M.I.T. Scholar's 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/science/mit-scholars-1949-essay-on-machine-age-is-found.html

In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots
By JOHN MARKOFF

It was a vision that never saw the light of day.

The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the
stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined
that they would one day become central to civilization, with
consequences both liberating and potentially dire.

One of those visionaries was Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), an American
mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1948
he had published "Cybernetics," a landmark theoretical work that
both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics
and automation. Two years later, he wrote "The Human Use of Human
Beings," a popularization of those ideas and an exploration of the
potential of automation and the risks of dehumanization by machines.

In 1949, The New York Times invited Wiener to summarize his views
about "what the ultimate machine age is likely to be," in the words
of its longtime Sunday editor, Lester Markel.

Wiener accepted the invitation and wrote a draft of the article; the
legendarily autocratic Markel was dissatisfied and asked him to
rewrite it. He did. But through a distinctly pre-Internet series of
fumbles and missed opportunities, neither version ever appeared.

In August, according to Wiener's papers, which are on file at the
M.I.T. Libraries, The Times asked him to resend the first draft of
the article so it could be combined with the second draft. (It is
not clear why the editors failed to keep a copy of the first draft.)

"Could you send the first draft to me, and we'll see whether we can
combine the two into one story?" wrote an editor in the paper's
Sunday department, then separate from the daily paper. "I may be
mistaken, but I think you lost some of your best material."

But by then Wiener was traveling in Mexico, and he responded:

"I had assumed that the first version of my article was finished
business. To get hold of the paper in my office at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology would involve considerable
cross-correspondence and annoyance to several people.

"I therefore do not consider it a practical thing to do. Under the
circumstances I think that it is best for me to abandon this
undertaking."

The following week the Times editor returned the second draft to
Wiener, and it eventually made its way to the libraries' Archives
and Special Collections. It languished there until December 2012,
when it was discovered by Anders Fernstedt, an independent scholar
who is researching the work of Karl Popper, the 20th-century
philosopher.

Almost 64 years after Wiener wrote it, his essay is still remarkably
topical, raising questions about the impact of smart machines on
society and of automation on human labor. In the spirit of
rectifying an old omission, here are excerpts from "The Machine
Age," courtesy of the M.I.T. Libraries (all rights reserved).

Consider the Abacus

By this time the public is well aware that a new age of machines is
upon us based on the computing machine, and not on the power
machine. The tendency of these new machines is to replace human
judgment on all levels but a fairly high one, rather than to replace
human energy and power by machine energy and power. It is already
clear that this new replacement will have a profound influence upon
our lives, but it is not clear to the man of the street what this
influence will be....

To understand what a computing machine is, let us compare a paper
scheme of mathematical computation, a Chinese ... abacus and a
Marchand or Fridén decimal computing machine for office use, and an
electronic computing machine. Of these, the abacus is actually the
oldest, but is not too familiar to the average man in the modern
West.

Let us then begin with an ordinary paper schedule of computations.
In this, we depend on certain memorized combinations of numbers and
rules of procedure to enable us to carry out our actual operations
on our numbers. The multiplication table and the rules of elementary
arithmetic represent something which needs human intervention to be
carried out on paper, but this human intervention follows certain
inhumanly rigid and memorized laws.

In the abacus we carry out a human intervention of exactly the same
sort as in combining numbers on paper, but in this case the numbers
are represented by the positions of balls along a wire rather than
by pen or pencil marks. The notation is just as arbitrary as in an
ordinary pen or pencil computation, but the operations have a more
mechanical appearance, in that they consist of the bodily motion of
certain pieces of matter. Nevertheless, there is not the slightest
logical difference between the abacus and the ordinary paper
computation.

In the third stage, that of the desk computing machine, the same
operations which occur in the abacus are made according to rules
which are not memorized in all their details, but which are
entrusted to the instrument, and carried out by its intervention.
There is no replacement of true thought by the machine, since the
level of thought of the elementary processes as we carry them out on
paper is that of routine. The desk computing machine is neither more
nor less than a mechanized abacus, in which our memory is replaced
by certain internal interlockings of the machine.

