Mechanical Brains
Dr. Wiener stops in a cold sweat and looks a few years ahead
Today in 1948, Time magazine published “In Man’s Image,” a review of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics:
Once in a great while a scientific book is published that sets bells jangling wildly in a dozen different sciences. Such a book is Cybernetics… It bristles with difficult mathematics; its text is a curious mixture of charm and opacity. But for those who can penetrate it (and thousands are trying), the book is intensely exciting…
Most remarkable are the computing machines, Professor Wiener's own specialty. They are growing with fearful speed. They started by solving mathematical equations with flash-of-lightning rapidity. Now they are beginning to act like genuine mechanical brains. Dr. Wiener sees no reason why they can't learn from experience, like monstrous and precocious children racing through grammar school. One such mechanical brain, ripe with stored experience, might run a whole industry, replacing not only mechanics and clerks but many of the executives too…
As men construct better calculating machines, explains Wiener, and as they explore their own brains, the two seem more & more alike. Man, he thinks, is recreating himself, monstrously magnified, in his own image.
The early calculators contained gears, scales and measuring devices. The best modern ones are built chiefly of electron tubes which give a simple "yes or no" answer when stimulated by electrical impulses. This is roughly what the neurons (nerve cells) do in the human brain.
Some modern calculators "remember" by means of electrical impulses circulating for long periods around closed circuits. One kind of human memory is believed to depend on a similar system: groups of neurons connected in rings. The memory impulses go round & round and are called upon when needed. Some calculators use "scanning" as in television. So does the brain. In place of the beam of electrons which scans a television tube, many physiologists believe, the brain has "alpha waves": electrical surges, ten per second, which question the circulating memories.
By copying the human brain, says Professor Wiener, man is learning how to build better calculating machines. And the more he learns about calculators, the better he understands the brain. The cyberneticists are like explorers pushing into a new country and finding that nature, by constructing the human brain, pioneered there before them.
Psychotic Calculators. If calculators are like human brains, do they ever go insane? Indeed they do, says Professor Wiener. Certain forms of insanity in the brain are believed to be caused by circulating memories which have got out of hand. Memory impulses (of worry or fear) go round & round, refusing to be suppressed. They invade other neuron circuits and eventually occupy so much nerve tissue that the brain, absorbed in its worry, can think of nothing else.
The more complicated calculating machines, says Professor Wiener, do this too. An electrical impulse, instead of going to its proper destination and quieting down dutifully, starts circulating lawlessly. It invades distant parts of the mechanism and sets the whole mass of electronic neurons moving in wild oscillations.
The cures administered to psychotic calculators are weirdly like the modern cures for insanity. One method is to overload the calculator with an extra strong electrical impulse in hope that the shock will stop the machine's oscillations. This is rather like the shock treatment given to human psychotics. Another cure is to isolate part of the calculator's mechanism, hoping to cut off the source of trouble. This is "like the lobotomies which brain surgeons perform. Lobotomies sometimes work (for both machine and brain) but are apt to reduce, in both cases, the subject's judgment.
…Many times throughout his book Dr. Wiener stops in a cold sweat and looks a few years ahead: "Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb," he says, "it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil . . . The first industrial revolution . . . was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery . . . The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and routine decisions . . . The human being of mediocre attainments or less [will have] nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy."