One Human Minute Read online

  Automated telephone communication on a global scale is a splendid thing, no question. But it did produce a by-product — numerically not insignificant — that is, telephone sex. In the last few years, agencies offering such services have mushroomed. You have but to pick up the receiver, dial, and give your credit-card number in order to avail yourself of your favorite variety of conversational lewdness — copulating in words, so to speak — with an Australian, say, while you sit in Ontario. But, then, no one can deny that the split between technological progress and moral progress has taken place and is irreversible — impossible though it may be to establish the date of this separation, which marks the collapse of our nineteenth-century faith in the collective march into the happy future. Technological solutions to one’s desires can serve evil as well as good. But goodness, again, is not measurable, and sometimes it happens that neither concept can be pinned down. In One Human Minute, for example, we learn how many scientific works are published every minute, and also how very little of his own field a scientist can assimilate, even superficially. There is more and more information that he ought to be aware of but that exceeds his physiological capacity of absorption. Today only supercomputers know everything in every field.

  Looking under the proper heading, one learns what computers — which seem to be changing from assistants to managers of our civilization — can accomplish in one minute. Models of the newest generation can perform nearly a billion logical operations in that interval. But a fragmentary look will not tell us what is really going on in science. Perhaps for that reason — or to give the book greater weight, without diminishing its readability — an extensive afterword was included, in addition to the commentaries introducing each chapter to the reader. This is actually an essay presenting the methods of calculation employed in One Human Minute. In more than one case they smack of detective work, almost in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes. But the infallibility of Holmes’s famous deductions, which he was able to make from an old hat, a forgotten pipe, a cane, or a watch, re-creating from them the unknown owner’s appearance, station in life, and character traits — for example, that the person had recently fallen on hard times — all that brilliant detection was due to the assistance given to Holmes secretly by the author. But countless parodies have since ridiculed that “classic deduction,” showing how from the same clues one might construct many logically tight but mutually exclusive hypotheses. No brilliant detective-statistician was in a position, however, to bring forth this book singlehandedly, nor could a large team of mathematicians have done it; computers were needed. A great deal of the work was done mechanically, that is, by converting known and accessible data to the unit of time indicated in the title. When data were unavailable, they had to be arrived at in a roundabout way, by searching for correlations (there is a high positive correlation, for example, between an accident at a power station that cuts current to a big city or area of a country and the number of children born roughly nine months later). Where we are dealing with single phenomena (and it was precisely with these that Sherlock Holmes grappled), the well-chewed mouthpiece of a pipe might testify to the smoker’s strong jaws and his attachment to that pipe and no other, though he has a large collection, or it might simply be the result of a nervous tic, or, finally, the pipe might not be his property at all — he might have found it, stuck it into his pocket, then got himself murdered, in which case the pipe would be a red herring.

  Five billion people, on the other hand, is a big enough aggregate to be governed by the laws of large numbers. Nothing is simpler than predicting the number of automobile accidents under specific weather conditions and a given volume of traffic. But how do we arrive at the number of accidents (say, per minute) that did not take place but were “close calls"? Or, as someone said more pointedly, how do we calculate the danger of driving, given the fact that heavy metropolitan traffic represents the sum of miraculously averted crashes? We can, it turns out, although only the accidents that actually take place leave behind evidence in the form of dented cars and sometimes corpses. Between the “unrealized collisions” and the collisions that do occur, with the number of dead and injured, with the frequency according to road surface and quantity of vehicles, there exist definite mathematical ratios, and one can make use of them. This is still a relatively simple matter.

  Some calculations were merely tedious and complicated, but did not require any special ingenuity on the part of the programmers. There was the amusing idea of comparing the global circulation of money with the circulation of red corpuscles, except that money does not pass from vessel to vessel but from hand to hand, and does not even physically participate in the transaction, because it consists of electronic impulses that change the balances in bank accounts. Despite bank confidentiality, a team of One Human Minute researchers secured the global payments-per-minute figures. By way of illustration, a small map of the Earth was put above the statistics, the “flow of currency” resembling the lines on a meteorological map. It is evident that considerable effort was put into imagery in this new edition, for often such data do not easily lend themselves to visualization. One could say that One Human Minute became a reality thanks to the collaboration of the publisher’s computers and the computers of nearly the entire world, and humanity was the raw material they processed.

  Formerly, when a central data bank of drivers with traffic violations did not exist, one could not obtain the necessary information with such wonderful precision. The number of people who travel by plane per minute can easily be established from the statistics on the utilization of passenger seats for all the airlines, information that is readily available. Corporate secrecy and the confidentiality of the medical (or legal) profession presented obstacles. There was also the problem of the “guesstimate” or “dark number": of incidents that happened, for example, but were not made public (as in the case of rape). Yet these numbers are not pulled out of a hat; in every area, whether hidden alcoholism, perversion, surgical blunders, or engineering mistakes, they merely vary according to the various indirect methods of calculation. But to learn how the seemingly impossible was accomplished, the reader must read the afterword himself.

