Vol. 69, No. 4 — July/August 1988 —
Living With
The Chip
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The tiny speck of material called
the microchip has enabled the computer to reach into every
corner of society. As computers get "smarter," the question
becomes: Who's in charge, us or them?
Historians determine whether a political event qualifies
as a revolution rather than an uprising or coup by asking
if it has fundamentally changed the lives of the people concerned
and the world around them. By that criterion, there can be
no doubt that a non-political revolution of historic dimensions
is now underway.
It is difficult to give it an accurate name. "The computer
revolution" is incomplete, and "the cybernetic revolution"
is fuzzy. Though it does not cover the whole ground, it seems
the nearest we can come to a definitive term is "the microchip
revolution," since microchips are the heart of both full-scale
computers and the special-purpose microprocessors which control
so many modern machines.
Whatever the revolution is called, it is clearly the real
thing. A revolution alters the mentality of the people going
through it and those born into it, and that can certainly
be said of this one. A revolution is impossible to hide away
from. It keeps looming up at you everywhere.
In little more than a dozen years, microtechnology has become
a pervasive fact of life in industrialized countries. It affects
us intimately: We carry little microprocessors called quartz
watches around on our wrists; we drive cars laced with computerized
controls and fill those cars up at computerized gas pumps.
Microcircuitry comes into play in many of our ordinary routines
- buying food, watching television, making a phone call. It
has eliminated some habits, such as going to the bank frequently
to draw out cash, and created new ones, such as buying tickets
in nationwide lotteries with gigantic prizes. It permits us
to do things that were unimaginable a couple of decades ago,
like recording television programs while we sleep.
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important
operations we can perform without thinking of them," Alfred
North Whitehead wrote. If so, the accelerator of civilization
today is a minuscule speck of silicon mutated to act as a
switch to handle information encoded in electric currents.
For a computer is basically a switching machine capable of
making calculations at astronomical speeds and storing the
results.
Computers have been around for a long time, of course. The
first to employ the binary system of counting in ones and
zeros came on stream in the United States in 1945. It was
called the ENIAC {for Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer}. It weighed 30 tons, was 18 feet high and 80 feet
long, and contained some 18,000 vacuum tubes which failed
at an average of one every seven minutes. It cost US $487,000
to build back then when a buck was a buck.
The vacuum tubes were the switches that directed the traffic
of information through the system. In the early 1960s manufacturers
began replacing them with transistorized integrated circuit
chips - microchips for short. The tubes had no more than half
a dozen different functions; the chips went from having a
few functions each when they were introduced to having hundreds
of functions in the 1970s. They now have hundreds of thousands
of functions, and there is no limit in sight to how much
further they can be miniaturized. One measure of how far miniaturization
has progressed is that all the circuitry in that 30-ton ENIAC
could now be contained on a panel the size of a playing card.
The revolution has been one both of size and cost. For all
their mind-boggling sophistication, microchips are essentially
derived from sand, the world's most common material. Steady
improvements in methods of producing them have brought about
a miraculous drop in the price of computers. According to
one expert interviewed by Otto Freidrich in Time magazine,
"If the automobile business had developed like the computer
business, a Rolls-Royce would now cost $2.75 and run 3 million
miles on one gallon of gas."
Coupled with ingenious methods of adapting the calculating
ability of computers to fields like graphics, word-processing
and machine control, the reduction in size and cost has allowed
them to spread into every corner of a modern economy. As they
have done so, they have verified Robert McIver's observation
that "technology is the most subtle and most effective engineer
of social change."
Robots and the quest for a better standard
of living
Political revolutions traditionally have stripped a class
of people - the aristocrats - of their previously unquestioned
security. On the surface, the technological revolution in
progress threatens to do the same to the class of blue-collar
and clerical workers that once formed the backbone of the
industrial society.
Entire skilled trades like hot-type printing and photo engraving
have already been decimated. A recent report by the Economic
Council of Canada forecast sharp reductions in employment
throughout the Canadian goods-producing industries. It predicted
that the number of machining and related jobs in Canadian
industry will plummet from 273,000 in 1981 to fewer than 13,000
in 1995, just seven years from now.
