INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM
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code from a father and from a mother, and we create new descendants.
Then we have this new generation compete on real-market data and go
through thousands of generations of simulated evolution; at the end,
you have the survivors who actually have evolved very intelligent, clever
methods for investing money in the market and can outperform experi–
enced human analysts. It's an unpredictable process because, even
though we've programmed it, we can't predict what this final generation
will do and there's no shortcut to it. We actually have to run through
this process (very powerful computers process this data for weeks).
Then it comes up with some very unpredictable results, but can make
decisions based on those final rules . So these systems, while unpre–
dictable, do make intelligent decisions-just like humans.
Gunther Stent:
I would like to make several comments. First, I don't see
how the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which asserts that the
entropy, or disorder, of an isolated system increases over time, has any–
thing to do with the subject of our discussion. We are talking about
people and their societies, which are not isolated systems .
Second, it is not the case that the belief in progress is a very ancient
idea. On the contrary, it is a very recent idea, which dates back only to the
Industrial Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prior to
that time, the canonical view, such as that expressed in ancient Egyptian
and Greek myths, was that the history of the human condition is regres–
sive rather than progressive: history began with a Golden Age, when a
golden race of happy people dwelt on earth. Their felicitous condition
came to an end when Pandora lifted the lid of her box and allowed the
spread of previously unknown evils. And since then, things have steadily
gotten worse and worse, finally culminating in our own awful Iron Age.
The reason for this ancient belief in regressive history was that the
rate at which progress did occur was too slow to be perceptible. As a
rule, the world into which people were born was either the same as that
from which they departed, or, if there were any perceptible changes,
they were always for the worse, such as those brought about by pesti–
lence, war, or natural disasters.
It
was only with the advent of the Indus–
trial Revolution that progress became fast enough that the
improvements in the human condition became perceptible within single
lifetimes, and the idea could arise that maybe things were actually get–
ting better on the whole and not worse.
Third, the person who noticed that the rate of progress increases
exponentially was not Turing but Henry Adams, in his work
The
Education of Henry Adams.
His observation became known among
