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

and its imitators: to supply the complete truth.
The original One Human Minute is supposed to be computerized, so that one can call it up
on one's home computer. But most people will prefer the volume on the shelf. And so the book,
styling itself "all books in one," will increase the mass of printed paper. In it you can find out
how many trees fall per minute to saw and ax all over the world. Forests are turned into paper to
make newspapers that call for the forests to be saved. But that piece of information is not in One
Human Minute. You have to figure it out yourself.
 III

Now One Human Minute has indeed been computerized, but not in the way I imagined.
The fact is, the contents of the book were becoming, slowly but surely, anachronistic. The
number of people in the world keeps increasing; new catastrophes and calamities are added to the
old ones; new means of production create different articles for daily consumption. Therefore, as
in the case of yearly almanacs, it came time to revise the book -- or rather, to recalculate it from
scratch. But a character appeared, even cleverer than the Johnsons; he decided to put a perpetual
One Human Minute on the market -- valid from year to year -- like a perpetual calendar! In an era
of pocket calculators, electronic chessplayers, and a host of similar devices claiming to embody
"artificial intelligence" (which has not been attained yet but someday, no doubt, will be), when
you can buy even a pocket translator to carry on simple conversations in a foreign language, it
was possible to make an electronic version of this book, avoiding the need for continual
corrections and new editions.
The year is entered, the subject code selected from the menu. Also, one can move both
forward and backward in time. Naturally, seeing that the machine can show how many children
were born thirty years ago, and how many three hundred years ago, a person is tempted to give it
a tougher problem: how many people watched television when Columbus discovered America?
The machine is not that stupid, however, and is not taken in. The answer that appears in the little
window is "0." We are soon convinced that the past has all been entered in the memory of this
new, microcomputerized version of One Human Minute. But it is more interesting to use it to
look at the future. You cannot jump more than one hundred years forward: when you try, you get
an "E" in the little window, signaling overload, as in any ordinary calculator. Future data are
extrapolations, derived from such weighty mathematics that I wouldn't dream of going into it.
The only thing certain is that all the data are uncertain, like any statement about the future. But
since The Perpetual Human Minute is really not a book, the book reviewer has no further
obligation to it; there remains for him only this parting, possibly profound remark:
In the Holy Scriptures it is said that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God. Paraphrasing for our earthly use, we can observe that in the beginning was a computer,
which brought forth this book, which became a computer again. An accident, perhaps, a
superficial analogy -- but I am afraid that it is not.



The Upside-down Evolution


I

Having gained access (by what means, I'm not at liberty to reveal) to several volumes on
the military history of the twenty-first century, I pondered, first and foremost, how to hide the
information they contained. The question of concealment was most important, because I
understood that the man who knew this history was like the finder of a treasure who, defenseless,