4 ms·

In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots

73 points by 7402 13y ago

quackerhacker 13y ago
Idea to fruition = half a century. So Popular Mechanics amazed me as a kid. They often speculated what the future held, but if I was to look back at their predictions and the current year, I'd probably be disappointed. I realize tech (specifically mobile) is the fastest evolving industry right now, but am I the only who feels that we're still behind on ideas coming to reality? It's what compelled me to get into coding. I didn't want to be one of the people that expresses an idea and say "they should make an app, that blah blah blah." I'm not waiting, I'll learn to code, and smash a keyboard...but I'll do it my self!
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I would have loved to talk to this person. I was particularly struck by this comment: 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. So often in debugging I see that machine doing exactly what I programmed it to do and not what I meant it to do. As we build things with greater influence in the world such bugs go from being "oopsies" to ones that do a lot of harm either economic, human, or both.
- quackerhacker 13y ago
  >I see that machine doing exactly what I programmed it to do and not what I meant it to do Chuck, don't you love spending, 15mins+ disabling parts of your code only to realize you forgot a variable, a comma, or one of these ';' :)
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    Heh, yet another reason I don't write HFT algorithms, ever.
- angersock 13y ago
  One of the things I love most about programming is that these sorts of bugs are nearly always something that I asked it to do that didn't make sense: the machine isn't being petty, it isn't angry, it isn't sulking--it simply did what I asked it to, and that means that to fix it I'll have to ask something better. This is wonderfully different than what we see dealing with people.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- fjk 13y ago
  Your last sentence makes me think of HAL from the Space Odyssey series. HAL wasn't explicitly programmed to harm anyone, but he attempted to kill the entire crew in order to fulfill his programmed orders. This creeped me out when I first saw the film, and reading the end of this article rekindled the same feeling.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  Hopefully, we will have layers of safeguards so you would need bugs in many programs to conspire allow a problem happen. For example, even on my personal laptop, I can play around with fan/CPU_speed without worrying about making a potential mistake, even if I am playing around with them in kernel space. The reason for this is I know that even if I make a mistake that would melt my CPU, the BIOS is also monitoring the temperature and, if nessasary, will scale back the CPU to minimum, kick the fan up to maximum, and possibly power off the machine. Granted, I could disable these protections, however then we go from me having a "oopsie", to me having disabled critical safety features. Note, I'm not sure how much the BIOS actually overrides the kernel. I was able to override the BIOS safties just by passing in some parameters to the Linux kernel. However, you could imagine a system where such would not be an option.
  - simcop2387 13y ago
    From what I understand that's all the System Management Mode stuff that's been around for a while, no idea what it's usually like though. I haven't gone that far down the rabbit hole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode
- gwern 13y ago
  If you liked his excerpts, you should check out his book _God and Golem, Inc._ on this and similar topics. (The book is available on various book-sharing sites, I'm sure you can find it without too much trouble.)
dylanhassinger 13y ago
I'm glad we're not still called tapers
kruhft 13y ago
He also formalized Brownian motion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_process.
HumbleWiener 13y ago
"We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die." - Norbert Wiener
- gizmo686 13y ago
  In fairness, we are going to die either way.
ordinary 13y ago
Similar: The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster, predicting the Internet, written in 1909. The full story is now in the public domain, and can be found here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
- wladimir 13y ago
  I immediately had to think of Kurt Vonneguts "Player Piano" published in 1952, with similar a theme of automation of all production (by "taping" actions) and the impact of that on society. It also briefly mentions a "third industrial revolution" in which even human thought will be performed more efficiently by machines.
noonespecial 13y ago
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. It took 50 years but we are finally starting to be forced to take this problem seriously.
gpcz 13y ago
I'll assume that he knew of the ENIAC since it was publicized in 1946, which means he probably didn't "predict" mechanical/electrical computation. Regardless, he successfully predicted digital feedback control systems, lights-out manufacturing, mechatronics, artificial intelligence (to a limited extent), and the social ramifications of a post-scarcity society. Are these technologies obvious progressions that come from knowing about automatic computation, or was he truly that much of a visionary?

