Let's move on to The Matrix, last time we talked about the similarity between the Matrix in The Matrix and Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" thought experiment, this time I want to talk about the technology in The Matrix. The most advanced technology in the Matrix is the artificial intelligence matrix, which can manipulate electronic squid to attack human bases, and can also create various sensory experiences by inserting plugs into the human brain, making people unable to realize that they are living in under the control of the mother. In the matrix, human beings are completely controlled by the technology of the matrix and have no autonomous ability. When Neo broke away from the mother and went to the human base (Zion), I have a deep memory of one of the episodes. The leader of Zion and Neo chatted in the silent night. The leader pointed to various machines in Zion and said, In the Matrix we depend on the Matrix, but in Zion we depend on the machines. This passage profoundly reveals the paradox since the emergence of human civilization. Human civilization needs various technologies, but technology has also brought new challenges to human civilization. This challenge has been with us since the emergence of human civilization. Different historians have different definitions of civilization, but most experts agree that the two necessary conditions of civilization are cities and writing. Cities and writing are complementary and mutually supportive technologies. Without the materials and food concentrated in cities, it is impossible to support the elites who master writing. Likewise, without the management skills brought by writing, it is also difficult for human beings to manage a city and its affiliates. in the vast countryside of the city. City- and text-based management techniques allowed human groups to concentrate more human and material resources, and at the same time started a process of large-scale war and inequality. The emergence of cities in any region will inevitably lead to wars and the continuous expansion of the power of the literate elite and the exploitation of the lower classes due to the coveted wealth of the cities. The ultimate solution is not to decay in mutually destructive wars like the two river basins, or to a totalitarian dictatorship that stifles freedom of thought through long and tragic wars like Egypt and China. The process of technological progress fell into a long-term slow development after human beings entered the agricultural civilization, and only accelerated again during the industrial revolution. Several industrial revolutions have brought a large number of new technologies to human society, and at the same time, human civilization has also experienced rapid social and psychological changes unseen in thousands of years. The steam engine brought powerful power to replace the power provided by humans and livestock, and also brought revolutionary technological breakthroughs in the transportation industry: steam ships and trains. Steam ships and trains not only changed the speed of our transportation, but also our concept of time and the way we live. Before the advent of steam ships and trains, no one could go from where they live to a place hundreds of kilometers away from home in one day, so everyone uses local time, and it is enough to refer to sunrise and sunset more often. Steam ships and trains allowed people to travel from one city to another in one day, and in order to ensure accurate timetables for steam ships and trains, a new concept of time had to be introduced. National unified time has become a prerequisite for the operation of steam ships and trains, and people are more aware of the time from clocks, rather than watching the sunrise and sunset. After people are gradually accustomed to the unified time provided by clocks, they not only rely on it to ride steam ships and trains, but also use this unified time to arrange their own life and work. When deciding when to eat, when to work, when to go to bed, and when to wake up, we no longer obey our senses and begin to obey the clock. Our schedules of action have become more scientific and efficient, but we have also become more mechanical, and we have lost our sensitivity to the time nature provides. The industrial revolution not only brought about the improvement of transportation efficiency, but also brought about the improvement of production efficiency. The secret to improving the production efficiency of the Industrial Revolution is mechanization and division of labor. A production job is decomposed into more production processes. Each worker only focuses on one process. The most typical description of labor division and cooperation comes from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. A description of the pin factory in . The production of a tack can greatly improve efficiency and increase production through division of labor, not to mention more complex products? The impact of division of labor and cooperation on society is not limited to improving production efficiency. Division of labor and cooperation also brings specialization and standardization, two basic characteristics of modern society. In order to improve the efficiency of division of labor and cooperation, each worker must be required to focus on a few processes, so that practice makes perfect, which requires the specialization of workers. Another condition for the actual implementation of the division of labor and cooperation is that no matter who the workers in the previous process are, the workers in the next process can produce according to the results of the previous process. This requires standardization, that is, everything produced by everyone is it's the same. If the needle caps of the pins are large or small, the workers engaged in the assembly will be very laborious, and the efficiency will be low, reducing the efficiency of the entire production process. Specialization and standardization are the most important core technologies of modern large-scale mechanized production. It has brought enormous material wealth to human beings, and also brought great changes. Due to the success of specialization and standardization in industrial production, many people blindly extend specialization and standardization to other areas of society, and the hardest hit area is education. Education before the Industrial Revolution was Teachers and disciples sit and discuss Taoism and discuss with each other. There are no timetables, no standard teaching materials, and no