"The sum of technology" summed up the classic era of exploration of the Future. In his book, Stanislav Lem made a unique and bold technological analysis of civilizations. He analyzed the possibilities of the emergence of fundamentally new groups of scientific disciplines and completely abandoned simple extrapolation constructions of the Future. Written almost forty years ago, the book is not at all outdated and is a classic of futurology.
Stanislav Lem
The amount of technology
Editorial
The sum of the future
"We have to talk about the future..." A famous phrase from a book that gave the world an incredible statement: the achievement of the Future is technological.
"The sum of technology" has shaped the vision of several generations of young technologists of the future. The brilliant book by Stanislav Lem does not describe the long and varied history of predictions of the future of our world. It does not work for the sake of any regime or established opinion. Moreover, this book does not promise any endless and free benefits in the future. She is different.
Lem's book lay exactly at the turn of scientific eras. The "sum of technology" appeared when the study of probabilistic processes was just becoming one of the main methods of cognition. Quantum mechanics had already been created and actively applied in theory and practice, but humanity was still confident that the universe was unambiguous and defined, and knowledge was reduced to laying a reliable route along the unshakable metric of the world. The progress of mankind was inevitably compared with scientific and technological progress. And our Euro-Atlantic civilization, in search of new boundless territories, rushed into outer space.
"The sum of technology" seemed to sum up the classic futurological era of exploration. Epochs when a person clearly realizing that "the links of his life have long been forged by the Great Father", tried to predict the position of the next link. Mankind has analyzed its own history in search of fundamental processes, mechanisms and sources of energy that move its flywheel. It assessed its evolution based on any one mechanism of development: biological, administrative, technical, etc. It threw the dice of insights and conjectures, or erected one-sided palaces of the desired future.
In "The Sum of Technology" Stanislav Lem made a unique and bold technological analysis of civilization, or rather civilizations. He estimated their statistics on a galactic scale, obtaining restrictions on age and spatial distribution. Lem placed civilizations in the phase space of evolutionary parameters, trying to build some kind of Main Sequence. He looked at civilizations over long periods of time to determine - please pay special attention! - possible areas of information innovation. Stanislav Lem did not undertake to implement quantitative extrapolation, dear to the heart of classical futurology. He analyzed the possibilities of the emergence of fundamentally new not even sciences, but groups of scientific disciplines.
In the first half of the last century, E. Hubble, having studied the statistics of the "runaway" velocities of galaxies, deduced his famous fundamental law that the speed of a galaxy is directly proportional to the distance to it. Over the following decades, Hubble's data were confirmed by powerful observational statistics. But a study of the original sample of Hubble galaxies shows that he could not get the exact pattern in such small statistics and with such accuracy of observations. But the law was defined just then... So the construction of the "Sum of Technology" is based on an extremely poor field of part of the scientific theories that received a popular presentation in the 50-60s of the last century. But this was enough to build the foundations of the technology of the Future. And outline the problem areas, draw the expected directions of the main strike. And set the scale and degree of freedom of research.
Actually, the milestone set by the "Sum of Technology" in the 60s of the 20th century made it possible at the beginning of the 21st century to set a completely technological task: the construction of the Future. It was possible to prove in principle that based on the knowledge of fundamental civilizational trends, it is possible to create a technology for building a given Future. Naturally, the solution space for this problem will be limited.
Commenting on this publication was made by S. Pereslegin and N. Yutanov (Research group "Designing the Future", St. Petersburg).
Nikolai Yutanov
To the Soviet reader
The Soviet reader knows well and appreciated the works of the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. In his books, we admired the author's skill in creating exciting and fascinating fantasies, which, as a rule, originate from the existing and foreseeable achievements of science, and his subtle humor, and skillful stylization in his cybernetic and space tales.
In the book offered to the attention of readers, S. Lem appears before us in a new capacity - as a thinker who sets himself the task of looking into the future of mankind, to imagine pictures of the possible development of civilizations. Moreover, unlike most modern "futurologists", he does not try to predict the chronology of certain discoveries and inventions, he argues in a broader, integral sense.
