Anatoly Wasserman: about the future, intelligence and socialism

But the fundamental principles remained. Actually, the main principle of programming is obvious: an arbitrarily complex task can be broken into pieces, so simple that anyone can cope with them. Since then, nothing has changed. And this principle works not only in programming.

As far as I can tell from the articles and books about programming that I have seen, the mainstream is now the same as the mainline at the time when my programming career was already ending. This is object-oriented programming when a program is assembled from structures containing both data and processing methods.
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I remember the official report on the language Algol-68: "any action described in this report can be replaced by any other action that gives the same external effect." This fundamental concept, in my opinion, will remain for a long time one of the key ones in programming. Just as before, the key was the idea of ​​structured programming, that is, the very decomposition of a complex task into elementary components, but only in applying, above all, to processing methods, and only then to data structures.

Well, the fact that now there are many software tools that allow you to represent objects as graphic symbols and draw relationships between them is, of course, convenient, but this is just a technical detail of the design of the same key idea. So, I believe, in the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that something will change.

I believe that in the foreseeable future, the main focus in the organization of large programming teams will be working with open source codes. Why is that? First, the classical collective programming with a single leader, around which the performers of his instructions are gathered, works only to a limited extent. Even in the book “The Mythical Man-Month”, it is described in some detail why, with such an organization, starting from a certain level of the number of employees, the addition of new employees only slows down the work. So, working with open source codes allows you to parallelize not only the programmer’s work, but also a lot of things related to its organization, when teams of several people interacting for each specific task are built, and the main designer can only accept or reject put forward solutions. In the case of quite complex and extensive projects, working with open source codes allows you to increase productivity faster than the version with a single manager.

Since for several years I have managed to manage a small team of five programmers, I’m about to imagine how much the complexity of coordination increases as the number of employees increases. I believe that the spontaneous formation of small groups emerging when working with open source, ultimately generates less overhead. Judging by the fact that Linux is developing now significantly faster than Windows, with a comparable number of developers making at least something significant, this path is more promising.

Helps a lot. First of all, in my main work - journalism. When right in the course of writing this article I can recall good examples illustrating it, this significantly speeds up the work. Even though for details, I still climb into books or on the Internet. But a good memory allows you to quickly add up the overall picture. I must say that a good memory is, above all, associative thinking. As many observations and experiments show, a person remembers everything that passes through his senses, and the question is not to remember, but to remember. And this helps a lot of associations. The more of them, the greater the chance that for some of these associations you will at the right time pull out the necessary fragment of memory.

No, I have never trained my memory on purpose, and have never even resorted to any mnemonic tricks. Is that the numbers E and Pi remembered mnemonically. For the same number Pi, with an accuracy sufficient for any practically significant calculations, a simple “rhyme” works:

You only need to try
and remember it as it is:
three fourteen fifteen
ninety two and six.

But this is an exception. My thinking is associative, and every time I come across something new, I start looking for associations in what I already knew before.

But it's not just about associations. There is another interesting thing that I constantly talk about and write about - a complete picture of the world. That is, the idea of ​​the world as the result of the interaction of some, rather simple, fundamental laws. If you know how to derive consequences from these laws, you already know a lot about the world. As two and a half centuries ago one of the founders of the French encyclopedia Helvetius said, knowledge of some principles successfully compensates for the lack of knowledge of certain facts. When you have a complete picture of the world in your head, any new fact finds a place in this picture, becomes attached to it and automatically acquires many associations, so that it is much easier to remember it afterwards.

Until the mid-1970s, all education in the world developed towards the formation of this integral picture of the world and the acquisition of skills to work with it. Unfortunately, then the direction of development of education was reversed. The fact is that the whole picture of the world is very convenient for its carrier, but very inconvenient for those who want to manipulate it. If a fact does not fit into the whole picture of the world, then it immediately causes suspicion. And this is not always due to the fact that the fact itself is erroneous. It also happens that the picture of the world is wrong.

For example, 10 years ago I had to start revising my picture of the world in terms of economics and politics. This part of me was built on the basis of liberalism and libertarianism, that is, the teachings on the beneficence of unlimited political and economic freedom of the individual without any regard for society. But a lot of facts have accumulated that do not fit into such a picture, and I found myself forced to admit that it was wrong for me. By the way, I now have quite a few publications where I point out both the specific mistakes of these teachings and the fundamental reasons giving rise to these mistakes. So the job was very helpful. I suppose if I did not have a complete picture of the world, then I would most likely just have not paid attention to these facts and would not engage in the appropriate revision. A person who has an integral picture of the world is much less amenable to commercial and political advertising; it is much more difficult to deceive him. Therefore, now both the market and politics with all their might are aimed at the stupidity of humanity, at the destruction of the whole picture of the world.

