A Note of Skepticism

I enjoyed Glenn Reynolds's' "An Army of Davids," mostly because of its implications in my fealty to Hayekian systems. The forward looking chapters on dramatically increased longevity, nanotech, and "the Singularity" intrigued me but did not necessarily win me over.

I'm no Luddite, but there are problems which do not lend themselves to technical solutions. A good friend who understood analog electronics far better than I, once showed my some amplifier schematics, in Leo Fender's own hand. I thought the schematics were cool, but Alan gave me a tour: " Look! He's biased the wiper of the tone pot against the hot side of the pre-amp tube!!!" Maybe he said "the flay rod has gone askew on treddle!" But the point remains that a textbook amplifier design sounds like crap when you plug a guitar into it. Leo's wacky bias scheme, conversely, created the sound of an electric guitar for half a century.

I've recorded with "The Pod," which uses DSP (Digital Signal Processing) to capture the tone of popular amp designs and speaker cabinets. It's pretty good and is hard to beat for recording. But in a live scenario, all the kings chips have yet to put Leo's sound together again.

Kenneth Silber, in TCS, sounds the same concerns about the Strad, or Stradivarius violin, but you can make similar suggestions about "The Strat."

Perhaps someday advanced technology will outstrip the Strad, producing violins widely regarded as superior. If so, it still will have taken a considerably long time for high tech to outdo the work of a craftsman who lived before the industrial revolution. In any event, there will be an element of subjectivity to any evaluation of which violins are best. It seems likely that the best future violins will be regarded as notably different from Strads, and not readily amenable to a direct comparison. One consideration is that Strads, in the view of many experts, already are at their peak and perhaps moving beyond it. It also remains to be seen what new qualities and subtleties current violins will take on with age.

There is, I believe, a broader lesson to be taken from the Stradivarius about the future of technology. Some futurists and technologists, such as Vernon Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, have argued that the world is approaching a transformation known as the "Singularity", marked by the advent of some form of superhuman intelligence. In this picture, technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering soar up a curve of rapid and inexorable change. In some versions, the Singularity is given a specific timeframe, occurring sometime around the year 2030.

Both the amplifier and the violin seek a subjective tonal quality and there is something intrinsically unfair in holding them up. Yet both have successfully resisted huge amounts of technology.

On the web Posted by jk at April 18, 2006 12:36 PM