The "sum of technology" is a broad canvas on which pictures are drawn of the possible development of human - and not only human - civilization on a large time scale. At the same time, Lem - and this is natural for a science fiction writer - extends his analysis so far that he invades areas that are practically the field of activity not so much of specialist scientists as of thinkers, who, according to the current development of science and technology, according to the trends traced in modernity, tend to predict the development of civilization (more precisely, civilizations) for hundreds and thousands of years ahead. Despite the purely problematic nature of such semi-fantasy forecasts, they also have a certain scientific value, since they explore the limits of the possible from the point of view of our modern ideas.
At the center of the Polish writer's thoughts is the fate of civilizations, the difficulties that today we can see in their future development, in particular, the difficulties arising from the exponential growth of scientific information, the rapid growth of masses and energies that people have to deal with, the complication of all spheres of society, the explosive growth of the population of our planet. Not succumbing to the pessimistic moods common in some circles of Western scientists and writers, Lem takes an optimistic position here, putting forward the thesis "Catch up and overtake nature!" Such an approach naturally introduces a wide range of questions into the writer's circle of thoughts: a comparison of biological and technological evolution, the biotechnical activity of civilizations, "cosmogonic construction", questions of a moral order related to all this, and much more. The reader will undoubtedly notice a strong cybernetic accent in the book: the information-cybernetic "cut" covers the range from the problems of automation of the intellect to the problems of the science of sign systems - semiotics.
In his hypothetical constructions, Lem strives to be strictly limited only to such constructions that do not contradict scientific methods and established data of natural science. This approach leads him to deny the exclusivity of the fate of the Earth and its cosmic environment. In general, "cosmic scales" - in the temporal and spatial senses - are characteristic of the flight of Lem's thought.
It is generally accepted that science fiction writers do not care about the laws of nature that govern the real world. But are the “creators of the worlds” so brave and reckless, and is it so easy to describe in all details a world with a different device (even if a really original idea came to mind)?
Michio Kaku
Until quite recently, it was difficult for us to even imagine today's world of familiar things. What bold predictions of science fiction writers and filmmakers about the future have a chance to come true before our eyes? Michio Kaku, an American physicist of Japanese origin and one of the authors of string theory, is trying to answer this question. Telling in simple terms about the most complex phenomena and the latest achievements of modern science and technology, he seeks to explain the basic laws of the universe.
Kirill Eskov
Futurological essay "Our answer to Fukuyama". The witty and captivating point of view of Kirill Yeskov allows the reader to see both the past and the future in a completely unexpected light.
Viktor Argonov Project
A symphony is not strictly an audio work. This is a philosophical story about the past and future history of the relationship between man and technology: from naive admiration for "progress for the sake of progress", through rethinking ideals, through attempts to escape from reality and a series of new discoveries - to a real spiritual transformation of mankind. The target audience is people who are interested in melodic and experimental electronic music, transhumanist futurology, philosophy of mind, ethics and religion, the psychology of altered states of consciousness, and science fiction in general.
Could rapid advances in technology, genetics, and artificial intelligence lead us to see the economic inequalities so widespread in this world become biologically fixed? This question is asked by the historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari.
In 1994, the queen herself touched the shoulder of this shy man with a sword, making him a knight. Few people believe in the paradoxical logic of Roger Penrose - it is so incredible. Few argue with her - she is so flawless. In this note, the knight of physics will talk about the Universe, God and the human mind. And everything finally fell into place.
Sean Carroll, William Craig
“The teleological argument about fine-tuning the fundamental constants is the best argument theists have when it comes to cosmology. Because this is a game of rules: there is a phenomenon, there are parameters of particle physics and cosmology, and you have two different models: theism and naturalism, and you want to compare which model fits the data better. Sean Carroll, in a debate with the philosopher William Craig, shows that the fine-tuning argument is far from convincing, and gives five reasons why theism does not offer a solution to the supposed problem of fine-tuning.
David Deutsch
The book of the famous American specialist in quantum theory and quantum computing D.Deutch actually represents a new comprehensive point of view on the world, which is based on the four most profound scientific theories: quantum physics and its interpretation from the point of view of the plurality of worlds, Darwin's evolutionary theory, the theory of computation (in including quantum), the theory of knowledge.
