The automatic recognizer will be capable of extraordinary tasks. With microphones and a large memory, this type of machine would be able to hear a foreign language spoken and translate it into spoken or written English. With phototubes and with an expanded filtering and decoding capacity as in deciphering machines, the automatic recognizer should be able to read a dead language, even those (such as Minoan or Etruscan) that have so far resisted efforts to read it. The machine would derive rules for the translation of the language and translate any sample.
An automatic recognizer could perhaps be equipped with many sensitive, tiny observing instruments that could be placed around or in the brain and nervous systems of animals. Then the machine might enable us to find out what activity in the nervous system corresponds with what activity in the animal.
TYPES OF PROBLEMS THAT MACHINES
WILL SOLVE IN THE FUTURE
We turn now to the second question regarding the future of machines that think: What types of problems can we foresee as solved by these machines?
Problems of Control
Probably the foremost problem which machines that think can solve is automatic control over all sorts of other machines. This involves controlling a machine that is running so that it will do the right thing at the right time in response to information. For example, suppose that you are mowing a lawn with a mowing machine. You watch the preceding strip so as to stay next to it. You watch the ends of the strips, where you turn around. If a stick is caught in the cutting blade, you stop and take it out. Now it is entirely possible to put devices on the mowing machine so that all these things will be taken care of automatically. In fact, in the case of plowing a large field, a tractor-plow can be equipped with a device that guides it next to the preceding furrow. Thus, once the first furrow around the edge has been made, riderless tractors will plow a whole field and stop in the middle.
For another example, take a gas furnace for heating steam to keep a house warm. Such a furnace has automatic controls, which respond to the following information whenever reported:
- House too warm.
- House not warm enough.
- Too much steam pressure.
- Not enough water in boiler.
- Gas flame not lit.
- Daytime.
- Nighttime.
In fact, your own meaning of “warm” can be put into the control system: you set the dial on your thermostat at the temperature that “warm” is to be for you.
In the future many kinds of automatic control will be common. We shall have automatic pilots for flying and landing airplanes. We shall have automatic missiles for destructive purposes, such as bombing and killing, and for constructive purposes, such as delivering mail and fast freight. An article in the magazine Fortune for November 1946 described the automatic factory ([see Supplement 3]). This is a factory in which there would be automatic arms for holding stuff being manufactured, and automatic feed lines for supplying material just where it is needed. All this factory would be controlled by machines that handle information automatically and produce actions that respond to information.