The fairy tale is a lie. Literary quiz game “A fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it, a lesson for good fellows”

A fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it...

What is the moral of this fable? What is this, another attempt to intimidate Adam Adamych with the gloomy prospects that the development of cybernetics is supposedly fraught with, undertaken by the malicious enemy of cybernetic progress?

Obviously not, because, firstly, the author of these lines is entirely in favor of cybernetic, as well as any other, progress, and secondly, it would probably be possible to invent a more terrible nightmare, although it is not easy to compete here with dozens talented science fiction writers who are diligently developing last years similar plot. The point, however, is not even about cybernetics at all. Karel Capek's famous science-fiction drama "RUR", during which an army of soulless "robots" rebels against humanity and wins complete victory over it, was written long before the world even heard about cybernetics. And even earlier, the poet M. Voloshin wrote the following lines:

How is there no inventor who,

Damn the car, I never dreamed of it

To do good to a person

So there is no machine that did not bring into the world

The gravest poverty

And new types of slavery...

The poet's one-sided assessment of the car is not accidental. After all, bitter experience long ago - both before and independently of any cybernetics - taught people that any ingenious discovery, any invention and technical innovation can be equally successfully used both for the benefit of man and for the detriment of him.

“The discovery of atomic chain reactions,” wrote Albert Einstein, “threatens the destruction of humanity as little as the invention of matches; it is only necessary to do everything to eliminate the possibility of abuse of this means... The liberation of atomic energy does not create a new problem, but it makes the solution more urgent old problem" The same can be repeated in relation to cybernetics. So fears of the dangers that a “machine” threatens a person do not owe their origin to cybernetics as such. Cybernetic technology in this respect is no different from any other technology, and even just from a cobblestone tied to a stick, with the help of which our underdeveloped ancestors could equally well get food for themselves and break the skull of their neighbor.

Therefore, it is not “the influence of some fantastic works” that gives rise to people’s fears about the possible consequences of the development of technology, and it is not “meaningless psychological routine” that prevents them from indulging in rosy optimism about promises to make the world happy by inventing a machine smarter and stronger than any living person. Such fears have much more reasonable grounds. Simply, people living on our sinful earth understand that in addition to the good intentions of inventors, there is also a stubborn reality - the real human society(socialist and capitalist systems with their opposing interests and aspirations), forced to solve very real, and not fantastic, problems.

The point, therefore, is not at all about intimidating people with future cybernetic or some other technical monsters, and not about what cybernetics can and cannot do. Let's assume that she can do everything we want from her. It is all the more important to think and formulate as precisely as possible what exactly we want from her, so as not to tear our hair out later and say that we were misunderstood.

And we will try, to the best of our ability, to remain on the basis of firmly established facts, avoiding talking about what “may be” and “what can never happen.” Let's talk about what is.

And there is a person who is capable, whether bad or good, of thinking. And there is a machine that cannot think yet. And there is the “Man – Machine” problem, which can be solved and which is actually being solved today globe differently both in theory and in practice. It is decided, of course, by people - with or without the help of machines. A problem that cybernetic technology not only does not remove from the agenda, but even makes it even more acute.

A person, when dealing with a machine, is actually dealing with another person, with its creator and owner, and the Machine is only an intermediary between people. The “Man – Machine” problem, if you delve into it a little deeper, turns out to be a problem of Man’s relationship to Man, or, as an old-school philosopher would put it, the problem of Man’s relationship to himself, although the relationship is not direct, but “mediated” through A car.

However, people did not get to the bottom of this truth right away. At first it seemed to them that it was the Machine that was causing them trouble and ruin, and they had to break it down to make sure that behind the innocent machine was hiding a “driver” - a person just like themselves - its owner, its owner, True, not everyone learned the lesson from this, and the naive idea of ​​the Machine as a villain persisted for centuries. And even to this day, many people curse the Machine - the “Demon of Machinery” - instead of seeing the face of their true enemy through the menacing and impenetrable image to the naked eye. This is how the myth arose about the Machine-villain, about the Machine-demon, about the Machine - the enemy of humanity. A myth that has its sworn philosophers and its bards. The poet we have already quoted exclaimed:

The machine defeated the man:

She needed a slave to wipe her sweat,

To anoint the perineum with oil,

Feed coal and accept droppings.

And then she became necessary

A teeming bundle of muscles and wills,

Brought up in hungry discipline,

And a greedy boor who cheapened the spirit

For the joys of comfort and philistinism...