Peter Atkins
This book is intended for a wide range of readers who want to learn more about the world around us and about ourselves. The author, a well-known scientist and popularizer of science, explains with extraordinary clarity and depth the structure of the Universe, the secrets of the quantum world and genetics, the evolution of life and shows the importance of mathematics for the knowledge of all nature and the human mind in particular.
Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter
Curious what the future holds? This time, Krauss invited other experts from different fields as speakers: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the world's most famous geneticist Craig Venter, who deciphered the human genome, Microsoft Research Managing Director Eric Horvits, IT entrepreneur and Yandex board member Esther Dyson and other equally interesting personalities. This debate will focus on medicine, synthetic biology, the role of machine learning, the projects the guests are working on and the big challenges facing humanity as a whole.
The amount of technology
Stanislav Lem
SUM TECHNOLOGY
“What, exactly, is this “Sum”? A collection of essays on the fate of civilization, permeated with a "general engineering" leitmotif? A cybernetic interpretation of past and future? An image of the Cosmos, how does it appear to the Designer? A story about the engineering activities of Nature and human hands? Scientific and technical forecast for the next millennia? A collection of hypotheses too bold to claim true scientific rigor? - A little bit of everything. To what extent is it possible, how admissible, to trust this book? - I have no answer to this question. I don't know which of my guesses and assumptions are more plausible. There are no invulnerable ones among them, and the passage of time will cross out many of them. So the author himself defines the range of issues considered in this book, and his attitude towards them. In a fascinating way, S. Lem touches on many problems of modern science, as well as problems that will face the science of the future.
The most popular science fiction writer, S. Lem, appears in this book in a genre new to the Soviet reader. But as in his other works, here, too, he remains an intelligent and very interesting interlocutor.
Editorial Board of Science Fiction and Non-Fiction Literature
To the Soviet reader
The Soviet reader knows well and appreciated the works of the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. In his books, we admired the author's skill in creating exciting and fascinating fantasies, which, as a rule, originate from the existing and foreseeable achievements of science, and his subtle humor, and skillful stylization in his cybernetic and space tales.
In the book offered to the attention of readers, S. Lem appears before us in a new capacity - as a thinker who sets himself the task of looking into the future of mankind, to imagine pictures of the possible development of civilizations. Moreover, unlike most modern "futurologists", he does not try to predict the chronology of certain discoveries and inventions, he argues in a broader, integral sense.
The "sum of technology" is a broad canvas that paints pictures of the possible development of human - and not only human - civilization on a large time scale. At the same time, Lem - and this is natural for a science fiction writer - extends his analysis so far that he invades areas that are practically the field of activity not so much of specialist scientists as of thinkers, who, according to the current development of science and technology, according to the trends traced in modernity, tend to predict the development of civilization (more precisely, civilizations) for hundreds and thousands of years ahead. Despite the purely problematic nature of such semi-fantasy forecasts, they also have a certain scientific value, since they explore the limits of the possible from the point of view of our modern ideas.
At the center of the Polish writer's thoughts is the fate of civilizations, the difficulties that today we can see in their future development, in particular, the difficulties arising from the exponential growth of scientific information, the rapid growth of masses and energies that people have to deal with, the complication of all spheres of society, the explosive growth of the population of our planet. Not succumbing to the pessimistic sentiments common in some circles of Western scientists and writers, Lem takes an optimistic position here, putting forward the thesis “Catch up and overtake nature!” as a guiding thread for the progress of civilizations on a large scale of time. Such an approach naturally introduces a wide range of issues into the writer's circle of thoughts: a comparison of biological and technological evolution, the biotechnical activity of civilizations, "cosmogonic construction", questions of a moral order related to all this, and much more. The reader will undoubtedly notice a strong cybernetic accent in the book: the information-cybernetic "cut" covers the range from the problems of automation of the intellect to the problems of the science of sign systems - semiotics.
In his hypothetical constructions, Lem strives to be strictly limited only to such constructions that do not contradict scientific methods and established data of natural science. This approach leads him to deny the exclusivity of the fate of the Earth and its cosmic environment. In general, "cosmic scales" - in the temporal and spatial senses - are characteristic of the flight of Lem's thought.
