Looking Forward by Kenneth Jr. (reading diary .txt) 📕

Humans will not even be required to maintain the factories of the future. Cybernated factories will be designed to operate for many decades without repair by men. Routine maintenance and repairs will be performed by machines. Improved metals and designs of the future will make machines almost impervious to wear and tear. Even today Western Electric makes complex switches that work so flawlessly that a single failure in five million operations is considered below par. Some relays now in use will perform a billion switching operations in their lifetime.

The Human Use of Human Beings

Dr. Norbert Wiener, the “Father of Cybernetics,” wrote:

It is a degradation to a human being to chain him to an oar and use him as a source of power; but it is almost an equal degradation to assign him purely repetitive tasks in a factory, which demand less than a millionth of his brainpower.

The advent of cybernation may be regarded as an emancipation proclamation for mankind. Its thorough application will at least enable man to have the highest conceivable standards of living with practically no labor. It will free him for the first time from a highly structured and outwardly imposed routine of repetitive day-by-day activity. It will permit him to return to the Greek concept of leisure where all work was done by slaves and men had time to cultivate their minds. In the future each of us will command a million slaves. These will be mechanical and electrical slaves, not the degrading use of a human being to do the work so that another may live an abundant life.

Computers are today in a very early stage comparable to the Model T Ford. At the present time the largest electronic computers have only about 1/10,000 of the associative powers of human beings. Computers today are generally programmed to operate in specific ways. We are only beginning to design them to observe a large range of outside data and creatively handle this information.

Although computers are just out of their teen years, some of them are already beginning to show a potential for originality. “The present level of these learning machines,” said Dr. Norbert Wiener:

is that they play a fair amateur game at chess but that in checkers they can show a marked superiority to the player who he programmed them after from 10 to 20 playing hours of working and indoctrination. They thus most definitely escape from the completely effective control of the man who has made them. Rigid as the repertory of factors may be which they are in a position to take into consideration, they do unquestionably—and so say those who have played with them—show originality, not merely in their tactics, which may be quite unforeseen, but even in the detailed weighting of their strategy.

Norbert Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science, Vol. 131, No. 3410, May 6, 1960, p. 13. Copyright 1960 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The micro-miniaturization of computer components may enable man to build computers in the future that will have a thousand times more associative power than any human brain. Computers will be designed that will have sensory receptors in all parts of the world which will give them immediate information on anything significant that occurs. A master computer in the future will be able to gather, digest, and analyze all recorded facts and information—a fantastic task that is impossible for any human being. The range of facts and formulas is so extensive today that it is often impossible for a scientist to keep up with new developments even in his specialty.

Only a computer will be able to handle the integration of all knowledge and come up with decisions that will be based on the full range of relevant data. In the future computers will not only be able to think as well as men, they will be able to exceed man enormously in the capacity to digest facts and information. They will analyze the data and come up with solutions to problems that will enable man to obtain what he wants on earth. It would be impossible to achieve the value system discussed in Chapter 4 without the thorough use of automated machinery and computers integrated into a world-wide cybernated complex.

Cybernation can transform our entire world into a Garden of Eden. The goods and services that we desire will be available without repetitive human toil. And the Tree of Knowledge will bloom for the fulfillment of everyone. The biggest portion of the prime years of one’s life will no longer be structured by the need for a weekly pay check. With cybernation household jobs will no longer saddle women with boring day-to-day routines. Men and women will for the first time in their lives be free to inquire into their own needs, to face themselves, and to work out satisfying patterns of life based on their own feelings and thoughts. “The liberation of people from tasks unworthy of human capacity,” said Gerald Piel, “should free that capacity for a host of activities now neglected in our civilization. ...” *

* Gerald Piel, “Consumers of Abundance” (Santa Barbara, California: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1961), p. 9.

The rat-race will be over. Society will require relatively little from any of its members. John F. Kennedy’s famous dictum, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” will be reversed. People may for the first time enjoy an abundant life made possible by the creative intelligence of man. With a cybernated technology it will be possible for all humans to live better than if each person were to have a million slaves at his command. Even a millionaire today has a crude, harried life compared with the smooth, fulfilling pattern that all people may achieve in a cybernated society.

We have asked how you would like a guaranteed income of $100,000 per year. In the 1960’s in the United States,