If the poet lived to this day, he would probably be very surprised to hear people arguing about whether the Machine of the future would or would not start a rebellion against Man, whether it could enslave him or not... Why would it start a rebellion? against the Man, when she had long ago turned him into her pathetic slave and lackey? The question for the poet was precisely the opposite perspective: can or cannot Man throw off the yoke of shameful slavery? Will he ever be smarter and stronger than the Machine? Or will it continue to degrade, and the Machine will become more and more perfect, more efficient and optimal, more and more cunning and powerful?

What would a cyberneticist answer to a poet?

He would probably take our side here and begin to prove that it is not the Machine itself that turns one Man into a Slave, brought up in hungry discipline, and another into a Greedy Boor, who sold his human dignity for the joys of comfort and philistinism; that the Slave is exploited not by the Machine at all, but by the Greedy Boor with the help of machines, that the fault of everything is not the soulless and inhumane Machine, but the soullessness and inhumanity of the relationship between Man and Man, within which the Machine actually acts as a tool for squeezing sweat and blood from the living person. He would argue with us that we should not curse and break the Machine, but we should change the way Man relates to Man, which turns one into a brainless slave of the machine, and the other into a soulless, albeit intelligent, greedy boorish lackey, into in his own way, serving the Machine, although he thinks that the Machine serves him...

Here the cyberneticist, of course, would be right against the poet. But he would thereby be forced to admit that, if we talk not about the vague prospects of the future, but about what is, the poet painted a very true and very terrible image, described a completely real state of affairs, although he explained it incorrectly in his description... Indeed, in the science called “political economy”, this image has its exact equivalent.

The “Greedy Boor” is called in it “the owner of capital”, “the owner of the means of production”, and “a slave brought up in hungry discipline” is defined as “the owner work force", as in "hired worker". The car is called the same here and there.

However, political economy explains, rather than simply describes, the actual state of affairs. It shows exactly what kind of force turns one person into a slave, and another into a boor under the Machine. Not the Machine, not the power of the Machine. The power of the Market, the power of the element of buying and selling, that is, this way of relating person to person, where the living flesh of a person can be sold and bought, borrowed and borrowed like any other “thing” - like a head of cabbage, a lathe, a kilowatt of electricity or a ton uranium ore. Elemental Power commodity-money relations, where a person not only can, but is forced to sell himself, the strength of his hands and his brain to another person, at least for a while, and not for life, as in the distant days of slavery.

Political economy has clearly shown that if a Man sells himself, his brain, his hands and all the other organs of his body for money or for things to another person, then he inevitably becomes a Slave of this money and things, and since they belong to another person, then - through things - the lackey of this other person. And then, in the end, the picture that the poet painted is completely logical and inevitable. In a society dominated private property, Man becomes a complete Slave of things, living labor falls into subordination to “dead” labor, “materialized” in the form of gold coins, in the form of houses, nickel-plated refrigerators, nylon underpants, cast iron wheels, copper wires, germanium semiconductors, wildly spinning conveyor belts, unsleeping the eyes of televisions - in a word, all those sophisticated and simple devices that human genius can invent...

And it turns out that it is no longer Man who works with the help of the Machine, but, on the contrary, the Machine works with the help of Man. The Machine does not serve him, but he serves the Machine. It is not Man who uses the Machine, its strength and power, but the Machine uses Man, consuming his living flesh in the same way as any other raw material, and the energy of his hands, brain and nerves - just like it consumes electricity or the energy of a split atom .

But the Machine remains a Machine and even becomes more and more perfect, efficient and optimal, more and more cunning and powerful, and Man loses more and more of his human merits, transferring his abilities, one after another, to the Machine... Above this Engineering thought is constantly beating.

The Machine thereby turns Man more and more into its “talking instrument”, into the missing part of its mechanism and forces him - like all other parts - to work to the fullest, to the point of wear and tear, to the point of exhaustion. And since thousands and thousands of individual machines are connected by the unity of the technological process into one grandiose Big Machine, and Man serves only a separate, private link of the Machinery, he really (and not at all in fantasy) plays the role of “a partial part of a partial machine.”

In other words, the problem is to return to Man the power he has lost over the world of machines, to turn Man into an intelligent and strong Master and Master of all the grandiose, ingenious and powerful mechanisms of modern machine production created by him, to make Man smarter and stronger than the Machine .