The attention of the Polish writer is directed, first of all, to consideration of the ways of evolution of the "technology" of civilization, determined by the state of knowledge and the social and biological environment of the ways of realizing the goals set by society. At the same time, he connects the issues of the future development of human “technology” with the position of man in the Cosmos. And this leads to the question: “Is intelligent life an accident or a regularity for the Universe?” Drawing on the ideas and achievements of cybernetics with its concepts of homeostasis, feedbacks, hierarchical construction of control programs, etc., Lem comes to the conclusion about the natural nature of the emergence of civilizations. Interested Lem and various options for their possible existence; duration of civilizations in time; the probability of their simultaneity, in particular, in the technological phase; their frequency in the Universe; possible distances between them and the problem of space communication, etc. The writer poses the problem of the fate of civilizations very sharply; at the same time, to the optimistic thesis about the colossal possibilities for the development of communities of intelligent beings, Lem adds a fundamentally important statement about the multiplicity of ways for their probable development.
The development of civilization has many aspects. One of them is the future of civilization in terms of the development of science in it. Lem notes that the key to the power of a civilization is in the masses of energy that it can dispose of, and the key to mastering energy is in the information power of society. Man is, says Lem, a strategic "game" "Civilization - Nature." It is the mastery of information processes that will open the way for mankind to victory in this “game”. The path leading to this goal is already visible in the most general terms: this is the path of creating cybernetic intelligence amplifiers, the path of “intellectronics”. At the same time, Lem, a brilliant science fiction writer, remains on the basis of a fundamentally important thesis about cybernetic information machines as human tools. The problem of "machine and man" develops in him into a more general problem of the correlation of natural and artificial in the development of civilization, in technology. Interesting are his considerations that in the progressive course of civilization, the artificial will gradually lose its position as an "ersatz" and show its superiority over the natural.
The future will bring with it new discoveries in science, new achievements in technology, and, therefore, new scientific terms. It is difficult today to see what they will be like. Lem is trying to do this - perhaps because the “imitation”, “phantomology”, “phantomology” and many other things of the same kind invented by him are less substantiated than the rest of the sections of the book, and, from my point of view, bear the stamp of artificiality. However, behind them lies a completely meaningful and worthy of reflection content. If we ignore the mentioned terminological side of the matter, then in Lem's arguments about the technology of the future we see the formulation and coverage of, if not very relevant today, then at least interesting considerations and hypotheses that have the right to exist. As applied to such a distant future, which Lem is trying to penetrate, it is quite reasonable, for example, to distinguish between the design activity of people in such a form that relies on the learned basic laws and objects of nature, and in that form that seeks to embody abstract theoretical structures into being. growing primarily on the basis of mathematics. And the impact on the brain processes of people and, consequently, on their consciousness in ways that bypass the usual, that is, biologically formed, brain communication channels - isn't this a possibility worth considering?! Lem's thought experiments also have their own meaning, where he seeks to analyze the possible introduction of man into the world of situations for the civilization of the future, the unreality of which he cannot detect. Civilizations are quite conceivable in which quite radical operations on the brain are allowed; civilizations in which the connection of the neural pathways of one person to those of another will become a reality. Then, for example, thousands of people will be able to see the marathon run of athletes through the eyes of the runner himself. The moral problems arising from this - the problems of preserving the individuality of a person, the permissible limits of "identification" of personalities or their "alteration" - are by no means idle conjectures, as long as we admit the possibility of a person's active interference in the neuro-physiological substratum of his mental activity.
Lem's idea is very interesting to base the analysis of possible ways of development of civilizations on a comparative analysis of biological and technological evolution. Such an analysis not only allows you to see a lot of new - and unexpected! - in the evolution of the technology of civilizations, but also a logical approach to the problem of "reconstruction" - improvements from any point of view - of the Homo sapiens species itself. From a methodological point of view, there can be no objection to Lem's prediction that the time will come when man will actively and with full knowledge of the matter intervene in the global course of evolution and remake his own nature. Of course, extremes must be avoided in this matter; this is by no means a prospect of today or tomorrow. However, bioengineering is becoming a fact before our eyes, and it is not surprising that Lem gives it an important place in his prediction of the future of technology and the evolution of mankind.
