Stanislav Lem
The amount of technology
Editorial
The sum of the future
“We have to talk about the future...” A famous phrase from a book that gave the world an incredible statement: the achievement of the Future is technological.
The Sum of Technology has shaped the visions of several generations of young technologists for the future. The brilliant book by Stanislav Lem does not describe the long and varied history of predictions of the future of our world. It does not work for the sake of any regime or established opinion. Moreover, this book does not promise any endless and free benefits in the future. She is different.
Lem's book lay exactly at the turn of scientific eras. The "sum of technology" appeared when the study of probabilistic processes was just becoming one of the main methods of cognition. Quantum mechanics had already been created and actively applied in theory and practice, but humanity was still confident that the universe was unambiguous and defined, and knowledge was reduced to laying a reliable route along the unshakable metric of the world. The progress of mankind was inevitably compared with scientific and technological progress. And our Euro-Atlantic civilization, in search of new boundless territories, rushed into outer space.
The Sum of Technology seemed to sum up the classic futurological era of exploration. Epochs when a person clearly realizing that “the links of his life have long been forged by the Great Father”, tried to predict the position of the next link. Mankind has analyzed its own history in search of fundamental processes, mechanisms and sources of energy that move its flywheel. It assessed its evolution based on any one mechanism of development: biological, administrative, technical, etc. Threw the bones of insights and conjectures, or erected one-sided palaces of the desired future.
In The Sum of Technology, Stanislav Lem made a unique and bold technological analysis of civilization, or rather civilizations. He estimated their statistics on a galactic scale, obtaining restrictions on age and spatial distribution. Lem placed civilizations in the phase space of evolutionary parameters, trying to build some kind of Main Sequence. He looked at civilizations over long periods of time to determine - please pay special attention! – possible areas of information innovation. Stanislav Lem did not undertake to implement quantitative extrapolation, dear to the heart of classical futurology. He analyzed the possibilities of the emergence of fundamentally new not even sciences, but groups of scientific disciplines.
In the first half of the last century, E. Hubble, having studied the statistics of the "escape" velocities of galaxies, derived his famous fundamental law that the speed of a galaxy is directly proportional to the distance to it. Over the following decades, Hubble's data were confirmed by powerful observational statistics. But a study of the original sample of Hubble galaxies shows that he could not get the exact pattern in such small statistics and with such accuracy of observations. But the law was defined just then... So the constructions of the "Sum of Technology" are based on an extremely poor field of part of the scientific theories that received a popular presentation in the 50-60s of the last century. But this was enough to build the foundations of the technology of the Future. And outline the problem areas, draw the expected directions of the main strike. And set the scale and degree of freedom of research.
Actually, the milestone set by the “Sum of Technology” in the 60s of the 20th century made it possible at the beginning of the 21st century to set a completely technological task: the construction of the Future. It was possible to prove in principle that based on the knowledge of fundamental civilizational trends, it is possible to create a technology for building a given Future. Naturally, the solution space for this problem will be limited.
Commenting on this publication was made by S. Pereslegin and N. Yutanov (Research group "Designing the Future", St. Petersburg).
Nikolai Yutanov
To the Soviet reader
The Soviet reader knows well and appreciated the works of the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. In his books, we admired the author's skill in creating exciting and fascinating fantasies, which, as a rule, originate from the existing and foreseeable achievements of science, and his subtle humor, and skillful stylization in his cybernetic and space tales.
In the book offered to the attention of readers, S. Lem appears before us in a new capacity - as a thinker who sets himself the task of looking into the future of mankind, to imagine pictures of the possible development of civilizations. Moreover, unlike most modern "futurologists", he does not try to predict the chronology of certain discoveries and inventions, he argues in a broader, integral sense.
The "sum of technology" is a broad canvas that paints pictures of the possible development of human - and not only human - civilization on a large time scale. At the same time, Lem - and this is natural for a science fiction writer - extends his analysis so far that he invades areas that are practically the field of activity not so much of specialist scientists, but of thinkers who, according to the current development of science and technology, according to the trends traced in modernity, tend to predict the development of civilization (more precisely, civilizations) for hundreds and thousands of years ahead. Despite the purely problematic nature of such semi-fantasy forecasts, they also have a certain scientific value, since they explore the limits of the possible from the point of view of our modern ideas.
