fabric upon which a highly simplified picture of the contents
could be projected. Above all else, the constituent cells of this new fabric
had to be capable of indefinite enrichment and reconstruction in a manner
appropriate to every type of documentary research. The eighteenth and part
of the nineteenth century had still made do with notebooks and catalogs.
These methods were succeeded by the card index, which did not begin to
be properly organized until the early twentieth century. In is most rudimentary
form it already represents a real exteriorized cerebral cortex: A simple
set of bibliographical index cards will lend itself to many adaptations
in the hands of is user, becoming an author or subject index, a geographical
or a chronological one with every possible permutation to meet requirements
as particular as the place of publication or the dimensions of inset plates.
This is still more obvious in the case of card indexes containing scientific
information, where each documentary component can be rearranged at will
in relation to all other components. Actually the
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parallel with the cerebral cortex is in some respects misleading, for if
a card index is a memory in the strict sense, it is a memory lacking is
own means of recollection and has to be brought into the researcher's visual
and manual operating field before it can go into action.
A further step forward was taken by making the card index contain several
sets of cards, perhaps of different colors, so that a second network of
references was added to the first basic one, or better still by using punched
cards. Books in their "raw" state are comparable to hand tools:
However sophisticated their presentation, the reader's full technical participation
is still required. A simple card index already corresponds to a hand-operated
machine: Some of the operations have been transformed and are now contained
in potential form in the index cards, which are the only things the reader
needs to activate. Punched index cards represent yet another stage, comparable
to that of early automatic machines. Whether they are cards with marginal
perforations that have to be activated by hand or cards of some other kind
requiring mechanical or electronic sorting, the principle of the punched-card
index is always the same: The data are converted by means of a binary code
(positive = no perforation, negative = open perforation), and a sorting
device separates the cards according to a set of questions, releasing only
those that produce an affirmative response. The principle is that of the
Jacquard loom, and it is curious to note that documentary material waited
for more than a century to follow in the footsteps of weaving. But although
the mechanism is the same, the degree to which it is exploited is entirely
different. The punched strips of the weaving loom express answers, whereas
each perforated index card corresponds to a possible question. A punched
card index is a memory-collecting machine. It works like a brain memory
of unlimited capacity that is endowed with the ability not present in the
human brain of correlating every recollection with all others.
No progress beyond this stage has so far been made except in the matter
of proportions. The electronic brain, although it employs different and
more subtle processes, operates on the same principles. Theoretically devices
using perforations or integrators (generally associated with the former)
can compete with the brain in terms of the ability to compare. They can
on a gigantic scale and within a negligible period of time process a mountain
of data to achieve a well-defined end, and they can produce every possible
answer. If provided with the data needed for an oriented
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choice, they can weigh those answers and enrich such preestablished weightings
with judgments based on experience drawn from precedents stored in their
memory. The electronic integrator's superiority over the card index is
derived from the amount of data it can process within a very short period
through the simultaneous action of several selection centers capable of
checking and correcting their own output, whereas the most efficient cards
in existence, having a data density of 20,000 per card or 10,000,000 per
500 cards, skill require the operator's direct participation and considerably
more time. The artificial brain of course is still in is infancy, but we
can already be sure that it will be more than just a nine days' wonder
with limited applications. To refuse to see that machines will soon overtake
the human brain in operations involving memory and rational judgment is
to be like the Pithecanthropus who would have denied the possibility of
the biface, the archer who would have laughed at the mere suggestion of
the crossbow, most of all like the Homeric bard who would have dismissed
writing as a mnemonic trick without any future. We must get used to being
less clever than the artificial brain that we have produced, just as our
teeth are less strong than a millstone and our ability to fly negligible
compared with that of a jet aircraft.
The tradition that holds the human brain responsible for human achievements
is a very old one. The human species adjusted with equanimity to being
overtaken in the use of is arms, is legs, and is eyes because it was confident
of unparalleled power higher up. In the last few years the overtaking has
reached the cranial box. Looking fans in the face, we may wonder what will
be left of us once we have produced a better artificial version of everything
we have got. We already know, or will soon know, how to construct machines
capable of remembering everything and of judging the most complex situations
without error. What this means is that our cerebral cortex, however admirable,
is inadequate, just as our hands and eyes are inadequate; that it can be
supplemented by electronic analysis methods; and that the evolution of
the human being a living fossil in the context of the present conditions
of life must eventually follow a path other than the neuronic one if it
is to continue. putting it more positively, we could say that if humans
are to take the greatest possible advantage of the freedom they gained
by evading the risk of organic over-specialization, they must eventually
go even further in exteriorizing their faculties.
If electronic machines learned one day to write perfect plays and paint
inimitable pictures, some serious questions would have to be asked about
the future of the human species. By learning how to love they would definitively
settle our hash as a zoological species. Before we project into the future
a picture that may well be
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false, I propose in the last part of this book to consider an area as yet
untouched by the machine, for we have all along gone round inside a triangle
formed by the hand, the word, and the sensory-motor cortex and have shuttled
back and forth between the human and the monkey in search of what cannot
be shared with the rest of the zoologically or mechanically animated world.
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