COMPUTERS AND TRANSPORTATION

[Music] [Applause] [Music] we are now entering our fourth generation of computers difficult problems which once required 30 hours of work by a computer as large as the house can now be solved in 12 seconds by a computer no bigger than a bathtub a modern electronic digital computer is made up of 50,000 transistors 125,000 resistors 500,000 connectors joined together by some 20 miles of wire they're getting smaller and more efficient at an amazing rate computer store data on magnetic tape magnetic disk and most recently by laser memory systems using advanced laser technologies one roll of one inch tape can hold approximately twenty typewritten pages of dossier on each of 230 million citizens in North America by the year 2000 computers will invade our privacy on a scale hardly imaginable they will be interconnected and unless prevented by new legislation we'll be able to sell information on where we travel how much we spend and in what restaurants and hotels whether and when we pay our bills what our neighbors say about our drinking habits what we do with our evenings and with home [Music] [Applause] Computers record dispose operate regulate solve devise predict explain translate it is the computer more than any other development which has allowed man to travel into space - Edward freaking of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology there is almost no limit to what it can do in the near future we're going to see computers and machines that use computers as taxing the machines are being able to be more and more interesting things and one good example that would be a little household robot that would be very helpful to have in the home now you might say well who would want such a household robot my guess is that almost every family that has a home would like one of these once they understood how good it could be [Music] such a machine would be a lot nicer than one good thing what it would do in the early versions it would wander around the house when no one was there usually vacuuming they were backing the rugs and sweep the floors and pick up stuff it could pick up dirty clothes at home take it down to the laundry room and more advanced versions would make beds and set the table and clear the table loading the dishwasher and so on in addition such machine would never need sleep it would be quietly wandering around making sure nothing's amiss in the house looking for fires checking for burglars and so on we think that the kinds of machines that were building computers will eventually have most of the characteristics of life in some sense they'll be able to think they'll be able to design and build new machines and what would be the next step in evolution on this planet maybe a new species if you like that's very different not biological not genetically related to anything else on the planet but which will be a great advance if you like in terms of the capability in the next decades artificial intelligence will be up to the level of an adult human being by the year 2000 the machine will go beyond the capacity of the human mind in many areas this television picture is the way the world is seen by the robot shaky a creation of the artificial intelligence section of the Stanford Research Institute of California Shakey's task today is to push a box off a platform he's just realized but to do this he must get up on the platform himself and he is pushing a rack into place for that purpose this sounds very simple the kind of thing that would be no trouble for a four-year-old child but when you consider that this problem is being thought out by a machine you are beginning to understand the term artificial intelligence [Music] jakie still seems primitive but he makes you think particularly if you consider the speculations of one of the world's most respected science writers artists C Clark any machine that can make decisions choices which could behave in a way which is not predictable by its designers and there are many machines like this now has a very rudimentary form of artificial intelligence the question is how powerless intelligence develop will it become as intelligent where machines become as intelligent as we are assuming that we are intelligent and sometimes one doubts this I think that most of the people in the computer field certainly the younger people believe that we will have intelligent machines and there's no limit to the intelligence which machines may ultimately develop [Music] this is an automated factory computerized robots perform mechanical tasks much faster and with far greater precision than the humans they replaced by the end of the century manual work as we now know it will have been transformed beyond recognition almost invariably attempts to describe or predict the future have been incredibly conservative short-sighted when one looks back on them scientific progress technology which is one way of measuring the future I suppose goes much further than anyone ever would have dreamed one example I'm very fond of giving his predictions about the future of the motorcar at the beginning of this century it was pointed out the automobile would be of no use except in the city because there were no roads outside the city this is what I mean by failure of imagination a fundamental invention can totally transform the future by the year 2000 global tripping will be a common experience you will be able to travel farther faster and cheaper thanks to a computer back on the ground there will be too many passengers too much baggage too many millions of reservations too heavy a load of scheduling to be handled in any other way than by computer this computerized reservation system handles more than 14 million calls a year whether you are in Los Angeles Toronto or Frankfurt the Airlines agent has instant access to the computers fund of information the computer will tell you what flights there are and whether a seat is available it will tell you what the weather is anywhere you want to go in the world what the customs regulations are what hotels are available in the city of your destination if you are making a double or triple reservation the computer will warm the ticket agent if you qualify for special handling the computer will check you out against its private list of VIPs [Music] the computer installation of this airline cost 34 million dollars with a life expectancy of only eight years by then a new generation of computers will have been developed to handle a volume which would be impossible to cope with today one of the ways a computer receives information is by punch cards they translate ordinary English or French or any other language into a language the computer can understand an actor this system is more than 150 years old [Music] in 1801 a French Weaver came out with a computerized load for the first time in history information was conveyed by holes punched in cards this marked a giant step forward in the development of levy now any combination of strands could be picked up by the Weaver this meant he was not restricted to a few basic patterns he could weave any pattern his imagination could devise just as in modern computers the process was programmed in advance and the punch cards fed into a small mechanical computer attached to the top of the loop [Music] our computers more intelligent than men this computer which plays tic-tac-toe at the Ontario Science Centre has never