At the center of the Polish writer's thoughts is the fate of civilizations, the difficulties that today we can see in their future development, in particular, the difficulties arising from the exponential growth of scientific information, the rapid growth of masses and energies that people have to deal with, the complication of all spheres of society, the explosive growth of the population of our planet. Not succumbing to the pessimistic sentiments common in some circles of Western scientists and writers, Lem takes an optimistic position here, putting forward the thesis “Catch up and overtake nature!” as a guiding thread for the progress of civilizations on a large scale of time. Such an approach naturally introduces a wide range of questions into the writer's circle of thoughts: a comparison of biological and technological evolution, the biotechnical activity of civilizations, "cosmogonic construction", questions of a moral order related to all this, and much more. The reader will undoubtedly notice a strong cybernetic accent in the book: the information-cybernetic "cut" covers the range from the problems of automation of the intellect to the problems of the science of sign systems - semiotics.
“We have to talk about the future...” A famous phrase from a book that gave the world an incredible statement: the achievement of the Future is technological.
The Sum of Technology has shaped the visions of several generations of young technologists for the future. The brilliant book by Stanislav Lem does not describe the long and varied history of predictions of the future of our world. It does not work for the sake of any regime or established opinion. Moreover, this book does not promise any endless and free benefits in the future. She is different.
Lem's book lay exactly at the turn of scientific eras. The "sum of technology" appeared when the study of probabilistic processes was just becoming one of the main methods of cognition. Quantum mechanics had already been created and actively applied in theory and practice, but humanity was still confident that the universe was unambiguous and defined, and knowledge was reduced to laying a reliable route along the unshakable metric of the world. The progress of mankind was inevitably compared with scientific and technological progress. And our Euro-Atlantic civilization, in search of new boundless territories, rushed into outer space.
The Sum of Technology seemed to sum up the classic futurological era of exploration. Epochs when a person clearly realizing that “the links of his life have long been forged by the Great Father”, tried to predict the position of the next link. Mankind has analyzed its own history in search of fundamental processes, mechanisms and sources of energy that move its flywheel. It assessed its evolution based on any one mechanism of development: biological, administrative, technical, etc. Threw the bones of insights and conjectures, or erected one-sided palaces of the desired future.
In The Sum of Technology, Stanislav Lem made a unique and bold technological analysis of civilization, or rather civilizations. He estimated their statistics on a galactic scale, obtaining restrictions on age and spatial distribution. Lem placed civilizations in the phase space of evolutionary parameters, trying to build some kind of Main Sequence. He looked at civilizations over long periods of time to determine - please pay special attention! – possible areas of information innovation. Stanislav Lem did not undertake to implement quantitative extrapolation, dear to the heart of classical futurology. He analyzed the possibilities of the emergence of fundamentally new not even sciences, but groups of scientific disciplines.
In the first half of the last century, E. Hubble, having studied the statistics of the "escape" velocities of galaxies, derived his famous fundamental law that the speed of a galaxy is directly proportional to the distance to it. Over the following decades, Hubble's data were confirmed by powerful observational statistics. But a study of the original sample of Hubble galaxies shows that he could not get the exact pattern in such small statistics and with such accuracy of observations. But the law was defined just then... So the constructions of the "Sum of Technology" are based on an extremely poor field of part of the scientific theories that received a popular presentation in the 50-60s of the last century. But this was enough to build the foundations of the technology of the Future. And outline the problem areas, draw the expected directions of the main strike. And set the scale and degree of freedom of research.
Actually, the milestone set by the “Sum of Technology” in the 60s of the 20th century made it possible at the beginning of the 21st century to set a completely technological task: the construction of the Future. It was possible to prove in principle that based on the knowledge of fundamental civilizational trends, it is possible to create a technology for building a given Future. Naturally, the solution space for this problem will be limited.
Commenting on this publication was made by S. Pereslegin and N. Yutanov (Research group "Designing the Future", St. Petersburg).
The Soviet reader knows well and appreciated the works of the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. In his books, we admired the author's skill in creating exciting and fascinating fantasies, which, as a rule, originate from the existing and foreseeable achievements of science, and his subtle humor, and skillful stylization in his cybernetic and space tales.
In the book offered to the attention of readers, S. Lem appears before us in a new capacity - as a thinker who sets himself the task of looking into the future of mankind, to imagine pictures of the possible development of civilizations. Moreover, unlike most modern "futurologists", he does not try to predict the chronology of certain discoveries and inventions, he argues in a broader, integral sense.