73 points by 7402 13y ago

Idea to fruition = half a century. So Popular Mechanics amazed me as a kid. They often speculated what the future held, but if I was to look back at their predictions and the current year, I'd probably be disappointed. I realize tech (specifically mobile) is the fastest evolving industry right now, but am I the only who feels that we're still behind on ideas coming to reality? It's what compelled me to get into coding. I didn't want to be one of the people that expresses an idea and say "they should make an app, that blah blah blah." I'm not waiting, I'll learn to code, and smash a keyboard...but I'll do it my self!

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I would have loved to talk to this person. I was particularly struck by this comment: 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. So often in debugging I see that machine doing exactly what I programmed it to do and not what I meant it to do. As we build things with greater influence in the world such bugs go from being "oopsies" to ones that do a lot of harm either economic, human, or both.

quackerhacker 13y ago
>I see that machine doing exactly what I programmed it to do and not what I meant it to do Chuck, don't you love spending, 15mins+ disabling parts of your code only to realize you forgot a variable, a comma, or one of these ';' :)
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Heh, yet another reason I don't write HFT algorithms, ever.
angersock 13y ago
One of the things I love most about programming is that these sorts of bugs are nearly always something that I asked it to do that didn't make sense: the machine isn't being petty, it isn't angry, it isn't sulking--it simply did what I asked it to, and that means that to fix it I'll have to ask something better. This is wonderfully different than what we see dealing with people.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
fjk 13y ago
Your last sentence makes me think of HAL from the Space Odyssey series. HAL wasn't explicitly programmed to harm anyone, but he attempted to kill the entire crew in order to fulfill his programmed orders. This creeped me out when I first saw the film, and reading the end of this article rekindled the same feeling.
gizmo686 13y ago
Hopefully, we will have layers of safeguards so you would need bugs in many programs to conspire allow a problem happen. For example, even on my personal laptop, I can play around with fan/CPU_speed without worrying about making a potential mistake, even if I am playing around with them in kernel space. The reason for this is I know that even if I make a mistake that would melt my CPU, the BIOS is also monitoring the temperature and, if nessasary, will scale back the CPU to minimum, kick the fan up to maximum, and possibly power off the machine. Granted, I could disable these protections, however then we go from me having a "oopsie", to me having disabled critical safety features. Note, I'm not sure how much the BIOS actually overrides the kernel. I was able to override the BIOS safties just by passing in some parameters to the Linux kernel. However, you could imagine a system where such would not be an option.
- simcop2387 13y ago
  From what I understand that's all the System Management Mode stuff that's been around for a while, no idea what it's usually like though. I haven't gone that far down the rabbit hole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode
gwern 13y ago
If you liked his excerpts, you should check out his book _God and Golem, Inc._ on this and similar topics. (The book is available on various book-sharing sites, I'm sure you can find it without too much trouble.)

dylanhassinger 13y ago

I'm glad we're not still called tapers

kruhft 13y ago

He also formalized Brownian motion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_process.

HumbleWiener 13y ago

"We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die." - Norbert Wiener

gizmo686 13y ago
In fairness, we are going to die either way.

ordinary 13y ago

Similar: The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster, predicting the Internet, written in 1909. The full story is now in the public domain, and can be found here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

wladimir 13y ago
I immediately had to think of Kurt Vonneguts "Player Piano" published in 1952, with similar a theme of automation of all production (by "taping" actions) and the impact of that on society. It also briefly mentions a "third industrial revolution" in which even human thought will be performed more efficiently by machines.

noonespecial 13y ago

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. It took 50 years but we are finally starting to be forced to take this problem seriously.

gpcz 13y ago

I'll assume that he knew of the ENIAC since it was publicized in 1946, which means he probably didn't "predict" mechanical/electrical computation. Regardless, he successfully predicted digital feedback control systems, lights-out manufacturing, mechatronics, artificial intelligence (to a limited extent), and the social ramifications of a post-scarcity society. Are these technologies obvious progressions that come from knowing about automatic computation, or was he truly that much of a visionary?