Why do we write Man and Machine with a capital letter here? Not because we designate with these terms some “definitions”, theoretical images we have constructed, reflecting either the same or the abstractly general that characterizes each individual and each individual car. No, the Man here is real modern humanity, that is, the entire totality of living people in their mutual relations to each other - the totality of social relations established between them regarding production. A Machine with capital letters- again, the entire set of machines and mechanisms created by civilization, including even the bourgeois state machine.

In this sense, “making a Man smarter and stronger than a Machine” means, first of all, to intelligently reorganize all relationships between man and man, transform social relations between living people, between classes, and change the way Man relates to himself.

And this problem is by no means a moral and psychological one, as it sometimes seems, much less a technical one. This, as political economy has shown, is the problem of the division of labor, class oppositions, the problem of the distribution among people of active functions and abilities necessary for the Big Machine modern production worked rhythmically, without crisis breakdowns, without tragic malfunctions, as a result of which it suddenly begins to produce disasters instead of blessings...

Here, and only here - in the sphere of mutual relations between Man and Man, arising in connection with and around the Machine - lies the key to solving the problem, which at first glance seems to be the “Man - Machine” problem, that is, the problem of Man’s relationship to something to another (to the Machine), and not “to oneself,” if we again use the same old philosophical turn of phrase.

But here we are immediately faced with an objection dictated from the very mythical idea that is briefly and figuratively expressed by the poet - from the myth of the Devil Machine. There is no need to try in vain to change the relationship of Man to Man, tied around the Machine, there is no need to make a revolution in the sphere of social relations, in the sphere of division of labor, modern bourgeois supporters of this myth tell us, this, they say, will change absolutely nothing, and is even simply impossible. Why? Yes, because the Machine by its nature is such, it is so structured that people are forced - if they want to put it into use - to divide among themselves the responsibilities for its maintenance exactly as they were once divided. Namely: one person is forced to take the place and position of a “slave brought up in hungry discipline” under her, and the other is forced to take the position of a “Greedy Ham”. Such a “division of labor” is supposedly required by the technical structure of the Machine. The machine supposedly demands that some people become “managers” and others become “managed”; it demands that mental labor be carried out by some, and physical labor by others. It thereby urgently demands that some people work all day and all their lives with their “heads,” while others work with their “hands,” and that they constantly train only the organs of their living individuality that are necessary for this, develop them, forgetting about other organs.

Therefore, they say, it is the Machine that turns one person into a “thinking brain” (whose arms and legs are an optional appendage), another into solid biceps, not requiring developed brain. She turns the third into a Gazing Eye, the fourth into a Hearing Ear, the fifth into a Sniffing Nose, and so on and so forth. And it goes without saying that the Thinking Brain on spider legs will perform its duties under the Machine more efficiently and optimally, the less it is distracted by other activities that are not at all required by the interests of its narrow specialty. The Eye, the Ear, the Nose, and the Hands are obliged to do the same, for which it would also be useful to divide their responsibilities between the Right and the Left, and then move on to even more fractional specialization along the lines of the Little Finger and Index, and so on.

Therefore, the supporters of the mentioned mythical idea believe that professional cretinism, associated with the maximum development in a living person of only one, highly specialized ability and the corresponding body organ, is not at all a misfortune or a curse of the Machine World, but an Ideal and Virtue. And the fact that all other organs of living individuality, which Mother Nature has awarded each person, remain underdeveloped and can even completely wither, atrophy, become something like an appendix, should not worry us. Whether we like it or not, this is an inevitable price to pay for efficiency and optimal functioning. Big Machines... The fact that every living person is born with a brain, with hands, with eyes, ears and other organs is simply an indicator of the unreasonable extravagance of Brainless Nature, the unscientific design of the human body, so to speak, architectural excess...

And we must admit that the logic of this position is completely ironclad, mathematically rigorous, inexorable and consistent. Once the basic premise and axiom are accepted, then everything else can be easily deduced by any modern Electronic Computer. What is the premise and axiom of such thinking?

The idea according to which the Machine - the Big Machine, as the totality of all existing and possible machines and machines - is highest goal, that is, the end in itself of the history of the development of human civilization, science and technology, theory and practice. And Man is a living person, an individual is only a means, only a living, speaking instrument with the help of which this great all-consuming goal is realized. A means more or less suitable for achieving a goal, and nothing more.

