Consciousness is subjective in the extreme, and thus far only in fiction have computers paused to reflect and consider what they have done and its effect on them. However, the machine-builder, if not yet the machine itself, is aware of this consciousness problem. The Hoffman Electronics Corporation recently published an advertisement in the form of a science-fiction story by A. E. Van Vogt. The hero is a defense vehicle, patrolling the Pacific more effectively because it thinks it is king of the Philippine Deep. Its name is Itself, and it has a built-in alter ego. Hoffman admits it has not produced a real Itself—yet, but points out calmly that the company’s business is the conversion of scientific fiction to scientific fact.

It has been suggested that mechanical consciousness may evolve when the computer begins to reproduce itself, a startling conception blessed in theory by logicians and mathematicians, as well as philosophers. A crude self-replicating model has been built by scientists—a toy train that reproduces itself by coupling together the proper cars to copy the parent train, a whimsical reflection of Samuel Butler’s baby engines playing about the roundhouse door.

Self-reproducing machines may depend on a basic “cell” containing a blueprint of what it should look like when complete, which simply hunts around for the proper parts and assembles itself. In the process it may even make an improvement or two. Having finished, it will make a carbon copy of its blueprint and start another “baby” machine on the way. Writers on this subject—some under the guise of science-fiction—wonder at what point the machines will begin to wonder about how they came to be. Will they produce philosophic or religious literature, or will this step in evolution prove that consciousness was a bad mutation, like seven fingers or three heads, and drop it from the list of instructions?

Clarke admits that the take-over by the machines is centuries off; meantime we can enjoy a golden age of intellectronic partnership with the machine. Linus Pauling, pointing out that knowledge of molecular structure has taken away the mystery of life, hopes that a “molecular theory of thinking” will be developed and so improve man that he may remake his thoughts and his world. Mathematician John Williams believes that existing human intelligence can preserve its distinction only by withdrawing from competition with the machine and defining human intelligence rigorously enough to exclude that of the machines. He suggests using the computer not just for a molecular theory of thinking, but also in the science of genetics to design our children!

Whatever lies ahead, it seems obvious that one of the most important things the computer can help us think about is the computer itself. It is a big part of our future.

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