This is because computerized machinery and equipment is
inexorably taking over work that was formerly done by human
beings. It is as if Czech playwright Karel Capek's 1921 drama
R.U.R. had been lifted off the stage and placed in
reality. In it, Capek coined the word "robots." He depicted
a sterile world in which machines had robbed man of the satisfaction
and dignity of work.
Robots like those envisaged by Capek -"mechanical men" complete
with arms and fingers and memories to remind them what to
do - now dominate the workload in many factories. Doubtless
in the future a lot more of them will be found on the shop
floors. Though these mobile devices embody the popular image
of robots, they are not the only ones of their kind in our
midst. A computer that follows blueprints like a machinist
or makes up a newspaper page like a compositor could be described
as a robot as well.
Computers that seem to be smarter than
human beings
Capek's play gives voice to a fear that is at least as old
as the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. This
is that technology will deprive masses of people of the means
of procuring a livelihood, throwing them out into the cold
without money or the hope of another job.
In R.U.R., the owner of the robot factory argues
the case for what we now call productivity, saying, in effect,
that the lowering of the price of goods due to mechanization
creates the activity and purchasing power that keeps the economy
turning over. This proposition is rejected in the play, but
it has been proved true in real life. Labour-saving machinery
and equipment has been coming on stream in Canada more or
less steadily for 100 years now, and the number of jobs has
risen with only a few interruptions. Increased productivity
has contributed to a rising overall standard of living. In
the past 30-odd years, the jobs eliminated in the goods-producing
sector have been replaced by new jobs in the service industries.
An even more deep-seated fear surfaced in Capek's play.
In it, the robots turn on their human masters and start destroying
them. The more "intelligent" they are, the more they display
the human characteristic of belligerency. This vision of manlike
monsters wreaking havoc on the human race is an age-old nightmare
that has been enshrined in literature ever since Homer. It
has cropped up many times in science fiction in reference
to stationary computers, which, although they don't look like
human beings, give the appearance of thinking like them.
It is easy to fantasize about a ring of computers that can
"talk" to one another conspiring to hold the world to ransom,
or some such plot-line. In Stanley Kubric's film 2001 -
A Space Odyssey, HAL the computer does not approve of
what the crew of the space ship is doing, so he settles matters
in his - or rather its - own way. It is all quite plausible
when you are watching the film, because HAL can talk out loud
in plain language. So can many computers in service today.
We tend to ascribe human qualities to computers because
they display these qualities more than any other machine.
They also manage to give the impression that, like HAL, they
could outsmart a human being if they put their "minds" to
it. A small desk-top computer can teach a person all kinds
of things he or she didn't know, not only imparting knowledge,
but posing problems and asking hard questions. It can command
users to do this or that while leading them through a program,
and scold them {so it seems} when they hit the wrong keys.
It can correct errors in the spelling or arithmetic like an
irritable school-marm. It can play chess, black-jack or poker,
and regularly beat us at our own games.
The lexicon of computer science adds to their human aura.
We talk about their "language," and about how they "read"
information into their "memories." If another sort of machine
doesn't work properly, we merely say there's something wrong
with it. If a computer goes haywire, we describe it in words
we would normally reserve for human beings: we say that it
has made an error, or that it has failed.
When this occurs, we derive a sneaking satisfaction from
it, as though a particularly uppity schoolmate had made a
fool of herself in front of the whole classroom. Everybody
has a funny story about entering into a correspondence with
a company or government and having a computer send them idiotic
replies. A wire service recently circulated a photo of a man
standing beside a stack of 100 thick government documents
which a computer had mailed out to him when he had only asked
for one: Typical! We chuckle over gaffes like this, but our
chuckles have a defensive ring, because we know that most
of the time computers can do a lot of things quicker and more
accurately than we can do them ourselves.
The "new illiterates" and why they
shouldn't worry
Consultants estimate that as many as one-third of all "information
workers" among professionals, managers and clerical staff
are "cyberphobes" who resent computers. They mistrust the
things, especially when they are told they will have to use
them in their work. And not without reason; as Murray Laver
wrote in an article in Management Today: "Computers
have faced many ordinary men and women with substantial and
disturbing changes in their working lives. Organization changes
may break up groups of colleagues which provide the basis
of social life within a company or department. Working methods
have frequently been altered in ways which supersede existing
skills, devalue precious experience and reduce an individual's
sense of responsibility and achievement."
