Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is So 1955

The quintessential brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder

Today in 1955, Time Magazine published the cover story “Brain Builders”:

"At last I came under a huge archway and beheld the Grand Lunar exalted on his throne in a blaze of incandescent blue . . . The quintessential brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within . . . Tiers of attendants were busy spraying that great brain with a cooling spray, and patting and sustaining it . . ."

—H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

Last week, in a pastel blue and grey room on the fifth floor of a St. Louis office building, the newest Wellsian brain in the earthly world was enthroned. This quintessential brain looked like nothing more than a collection of filing cases, stretching in a 60-ft. semicircle about the room. From within the grey metal cases came a faint humming sound; along the light-studded metallic face were scores of twinkling orange sparks, rippling like waves of thought. As in the Grand Lunar's palace, a blaze of light flooded over the pale walls and pillars of rosy pink. Air conditioning filtered out the dust, kept the temperature at an even 75°. Along one end of the chamber was a gleaming plate-glass observation window, through which mere humans—attendants and sightseers —could watch and marvel.

The brain was the newest electronic calculator, developed by International Business Machines Corp. and installed in Monsanto Chemical Co.'s St. Louis headquarters. To IBM, it was the "Model 702 Electronic Data Processing Machine." To Monsanto and awed visitors, it was simply "the giant brain." Seated at its control console, a man has at his command the computing ability of 25,000 trained mathematicians.

New Horizons. On each of its reels of magnetic tape, the brain can remember enough information to fill a 1,836-page Manhattan telephone book—any figure, word, chemical or mathematical symbol—and work the information at the rate of 7,200 unerringly logical operations per second. In its vast computing units (2,500 electronic tubes, three miles of wire) it can multiply a pair of 127-digit numbers and arrive at a 254-digit answer in one-third of a second. In a second it can add 4,000 five-digit figures or do 160 equally complicated long divisions. And at the end, it can produce its answers in any of four ways—flash them on a TV-like screen, punch them on cards, print them on paper, or store them away on rolls of magnetic tape at the rate of 15,000 characters every second.

To Monsanto, the great brain will mean unprecedented speed, accuracy and economy in every phase of its manifold chemical business. In just twelve machine-hours the brain will do 1,200 cost reports that normally take 1,800 man-hours; in barely two hours it will complete a financial statement that takes a staff of accountants 320 hours. For Monsanto's chemists it will open up new horizons by rapidly working out complex equations to help discover new products, improve old ones, find out which of dozens of technically "correct" answers' to problems are the best.

"THINK." IBM's new brain is a logical extension of the company's famed slogan, "THINK." In the age of giant electronic brains, IBM's President Thomas J. Watson Jr. is applying to machines the slogan which his father, IBM's Board Chairman Thomas J. Watson Sr., applied only to men. President Watson hopes to mechanize hundreds of processes which require the drab, repetitive "thought" of everyday business. Thus liberated from grinding routine, man can put his own brain to work on problems requiring a function beyond the capabilities of the machine: creative thought. Says Watson: "Our job is to make automatic a lot of things now done by slow and laborious human drudgery. A hundred years ago there was an industrial revolution in which seven to ten horsepower was put behind each pair of industrial hands in America. Today we're beginning to put horsepower behind office hands, electric energy in the place of brain power."