In philosophy, this position has for some time now received the name - technocratic ideology.

What is she? The result of simple thoughtlessness? A soulless theoretical construct of a morally undeveloped intellect?

Unfortunately no. If this were so, then the above reasoning could be treated with irony. Unfortunately, technocratic ideology is a completely accurate logical-theoretical reflection of the practice that still exists on the globe, a theoretical reflex of the actual form of relations between Man and Man, the very form that humanity will either radically transform, or, if it does not perish, will sink to a much greater extent. more terrible disasters than all those that he had already experienced, much more terrible than all the horrors invented by the authors fantastic stories and novels, because they will be real and not imaginary. After all, Auschwitz and Hiroshima are much more terrible images than any frightening fantasies intended for reading in a cozy apartment.

Machine production, which has turned into an end in itself, which has become “production for the sake of production,” unfortunately, is not at all a fantasy, not a bogeyman invented by detractors technical progress. This is the real principle of organizing the real production of the material life of people, called in science CAPITALISM, the principle of organizing the system of relations between Man and Man, based on the laws of the Market, on the laws of purchase and sale, on the law cost, as that highest measure of value of any thing, and any person, with the help of which the “profitability” or “unprofitability”, “efficiency” or “ineffectiveness” of everything in the world is determined, be it a Machine, its product or a Person. For the ruling class in this society, the whole point of activity lies in the pursuit of surplus value. And then you have to look at a person in the same way as at a can of blacking, a rolling mill, a head of cabbage or a sheep - look from the point of view of the answer to the question: “How much does it cost?”, in order to then decide where it is more profitable to invest money and effort, - in a living person (that is, in his education, health, in the conditions of his life and development), or - in iron, semiconductors, computing machines, in order to quickly obtain the maximum effect in the form of a “product”, that is, in the form of things , measured again in the same units, the same measure of value - money: dollars, pounds or lire.

Political economy has proven that as long as the relations of man to man are “mediated” and established through the “free” Market, through the play of market prices, so long will the absurd principle of “production for the sake of production” dominate in the world, and a living person will play the unenviable role of a detail of this production.

And until then, the “most profitable and optimal” way of using Man in the process of Machine Production will remain his use as a “partial part of a partial machine,” as a Thinking Brain on spider legs and with spider arms, and even without them at all, as a Brainless Hands, Eavesdropping Ears, Running Legs and similar nightmarish images. In other words, until then the most profitable and effective way“use” of Man in the process of Machine Production will remain his use in the form of the most narrow (and therefore the most “perfect” of his kind) professional, in the form of a lifelong lackey or in the form of a lifelong mathematician, in the form of an official of a highly specialized department or in the form of a logician...

This is what we tried to talk about in our fairy tale. So the fairy tale is not at all about the Machine, be it cybernetic, pre-cybernetic or super-cybernetic. It is about Man, although there is no place for Man in this fairy-tale world. And yet it is he who is the main (and even the only) actor, the role of which is played by machines that have distributed among themselves the individual functions and grimaces of the character they portray.

Machines, however, can forget about this circumstance, despite their amazingly perfect memory devices, they can imagine that they are playing themselves, and only themselves, and that the whole tragedy of Machine Production is being played out for the sake of Machine Production itself. There may also be people among people who will fall into the same machine illusion. “People” who, instead of looking at the Machine through the eyes of a Man and seeing in it a means and instrument of the Human Intelligent Will, will begin to look at a Man from the point of view of the interests of the Machine, with the Glancing Eyes of the Machine, and therefore see in him a non-living human individual, a creator and the creator of the entire machine world, who, alas, released the reins of control of the machine world from his weak hands, but just one of the possible machines, just a detail of the machine world.

So, if the fairy tale seemed worthy of attention, if in this chapter it was possible to show that there is a moral in the fable, that in addition to lies, the fairy tale also contains a hint, and that the hint refers to a very serious things, then you will have to embark on a longer and, perhaps, not so fun voyage through the seas and waves of scientific and theoretical terminology.

And since our fable, unlike most fables, does not refer to individual conspicuous shortcomings, but is an attempt to understand the problem of the fundamental shortcomings and advantages of Man with a capital M and Machine with a capital M, in so far, unlike ordinary fables, where morality fits perfectly into one line, into one aphorism, the morality here will be - alas - much longer than the text of the fable itself. It will not be possible to comply with the laws of the genre here.