exams and standard answers. After the Industrial Revolution, a large number of literate industrial workers were needed, and the old-fashioned education could not provide such a large number of workers, so the new compulsory education system was born. The new compulsory education system quickly cultivated a large number of literate and accustomed industrial workers through standardized textbooks, standardized class schedules and semesters, and standardized tests and answers, providing factories with a large number of human resources. With the success of specialization and standardization in compulsory education, this new education method has also been extended to universities that used to talk about things. The universities are subdivided into departments, and the teachers and students of each department only learn this The relevant knowledge of the department, so that more knowledge is generated in each sub-scientific field, and a more detailed division of the department is required. So the university went from being a place for thinkers to a place for business people and engineers. This specialization and standardization of education has brought us a lot of literacy, industrial workers with basic knowledge, and engineers who can solve technical problems, but it also suppresses people's curiosity and thirst for knowledge, and weakens people's thinking and questioning The ability to alienate himself into a screw in the social machinery. Universities have also lost the ability to criticize and reflect on social systems and social ideas, and have become scientific research institutions purely serving economic development. What is really pitiful is that what our current factories need is no longer industrial workers who can read and have basic knowledge (many factories can no longer see workers), but our education system is still using the previous education methods, using Standardized teaching materials and answers to destroy children's curiosity and thinking ability can only prove the huge inertia of the social system. Now education reform is a headache for all countries in the world, but the social system and vested interests formed over the past few hundred years do not seem to be easily overcome. The poor thing is that I don’t know how many children will become this old system that is dying. 's funeral objects. Our consumption habits today are also thanks to technological progress. Before the Industrial Revolution, most households were self-sufficient, producing their own necessities such as food and clothes, and only salt or production tools needed to be exchanged. The invention of the industrial assembly line makes mass production no longer a problem, so the next problem is how to digest the products produced in mass. The high wages of workers on Henry Ford's Model T line may appear to be in conflict with company profits, but it's a smart move. Mass-produced, affordable cars needed more people who could afford them, and Henry Ford turned his employees into his customers by raising wages. In this way, the circulation in the body is realized, and the problem of mass product sales is solved in advance. Industrial production line technology naturally brings many problems. For example, the alienated worker that Chaplin satirized at seeing everything as a screw and wanting to screw it. The worker also lost control over his work and became a manager. A tightly controlled screw, man is no longer the user and controller of the machine and becomes a screw on the production line. Another problem brought by industrial production lines is that it must provide a market for the large amount of goods produced. Since production is no longer a problem, the only problem is sales. The popularity of advertising and marketing strategies began after the popularization of production line technology. Everyone was persuaded to buy more products, and artificially designed the product life in advance, forcing users to buy new products in various ways. (For example, does your mobile phone and computer become slower the more you upgrade the software system? Haha) This naturally brings a lot of waste and is not environmentally friendly, but if we really break up the whole society and don’t buy it, it’s unnecessary If the products produced in large quantities will not be bought by anyone, factories will be forced to stop production, and workers will be unemployed. Environmentalists from all over the world have criticized the government for not doing enough environmental protection. However, they do not know that governments are dancing on the tightrope between environmental protection and unemployment, for fear that environmental protection will affect tax revenue and employment. After all, the economy cannot continue to operate if the products produced are not sold of. The advancement of industrial technology has also brought about changes in our interpersonal relationships and changes in social structure. The most typical example is the improvement of women's status and the awakening of women's rights awareness. Before the Industrial Revolution, women rarely went out to work outside the home (except for servants and some special industries). The Industrial Revolution made it possible for women to obtain economic income on their own for the first time. The textile industry in Lancashire in the United Kingdom basically relies on Supported by female workers, China's textile mills in the last century were basically all female workers. The increased level of industrial mechanization has freed more jobs from relying on human muscle strength, opening the door to more careers for women. In particular, with the continuous expansion of the scale of enterprises, the information management work required, such as typists, operators and other jobs, are basically undertaken by women. Women's participation in social activities and obtaining independent economic income is the foundation of all subsequent feminism, and this foundation is also created by technological progress. The assembly line technology has greatly improved the production capacity of the enterprise, and at the same time, the scale of the enterprise has continued to expand and the complexity has continued to increase. Ford's factories once included the entire industry chain, from steelmaking to car assembly. management is so complicated And huge enterprises need to collect and process a large amount of information, and the manual method of information collection and processing is no longer applicable. Starting from the punching