| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016855)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016855" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 3720 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| inadequate for describing the mechanisms underlying biological systems, and so he |
| missed out on how similar mechanisms might eventually be embodied in technological |
| computational systems—as now they have been. Today's dominant technologies were |
| developed in the world of Turing and von Neumann, rather than the world of Wiener. |
| In the first industrial revolution, energy from a steam engine or a water wheel was |
| used by human workers to replace their own energy. Instead of being a source of energy |
| for physical work, people became modulators of how a large source of energy was used |
| But because steam engines and water wheels had to be large to be an efficient use of |
| capital, and because in the 18th century the only technology for spatial distribution of |
| energy was mechanical and worked only at very short range, many workers needed to be |
| crowded around the source of energy. Wiener correctly argues that the ability to transmit |
| energy as electricity caused a second industrial revolution. Now the source of energy |
| could be distant from where it was used, and from the beginning of the 20th century, |
| manufacturing could be much more dispersed as electrical-distribution grids were built. |
| Wiener then argues that a further new technology, that of the nascent |
| computational machines of his time, will provide yet another revolution. The machines |
| he talks about seem to be both analog and (perhaps) digital in nature; and he points out, in |
| The Human Use of Human Beings, that since they will be able to make decisions, both |
| blue-collar and white-collar workers may be reduced to being mere cogs in a much bigger |
| machine. He fears that humans might use and abuse one another through organizational |
| structures that this capability will encourage. We have certainly seen this play out in the |
| last sixty years, and that disruption is far from over. |
| However, his physics-based view of computation protected him from realizing |
| just how bad things might get. He saw machines' ability to communicate as providing a |
| new and more inhuman way of exerting command and control. He missed that within a |
| few decades computation systems would become more like biological systems, and it |
| seems, from his descriptions in chapter 10 of his own work on modeling some aspects of |
| biology, that he woefully underappreciated the many orders of magnitude of further |
| complexity of biology over physics. We are in a much more complex situation today |
| than he foresaw, and I am worried that it is much more pernicious than even his worst |
| imagined fears. |
| In the 1960s, computation became firmly based on the foundations set out by |
| Turing and von Neumann, and it was digital computation, based on the idea of finite |
| alphabets which they both used. An arbitrarily long sequence, or string, formed by |
| characters from a finite alphabet, can be encoded as a unique integer. As with Turing |
| Machines themselves, the formalism for computation became that of computing an |
| integer-valued function of a single integer-valued input. |
| Turing and von Neumann both died in the 1950s and at that time this is how they |
| saw computation. Neither foresaw the exponential increase in computing capability that |
| Moore's Law would bring— nor how pervasive computing machinery would become. |
| Nor did they foresee two developments in our modeling of computation, each of which |
| poses a great threat to human society. |
| The first is rooted in the abstractions they adopted. In the fifty-year, Moore's |
| Law-fueled race to produce software that could exploit the doubling of computer |
| capability every two years, the typical care and certification of engineering disciplines |
| was thrown by the wayside. Software engineering was fast and prone to failures. This |
| 52 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016855 |
|
|
