Here is computer science imitating art imitating computer science. In this century, technological surprise has been a major bane of civilization, although it has always held great potential for good as well. This includes the impact on civilization of the automobile, the airplane, radio, the infamous V-rockets, television, nuclear energy, Sputnik, and transistors, among many others. Technological surprise was an event to be anticipated and controlled as best as possible. Gelernter predicts a significant social upheaval in the near future, which will be software-oriented in contrast to earlier paradigm shifts, which tended to be hardware-oriented. He predicts this upheaval in spite of the fact that no one has ever touched software.
So-called mirror worlds will be the Great Pyramids of tomorrow: enduring monuments of technology and art. Unfortunately, the author is not sure of their moral impact on civilization. Will they invite abuse or bigotry such as the world has not yet seen? Will they spawn ferocious systems that devour their users? Will they produce a brilliant new age of the humane use of human beings? Will computer scientists finally know sin as physicists do? The author addresses some ethical values in the epilogue at the end of the book, but one sees more golem than God.
The author’s style is discursive, with occasional examples. He expresses numerous opinions, some of which he defends. This monograph is not a textbook. It contains no student exercises or hints for resolving perplexing remarks. The overall message hinges almost exclusively on the consecutiveness of aural presentation rather than on the concurrency of visual presentation; it resembles the non-visual presentation style found in Kabbalah. Each of the author’s 20 figures approaches surrealist art, which will make them difficult to understand and is ironic for one who is such a staunch advocate of the visual display of information. The book is written for the general reader with some knowledge of computer science.
The seven chapters cover such topics as mirror worlds, their significance, embodied machines, the design process, hypercomputers, the design of real-time knowledge plants, Turingware, simple mind machines, and building mirror worlds. Emphasis is placed on artificial intelligence, concurrent systems, software engineering, and programming languages in a broad philosophical context.
The author misses a marvelous opportunity to revise the old mind-body problem as a software/hardware problem while shining new light on mirror worlds. Instead, he attempts to explicate object-oriented programming to a largely nontechnical audience, when it is difficult enough to explain to computer science experts. But wait until Madison Avenue gets hold of mirror worlds (they will). I recommend the book highly for the general reader.
