This prospect fills us with concern as well as with amazement. How shall we control these automatic machines, these robots, these Frankensteins? What will there be left for us to do to earn our living? But more of this in the next chapter.
Problems of Science
Other problems for which we can foresee the use of machines that think are the understanding, and later the controlling, of nature. One of these problems is weather forecasting and weather control.
The Weather Brain
We can imagine the following type of machine—a weather brain. A thousand weather observatories all over the country observe the weather at 8 a.m. The observations are fed automatically through a countrywide network of communication lines into a central station. Here a giant machine, containing a great deal of scientific knowledge about the weather, takes in all the data reported to it. At 8:15 the weather brain starts to calculate; in half an hour it has finished, having produced an excellent forecast of the weather for the whole country. Then it proceeds to transmit its forecast all over the country. By 8:50 every weather station, newspaper, radio station, and airport in the country has the details. In October 1945, Dr. V. K. Zworykin of the Princeton Laboratories of the Radio Corporation of America proposed solving the problem of weather forecasting in this way by a giant brain.
The weather brain will have a second stage of application. From time to time and here and there, the weather is unstable: it can be triggered to behave in one way or another. For example, recently, pellets of frozen carbon dioxide—often called Dry Ice—have been dropped from planes and have caused rain. In fact, a few pounds of Dry Ice have apparently caused several hundred tons of rain or snow. In similar ways, we may, for example, turn away a hail storm so that hail will fall over a barren mountain instead of over a farming valley and thus protect crops. Or we may dispel conditions that would lead to a tornado, thus avoiding its damage. Both these examples involve local weather disturbances. However, even the greatest weather disturbances, like hurricanes and blizzards, may eventually be directed to some extent. Thus the weather may become to some degree subject to man’s control, and the weather brain will be able to tell men where and when to take action.
Psychological Testing
Another scientific problem to which new machinery for handling information applies is the problem of understanding human beings and their behavior. This increased understanding may lead to much wiser dealing with human behavior.
For example, consider tests of aptitudes. If you take one of these tests, you may be asked to mark which word out of five suggested ones is nearest in meaning to a given word. Or your test may be 40 simple arithmetical problems to be solved in 25 minutes. Or you may be given a sheet with 20 circles, and be asked to put 3 dots in the first, 7 dots in the second, 4 dots in the third, 11 dots in the fourth, and so on, irregularly; you may be given a total of 45 seconds to do this as well as you can. Now, if a vocational counselor gives you one of these tests, and if you get 84 out of 100 on it, he needs to know just what he has measured about you. Also, he needs to know whether he can reasonably forecast that, as a result of your grade of 84, you will be good at writing articles, or good at supervising the work of other people, or good at designing in a machine shop. He needs to know the records of people with scores of about 84 on this test and to have evidence supporting his forecasts.
If we wish to make the most use of the tests, we need to carry out a good deal of statistics, mathematics, and logic. For example, it will turn out that answers to some questions are much more significant than answers to others, and so we can greatly improve the quality of the tests by keeping only the more significant questions. Powerful machinery for handling calculations will be very useful in the field of aptitude testing.