The "sum of technology" is a broad canvas that paints pictures of the possible development of human - and not only human - civilization on a large time scale. At the same time, Lem - and this is natural for a science fiction writer - extends his analysis so far that he invades areas that are practically the field of activity not so much of specialist scientists, but of thinkers who, according to the current development of science and technology, according to the trends traced in modernity, tend to predict the development of civilization (more precisely, civilizations) for hundreds and thousands of years ahead. Despite the purely problematic nature of such semi-fantasy forecasts, they also have a certain scientific value, since they explore the limits of the possible from the point of view of our modern ideas.
At the center of the Polish writer's thoughts is the fate of civilizations, the difficulties that today we can see in their future development, in particular, the difficulties arising from the exponential growth of scientific information, the rapid growth of masses and energies that people have to deal with, the complication of all spheres of society, the explosive growth of the population of our planet. Not succumbing to the pessimistic sentiments common in some circles of Western scientists and writers, Lem takes an optimistic position here, putting forward the thesis “Catch up and overtake nature!” as a guiding thread for the progress of civilizations on a large scale of time. Such an approach naturally introduces a wide range of questions into the writer's circle of thoughts: a comparison of biological and technological evolution, the biotechnical activity of civilizations, "cosmogonic construction", questions of a moral order related to all this, and much more. The reader will undoubtedly notice a strong cybernetic accent in the book: the information-cybernetic "cut" covers the range from the problems of automation of the intellect to the problems of the science of sign systems - semiotics.
In his hypothetical constructions, Lem strives to be strictly limited only to such constructions that do not contradict scientific methods and established data of natural science. This approach leads him to deny the exclusivity of the fate of the Earth and its cosmic environment. In general, "cosmic scales" - in the temporal and spatial senses - are characteristic of the flight of Lem's thought.
The attention of the Polish writer is directed, first of all, to the consideration of the ways of evolution of the "technology" of civilization, determined by the state of knowledge and the social and biological environment, ways of realizing the goals set by society. At the same time, he connects the issues of the future development of human “technology” with the position of man in the Cosmos. And this leads to the question: “Is intelligent life an accident or a regularity for the Universe?” Drawing on the ideas and achievements of cybernetics with its concepts of homeostasis, feedbacks, hierarchical construction of control programs, etc., Lem comes to the conclusion about the natural nature of the emergence of civilizations. Interested Lem and various options for their possible existence; duration of civilizations in time; the probability of their simultaneity, in particular, in the technological phase; their frequency in the Universe; possible distances between them and the problem of space communication, etc. The writer poses the problem of the fate of civilizations very sharply; at the same time, to the optimistic thesis about the colossal possibilities for the development of communities of intelligent beings, Lem adds a fundamentally important statement about the multiplicity of ways for their probable development.
The sum of technology - description and summary, author Lem Stanislav, read for free online on the website of the electronic library site
"What, in fact, is this "Sum"? A collection of essays about the fate of civilization, permeated with a "general engineering" leitmotif? A cybernetic interpretation of the past and future? An image of the Cosmos, how does it present to the Constructor? A story about the engineering activities of Nature and human hands? Scientific and technical forecast for the coming millennia? - A little bit of everything. How much can, how much is it permissible to trust this book? - I have no answer to this question. I don’t know which of my guesses and assumptions are more plausible. Among them there are no invulnerable ones, and the passage of time crosses out a lot of them." So the author himself defines the range of issues considered in this book, and his attitude towards them. In a fascinating way, S. Lem touches on many problems of modern science, as well as problems that will face the science of the future.
The most popular science fiction writer, S. Lem, appears in this book in a genre new to the Soviet reader. But as in his other works, here, too, he remains an intelligent and very interesting interlocutor.
Stanisław Lem is a philosopher and futurist originally from Poland. His works were of great importance for the development of all modern technology, and the author's most popular book was "The Sum of Technology" - a futurological treatise with a philosophical theme. In this paper, Lem makes many statements about new technologies that will become commonplace in the near future. Tellingly, the author was able to foresee many details that now surround modern man. The treatise is a fountain of futuristic ideas that concern not only science and technology, but also affect religion, the development of society and philosophical teachings. With the help of his work, the author penetrates into all the main spheres of modern human activity.