This brief appeal to the domestic reader is not a preface to the book. It does not claim to analyze or evaluate it. I just want to draw the reader's attention to this book and emphasize that scientific forecasting has the right to exist not only when it comes to the near future, but also when they try to look into the future, which until now has been almost exclusively the prerogative of the artistic world. fiction.
Academician V.V. PARIN
August 2, 1968
Author's preface to the Russian edition
Every author, with satisfaction and joy, takes up the preface to his book, published in another country. But in this case, these feelings are joined by a sense of special responsibility: after all, this book - a book about the distant future - comes out in a country on which, more than any other, the future of the whole world depends. This circumstance forced me to review the text again and make some changes to it. At the end of the book, I placed a conclusion on the prospects for modeling complex evolutionary phenomena, both biological and technological - and hence civilizational - types. True, I have given only a brief outline, since a review of the various possible approaches to a process of such a spatio-temporal scale would require a separate book in itself. As for the proposed book, having gone through two editions in Poland and having also experienced discussions and discussions of various specialists, this book has undergone to a certain extent a kind of that very “progressive evolution”, the processes of which it talks so much about. After all, the best means of learning are your own mistakes, clearly outlined. I don't mean to say that the book no longer contains any errors. A state of such high perfection seems to be generally unattainable for a book about the future.
When creating the original version of the Summa, I did not have access to any monographs on the so-called futurology. Those works that I then happened to read, like the books of Thomson or Clark, are, as I could see, somewhat different in nature from the "Summa", because the authors of these books mainly build assumptions about new, as yet unknown inventions and scientific discoveries, and they also "outline" the dates of their appearance, in other words, they, as it were, "make a calendar" of the future development of science and technology. I was attracted by a somewhat different question, the question of the very "generator" of both inventions and discoveries, and in general all creative (for example, mathematical) acts of human thought. Speaking in a figurative sense, the goal that I saw in the distance was a certain image of the "most universal final algorithm" that embraces any intelligent creation in the material realm of the world. At the same time, I tried to give as complete an overview of civilizational phenomena as possible, a survey that claims to perceive the phenomena of the “psychozoic” from a kind of extraterrestrial, galactic, or simply general cosmic point of view. Of course, in doing just that, I was fully aware of the significance of the risk I was taking, since the bolder such attempts, the more likely they will turn out to be ridiculous and will be crossed out by the actual development of society and science, and yet I considered that at the present time it is worth taking such an even such a significant risk. For I consider our time to be exceptional, and I understand it in the following sense. As you know, the fundamental position of Marx's historical materialism says that man was created by labor and that the changes that make up the history of mankind ultimately depend on changes in the tools of labor, since new tools transform the productive forces of society in a new way. In the process of human anthropogenesis, physical labor was formed as an activity aimed at satisfying basic needs, while mental labor was derived from physical labor and served to strengthen this latter. Over the centuries, perfect machines became allies of man - the producer of material goods, but in the field of thinking he was not only deprived of any similar help, but even the very idea of such help was considered unrealistic. Moreover, a person considered this idea wrong and even "harmful", which is easy to see from the resistance that - among the most diverse thinkers - awakens the ghost of a "synthetic mind", which supposedly constitutes a genuine threat to human values and even the very existence of a person. This point of view must first of all be seen as a prejudice created by the pressure of centuries of tradition. However, this does not mean that this point of view should be neglected.