Finally, the high-speed electronic computing machine differs from
the desk machine only in the speed of its operations and the much
higher complications of its interlockings. Thus an operation which
previously took hours may be reduced to a matter of seconds.

Mass-Produced Laborers

We have so far spoken of the computing machine as an analogue to the
human nervous system rather than to the whole of the human organism.
Machines much more closely analogous to the human organism are well
understood, and are now on the verge of being built. They will
control entire industrial processes and will even make possible the
factory substantially without employees.

In these the ultra-rapid digital computing machines will be
supplemented by pieces of apparatus which take the readings of
gauges, of thermometers, or photo-electric cells, and translate them
into the digital input of computing machines. The new assemblages
will also contain effectors, by which the numerical output of the
central machine will be converted into the rotation of shafts, or
the admission of chemicals into a tank, or the heating of a boiler,
or some other process of the kind.

Furthermore, the actual performance of these effector organs as well
as their desired performance will be read by suitable gauges and
taken back into the machine as part of the information on which it
works.

The general outline of the processes to be carried out will be
determined by what computation engineers call taping, which will
state and determine the sequence of the processes to be performed.
The possibility of learning may be built in by allowing the taping
to be re-established in a new way by the performance of the machine
and the external impulses coming into it, rather than having it
determined by a closed and rigid setup, to be imposed on the
apparatus from the beginning.

The limitations of such a machine are simply those of an
understanding of the objects to be attained, and of the
potentialities of each stage of the processes by which they are to
be attained, and of our power to make logically determinate
combinations of those processes to achieve our ends. Roughly
speaking, if we can do anything in a clear and intelligible way, we
can do it by machine.

What the economic limitations will be--namely, how we may
determine whether it is desirable to use the machine rather than
human effectors--is something which we cannot state unambiguously
until we have more experience. It is, however, quite clear that
apart from the taping, which is the job for an intelligent man
rather than for a deft man, the apparatus which we shall depend upon
in the future machine age is largely repetitive, and will be capable
of being manufactured by the methods of mass production.

The Genie and the Bottle

These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present
basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine
factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any
price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the
valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is
based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated
cruelty.

We must be willing to deal in facts rather than in fashionable
ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. Not even
the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in
which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for
the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent.

Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we
ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between
man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of
the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists.

There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the
past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will,
we are more likely to use it wrongly than to use it rightly, more
likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently. [W. W.
Jacobs's] terrible story of the "Monkey's Paw" is a modern example
of this--the father wishes for money and gets it as a compensation
for the death of his son in a factory accident, then wishes for the
return of his son. The son comes back as a ghost, and the father
wishes him gone. This is the outcome of his three wishes.

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn
and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact
that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of
possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not
willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect
them to be well disposed to us.

In short, it is only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will
also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are
opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with
the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die._______________________________________________
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Robots Could Put Humans Out of Work by 2045

MOSHE VARDI: ROBOTS COULD PUT HUMANS OUT OF WORK BY 2045

Robots began replacing human brawn long ago—now they’re poised to replace
human brains. Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University,
thinks that by 2045 artificially intelligent machines may be capable of “if
not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction
of the work that humans can do.”

So, he asks, what then will humans do?

In recent writings, Vardi traces the evolution of the idea that artificial
intelligence may one day surpass human intelligence, from Turing to Kurzweil,
and considers the recent rate of progress. Although early predictions proved
too aggressive, in the space of 15 years we’ve gone from Deep Blue beating
Kasparov at chess to self-driving cars and Watson beating Jeopardy champs Ken
Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Extrapolating into the future, Vardi thinks it’s reasonable to believe
intelligent machines may one day replace human workers almost entirely and in
the process put millions out of work permanently.

Once rejected out of hand as neo-Luddism, technological unemployment is
attracting commentary from an increasingly vocal sect of economists.
Highlighted in a recent NYT article and “60 Minutes” segment, Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT also discuss the impact of automation
on employment in their book, Race Against the Machine.

The idea is we may be approaching a kind of economic singularity, after which
the labor market as we know it will cease to exist.

