Why Luke Skywalker Was Wrong to Use the Force – The Atlantic

Machines can now see into the future, and we ignore them at our peril.

in our galaxy, technology is the Force. Increasingly, it’s computers that train our intuition. It’s computers that help us perceive beyond our senses.

You can avoid bad futures because you can actually see them. … It’s an entirely new kind of vision. We don’t often think of computation that way, as a visual aid, because it’s somewhat difficult to describe what it helps us see. Where telescopes and microscopes show us the very far and the very small, the computer shows us the very much, all at once. It makes time available to the mind and eye. Computation, in that sense, is a kind of compacting of imagination: It helps us generate and explore a zillion scenarios and digest them into a representation that’s easy to play around with.

This is going to start happening everywhere. We’ll use computers to explore possible futures, and over time we’ll learn how to see those futures for ourselves, almost to feel them, to the point where it’ll seem to those not in the know that we have command of an arcane force.

Source: Why Luke Skywalker Was Wrong to Use the Force – The Atlantic