The Sum of Technology is an amazing book written back in 1963. In it, Stanislav Lem makes bold statements and prophecies about the future development of technology, philosophy and civilization. His ideas are many years ahead of the time in which this treatise was written. The problems raised then are even more relevant in our modern times. Reading this book will be interesting to anyone who is fond of modern computer technology, technology, physics and other complex sciences. The author easily explains all his unimaginable ideas, using easy speech and an engaging style of writing.
The Sum of Technology may at first glance look like a complex scientific work intended for a narrow circle of specialists, but in reality everything is quite different. Stanislav Lem wrote his book for all readers, regardless of their gender and age. The ideas of the treatise touch upon such topics as cloning and atomic copying of individuals, the search for new extraterrestrial civilizations, reflections on space travel, and much more. This work should be read as solid science fiction, not a dry encyclopedic text.
The futuristic "Sum of Technology" is a must-read book for all lovers of modern technology and thinking about the future. In it, anyone can acquire useful theoretical knowledge for themselves, as well as get into their life baggage the basic methods that helped the author to determine the future of all mankind with such accuracy. This is a truly unique work that has remained relevant for more than half a century.
On our literary site, you can download Stanislav Lem's book "The Sum of Technology" for free in formats suitable for different devices - epub, fb2, txt, rtf. Do you like to read books and always follow the release of new products? We have a large selection of books of various genres: classics, modern science fiction, literature on psychology and children's editions. In addition, we offer interesting and informative articles for beginner writers and all those who want to learn how to write beautifully. Each of our visitors will be able to find something useful and exciting.
Stanislav Lem
The amount of technology
Editorial
The sum of the future
“We have to talk about the future...” A famous phrase from a book that gave the world an incredible statement: the achievement of the Future is technological.
The Sum of Technology has shaped the visions of several generations of young technologists for the future. The brilliant book by Stanislav Lem does not describe the long and varied history of predictions of the future of our world. It does not work for the sake of any regime or established opinion. Moreover, this book does not promise any endless and free benefits in the future. She is different.
Lem's book lay exactly at the turn of scientific eras. The "sum of technology" appeared when the study of probabilistic processes was just becoming one of the main methods of cognition. Quantum mechanics had already been created and actively applied in theory and practice, but humanity was still confident that the universe was unambiguous and defined, and knowledge was reduced to laying a reliable route along the unshakable metric of the world. The progress of mankind was inevitably compared with scientific and technological progress. And our Euro-Atlantic civilization, in search of new boundless territories, rushed into outer space.
The Sum of Technology seemed to sum up the classic futurological era of exploration. Epochs when a person clearly realizing that “the links of his life have long been forged by the Great Father”, tried to predict the position of the next link. Mankind has analyzed its own history in search of fundamental processes, mechanisms and sources of energy that move its flywheel. It assessed its evolution based on any one mechanism of development: biological, administrative, technical, etc. Threw the bones of insights and conjectures, or erected one-sided palaces of the desired future.
In The Sum of Technology, Stanislav Lem made a unique and bold technological analysis of civilization, or rather civilizations. He estimated their statistics on a galactic scale, obtaining restrictions on age and spatial distribution. Lem placed civilizations in the phase space of evolutionary parameters, trying to build some kind of Main Sequence. He looked at civilizations over long periods of time to determine - please pay special attention! – possible areas of information innovation. Stanislav Lem did not undertake to implement quantitative extrapolation, dear to the heart of classical futurology. He analyzed the possibilities of the emergence of fundamentally new not even sciences, but groups of scientific disciplines.
In the first half of the last century, E. Hubble, having studied the statistics of the "escape" velocities of galaxies, derived his famous fundamental law that the speed of a galaxy is directly proportional to the distance to it. Over the following decades, Hubble's data were confirmed by powerful observational statistics. But a study of the original sample of Hubble galaxies shows that he could not get the exact pattern in such small statistics and with such accuracy of observations. But the law was defined just then... So the constructions of the "Sum of Technology" are based on an extremely poor field of part of the scientific theories that received a popular presentation in the 50-60s of the last century. But this was enough to build the foundations of the technology of the Future. And outline the problem areas, draw the expected directions of the main strike. And set the scale and degree of freedom of research.
Actually, the milestone set by the “Sum of Technology” in the 60s of the 20th century made it possible at the beginning of the 21st century to set a completely technological task: the construction of the Future. It was possible to prove in principle that based on the knowledge of fundamental civilizational trends, it is possible to create a technology for building a given Future. Naturally, the solution space for this problem will be limited.
