The Death of Distance
The popular idea that intelligent machines must be hostile to man is absurd
Today in 1927, a group of newspaper reporters and dignitaries gathered at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories auditorium in New York City to see the first American demonstration of something new: television.
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover provided the “entertainment,” as his live picture and voice were transmitted over telephone lines from Washington, D.C., to New York. “Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history,” Hoover said. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”
Also today, the rise of (computing) dominance…
Today in 1964, IBM announced the System 360, the first family of computers spanning the performance range of all existing (and incompatible) IBM computers. Thomas J. Watson Jr., IBM’s CEO at the time, wrote in his autobiography Father, Son, & Co.:
By September 1960, we had eight computers in our sales catalog, plus a number of older, vacuum-tube machines. The internal architecture of each of these computers was quite different, different software and different peripheral equipment, such as printers and disk drives, had to be used with each machine. If a customer’s business grew and he wanted to shift from a small computer to a large one, he had to get all new everything and rewrite all his programs often at great expense. …
[The] new line was named System/360—after the 360 degrees in a circle—because we intended it to encompass every need of every user in the business and the scientific worlds. Fortune magazine christened the project “IBM’s $5,000,000,000 Gamble” and billed it as “the most crucial and portentous—as well as perhaps the riskiest—business judgment of recent times.”… It was the biggest privately financed commercial project ever undertaken. The writer at Fortune pointed out that it was substantially larger than the World War II effort that produced the atom bomb.
The popular idea, fostered by comic strips and the cheaper forms of science-fiction, that intelligent machines must be malevolent entities hostile to man, is so absurd that it is hardly wasting energy to refute it.