Another large group of problems for which we can foresee the use of machines that think is found in business and economics.
For example, consider production scheduling in a business or a factory. The machine takes in a description of each order received by the business and a description of its relative urgency. The machine knows (that is, has in its memory) how much of each kind of raw material is needed to fill the order and what equipment and manpower are needed to produce it. The machine makes a schedule showing what particular men and what particular equipment are to be set to work to produce the order. The machine turns out the best possible production schedule, showing who should do what when, so that all the orders will be filled in the best sequence. What is the “best” sequence? We can decide what we think is the best sequence, and we can set the machine for making that kind of selection, in the same way as we decide what is “warm” and set the thermostat to produce it!
On a much larger scale, we can use mechanical brains to study economic relations in a society. Everything produced in a society is made by consuming some materials, labor, equipment, and skill. The output produced by one man or factory or industry becomes the input for other men, factories, industries. In this way all economic units are linked together by many different kinds and degrees of dependence. The situation is, of course, complicated: it changes as time goes on and as people want different things produced. Economists have already set up simple models of economic societies and have studied them. But with machines that think, it will be possible to set up and study far more complicated models—models that are very much like the society we live in. We can then answer questions of economics by calculation instead of by arguments and counting noses. We shall be able to solve definitely such problems as: “How will a rise in the price of steel affect the farming industry?” “How much money must be paid out as wages and salaries so that consumer purchasing power will buy back what industry produces?”
Machines and the Individual
What about the ordinary everyday effects of these machines upon you and me as an individual? We can see that the new machinery will apply on a small scale even to us. Small machines using a few electronic tubes—much like a radio set, for example—and containing spools of magnetic wire or magnetic tape will doubtless be available to us. We shall be able to use them to keep addresses and telephone numbers, to figure out the income tax we should pay, to help us keep accounts and make ends meet, to remember many things we need to know, and perhaps even to give us more information. For there are a great many things that all of us could do much better if we could only apply what the wisest of us knows.
We can even imagine what new machinery for handling information may some day become: a small pocket instrument that we carry around with us, talking to it whenever we need to, and either storing information in it or receiving information from it. Thus the brain with a motor will guide and advise the man just as the armor with a motor carries and protects him.
Chapter 12
SOCIAL CONTROL:
MACHINES THAT THINK
AND HOW SOCIETY MAY CONTROL THEM
It is often easier for men to create a device than to guide it well afterwards: it is often easier for a scientist to study his science than to study the results for good or evil that his discoveries may lead to. But it is not right nor proper for a scientist, a man who is loyal to truth as an ideal, to have no regard for what his discoveries may lead to.
This principle is now being widely recognized. Many scientists today—both as individuals and as groups, and especially the atomic scientists—are considering the results of their scientific discoveries; and they are sharing in the effort to render those results truly useful to humanity.
It would be easy to leave out of this book any discussion of how machines that think may be controlled, any consideration of how they may be made truly useful to humanity. But that would be hardly right or proper. In concluding a book such as this one, that touches on many aspects of machines that think, we need to consider what can and should be done to make such machines of true benefit to all of humanity.