us must be alert. Therefore, I have chosen to follow Quartiroli’s choice of we with my singular invention ourself. We all are active on the stage he describes, but responsibility for awareness lies with the individual.
David Carr
Chapter 1
From Awareness of Technology to Technologies of Awareness
Ever since I was a child the mysteries of numbers fascinated me. When I learned about prime numbers at school, I was captivated by those unique, solitary, unpredictable, indivisible odd numbers.
At 12, I desired nothing less than finding their law. A few years later I discovered long series of numbers which were possibly connected to prime numbers. I found the formulas of the first series, but the more complicated ones had many components in individual numbers reaching fifteen digits. Such numbers were beyond the capacity of pocket calculators, so I proceeded manually.
The slow pace of manual calculation allowed me to “feel” numbers, contemplating each one, sensing its relationship to other numbers in the series. At 15, I entered the Philips Contest for Young Researchers and Inventors. There were just a couple of months to prepare my presentation – impossible for me to progress through all the calculations. Yet under the puzzled gaze of my schoolmates, this wild boy turned into a would-be mathematician.
The computational effort took me to the university’s computer center to ask for help. Grounded in comic books, I thought I could “feed” the computer with the numbers in the series and have the formulas delivered. At that time, computer laboratories in Italy looked like any other academic laboratories, with high-level technicians dressed formally. I tried to explain my problem to a few students, who mostly ignored me. A kind employee told me simply that computers couldn’t find the formulas of my series – they could not even add or subtract such big numbers unless they were programmed to. “Oh really? Are computers that dumb?” I wondered.
I understood from her that what I needed was a piece of “software” suited to the problem. “Fine,” I said, “can you make it for me?” She couldn’t, since it had to be designed for the specific problem – and anyway, computer time was very limited, even for students. I returned to manual calculations.
In 1976 computers were as big and unapproachable as the people who worked with them. In time, computers became more user-friendly and much faster – but not less dumb. Concurrently, computer technicians changed from uniforms to casual or messy clothes, though their detached attitude did not noticeably change.
For my research on those series, I was a finalist in the Italian contest – which led to a personal conversation with the president of the Italian CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, National Research Council). He discouraged me from searching for the law of prime numbers as “a waste of time, something which centuries of mathematicians had already tried to find, but nobody could.” I might instead concentrate my energies on developing useful applications in the scientific arena. He introduced me to the reality that research was most welcomed by society when it could be translated into products and money.
What about the fun and enthusiasm I had doing that research? What about the almost mystical states I reached in diving into the mysteries of prime numbers? What about the development of my perseverance in pursuing such a task, even though (or maybe because) it was an impossible one? What about my capacity to tolerate frustration when my long calculations had been faulty from the beginning of the series?
I recognize now that some important inner qualities had been shaped as I chased those prime numbers. I had learned that the path is itself the goal.
Latin putare means “to prune,” “to cut,” “to clean.” In the etymology of “computer” lies its implicit goal: something to accomplish, to complete, a clear-cut result to reach.
Computing, that increasingly-present activity in our lives, has created what I call the “digitization of reality.” Computing wants answers – well-defined results cleansed of “noise” – and it wants them fast.
Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method which shaped Western science, sought a state of pure thinking, free from the body and from feelings – for in his opinion they would distort the scientific quest. He would be proud of contemporary technical developments which allow both scientists and ordinary people to interact with a machine through pure thinking. But if he could peek into this century, I feel he would miss the philosophical and spiritual attitude he had even as a scientist – which is left out of the technological race.
In our rush, everything which can possibly be automated and speeded up becomes digital. Everything which can be represented by bits and bytes is sucked into the digitizing mentality.
I too believed this, when it was time for university, so I went into computer science – partly to fulfill my need to write a program to find the law of my series. In time I stopped chasing prime numbers, but by then I was a programming enthusiast.
What did not change was my propensity for impossible tasks. Since I enjoyed playing the guitar, I wrote a program for creating chords and harmonies. Then, wanting to grab the secrets of guitarists like Jimi Hendrix or Carlos Santana, I translated their improvisations into digital form. After all, I figured, musical scales have a mathematical structure, so if I could decode and deconstruct their creations, then my software could produce amazing new melodies which I could then reproduce on my guitar.
There was still no affordable way to generate good quality sound from a computer, so as output (programming in C language for the UNIX operating system), I had a list of notes, their pitch, duration, and their attributes like sliding or bending – a sort of score I could perform on my guitar. Far from masterpieces, they were funny, like the caricature of a living person.
Meanwhile, I was working for the computer labs of the new computer science faculty in Milan, preferring to learn through practice rather than study for exams. There was a pioneering atmosphere in the very early 1980s – and many of the students later becoming entrepreneurs of the dotcom revolution in Italy.
The peak of impossibility lay in my plan to create an artificial intelligence system, written in the Prolog programming language, to explore people’s psychological patterns in depth – according to various models, both psychological and spiritual. It never went beyond a very initial idea.
The Limits of Technology
In searching for the law of prime numbers, for the secrets of great guitarists’ solos, or for the understanding of the human soul, 25 years ago, I reached what was – and still remains – the limits of computability.
Finding those limits is perhaps the unconscious secret goal of our drive toward technology. Whatever can be made digital is merely a model created by the mind, which the mind itself can reshape or destroy at any moment.
The mind is by nature dualistic, operating within the same binary logic as computers. The dualistic-binary attitude of looking at the world gives both people and computers a powerful discriminating tool – a tool to produce huge amount of data and to act on matter in powerful ways. Through this dualistic mind we can fulfill our highest “mission” – to be masters of nature, as assigned by the scriptures. But matters that are more than mental – artistic creativity, brilliant intuition, feelings of compassion, love, joy, peace, as well as experiencing spiritual states like a no-mind state of deep meditation – cannot be represented in digital form. Though information technology can point to or inform us about those states, more often than not it keeps us stuck looping at the informational level, actually distancing us from them.