  The new edition also has a new introduction. It is odd. Its author is unquestionably an intellectual who wished to remain anonymous; instead of praising One Human Minute, he speaks of it critically and ironically, making one suspect that he considers this numerical fruit of computers collaborating with computers, under human management, to be like the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

  He advises against reading the book page by page, for that would be like reading an encyclopedia in alphabetical order — it would only make the reader’s head swim. Moreover, he says that he himself, as a reader, was “bullied” by One Human Minute. In his opinion, “Everything has always happened at once,” because the ineffable sum of all humanity’s experience is, for every historical instant — for every minute or second — a quantity that is constant. The reasons for the cares, joys, and sorrows may change radically, but they do not affect that existential sum. That is the Constant. And even if it shows historical fluctuation, there is no way to discover when an increase in misery takes place and a decrease in pleasure, or vice versa. But the book is valuable as a background enabling us to understand what the mass media are telling us as they advance technologically and carry more and more trivia. The image of the book’s “ideal reader” is ridiculous; according to the author of the Introduction, such a reader would study it bit by bit, to the exclusion of all else, attempting to glimpse the human reality behind the numbers. The example the author uses to illustrate his ideal reader is ironic; the manipulating of figures almost caricatures the method that gave rise to the whole volume. This ideal reader, having the best of intentions, will power, imagination, and loads of free time, does nothing his whole life long (apart from catching a few hours’ sleep) except study what is taking place, at that moment, among his fellow creatures. Devoting thirty seconds to each living person for eig
hteen hours a day for fifty years, he will be able to contemplate thirty-six million people, but that is not even one two-hundredth of his contemporaries. He will not have time to consider the remaining 199/200 of humanity even if he does nothing else until his dying breath, even if he considers while he eats, drinks, and undresses for bed. This example demonstrates that in reality we can know almost nothing of human fortunes beyond what is given by the statistical data.

  The editors, I’m sure, allowed such a skeptical and agnostic introduction, knowing that they had a best seller, because with best sellers condemnation as well as praise increases sales. A cynical observation, perhaps, but true.

  Naturally, pirate editions and imitations of One Human Minute have appeared. It will be amusing and fitting if the next edition includes phenomena of this sort under the headings “Intellectual Theft” and “Counterfeiting of Information"; the once-innocent appearance of a best seller now produces a train of imitators — a pack of jackals and hyenas following a lion. Meanwhile, computer crime has moved from fantasy into reality. A bank can indeed be robbed by remote control, with electronic impulses that break or fool security codes, much as a safecracker uses a skeleton key, crowbar, or carborundum saw. Presumably, banks suffer serious losses in this way, but here One Human Minute is silent, because — again, presumably — the world of High Finance does not want to make such losses public, fearing to expose this new Achilles’ heel: the electronic sabotage of automated bookkeeping. Therefore there is no heading in the book for computer crime, but it is bound to show up sooner or later, in a future edition.

  Since the copyright covers the title of the book but not the idea that gave birth to it, one can now find, in the bookstores, The World Now, What’s Happening, Fantastic Reality/Real Fantasy — which have slightly modified figures in the decimal places, so that the publisher of One Human Minute would have difficulty in court in the event of a plagiarism suit. All these imitations, of course, are cut from the same cloth; only once, as I was turning the pages of one of them, did I come upon an introduction that was rather original. The mass media, it said, are never completely objective. In fact, the pattern is like this: the worse the news in the local press, the more freedom there is and the better conditions are in the society that prints it. If journalists are wringing their hands, tearing their hair, predicting the end, and bewailing imminent ruin, then the streets are rivers of glistening cars, the store windows are packed with delicacies, everyone walks around tanned and rosy-cheeked, and a handcuffed wretch brought to prison at gunpoint is harder to find than a diamond in the gutter. And vice versa: where prisons are overcrowded, where gloom and fear prevail, where poverty is terrible, one usually reads — in the papers — news that is cheerful, uplifting, determinedly joyous (telling you that you had better participate in the general happiness), and syrupy press releases paint life in rainbow colors (except that it is a rainbow that will shine — but not just yet). This introduction claims an important role for One Human Minute and its imitators: to supply the complete truth.

  The original One Human Minute is supposed to be computerized, so that one can call it up on one’s home computer. But most people will prefer the volume on the shelf. And so the book, styling itself “all books in one,” will increase the mass of printed paper. In it you can find out how many trees fall per minute to saw and ax all over the world. Forests are turned into paper to make newspapers that call for the forests to be saved. But that piece of information is not in One Human Minute. You have to figure it out yourself.

