Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc.
Information in many forms can be displayed with “polymorphic” data-processing systems.
Antedating synnoetics and intellectronics is another idea of such a relationship. In his book The World, The Flesh and the Devil, J. D. Bernal considers man’s replacement of various of his body’s parts with mechanical substitutes until the only organic remains would be his brain. This is a sort of wrong-end-to synnoetics, but in 1929 when the book was published there was already plenty of raw material for such a notion. Wooden legs and hooks or claws for hands, metal plates for bone material, for example; and the artificial heart already being developed. More recently we have seen the artificial kidney used, along with other organs. We have also added electronic gear to our organic components, for example the “pacemaker” implanted in many laggard hearts to keep them beating in proper cadence, plastic plumbing, and the like. There is a word for this sort of part-organic, part-mechanical man: the name “cyborg” for cybernetic organism was proposed by two New York doctors. Their technical definition of cyborg is “an exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as a homeostatic system.” There is of course strong precedent in nature for the idea of such a beneficial combination: symbiosis, the co-existence or close union of two dissimilar organisms. The shark and his buddy, the pilot fish, are examples; as are man and the many parasites to which he is host.
The idea of man being part of machine harks back to youthful rides in soapbox racers, and later experiences driving cars or flying aircraft. The pilot who flew “by the seat of his pants” in the early days easily felt himself part of the machine. As planes—and cars—grew bigger and more complex, this “one-manship” became more remote and harder to identify. The jet transport pilot may well have the feeling of handling a train when he applies force to his controls and must wait for it to be amplified through a servo system and finally act on the air stream. In the space age the man-machine combination not only survives but also flourishes. Arthur C. Clarke writes in a science-fiction story of a legless space man who serves well and happily in the weightlessness of his orbiting satellite station.
We have two stages of development, then, not necessarily sequential: man working with the machine and man as part of the machine. Several writers have suggested a third stage in which the machine gradually supplants the weaker human being much as other forms eased out the dinosaur of old. William O. Stapledon’s book, Last and First Men, describes immortal and literal giant brains. Many writers believe that these “brains” will not be man’s, but those of the machine, since frail humanity cannot survive in its increasingly hostile environment.
Arthur C. Clarke is most articulate in describing what he calls the evolutionary cycle from man to machine. As the discovery of tools by pre-man created man, so man’s invention of thinking machines set about the workings that will make him extinct. Clarke theorizes that this breakthrough by man may well be his last, and that his machines will “think” him off the face of the earth!
Hughes Aircraft Company
Withstanding underwater pressures, at depths too great for human divers, a Mobot vehicle demonstrates in this artist’s concept how it can perform salvage and rescue operations at the bottom of the ocean.
As we move into a technology that embraces communication at a distance of millions of miles, survival under death-dealing radiation, and travel at fantastic speeds, man’s natural equipment falters and he must rely on the machine both as muscle and brain. Intelligence arose from life but does not necessarily need life, in the sense we think of it, to continue. Thus the extension of man’s intellect by electronics as hailed by Dr. Ramo will lead ultimately to our extinction.
Clarke feels that the man-machine partnership we have entered, while mutually benevolent, is doomed to instability and that man with his human shortcomings will fall by the wayside, perhaps in space, which may well be the machine’s true medium. What will remain will be the intelligent machine, reduced as time goes on to “pure” intelligence free to roam where it will and do what it wants, a matterless state of affairs that even Clarke modestly disclaims the imagination to speculate upon.
Before writing man off as a lost cause, we should investigate a strong argument against such a take-over by the machine. Man stands apart from other creatures in his consciousness of himself. He alone seems to have the ability to ponder his fate, to reflect, and to write books about his thoughts and dreams. Lesser animals apparently take what comes, do what they have to do, and get through this life with a minimum of changing their environment and themselves. Thus far the machines man has built do not seem to be conscious of themselves. While “rational beings,” perhaps, they do not have the “ability to laugh” or otherwise show conscious awareness of their fate. A term applied to primitive mechanical beings is “plugsuckers.” They learn to seek out a wall socket or other form of energy and nourish themselves much as animals must do. Just where man himself switched from plugsucking and began to rewire his own world is a fuzzy demarcation, but he seems to have accomplished this.