Dear Mr. Galvin:
I speak of the future-the vacuumous invisibility of the coming times. The future has one certainty: the total acceptance by big business of the computer as a replacement for the office worker. Business has followed the times, even paced the times. Therefore, the speed, accuracy, and future creativity of developing computers cannot be denied by future business.
The clerk, the bureaucratic nonentity of business, will be replaced by the complexity, yet practical simplicity of the computer. A computer gathers and analyzes information faster and more accurately than man. The memory lock of any computer offers the most logical answer to any given problem and theoretically possesses an unlimited memory. And if science can duplicate in the machine the DNA code of the human,the creative thoughts of the human could be synthesized in the machine.
The computer's primary code could essentially simulate man's life controlling function regulated by the mysterious DNA amino acids code. When research, as at the University of Chicago, refines its DNA investigation and applies it to cybernetics, the machine could achieve the creative function it now lacks. Thus, it is conceivable the machine could invent an item or develop a thought well beyond man's creative limits.
The final determining force unfortunately is man's selective programming into the machine. Will man thus fear the power of the machine? Will computers be developed to their fullest potential, and allowed to function? More important, will business accept the apparent philosophical implications of a machine having better talents than man?
Mr. Galvin:
Yours sincerely,
Will Men Fear the Power of the Thinking Machine?
Arnold Shelby
Arnold Shelby Latin American Studies. Tulane
Dear Mr. Shelby:
Robert W. Galvin
Why should man fear the machine? It's a tool for the elimination of drudgery. for freeing people from limiting routine. Each more sophisticated application opens another door to exciting new functions for the individual.
As to business' acceptance of the apparent philosophical implications of a machine being better talented than man, let's expand your question to include society as a whole. Your suggested potential of the machine's inventiveness, after all, would not only affect the structure of business and its practices but the role of the individual in every institution of the community education, government, the professions, in fact, man's day to day living environment. Already many of these changes have been manifest.
Think of the brigades of bookkeepers trapped through the years into peering from under their green eyeshades at mounting columns of figures. With perfection of the adding machine and comptometer, their working world assumed a whole new dimension. No more scratching out monthly statements with a steel-tipped pen. Instead, many have assumed functionally more interesting responsibilities by applying the skills, and wider knowledge needed to use these tools. As a result, the individual gained more capabilities, and industry, more capacity.
The computer has broadened the horizon much further. With its characteristic abilities for sensing, feedback, and self-adjustment—the determination of changing requirements without human intervention-masses of data can be digested and analyzed, and complex calculations made, to meet the needs for which it is programmed.
Its applications already have had a profound effect on almost every phase of our daily lives. Look, for example, at its employment in teaching: programmed lesson plans in a dozen subjects that permit student responses, and instant correction of errors, which enable uninterrupted progress to the extent of each individual's capacity.And the day is not far off when many university libraries will be linked together in a vast information retrieval system. A question fed into a machine by you at Tulane may elicit needed data from memory locks at Cornell, or Northwestern, or Stanford.
Its uses in long-range economic policy planning by government and business are infinite. A projection of population growth concentrations five years ahead, or twenty, will make possible realistic plans for food requirements, or housing starts, or highway construction programs, or the thousands upon thousands of goods and services requisite for further up-grading our living standards.
And what about the computerized services touching all of us that already are taken for granted: programming traffic lights to cope with rush-hour congestion . . reconciliation of monthly bank statements . . processing individual income tax returns . . even notifications from insurance companies when premiums are due.
All of this is part of the increasingly fast-paced tempo of our times. Man now demands "more", and he demands it "faster." This poses requirements best met by wider usages of computers, and in turn prompts the need for computers with increasingly sophisticated characteristics to keep pace.
The point is that the philosophic implications arising from the economic and social consequences of computer complexes already has been accepted by society.
Paradoxically, as computerized functions broaden, job losses don't necessarily follow. To the contrary, new fields of employment open, and people directly affected acquire new skills and abilities which improve their earning capacities一to the extent that each utilizes the opportunities proffered. Isn't this a capsulated instance of the force-drive for progress, and man's growth?
No one really knows to what exotic limits computers can be developed. The day may well come when "creative thought" is a characteristic. But I am confident that during the intermediate evolutionary steps, man's own intellectual sophistication will continue to outpace the machine, and assure control over a product of his own making. Certainly there's no real cause for worry, however, until the machine learns how to plug itself in.
Robert W. Gaivin
Chairman, Motorola Inc.
IS ANYBODY LISTENING TO CAMPUS VIEWS?
BUSINESSMEN ARE.
Three chief executive officers—The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company's Chairman, Russell DeYoung, The Dow Chemical Company's President, H. D. Doan, and Motorola's Chairman, Robert W. Galvin—are responding to serious questions and viewpoints posed by students about business and its role in our changing
society . . . and from their perspective as heads of major corporations are exchanging views through means of a campus/corporate Dialogue Program on specific issues raised by leading student spokesmen.
Here, Arnold Shelby, in Liberal Arts at Tulane, is exploring a point with Mr. Galvin. Keenly interested in Latin American political and social problems, Mr. Shelby toured various countries in the area last summer on a "shoe-string" budget. He plans a
career in journalism.
In the course of the entire Dialogue Program, Arthur Klebanoff, a Yale senior, will probe issues with Mr. Galvin, as will Mark Bookspan, a Chemistry major at Ohio State, and David G. Clark, in graduate studies at Stanford, with Mr. DeYoung; and similarly, David M. Butler, Electrical Engineering, Michigan State, and Stan Chess, Journalism, Cornell, with Mr. Doan.
All of these Dialogues will appear in this publication, and other campus newspapers across the country throughout this academic year. Campus comments are invited, and should be forwarded to Mr. DeYoung, Goodyear, Akron, Ohio; Mr.Doan, Dow Chemical, Midland Michigan; or Mr. Galvin, Motorola Franklin Park, Illinois, as appropriate.