Commenting on this publication was made by S. Pereslegin and N. Yutanov (Research group "Designing the Future", St. Petersburg).
Nikolai Yutanov
To the Soviet reader
The Soviet reader knows well and appreciated the works of the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. In his books, we admired the author's skill in creating exciting and fascinating fantasies, which, as a rule, originate from the existing and foreseeable achievements of science, and his subtle humor, and skillful stylization in his cybernetic and space tales.
In the book offered to the attention of readers, S. Lem appears before us in a new capacity - as a thinker who sets himself the task of looking into the future of mankind, to imagine pictures of the possible development of civilizations. Moreover, unlike most modern "futurologists", he does not try to predict the chronology of certain discoveries and inventions, he argues in a broader, integral sense.
The "sum of technology" is a broad canvas that paints pictures of the possible development of human - and not only human - civilization on a large time scale. At the same time, Lem - and this is natural for a science fiction writer - extends his analysis so far that he invades areas that are practically the field of activity not so much of specialist scientists, but of thinkers who, according to the current development of science and technology, according to the trends traced in modernity, tend to predict the development of civilization (more precisely, civilizations) for hundreds and thousands of years ahead. Despite the purely problematic nature of such semi-fantasy forecasts, they also have a certain scientific value, since they explore the limits of the possible from the point of view of our modern ideas.
At the center of the Polish writer's thoughts is the fate of civilizations, the difficulties that today we can see in their future development, in particular, the difficulties arising from the exponential growth of scientific information, the rapid growth of masses and energies that people have to deal with, the complication of all spheres of society, the explosive growth of the population of our planet. Not succumbing to the pessimistic sentiments common in some circles of Western scientists and writers, Lem takes an optimistic position here, putting forward the thesis “Catch up and overtake nature!” as a guiding thread for the progress of civilizations on a large scale of time. Such an approach naturally introduces a wide range of questions into the writer's circle of thoughts: a comparison of biological and technological evolution, the biotechnical activity of civilizations, "cosmogonic construction", questions of a moral order related to all this, and much more. The reader will undoubtedly notice a strong cybernetic accent in the book: the information-cybernetic "cut" covers the range from the problems of automation of the intellect to the problems of the science of sign systems - semiotics.
In his hypothetical constructions, Lem strives to be strictly limited only to such constructions that do not contradict scientific methods and established data of natural science. This approach leads him to deny the exclusivity of the fate of the Earth and its cosmic environment. In general, "cosmic scales" - in the temporal and spatial senses - are characteristic of the flight of Lem's thought.
The attention of the Polish writer is directed, first of all, to the consideration of the ways of evolution of the "technology" of civilization, determined by the state of knowledge and the social and biological environment, ways of realizing the goals set by society. At the same time, he connects the issues of the future development of human “technology” with the position of man in the Cosmos. And this leads to the question: “Is intelligent life an accident or a regularity for the Universe?” Drawing on the ideas and achievements of cybernetics with its concepts of homeostasis, feedbacks, hierarchical construction of control programs, etc., Lem comes to the conclusion about the natural nature of the emergence of civilizations. Interested Lem and various options for their possible existence; duration of civilizations in time; the probability of their simultaneity, in particular, in the technological phase; their frequency in the Universe; possible distances between them and the problem of space communication, etc. The writer poses the problem of the fate of civilizations very sharply; at the same time, to the optimistic thesis about the colossal possibilities for the development of communities of intelligent beings, Lem adds a fundamentally important statement about the multiplicity of ways for their probable development.
The development of civilization has many aspects. One of them is the future of civilization in terms of the development of science in it. Lem notes that the key to the power of a civilization is in the masses of energy that it can dispose of, and the key to mastering energy is in the information power of society. Man is leading, says Lem, a strategic "game" "Civilization - Nature". It is the mastery of information processes that will open the way for mankind to victory in this “game”. The path leading to this goal is already visible in the most general terms: this is the path of creating cybernetic intelligence amplifiers, the path of “intellectronics”. At the same time, Lem, a brilliant science fiction writer, remains on the basis of a fundamentally important thesis about cybernetic information machines as human tools. The problem of "machine and man" develops in him into a more general problem of the correlation of natural and artificial in the development of civilization, in technology. Interesting are his considerations that in the progressive course of civilization, the artificial will gradually lose its position as an "ersatz" and show its superiority over the natural.