A new education system is being created, which prevents the very idea of ​​the possibility of forming this picture. Unfortunately, this can only be countered on an individual basis. In particular, I recommend that everyone read and ponder four books:

• Friedrich Engels - Anti-Dühring,
• Stanislav Lem - "The amount of technology"
• Richard Dawkins - "The Blind Watchmaker",
• David Deutsch - "Structure of Reality".

According to my observations, these books in aggregate are enough to at least in general terms form a complete picture of the world. And then you need to work on its refinement and filling.

By the way, for me personally, the formation of a complete picture of the world began with a children's encyclopedia read at the age of 9–10 years. Now all 10 volumes of this first edition are available on the Internet. Recently, I just downloaded them to my archive. Children's encyclopedia, in contrast to the adult, is not built on a vocabulary principle, but on a thematic one, which contributes to the formation of a complete picture of the world.

Subsequently, Khrushchev and Gorbachev's propaganda destroyed in my part of the picture, devoted to social disciplines. I had to form it anew, and now I am pretty close to the picture formed in childhood. I was convinced: with all the technical amendments to progress, Marxism still remains a fairly good approximation to reality in the social sciences, and it makes sense to focus on it.

Just a couple of days ago, my book finally appeared on sale, entitled “The Socialism is Better than Capitalism”. These are mainly articles from Business Journal, where I consider first of all what limitations of information technologies contributed to the emergence of the advantages of capitalism over socialism and by what point these restrictions would disappear. By the way, this will happen pretty soon. In about 2020, socialism will become more profitable than capitalism in all indicators, without exception, thanks to the development of information technologies. In addition, the articles deal with many aspects of the upcoming transition to a new socialism. At the end of the book, there is a research program developed by me and my colleagues that should be carried out to make this transition the most painless. So that no one was hurt and lost nothing. By approximate estimates, for these studies it is necessary to attract specialists of such quality and in such quantity that financing in the amount of one million dollars per month for 5 years will be required. Naturally, I wouldn’t get that much money out of my pocket — they had never been there before. But I hope that the publication of the book will help finance this set of tasks.

No, not a strategic development plan. The bottom line is that starting from about 2020 (with a very unfavorable scenario - from 2022, but not later), the total computing power of a computer park connected to the Internet will allow you to calculate a complete, accurate and optimal plan for the entire world production less than a day.

But this will be possible only in the case of common ownership of all means of production. As under socialism. And this, in turn, means: it is necessary to think in advance what to offer to each owner in return for his property, so that he agrees to such a transition.

Secondly, it is necessary to solve the problem of goal-setting, that is, working out not a plan, but the main goal for which we all work. There is reason to believe that this is an algorithmized problem. That is, it can be solved not at the level of personal discretion, but by analyzing a large array of heterogeneous data.

In this case, the main difficulty lies precisely in the diversity of information, right up to science fiction novels. Algorithms can be developed by means of the theory of reflection. But this theory, firstly, develops just half a century, and secondly, its creator, Vladimir Alexandrovich Lefevre, more than a quarter of a century ago left for Irvine. That is, most of the experts on the theory of reflection now lives in California. You can only contact them on the basis of funding already allocated.

In addition, there is a large range of psychological problems to be solved even before the beginning of the above described transition, in order to minimize the prerequisites for inevitable conflicts. It must be said that all the known flaws of the old socialism in one way or another stem from the limited capabilities of the then information technologies. Now these opportunities are many times wider, so that those shortcomings will not be repeated. But there are a number of other shortcomings that need to be addressed in advance. In particular, it is already clear what psychological problems will arise in the new society, and it is clear that these problems are solvable, but it is not yet known how.

Work on a single plan, in the common interest, is much more effective when each person is able to realize this community of interests and the need for unity of the plan. And the fragmentation of views and interests just means: people work not in the common interest, but in someone’s private interests. Therefore, a system aimed primarily at the general interest will greatly contribute to the revival of the whole picture of the world and the maximum increase in the intellectual and creative abilities of each person. Especially creative abilities - because now, when you try to implement some kind of creative idea, you will certainly encounter the need to do much more, spend too much time. And if we talk about a planned system that is able to work out any innovation for a day, then this will remove very serious obstacles in the way of creativity.

Accordingly, in the new society, creative activity will be much more demanded than now. I emphasize: we are talking about real creative activity, and not about its imitation, when you are just trying to combine the fruits of someone else's creativity in a new way. Not about so-called creativity: although it is translated as creativity, in our conditions it has become a designation for various imitation methods. Real creative activity in the new society will be in demand much more than in the old one. And the intellect in the new society will be in demand much more.

