"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

murder, or any perversion, there are no such difficulties: statistical theory is at our service.
The industrialization of emotion in all its aspects -- say the indignant critics of One
Human Minute -- is an utter impossibility. There cannot be, nor ever will be, devices, harnesses,
salves, aphrodisiacs, or any sort of "meters" to abet or measure filial or maternal love; no
thermometers to gauge the heat of lovers' passions. That their temperature is sometimes fatally
high, we learn only indirectly from the statistics on suicides resulting from unrequited love. Such
love is out of fashion in the modern world, and any writer who devotes his works to love alone
will not make it into the literary Parnassus.
There is no denying the merit of such arguments as these; the trouble is that without the
backing of facts and figures they remain generalities. The publishers of One Human Minute failed
not only to establish the I.Q. of politicians; they were also unable to include a register of the sins
confessed per minute in the Catholic confessional, or of those acts of kindness whose authors
wished to remain anonymous. And so the argument over the precise degree of objectivity or
subjectivity of this book cannot be settled.
With the help of the alphabetical index, anyone who seeks an answer to a particular
question can easily locate the relevant data. It is true that the conclusions drawn from data
combined in this way are far from unequivocal. Even today, five billion human brains process
less information per minute than do computers in the same time; computers make possible the
solution of problems and the execution of tasks otherwise beyond reach.
Automated telephone communication on a global scale is a splendid thing, no question.
But it did produce a by-product -- numerically not insignificant -- that is, telephone sex. In the
last few years, agencies offering such services have mushroomed. You have but to pick up the
receiver, dial, and give your credit-card number in order to avail yourself of your favorite variety
of conversational lewdness -- copulating in words, so to speak -- with an Australian, say, while
you sit in Ontario. But, then, no one can deny that the split between technological progress and
moral progress has taken place and is irreversible -- impossible though it may be to establish the
date of this separation, which marks the collapse of our nineteenth-century faith in the collective
march into the happy future. Technological solutions to one's desires can serve evil as well as
good. But goodness, again, is not measurable, and sometimes it happens that neither concept can
be pinned down. In One Human Minute, for example, we learn how many scientific works are
published every minute, and also how very little of his own field a scientist can assimilate, even
superficially. There is more and more information that he ought to be aware of but that exceeds
his physiological capacity of absorption. Today only supercomputers know everything in every
field.
Looking under the proper heading, one learns what computers -- which seem to be
changing from assistants to managers of our civilization -- can accomplish in one minute. Models
of the newest generation can perform nearly a billion logical operations in that interval. But a
fragmentary look will not tell us what is really going on in science. Perhaps for that reason -- or
to give the book greater weight, without diminishing its readability -- an extensive afterword was
included, in addition to the commentaries introducing each chapter to the reader. This is actually
an essay presenting the methods of calculation employed in One Human Minute. In more than
one case they smack of detective work, almost in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes. But the
infallibility of Holmes's famous deductions, which he was able to make from an old hat, a
forgotten pipe, a cane, or a watch, re-creating from them the unknown owner's appearance,
station in life, and character traits -- for example, that the person had recently fallen on hard times
-- all that brilliant detection was due to the assistance given to Holmes secretly by the author. But
countless parodies have since ridiculed that "classic deduction," showing how from the same
clues one might construct many logically tight but mutually exclusive hypotheses. No brilliant
detective-statistician was in a position, however, to bring forth this book singlehandedly, nor
could a large team of mathematicians have done it; computers were needed. A great deal of the