lost a game the best you can do is a tie and if you get tired or make a slip well that's one up for the computer [Music] [Applause] in the decades ahead the computer will enter our lives as an unparalleled mechanism for social change it may affect our style and standards of living even more profoundly than did the coming of the automobile but not only can the computer make computations it also has massive powers of memory the ability to accept and utilize logic and sort out mountains of information for the important kernels we see it can remember the taste and preference of millions of individual customers and give it to them instantly within this century all the billions of words printed in the New York Times since it was founded in 1851 will be put on a computer it will be possible for an Inquirer perhaps sitting at a computer console in his own home to ask the computer to print out every story published in the last hundred and thirty years on any subject he is interested in [Music] as a household servant interconnected with a coaxial cable of cable TV the computer will record utility meters automatically instruct your bank to pay bills keep a record of these transactions and when income tax time comes deliver all the information about your income and dependents and deductible expenses to the tax assessor not only can computers be used for industry and invasions of privacy but in the future they will assist your enjoyment of leisure time professor freakin has a computer whose sole function is to provide do-it-yourself home entertainment the way this machine works is you set up these little switches to a pattern and then you turn it on and it plays a tune according to whatever pattern you set up and there's many many patterns in the billions and billions that you can set up and each one corresponds to a different tune and some of the tunes are very quick can repeat in just a few notes and others will last for years before they repeat I have this set right now to a pattern that was found by my son a long time ago and is the best tune anyone's ever found since and so we call it Michaels tune and I'll turn it on and play it for you [Music] now when you listen to a tune life is you can control such as if you'd like it to play faster you can make it play a little faster like this and glaze lower [Music] but ever saw in control the tempo and you can control the pitch and of course by changing these positions you can get all kinds of different rules the Box on the right plays a different color of light or a different combination of light colors for each note and each combination air corresponds to a given notice it's the first kind of computer technology that's been applied to the home instead of weapons or guided missiles or business computers and so on now it's only the first and this time we're going to see more and more human applications of computer ideas and they'll be a great development of machines that make life even more human than humans can make it that may seem paradoxical but we can make machines that deal with all the aesthetic sides of life for example we could make a machine that composes piano music and plays it I would like to hear what Chopin would have written if he'd looked out the window during today's snowstorm from my house and Brookline and the machine thinks about that for a while and composes a new kind of Nocturne that might have been done by Chopin in his style and you say I'd like it played by Liszt and it remembers how Liszt played the piano and it composes it in plays it for you why not that's all in the cards for the future if someone will pay attention to technology applied to the aesthetics computers will invade the arts just as they do every other part of our lives in the future artists may have to learn new skills of mathematics mechanics engineering and programming in order to practice their Prague I've energized a relay here and this is this is the bank of amplifiers that drive the servo motors of the system in the computer which created the Stargate corridor in the film 2001 was developed by the man behind these glasses john whitney his three sons and his brother james have all used his machines to make computer films the Whitney's are not inhibited by the specter of giant computer companies they build their own they're hardly to be called computers because they're really specialized problem solvers they were computers that were designed to compute only on one kind of an equation for many years I had been doing straight animation using the hand drawing techniques or primitive forms of manipulation of artwork in one way or another some of the things that Norman McLaren has done in fact I've drawn on directly on film and but it was only in the mid 50s when I began to see these devices that it became clear that there were great possibilities for developing animation machines that would manipulate design in ways that could never be done by hand as drawing almost a perfect circle here now many cycles later it might be drawing a straight line path the fact that it's putting this kind of motion as a series of images on one motion picture frame at a time means that it gets on the screen in quite a different way than it is here and the fact that this is a circle pattern does not mean that the image generated by this pattern will be a circle on the screen it'll be some sort of a complex overlay pattern of a whole series of circles or some sort of a flowing halftone pattern possibly I'm also working with the modern digital computer systems through the my research grant from IBM and there I am using a completely electrical solid-state electronic system which involves no mechanical moving parts to speak up and there I get to the heart of the problem there arm mathematical equations that generate very very elegant images very very elegant designs [Music] [Music] the computer field has gotten to the point where we do things we build things we make them work and we've had very little understanding but we're beginning to get a glimmering and that glimmering is fantastically exciting and why is it exciting well because not not because if you like that we're gonna build better computers and not because we'll make them faster and so on but because when we look around at the world we see all kinds of phenomena things that happen in this world that we've had difficulty understanding that we're going to be able to explain with this new science that we haven't even thought of yet [Music] [Music] the next decade we'll see computers being applied everywhere rapid technological breakthroughs particularly in the field of miniaturization of memory systems will make today's most sophisticated machines look old-fashioned and cumbersome beyond that speculation becomes less certain more open to fanciful flights of imagination my feeling is that we are part of an evolutionary process leading to which is completely mechanical which is treated many of our other obvious limitations but we shall develop new types of consciousness we have arisen from many earlier orders of life the primitive man apes there were our ancestors couldn't possibly imagine us are we aware of the kind of universal richness of experience and knowledge which we take for granted in precisely the same way we can't imagine our successors there as much above us their organic or inorganic as we are above the man Apes who preceded us [Music] [Applause] [Music]