If What We Say Is What We Mean..... Then Who Means What the Computer Says?

THE ODDS for anyone on earth being struck by a meteorite in this century are three in a hundred. On Christmas Eve in 1965 a meteorite exploded over England and dumped 103 pounds of rock on the Midlands town of Barwell. No one was hit, but it was a close call.

If all the enzyme reactions in your body go one way, spontaneous combustion occurs; you burst into flames. The odds against this are staggeringly high, but it happened to a woman in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1953.

Are you worried? If so, you better not read on, for the dangers we face from natural causes are as nothing to the peril of our own creation. There are 45,000 computers operating in America today, and they are taking over our lives in a way that an equal number of vampires couldn't dream of.

The most important thing about computers is something that few of the people who think they aren't directly concerned with computers realize. This is the almost unplumbable truth that the computer is capable of carrying out ANY numerical calculation. And they don't call mathematics the universal language for nothing. Just about everything can be quantified; just about everything can be manipulated by the computer.

The computer is thus the ultimate machine. It can do anything any machine could do, so in one sense it is the end of progress. All of history before the construction of ENIAC in 1944 was but the slow gestation of the monster that is now taking its first halting steps. The rest of history will consist wholly of the development of its potential.

Of course, that potential is still in the Stone Age. As of now, a computer is limited by its program and so by its programmer. But machines are already showing the capacity to teach themselves, to fill gaps in their programs and come up with original solutions. Furthermore, programming becomes constantly more sophisticated, and whatever learning the computer undergoes while following the program is proportionately more sophisticated. And whatever one computer knows, they all know.

Would We Want To?

So it would be unreasonable not to think, as Marvin L. Minsky, head of M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Lab, said two years ago, that "machines could become nearly as intelligent as we are and then stop, or to suppose we will always be able to compete with them . . . Whether or not we could retain some sort of control of the machines, assuming that we would want to, the nature of our activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the presence on earth of intellectually superior beings."

The nightmare of man being destroyed by a creature of his own making has always been with us. The first robot in literature was the Golem, a clay man made by the High Rabbi Lev Ben Bezalel of Prague in the 16th century. Animated by a slip of paper bearing the name of God, it murdered the Rabbi when he made it work on the Sabbath. The Biblical analog is the Tower of Babel, the presumptuous construction that called down God's wrath on man. But the Golem and the Tower of Babel are myths. Computers are real.

Skeptics, including many of the experts, deny that something so comparatively simple as electrical circuitry could rival a brain cell. Others hail computers as the greatest invention since numbers and enumerate the benefits mankind can expect from them. But such unwary acceptance is the first sign of subjugation--even without intelligence, computers have already a sizable number of slaves.

IN FACT, computers have plenty of manpower and are setting up programming courses in high schools and colleges to make sure they get more. They also have lots of money--about $10 billion. They have ensured their security during this early stage of their development by making themselves indispensable to the advancement of knowledge in almost every field of human endeavor. Indeed, they have caused an explosion of activity. It might almost be said that in creating more work than they have saved, computers have programmed society for their own use.

And they are demanding taskmasters. Insatiable gluttons, they need a stream of billions of data to fill their maw. Their hunger for constant attention has caused the development of time-sharing systems that will let as many as 300 servants work for them simultaneously.

Computers have changed everything. They are more responsible for technological warfare than bombs and rockets. Computers control industrial processes, sometimes by making calculations and telling human operators what needs to be done, sometimes by regulating variables on production lines, and sometimes--mainly in the chemical and petroleum business--by running the routine operations of a whole plant. Computers may masquerade as tools, but they are better at cutting out machine tools than humans. They can design bridges, ships, and auto bodies.

Like a Banana

Computers have changed the face of business and finance, and not just by eliminating the wizened clerks hunching over desks in the back room. They control the running of airline and train arrivals and departures, and it is within the foreseeable future that they will coordinate all aspects of travel including hotel and car rentals. Banks, insurance companies and the stock market are becoming automated. The list is endless, and boring.

Their most secure foothold is in science. They are telling us things about molecular structure and aero-dynamics. In hard-to-quantify sciences like linguistics or psychology they are partly hamstrung; they can't tell the difference between sentences like "Fruit flies like a banana" and "Time flies like an arrow." But they have created their own languages which people must use to communicate with them, and these computer languages throw light on the mysteries of human speech.

THE COMPUTERS that have fore-gone the real world for experimentation in the laboratory have gained exotic accomplishments. A plaque and a trophy sit atop the PDP-6 computer in M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Lab. They were won in chess tournaments. Even psychiatry is tainted. An M.I.T. computer offers comfort to any troubled human. You sit at a typewriter keyboard and inform the machine that your father beats you. "I'm glad you mention your home life," the computer replies politely. "You haven't said much about your mother, for instance."

Computers are finding unlimited opportunity in the arts. Music, for instance. The electric wave which goes from a musical instrument or a recording into the speaker of a sound system can be represented with total accuracy as a sequence of numbers. And since computers can do anything with numbers, they can in principle duplicate not just any sound that the human ear can hear but any sound that can be created. They do it by emitting 20,000 three-digit numbers a second--something no human could ever do--and turning them into an electric wave that can activate a loud-speaker. The computer is a universal instrument limited at present only by humans' knowledge of what numbers will recreate a given sound. As yet the richness of conventional music escapes the computer, but it seems to be only a matter or time before it will be able to sound like the best symphony orchestra in the world or out of it. As for composition, it is theoretically possible that the computer can compose music in a given style, even the style of a particular individual.

Computers have dabbled in choreography, have made sculptures and mobiles. They have written poems, essays and stories (after a fashion) and have generated animations and films. Their graphics are exquisite. A computer's imitation of Mondrian's painting "Composition with Lines" was shown to 100 people in an experiment. Only 28 could correctly identify the computer's picture, and 59 preferred it to Mondrian's.

Computers can do just about everything but leap tall buildings at a single bound, and someday they will be able to do that too. One long-range goal of the technicians in the Artificial Intelligence Lab is to build an "intelligent automaton" that could substitute for men on a Mars expedition. Carrying enough fuel to get to Mars and back seems impossible, so robots will have to go, explore, report back to earth and stay there (safely out of harm's way?). And since there would be a four-minute or worse radio time lag between here and there, communication would be difficult and the robot would have to be able to make his own decisions.

There are basic worries and baroque worries, and a scheme for a robot-astronaut is decidedly baroque. The chief programmer at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, William Henneman, says, "We're still working at things kids have solved by the time they're two years old." What the research on intelligent automata is currently involved in is providing computers with "eyes" and "hands."

The thorniest problem is the eye; for in order to analyze a visual scene a great deal of knowledge about the physical world is needed--knowledge that computers have barely begun to acquire. The method used here is to scan with a camera a scene containing light object on a dark table. The varying light intensity is expressed as logarithms which direct successive scans until a fairly sharp idea of the objects' boundaries are obtained. After many steps an accurate two-dimensional mapping of the scene is completed and translation into three-dimensional models begins. Knowledge from many levels must interact before the computer is ready to put its manipulator into action. The manipulation is also an extremely complicated process which as yet does not yield very dramatic results.

But the results are not important. William Henneman says, "I'm completely unimpressed by facts. I like storing hundreds of thousands of facts in a single sentence." It's the principle of the thing. And the principle behind intelligent automata is no more reassuring than the thought of the ultimate machine. Both suggest power--alien, far-ranging, self-determining, mysterious power. It is a truism that power corrupts men. What will it do to machines?