The theory is tempting for its simplicity but hard to prove. In my opinion,
though you can list anecdotes and interpret select statistics showing the
negative effects of automation—the qualitative historical record, that the
labor market will evolve and adapt, remains the weightier body of evidence.

Relying on modern statistics to prove something fundamental has changed is
troublesome because you can’t do rigorous, apples-to-apples comparisons with
most of the technological revolutions of the past centuries. The data get
dodgier and the statistical methodologies change the farther back you go.

Are machines really replacing humans faster now than say in the early 19th or
20th centuries? And are workers really falling behind at a greater rate? We
can’t say with certainty.

However, we can say that accelerating technology over the last few centuries
has consistently erased some jobs only to replace them with other jobs. In
the short and medium term, these transition periods have caused discomfort
and vicious battles in the political arena. But the long-term outcome has
been largely positive—that is, improving living standards thanks to cheaper,
better goods and services.

By dismissing qualitative historical evidence as newly irrelevant, you’re
left with a quantitative vacuum into which you can inject any number of
competing theories, fascinating but as yet impossible to prove or disprove.

As you may have gathered, I fall into the boring mainstream on the subject.
To me, the technological unemployment thesis is too dire and what humans will
do too hard to imagine. But just because we can’t imagine something, doesn’t
mean it won’t exist.

While microchips are just now beginning to replace human brains, machines
have been replacing human brawn for years. And yet workers are still paid to
perform many physical jobs that were automated long ago and a number of new
ones to boot. Why is that?

Assembly line products are cheaper, but folks still place a premium on and
desire “handmade” items. Some people feel good about supporting an artisan;
others believe the products are better quality; many value something’s
distinctiveness, looking down their nose at assembly line monotony. None of
these reasons are perfectly rational, but the economy is seldom rational on
the level of the individual.

Further, physical activities that used to be classified as leisure activities
now command an income. In the past, sports were at most an amateur activity
for those who could afford the time to play them. However, in the 19th and
20th centuries, as countries industrialized, a giant new market in athletics
popped into existence.

I imagine a futurist at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution finding
the idea preposterous. But today’s best pro athletes collect paychecks that
would make an investment banker blush. And it’s not just the top athletes
getting paid. There are lower tiers for the less skilled too—utility players,
backups, smaller market pro leagues, or feeder leagues all pay modest but
livable incomes.

Why shouldn’t the same hold true for activities of the mind?

Perhaps in the future, while some of us work hard to build and program
super-intelligent machines, others will work hard to entertain, theorize,
philosophize, and make uniquely human creative works, maybe even pair with
machines to accomplish these things. These may seem like niche careers for
the few and talented. But at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, jobs
of the mind in general were niche careers.

Now, as some jobs of the mind are automated, more people are doing creative
work of some kind. In the past, not many writers earned a living just
writing. But the Internet’s open infrastructure and voracious appetite for
content allows writers of all different levels of skill to earn income. The
same holds true for publishing—50 Shades of Grey isn’t exactly literature,
but it’s sold millions—and music, film, design, you name it.

How will the economy make the transition? The same way it has for the last
several hundred years—with a few (or more than a few) bumps. But maybe these
job-stealing exponential technologies are also empowering humans with
exponential adaptation.

Online courses from Coursera and edX and Udacity make education more
specialized, shorter in duration, and either cheap or free. This model may
allow for faster more affordable acquisition of new skills and smoother
economic adaptation. The belief many people are only capable of unskilled
labor is elitist to the extreme. The problem of acquiring new skills is
largely one of access not intelligence.

There are those who think our great grandchildren simply won’t work. But I
can’t imagine such a future. The developed world could have rested on its
laurels years ago, having automated the means of production for essentials
like food or clothing or cars or televisions (the essentials change as they
get cheaper).

But we’re working harder than ever. Why? Work lends meaning to life and
leisure. When one kind of work goes away, we tend to create something
productive to replace it. And life is richer when we get to trade the fruit
of our labors for the vegetables or lines of code or smartphones of other
people’s labors.

Vardi says, “The world in 50 years…either will be a utopia or a dystopia.”
But history is littered with dystopic and utopian visions, even as the world
has consistently muddled along the middle path.