—Montaigne
11: The Road Ahead
In Book One of Les Miserables, Cosette says, “Would you realize what Revolution is, call it Progress; and would you realize what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.” Victor Hugo’s definitions apply well to what has been termed by some the computer revolution and by others simply the natural evolution of species. The computer has a past and a present, differentiated mainly by the slope of the line plotting progress against time. Its future, which blurs somewhat with the present, will obviously be characterized by a line approaching the vertical.
The intelligent machine has been postulated for years, first by the scientist, then by the science-fiction writer, and now again by the scientist. Norbert Wiener of cybernetics fame, Ashby and his homeostat, Grey Walter and his mechanical turtles, A. M. Turing, John von Neumann, and others, have recently been joined by men like Ramo, Samuel, Newell, et al., who, if not actually beating the drums for machine intelligence, do more than admit to the possibility. For each such pro there are cons, of course, from sincere, intelligent authorities who in effect holler “Get a horse!” at those who say the computer is coming.
The Royal Society in England met its stiffest opposition from otherwise intelligent people who deplored naturalism in any form. Perhaps such detractors are a necessary goad, a part of progress. At any rate, science survived the Nicholas Gimcrack jibes of the Popes and Addisons and Swifts. Darwin was more right than Butler, though the latter probably made more money from his work. Today, we find a parallel situation in that there are those who refuse to accept the computer as an intelligent machine, though it is interesting to watch these objectors regroup and draw another line the machine dare not go past.
The writers of science and pseudo-science have often been accused of fantasy and blue-sky dreams. A case in point in the electronics field is the so-called “journalistor” or marvelous successor to the transistor. Such riding off in all directions with each new laboratory experiment may be justified in that it prods the scientist who must keep up with the press and his advertising department! This theory apparently works, and now it seems that the most startling and fantastic stories come not from writers, but from the scientists themselves.
In 1960 the Western Joint Computer Conference was held in San Francisco, and one session was devoted to the fanciful design and use of a computer with the problem-solving capability of an intelligent man and the speed and capacity of a high-speed data-processor. It was proposed to use “tunnel-effect tetrodes” with a switching time of one ten-billionth of a second as the logic and storage elements. These would be fabricated of thin-film materials by electron beam micromachining, and 100 billion of them could be packed into a cubic inch volume. With these tiny components and new circuit modes a supercomputer could be built, stored with information, and programmed to solve what one of the participants called the most difficult problem the human being faces today—that of bargaining.
This computer has not yet been built; it won’t be for some time. But design and fabrication are moving in that direction on a number of fronts. One of these fronts is that of hardware, the components used in building up the computer circuitry. In a decade we moved from vacuum tubes to transistors to thin-film devices. Examples of shrinkage on a gross scale are shown in the use of a single ferrite core to replace some twenty conventional (relatively speaking!) components.
Memory circuits once were mechanical relays or tube circuits. Briefly they were transistorized, and then ferrite cores. Magnetic thin-film circuits have now been developed, making random-access storage almost as compact as the sequential tape reel. As circuits grow smaller the major problem is manipulating them, or even seeing them, and a sneeze can be disastrous in today’s electronics plant.
One early journalistor was the molecular circuit. Many scientists and engineers working in the field scoffed at or derided such a visionary scheme. But the industry has indeed progressed into the integrated-circuit technology—a sort of halfway point—and is now on the fringe of actual functional block techniques in which the individual components are not discernible. Electronic switching and other action at the molecular level is close to reality, and hardheaded scientists now speak calmly of using a homogeneous block of material as a memory, scanning its three dimensions with the speed of light to locate any one or more of billions of bits of data in a few inches of volume.