Commentary: Facebook debacle illustrates man’s continued acquiescence to technology

Once upon a time, there were these huge iron boxes locked in a few secure rooms at banks and other controlled environments with raised floors and big air conditioners underneath. They did miracles.

They could add, subtract, divide and multiply at a very fast rate, close to the speed of light. The anatomy inside of these iron boxes featured various organs. The blood passing through the tiny and large veins — wires and cables — was really a stream of data feeding the vacuum tubes.

This was the machine of the “prehistoric” era of the 1950s and 1960s, the equivalent of Neanderthal man ready to make a quantum leap in evolutionary revolution.

The machine and its creator got clever each year and came up with faster, better, cheaper, smaller, easier-to-use next-generation models.

The large vacuum tube organs were replaced — with surgical accuracy — by much smaller and even faster units of integrated circuits (ICs). The huge miles of wires and cables were all condensed to tiny cobblestone alleys, carved, printed and embedded in the ICs.

The machine got smarter and smarter and entered into the daily life of its creator. And so the story goes.

Man, still the creator, had gone through several determinant revolutions — the Industrial, as well as several social, ideological and political revolutions.

But while all the other revolutions changed the world forever at certain speed, the current and ongoing Information Revolution is changing our lives at the speed of light. This is a quantum leap, for better or for worse.

The recent Facebook debacle and the testimony before Congress of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was just the tip of an iceberg. There is lot more untold and even untouched. The beast that man has created to serve him is gradually becoming the master to be served by man — especially once this one last step, “cognitive ability,” is learned by the machine.

At that time, it will not be about voting manipulation and the spread of the real or fake news. It will be about the very life of man and who controls it. That faithful day is coming if the manmade machine, now a beast of its own, continues its evolutionary revolution.

Take it from me, a technocrat who spent most of his academic and professional life with many generations of the beast, from the early IBM punch cards and DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) PDP11 series with one 2-foot wide circular removable disk weighting 25 pounds, which could have a maximum 32K storage and took 15 minutes to boot, all the way to the latest IBM Deep Blue Quantum.

We are all on a journey from here to eternity, and if nothing is done to manage and control the beast, I see the dawn of the day when we become slaves to our own creation.

K.E. MEHRFAR lives in Newport Beach.