We are at a turning point in the history of tools, tools that, having emerged in the world of work
physical, cross its borders and invade the spherementalhuman labor. We are talking about the elementary beginnings of a gigantic process aimed at the future, and at the same time about the inevitable result of the cumulative growth of science created over the centuries. In this sense, this "new" is a consequence of the unstoppable run of our civilization, which, again, does not imply that this next technological revolution cannot bring with it tasks and problems that are very difficult and even fraught with danger. However, any threat to civilization can be reduced either to the inability to masterpublicforces, or to the inability to master the forcesNature.In both cases, therefore, we are talking about the same type of threat source: this source isignorance- ignorance of the laws of development, be it social, be it natural, natural. The best remedy for ignorance isnew knowledge, and the situation requires more and more energetically reversing the former order of phenomena: in prehistory, practice, of course, was ahead of theory, but now theory is obliged to foresee the paths of practice, because for any ignorance shown now, humanity will have to pay dearly later. Obviously, more complete, and therefore better, knowledge has always been the most perfect remedy against half-hearted, or simply false, knowledge, but now, more than ever, the amount of costs, losses, and even defeats that such a lack of knowledge entails has increased to enormous proportions. For this reason, the most valuable, vital information is information about the laws of scientific and technological development, but not information about the "calendar of discoveries and inventions", access to which is closed to us, but information about them.source, "generator". Reflections on its characteristics, its cognizability, its action and its various forms, and is mainly devoted to the proposed book. Taking advantage of this opportunity, I want here to sincerely thank the publishing house "Mir", which wished to present this book to the critical attention of the Soviet reader, as well as all those who had to work hard so that - without having the perfect translation machines, about which so much is said in the "Summa" ! - clothe in the clothes of the beautiful Russian language the thoughts contained in it.Krakow, April 1968
Preface to the first edition
I began writing this book three times, and only on the third attempt did I succeed in delineating its boundaries, and thanks to this, to complete it; otherwise, conceived as a "tower of reason" from which an endless perspective opens up, it would share the fate of its biblical predecessor. I had to omit many questions and topics (very important in their own way) in order to maintain the main line, expressed not so much in the choice of the problems involved, but in the approach to them - an approach that is defined in the text as the "Designer's position". Yet the book is not without its thematic imbalance. About one it says too little, about the other - too much. I could justify my choice of material, but ultimately it is, of course, dictated by my personal tastes and predilections.
What, exactly, is this “Sum”? A collection of essays on the fate of civilization, permeated with an "all-engineering" leitmotif? A cybernetic interpretation of past and future? An image of the Cosmos, how does it appear to the Designer? A story about the engineering activities of Nature and human hands? Scientific and technical forecast for the next millennia? A collection of hypotheses too bold to claim true scientific rigor? - A little bit of everything. To what extent is it possible, how admissible, to trust this book? - I have no answer to this question. I don't know which of my guesses and assumptions are more plausible. There are no invulnerable ones among them, and the passage of time will cross out many of them. And maybe that's all - but only those who are prudently silent are not mistaken.
I tried to tell about what interests me, as simply as possible. However, not always strictness entered into an alliance with simplicity. And I did not always clearly enough separate the concepts that I created myself (at my own peril and risk) from those that I borrowed from somewhere.
Many - and often all - I owe to a whole range of authors, but I give a special place to prof. I. S. Shklovsky, since his monograph
1 turned out to be one of the key ones for the Summa, which without it could not have been written at all in its current form. Since (as discussed in the first chapter) the prediction of future development is burdened by "unreliability" even with highly specialized forecasts for a decade, since the two great terrestrial evolutions - biological and technological (described in the second chapter) - do not provide sufficient grounds for integral and distant forecasts, then the only way out in such a situation, which is not purely speculative, would be an attempt to include the earth's civilization as an element in some set. It can only be included in a hypothetical set of space civilizations; this gives us reason to present in the third chapter the experience of such "comparative studies". Cultivating a "comparative cosmic sociology" that would allow for truly far-reaching predictions is also a very risky endeavor. This discipline, which does not yet exist, relies practically on only one single experimental fact, and even that negative one: the absence in the entire set of astrophysical data of any signs of intelligent (technological) activity in the part of the Cosmos that we observe. To elevate a single fact to the rank of a criterion and (in subsequent chapters) to base on it an assessment of the possible ways of human development - looks like a paradox or absurdity. However, after all, the basis of cosmogonic theories is a negative fact. I mean Olbers