machine, various information management technologies and tools have been applied to the information collection and processing of enterprises and governments. The information collection and processing tools of enterprises and governments have undergone nearly a hundred years of evolution, from punching machines at the beginning to mainframes, desktops, notebooks and even smartphones. Devices are getting smaller and smaller, but their information collection and processing capabilities are getting stronger and stronger. . With the increasing complexity of enterprises and markets, and the increasing level of industrial mechanization and automation, the number of people engaged in information-related work in some enterprises even exceeds the number of people engaged in production work, and white-collar and knowledge workers have gradually become the main component of the employed labor force. Personal computers and smart phones not only improve the efficiency of information collection and processing for enterprises and governments, but are also applied to personal information collection and processing. We are gradually outsourcing more and more information collection and processing work to personal computers and smart phones. running software. Dating software has gradually replaced the traditional social interaction within the family and community, and has become the main way for us to develop interpersonal relationships. The news pushed by smartphones has replaced our chat with others as the main way for us to understand the world. We no longer recognize the way but rely on navigation software, and we no longer remember common sense but rely on search engines. We used to program computers, now computers program us. When we "outsource" problem-solving and other cognitive tasks to computers, we impair our brain's ability to "build solid knowledge structures," or schemas, that can be used later "Apply to New Circumstances". People with sharp words can also be sharper: the smarter the software, the dumber the users. Personal computers and smartphones, as intellectual technologies, are so integrated into the social fabric that they are so entrenched in a variety of vital infrastructures that they can no longer be separated from the entire social fabric unless they are completely disrupted. Once this happens, intellectual technology becomes an indispensable component of any social structure. Once smartphones are the only way our information is collected and processed, we risk becoming batteries manipulated by a matrix built by tech giants. Production automation and mechanization have brought decades of dividends to the information industry, but all of this may come to an end with the development of artificial intelligence technology. If the purpose of various technologies since the Industrial Revolution is to mechanize and automate production, then the purpose of artificial intelligence technology is to automate the work of information collection and processing. Technological advances since the industrial revolution Steps generate a large amount of new knowledge, and the human brain cannot remember such a large amount of knowledge. Disciplinary management has become a means for human beings to cope with the explosion of knowledge. Everyone focuses on a specific discipline. If a discipline produces too much new knowledge, it will be subdivided into more disciplines. The knowledge continuously produced in universities and scientific research institutions is divided and managed by a large number of experts, white-collar workers in enterprises also focus on the knowledge required for a specific job position and process, and the government and enterprises rely on many experts and knowledge to work cooperation between the parties to complete all management tasks. Artificial intelligence will destroy the foundation of this knowledge management system. No one can remember all the knowledge in modern society, but artificial intelligence can do it. Artificial intelligence has already defeated humans in the fields of chess, Go and quiz. If we say that in the future I wouldn't be at all surprised that there will be artificial intelligence that can store and quickly read all the knowledge of human society. In fact, tech giants such as Google are already doing this, Google is scanning all the books in the library, and Facebook is collecting all our photos. If one day a super artificial intelligence can manage all the knowledge of human society, then the existence of experts and a large number of knowledge workers is unnecessary. As far as I know, a large amount of information collection and processing work has gradually shifted from humans to artificial intelligence. A large number of stock market traders have been replaced by quantitative trading software in computers. Deloitte, one of the big four accounting firms, is developing artificial intelligence Auditing software to replace large numbers of human auditors. The development of artificial intelligence in the next few decades will greatly challenge human social structures and institutions. If a large number of production and information jobs are replaced by artificial intelligence in the future, the current work system and economic system of human beings will face severe turbulence and reorganization. Our education system today will also look outdated and ridiculous, if in the future AI knows everything, then it will be enough for our children to learn from AI. Once AI knows everything that is currently known about human society, what questions you can ask will be more important in the future than what you know. I have stated that I am not an opponent of technology, I just want to be able to calmly face all that technology brings to us. I agree with McLuhan, a famous Canadian scholar: if we want to evaluate any new technology or a new development realistically, we need to be equally sensitive to what is lost and what is gained, rather than just seeing the bright side of technology Or the dark side. Human society today cannot survive without various technologies, but various technologies are constantly forcing us to change our thinking and our behavior. patterns, our relationships, our social structures and institutions. Every technology that brings great benefits to human beings will bring about great changes to human society. History has proven this in countless ways, as Christian pastor and media scholar John Culkin said in 1967: "We shape the tools, and the tools shape us."
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