Excerpt

Scientists and engineers have been hugely successful in solving problems of design and control. Advances in the physical, chemical, biological, and mathematical sciences have been accompanied and driven by the systematic search for technological benefits for society at large. The successes of this search have transformed the ways in which people live and work. One of the most striking transformations of society is the increasing importance of information in providing solutions for problems that were once completely mechanical. For example, a nineteenth-century farmer who wished to provide a cushion against the failure of his wheat crop would plant some fields of corn; today’s farmer sells options—bits of information on pieces of paper—to provide a guaranteed income if the crop fails. Where thirty years ago a hot-rodder seeking extra performance would bore out the cylinders of his car, put on dual exhausts and a four-barrel carburetor, a modern hot-rodder simply removes the microprocessor chip that regulates fuel injection and timing, and replaces it with a chip that sacrifices fuel efficiency, low emissions, and reliability for power.

Even when sophisticated information-processing techniques are brought to bear, however, many problems stubbornly resist solution. The initial promises of cybernetics, and, more recently, of artificial intelligence, have proved harder than expected to attain. Some problems in pattern recognition and robotics appear to be simply difficult, in spite of the fact that humans solve such problems every day. These seem to exhibit an intrinsic complexity, a complexity that the process of finding their solutions must share. In addition, though information processing has become so ubiquitous a part of design and control that the humblest of kitchen appliances seems to contain a microchip, success inevitably gives rise to new possibilities for failure. Highly leveraged options traders, when their hedged bets go bad, fail spectacularly. Engines regulated by microprocessors may be efficient and reliable, but they are hard to fix when they break down.

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