paradox. If the universe - this paradox says - were infinite and uniformly filled with stars, the entire sky would have to emit uniform light, which in fact does not happen. This is precisely the “negative fact” that all hypotheses about the structure of the Universe must take into account. Similarly, the absence of visible manifestations of astroengineering activity prompts us to reject all orthoevolutionary hypotheses, according to which the future is a multiplied present, and, therefore, all civilizations ahead of the earthly one should widely cultivate stellar engineering on an astronomically observable scale. Just as the Olbers paradox does not serve as a milestone for an unambiguous choice of the correct model of the Universe, the absence of astroengineering activity does not guarantee the success of one or another hypothesis about the directions of civilization development, because the absence of visible traces of such activity can be explained either by the extreme rarity of life in space, or by (or along with with this) the special short duration of the planetary "psychozoic eras". In the "Summa", however, in accordance with the views prevailing today, I proceed from the cosmic universality of life and at the same time reject (for reasons that are highlighted in the text) the thesis of "cosmic pan-catastrophism" - the propensity of all possible civilizations to suicide.On the basis of the premises thus established, I consider (in Chapter Four and subsequent) mutually exclusive hypotheses of development. At the same time, the main factor hindering technological orthoevolution, the factor that changes the future fate of civilization, is the exponential growth of scientific information. A review of attempts to overcome this "information barrier" leads us to the concept of "growing information" - a biotechnical event on a large scale - and, finally, to "cosmogonic construction", in particular to those of it - especially interesting in view of the above - options that are astronomically unobservable. The book ends with a sketch of the prospects for unlimited technological creation, that is, the successful rivalry of civilization with Nature in the field of its “design” achievements. On the other hand, against the background of this “expansion” of our civilization into the material environment, a “counter” trend is depicted, as it were, the trend of technology intrusion into the human body; we are talking about possible variants of human biological auto-evolution.
The scheme outlined above, which reflects the logical "skeleton" of the book, can, of course, be criticized. One can, for example, consider that the development of each civilization is divided into two periods: the period of "uterine development", which leads to its "cosmic birth", and the period of "maturity". In the first period, intelligent activity is limited by the boundaries of the mother planet. Having overcome a certain "technological threshold", this civilization gets the opportunity to enter into a cosmic connection with other civilizations (according to this hypothesis, such "mature civilizations" exist and have long been actively operating in the Cosmos, and only we, in our "uterine phase", are not in able to notice and recognize them). This point of view, which requires some additional assumptions, is not taken into account by us, just like many others who declare any attempts to create a "cosmic sociology" premature. I have limited myself only to what is admissible from the point of view of scientific methodology, or, more precisely, its requirements, and therefore I believe that I have stated, nevertheless, a set of hypotheses, and not fantastic fictions. What separates a hypothesis from fiction? One can imagine, for example, that the entire visible Universe is a local perturbation resulting from the clash of cosmic titans, whose seconds and millimeters correspond to billions of years of our time and parsecs of our space. Then the Metagalaxy available to our observations is a place of a local explosion with nebulae, fragments and fragments of stars flying in all directions; we, microscopic creatures, were at the center of this catastrophe by pure chance. It is this kind of assumption that is fiction, and not because they are “amazing”, “unusual”, “incredible”, but because they contradict the foundations of science, which denies any exceptional fate of the Earth and its cosmic environment. The imaginary picture of "Space as a battlefield" is a fiction, not a hypothesis, because in it our position in the Cosmos is highlighted in a certain way. On the contrary, following science, we consider everything that exists on Earth and in the sky to be statistically ordinary, average, normal, in a word -
ordinary. It is the refusal to accept the concepts that postulate the exclusivity of our existence that is the starting point of the reflections presented to the reader.Krakow, December 1963
Sum Technology
Description: “What, in fact, is this “Sum”? A collection of essays on the fate of civilization, permeated with a "general engineering" leitmotif? A cybernetic interpretation of past and future? An image of the Cosmos, how does it appear to the Designer? A story about the engineering activities of Nature and human hands? Scientific and technical forecast for the next millennia? A collection of hypotheses too bold to claim true scientific rigor? - A little bit of everything.
To what extent is it possible, how admissible, to trust this book? - I have no answer to this question. I don't know which of my guesses and assumptions are more plausible. There are no invulnerable ones among them, and the passage of time will cross out many of them. So the author himself defines the range of issues considered in this book, and his attitude towards them. In a fascinating way, S. Lem touches on many problems of modern science, as well as problems that will face the science of the future.