Another source of cyberphobia, especially among middle-aged
workers, is that their unfamiliarity with computers has turned
them into the "new illiterates." They hesitate to take training
in computer use because they may be embarrassed to reveal
how little they know. Not only do they not know how to work
them, they do not know how they work; and a certain social
stigma has become attached to not being able to chat easily
about bits, bytes and boot programs. In his own unique description
of a computer, columnist Russell Baker put this in perspective:
"First, you have the hardware. This is pretty much like the
brain housed in your skull. Do you know how your brain works?
What the cerebellum does when the memory is activated? Of
course not. And it doesn't bother you, does it? So why go
all to pieces because the computer is so complicated that
only a Ph.D. from MIT can understand it?"
One doesn't have to be a cyberphobe to feel a certain apprehension
about the things computers can be made to do. We hear a lot
of talk about "artificial intelligence," though what is really
meant is that computers can be programmed to make automatic
choices among certain types of information or to set out optional
choices for managers to take. Still, no doubt about it, they're
getting "smarter." Isn't it just possible they'll get so smart
they'll be running everything?
"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think
like men, but that men will begin to think like computers,"
wrote columnist Sydney J. Harris. Whatever it is programmed
to do, a computer employs a system of algebra devised by 19th
century British mathematician George Boole which reduces propositions
of any kind to mathematical terms. The solutions to problems
put to a computer are thus completely rational. They may,
however, be all too rational for human beings, who have a
preference for solutions that are humane, moral and just.
The computer could help us to understand
ourselves
The great mistake of computer enthusiasts is to assume that,
because these machines have such amazing capabilities, they
are able to do anything. What they cannot do was pointed out
in a recent speech by I.B. Scott, chairman of CP Rail. They
do not, he said, have brainwaves: "They never sit up nights
wondering 'how come?' or 'what if?' They never have hunches.
Despite some progress in our search for artificial intelligence,
only the human mind has the power to prove or disprove rules
by trying to break them. And only the human mind has the instinct
to try."
Everybody got a scare in the stock market crash of October,
1987, when it looked as if computers were doing things that
should rightly be done by people. The machines had been programmed
to sell when prices hit certain levels, and they kept on selling
among themselves. As always, they were only reacting to their
controls like any other machine - a car or an automatic washer.
Still, the situation carried a frightening echo of William
Henry Thoreau's lamentation: "Lo! Men have become tools of
their tools!"
The way to prevent men from becoming tools of their tools
in future is simply to remember that a computer is a tool,
one that is as likely to be wielded as badly as any other.
Human nature being what it is, we should keep a running check
on whether it is being wielded responsibly, because we "repeatedly
enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purpose,"
as Will Durant wrote.
The computer was originally designed to blow people to bits
more efficiently by doing artillery trajectory calculations
quicker and more accurately for the U.S. Army, but World War
II had ended before it could be applied to this purpose. Computers
even now are employed for a great variety of military purposes.
These include directing the nuclear missile systems that could
bring about the end of the world.
At the same time, their wonderful powers are being put to
the cause of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge in medicine
and other fields of research. Through these research functions,
they are enabling us to understand our world as we never have
before. By freeing human beings from the drudgery of routine
work, they are opening up new avenues of creativity. Lewis
Mumford once said that every technological advance ever made
has proved potentially dangerous because it has not been accompanied
by advances in self-understanding. Just possibly, microtechnology
might one day allow us more fully to understand ourselves.
One of the great abilities of the computer is to run through
all the facts and figures pertaining to a situation and set
out alternative courses of action. The computer presents an
alternative in itself. Like any other tool, it can be used
thoughtlessly or carelessly, or for evil ends. You can smash
in a man's head with a hammer, you can mangle your own thumb
with it, or you can use it to build a house. You make something
excellent with it, or something mediocre. The computer is
asking us: What will it be?
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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