To weep is unctious, to move is poor.
This masterpiece, produced by a computer in the Librascope Laboratory for Automata Research, is not as obscure as an Eliot or a Nostradamus. Computer music has not yet brought audiences to their feet in Carnegie Hall. The machine’s detractors may well claim that it has produced nothing truly great; nothing worthy of an Einstein or Keats or Vermeer. But then, how many of us people have?
There is yet another way we can ban the computer from membership in our human society. While human beings occasionally think they are machines, and Dr. Bruno Bettelheim has documented a case history of “Joey” who was so convinced that he was a machine that he had to keep himself plugged in to stay alive, no machine has yet demonstrated that it is consciously aware of itself, as human beings are.
Machines are, hopefully, objective. Consciousness seems to be subjective in the extreme; indeed, some feel that it is a thing one of us cannot hope to convey as intelligence to another and thus has no scientific importance. It is also noted that the thinking and learning processes can be carried out with no need for consciousness of what we are doing. An example given is that of the cyclist who learns, without being “aware” of the fact, that to turn his machine left he must first make a slight swing to the right in order to keep from falling outward during his left turn. This observation in itself is not final proof of the pudding, of course, unless we are aiming only to make a mechanical bike-rider, but many of our other actions are carried out more or less mechanically without calling attention to themselves. Just as certainly, however, the thing called consciousness plays a vital role in human thinking. Perhaps the machine must learn to do this before it can be truly creative.
Although we have described some fairly “exotic” devices, it should be remembered that the computers in use outside of the laboratory today are fairly old-fashioned second-generation models. They have progressed from vacuum tubes or mechanical relays to “solid-state” components. When Artrons and neuristors and memistors and other more sophisticated parts are standard, we can look for a vast increase in the brain power of computers.
The Gilfillan radar ground-controlled-approach system for aircraft that “sees” the plane on the radar scope, computes the proper path for it to follow, and then selects the right voice commands from a stored-tape memory seems to be thinking and acting already. The addition of eyes and ears plus limbs and locomotion to the computer, foreseen now in the photocell eyes of Perceptron, the ears of Cybertron, and dexterity of Mobot and Hand, will move the computer from mere brain to robot.
Some people profess to worry about what will happen when the computer itself realizes that it is thinking, calling to mind the apocryphal story of the machine that was asked if there was a God. After brief cogitation, it said, “Now there is.” To offset such a chilling possibility, it is comforting to recall the post-office electronic brain that mistook the Christmas seals on packages for foreign stamps, and the Army computer that ordered millions of dollars worth of supplies that weren’t needed. Or perhaps it isn’t comforting, at that!
The question of whether or not a computer actually thinks is still a controversy, though not as much so as it was a few years ago. The computer looks and acts as if it is thinking, but the true scientist prefers to reserve judgment in the spirit of one shown a black sheep some distance away. “This side is black,” he admitted, “but let’s investigate further.”
“For forms of government let fools contest,