Since we started talking about intelligence: it is quite possible that in the near future there will be some kind of chemical compounds or manipulations with the genetic code, which can significantly increase the IQ of the average person. If the intellectual potential of a society increases, then manipulation techniques based on fragmentation of thinking and concealing information will not be very effective. And then the question arises - where to go? If a person is so smart that he sees no interest in some routine work, and robots that can work in factories and plants have not yet been created, then serious social and economic problems will arise.

Robots for many types of activities are not created just because a man is still cheaper than a robot. As each individual person and society as a whole develops, a very powerful economic incentive will appear for creating robots. As Engels noted, when society has a need, it moves science forward more than a dozen universities. I believe that in the new conditions the automation of production will grow substantially. As for IQ, I do not expect that the growth of the intellect of society will reduce the level of fraud. After all, IQ scammers will also grow. In addition, as the extensive experience shows, an intelligent person can, in fact, be deceived with the same ease as a fool — you just need to slip other baits.

In particular, we and the Kiev Maidan are a hell of a lot of people who are clever by all objective indicators. But this does not prevent them from completely sincerely believing that the return to power of people who departed from there because they have already proved their professional inconsistency can somehow improve the situation in the country. Moreover, I have often observed how quite intelligent people easily peck at such simple baits that even the worst fish would swim past. Unfortunately, the smarter the person, the more stupid he is able to come up. And I do not expect that the massive cleverness of humanity in itself will save us from deception. For this, completely different means are needed - including direct and purposeful struggle against deception, including the criminal code.

For example, the founding fathers of the United States of America, adopting the first amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech, motivated this amendment by the right of every person to free access to all the information he needs to make informed decisions. This means that freedom of speech has nothing to do with freedom of lies. If we recognize the right of a person to receive the information necessary to make informed decisions, then by doing so a public lie turns out to be the most serious violation of this right. And it should be prosecuted - completely independent of the right to freedom of speech.

As for chemical, genetic and other means of increasing intelligence, I will not say anything specific about them yet. All previously studied similar means have many undesirable side effects. I am afraid that this will be more than one decade, because our thinking is too complex a system. There are too many interrelations between the elements in it, and in the foreseeable future we will hardly be able to calculate the possible consequences. Therefore, I am still very skeptical of such means.

Not. I think they will not. Moreover, the intellectualization of society is much more affected by a return to the methods of teaching adopted in the 1960s.

The words of each person are evaluated with regard to prehistory. If someone's words are fairly regularly confirmed by the further course of events, then his new statements can be treated with attention and trust. The anonym has no history. Each anonymous statement is perceived as independent, not supported by anything. Sometimes, with quite long and lively discussions, it is possible to recognize some anonymous authors by style, but this is still not reliable, and most often each statement of an anonymous author is perceived as independent and divorced from everything else. Therefore, it seems to me that there is no particular harm from anonymity on the Internet, because the price of an anonymous word is rather small.

A virtual character is still not anonymous. This is a person, even without a specific name and address, but with a serious background to the statements, and we can get acquainted with it. Because of this, such a character is perceived not as an anonym, but as a real and well-known personality. Pure anonymous is a person who has no history.

To what extent should a person be responsible for his words on the Internet and how does the separation of a virtual person from a real one affect the reliability of statements? I think that in most cases, the fact that after the first false statement the value of a virtual personality drops sharply is a sufficient punishment.

I constantly read several familiar blogs and websites whose authors and editors are already selecting and concentrating a significant part of the information that interests me. If I am particularly interested in any information, then I follow the links provided in these publications. But more often I have enough to see the text itself. So the very presence of some publishers pretty easy life for me.

Mostly I am an owl. But I do not have a hard schedule - it is largely tied to contacts with other people, to external affairs. That part of the work that I do freely, I usually do in the evening and at night. Although this leads to the fact that I do not get enough sleep.

Hard to say. Most of what I carry with me are tools for various occasions. From a set of needles and a thin fishing line used as a sewing thread, to wrenches and screwdrivers of various formats. The habit of dragging it all worked out when I was a programmer and was engaged in the development of process control systems for sugar beet enterprises. These enterprises are located in the wilderness, near the places of beet growing. In addition, I had to spend in the engine room for several days, and everything that could be needed unexpectedly and very urgently, had to be kept to myself. This led to the fact that at first I was carrying a gradually expanding and heavier portfolio, and when I was completely tired of it, I began to sew myself unloading. Now I order them.