  III

  Now One Human Minute has indeed been computerized, but not in the way I imagined. The fact is, the contents of the book were becoming, slowly but surely, anachronistic. The number of people in the world keeps increasing; new catastrophes and calamities are added to the old ones; new means of production create different articles for daily consumption. Therefore, as in the case of yearly almanacs, it came time to revise the book — or rather, to recalculate it from scratch. But a character appeared, even cleverer than the Johnsons; he decided to put a perpetual One Human Minute on the market — valid from year to year — like a perpetual calendar! In an era of pocket calculators, electronic chessplayers, and a host of similar devices claiming to embody “artificial intelligence” (which has not been attained yet but someday, no doubt, will be), when you can buy even a pocket translator to carry on simple conversations in a foreign language, it was possible to make an electronic version of this book, avoiding the need for continual corrections and new editions.

  The year is entered, the subject code selected from the menu. Also, one can move both forward and backward in time. Naturally, seeing that the machine can show how many children were born thirty years ago, and how many three hundred years ago, a person is tempted to give it a tougher problem: how many people watched television when Columbus discovered America? The machine is not that stupid, however, and is not taken in. The answer that appears in the little window is “0.” We are soon convinced that the past has all been entered in the memory of this new, microcomputerized version of One Human Minute. But it is more interesting to use it to look at the future. You cannot jump more than one hundred years forward: when you try, you get an “E” in the little window, signaling overload, as in any ordinary calculator. Future data are extrapolations, derived from such weighty mathematics that I wouldn’t dream of going into it. The only thing certain is that all the data are uncertain, like any statement about the future. But since The Perpetual Human Minute is really not a book, the book reviewer has no further obligation to it; there remains for him only this parting, possibly profound remark:

  In the Holy Scriptures it is said that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. Paraphrasing for our earthly use, we can observe that in the beginning was a computer, which brought forth this book, which became a computer again. An accident, perhaps, a superficial analogy — but I am afraid that it is not.

  THE UPSIDE-DOWN EVOLUTION

  I

  Having gained access (by what means, I’m not at liberty to reveal) to several volumes on the military history of the twenty-first century, I pondered, first and foremost, how to hide the information they contained. The question of concealment was most important, because I understood that the man who knew this history was like the finder of a treasure who, defenseless, could easily lose it along with his life. I alone possessed these facts, I realized, thanks to the books that Dr. R.G. loaned to me briefly and which I returned just before his premature death. As far as I know, he burned them, thus taking the secret with him to the grave.

  Silence seemed the simplest solution: if I kept quiet, I would save my skin. But what a shame, to sit on a thousand and one extraordinary things having to do with the political history of the next century, things opening up completely new horizons in all areas of human life. Take, for example, the astonishing reversal — completely unforeseen — in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which became a force to be reckoned with precisely because it did not become the machine embodiment of the human mind. If I remained silent for my own safety, I would be depriving myself of all the advantages stemming from that knowledge.

  Another idea occurred to me: to write down exactly what I remembered of those volumes and place the manuscript in a bank vault. It would be necessary to write down everything I retained from my reading, because with the passage of time I would forget many particulars of such a broad subject. Then, if I wanted to refresh my memory, I could visit the vault, take notes there, and return the manuscript to the strongbox. But it was dangerous. Someone could spy on me. Besides, in today’s world no bank vault was 100-percent secure. Even a thief of low intelligence would figure out, sooner or later, what an extraordinary document had fallen into his hands. And even if he discarded and destroyed my manuscript, I would not know it and would live in constant dread that the connection between my person and the history of the twenty-first century would come to light.

  My dilemma was how to hide the secret fore
ver but at the same time take advantage of it freely — to hide it from the world but not from myself. After much deliberation, I realized that this could be done very easily. The safest way to conceal a remarkable idea — every word of it true — was to publish it as science fiction. Just as a diamond thrown on a heap of broken glass would become invisible, so an authentic revelation placed amid the stupidities of science fiction would take on their coloration — and cease to be dangerous.

  At first, however, still fearful, I made a very modest use of the secret I possessed. In 1967 I wrote a science-fiction novel entitled His Master’s Voice (published in English in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). On page 125 of that edition, third line from the top, are the words “the ruling doctrine was… ‘indirect economic attrition,’” and then the doctrine is expressed by the aphorism “The thin starve before the fat lose weight."

  The doctrine expressed publicly in the United States in 1980 — thirteen years after the original edition of His Master’s Voice — was put a little differently. (In the West German press they used the slogan “den Gegner totrüsten” — “arm the enemy to death.")

  Once I had confirmed — and there had been time enough to do so, after all, since the book’s appearance — that no one had noticed how my “fantasizing” agreed with later political developments, I grew bolder. I understood that truth, when set in fiction, is camouflaged perfectly, and that even this fact can be safely confessed. For that matter, no one takes anything seriously if it’s published. So the best way to keep a top secret secret is to put it out in a mass edition.