The most popular science fiction writer, S. Lem, appears in this book in a genre new to the Soviet reader. But as in his other works, here, too, he remains an intelligent and very interesting interlocutor.
Above is an annotation to a book that was published in the USSR in 1969 and completed five years earlier. Some of the author's ideas already seemed naive then, others seem naive now. But what is striking is that this futurological essay, unlike the mass of others, is not at all outdated. Why? Because Lem in this work of his conscientiously analyzed the history of the development of life (including intelligent life) on planet Earth, and not ideological speculation, which was so rich in the 20th century. For his goal was to look as far as possible into the future of our civilization. So far that none of us living today can check if he was right. But since “manuscripts do not burn”, and there is hope that the living History does not end, such a test, apparently, is yet to be, and - who knows - perhaps more than one.
Philosophers and scientists speak of this book condescendingly, but with a note of disdain in their voices. The former believe that he is a "non-important" philosopher, sometimes even confusing categories, the latter point fingers at the author's actual errors in interpreting scientific facts. But both of them are completely helpless in solving the basic question of science and philosophy: what is the meaning of life? But Lem had something to say about this ...
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The amount of technology
Stanislav Lem(No ratings yet)
Title: The sum of technology
About the book "The sum of technology" Stanislav Lem
Stanislav Lem is a science fiction writer, satirist, futurist, and philosopher. Winner of numerous awards for his works, he was a member of the American science fiction writers organization SFWA. However, for criticizing literature, the USA was expelled from it, but subsequently he was offered ordinary membership, which he rejected. The works of S. Lem are distinguished by their depth, well-thought-out plot and well-written characters. His books quickly became popular, so more than 30 million copies were sold in total. At the same time, the author's works have been translated into more than 40 languages. However, S. Lem did not immediately receive recognition, but he did not stop working and as a result of his work they noticed. His work "The Sum of Technology" is the most famous and in demand. It is called fundamental because in it the author was able to predict the emergence of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Many consider his philosophical reflections to be prophetic and interpret the development of future events in different ways.
Stanislav Lem in his fundamental work "The Sum of Technology" attempts to conduct a predictive analysis of moral, ethical, scientific, technical and philosophical problems that are related to the functioning of civilization in conditions of freedom from technological and material restrictions. In the book, the author develops the ideas of human autoevolution, suggests that artificial worlds will soon be created. They will be multifaceted, so people will want to start a new life in them, because they will get bored with earthly reality. It is noteworthy that the work "The Sum of Technology" has a number of inaccuracies, since S. Lem did not check individual details. However, later the book was revised more than once, fresh ideas were introduced into it. With each reprint of the work, she found more and more fans. However, it does not lose its relevance today. Many re-read this creation of the author and find ideas for future projects in it.
Stanislav Lem in his work "The Sum of Technology" was able to do the impossible by predicting the development of future technologies. The author himself admitted that he was not a medium or a clairvoyant, he simply analyzed the existing technologies and imagined how they would develop. Thus, a work was born that anticipated the time.
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Quotes from the book "The sum of technology" by Stanislav Lem
With all the evil done, it was science that rescued a significant part of humanity from a hungry existence, while the foundation of all religious systems of the Asian model is precisely indifference - as sublime as catastrophic in its consequences.
... the ideal of a scientist is a thorough isolation of the phenomenon he is considering from the world of his own experiences, the purification of objective facts and conclusions from subjective emotions. This ideal is alien to the artist. It can be said that a person is the more a scientist, the better he is able to suppress human impulses in himself, as if forcing nature itself to speak with its own lips. The artist is the more an artist, the stronger he imposes himself on us, all the greatness and insignificance of his unique existence. We never meet such pure cases; this indicates that it is completely impossible to realize them: after all, in every scientist there is something of the artist, and in every artist - something of the scientist.
The more artificial the environment around us, the more we depend on technology, on its reliability - and on its failures, if it allows them.
Any information assumes the presence of the addressee. "Information in general" does not exist.
As you know, nothing gets old as fast as the future.