The unbounded faith that software can tackle just about anything humans can finds its origins in a 1958 essay by mathematician John Von Newman entitled “The Computer and the Brain“.

Von Neumann was a genius in computer science, and the book discusses how the brain can be viewed as a computing machine. Rather than being seen as an interesting but highly imperfect analogy, the essay has passed into the realm of fact governing the minds of those who imagine a world ruled by software.

I’m an engineer and I know we are not ‘thinking equations’. We (and all living beings) are complex systems with billions of years of knowledge coded in them, and somehow connected among all of us.

The transhumanist lie from Silicon Valley and its mind programming machine (Hollywood) is that we are just lines of code that happen to feel and think because of some evolutionary random accident. And that sooner or later some form of consciousness will be reached or will “emerge” by artificial means. But this has nothing to do with real science. 

Related:

  1. The Real Risk Lies in Complexity They talk about Global Warming, negative interest rates, Brexit, etc. but the real threat is not in those specifics. The......
  2. El Riesgo Real Está en la Complejidad Hablan sobre el calentamiento global, las tasas de interés negativas, el brexit, etc., pero la verdadera amenaza no está en......
  3. The value of your network goes up exponentially when you view your contacts and resources not as a list but......
  4. Entropia de un Mercado en el Marketing Digital Una de las definiciones de entropía en Teoria de la Información es la cantidad de combinaciones equivalentes de un mismo......
  5. Reporting, Bureaucracy and Misdiagnosis In an interconnected world, the traditional way of analyzing reality based on cause-effect relationships is obsolete. The economy depends on......