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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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New Dark Age summary
James Bridle
Technology and the End of the Future
28 mins
Brief summary
New Dark Age by James Bridle warns of the consequences of tech obsession: misinformation, loss of privacy & humanity's detachment from physical reality.
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New Dark Age
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Modern computation originated in military attempts to control the weather.
What do computers have to do with the weather, and what does the weather have to do with the military?
Well, everything. For decades, devising methods to predict and control the weather was a chief concern for Western armies – and in that project lies the origin of modern computation.
The first person to make calculations on atmospheric conditions in order to predict the weather was mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson. This was during World War I, when he was volunteering as a first responder on the Western Front.
Richardson even came up with a thought experiment that could be conceived as the first description of a "computer": he envisioned a pantheon made up of thousands of human mathematicians, each calculating the weather conditions for a particular square of the world, and communicating the results between one another to make further calculations. Such a machine, Richardson dreamed, would be able to accurately predict the weather anywhere, at any moment in time.
His futuristic idea didn’t come into view again until World War II, when big military research spending spurred the advent of machine computation. The Manhattan Project, a US military research project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb, is closely linked to the development of the first computers. Many of these first computers, such as the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) from 1946, were used to perform automated calculations to simulate the impact of different bombs and missiles under certain weather conditions.
Often, however, the military origins and purposes of the computers were concealed.
In 1948, for example, IBM installed its Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) in full view of the public in a shop window in New York. But while the public was told the computer was calculating astronomical positions, it was actually working on a secret program called Hippo – carrying out calculations to simulate hydrogen bomb explosions.
From the beginning, the complex, hidden workings of computers provided a convenient cloak for obfuscating their actual functions.
Most of the time, though, they didn’t even carry out their actual functions all that well. The history of computation is full of anecdotes that illustrate how computers’ oversimplified view of the world, their inability to distinguish between reality and simulation, and bad data can have serious consequences for their human users. For example, the US computer network SAGE, which was used to integrate atmospheric and military data during the Cold War, is infamous for its near-fatal bloopers, such as mistaking a flock of migrating birds for an incoming Soviet bomber fleet.
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What is New Dark Age about?
New Dark Age (2018) investigates the fundamental paradox of our digital age: as new technologies allow us to gather more and more data on our world, we understand less and less of it. Examining the history, politics and geography of the complex digital network we are enmeshed in, James Bridle sheds new light on the central issues of our time, from climate change to wealth inequality to post-factual politics, and explains how we can live with purpose in an era of uncertainty.
Best quote from New Dark Age
Complexity is not a condition to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned.
—James Bridle
Who should read New Dark Age?
- Tech skeptics and tech enthusiasts
- Critical thinkers fascinated by the geopolitics of our networked world
- Anyone interested in the silly and profound ways technology shapes our lives
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