Off-Topic: The Future of Information Technology and the Human Brain

My apologies for this post, but it seemed relevant to the CAD vs. manual argument we had a few years ago.

If you are unfamiliar with James Burke's thinking, it's probably worth looking him up. Don't necessarily take this excerpt as being representative of his ideas, read the article (or even better yet, read his books).

Paul

From:
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5148/burke_james_technol">http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5148/burke_james_technol</a> ogy.html

"BURKE: Well, going out on somewhat of a limb, I would have said that formal qualifications are again the last expression of the old way of looking at things, in the sense that to have a doctor operate on you, you need to have a doctor who knows what he's talking about. And you don't want to cross a bridge built by an engineer who failed his degree or didn't take a degree but just said, "I want to build a bridge," but knows nothing about stress. And almost every aspect of the mass-produced modern industrial world has until now relied on a means of assuring society that the persons to whom it gives these responsibilities are indeed what they said they were. However, increasingly what will happen is that qualified machines will do the jobs instead of human experts. For example, it may be that surgery 50 years from now will not consist of some extremely talented butcher slicing meat, but of harnessing the body's own repair mechanisms, the immune system, or whatever, to do the necessary work to cure disease before the need for surgery develops. If that happens, we may no longer have need of surgeons. It's happened before. How many people can shoe a horse today?" Received on Fri Jul 06 19:40:00 2001