Quantum Living - Part Six - Machine Intelligence

THE WORLD OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

During World War II in Britain, America and elsewhere, two new kinds of science were being born.

One was built on the radiation work of Roentgen, who worked with high-energy rays of electromagnetism, and the Curies, who explored the properties of Uranium and Radium. Pierre Curie, a French chemist, married a colleague, Marie Sklodowska of Poland. After Pierre’s death in a street accident, Marie earned a Nobel prize for her work in isolating Radium and various forms of Uranium, before dying of radiation sickness.

While their work went on to usher in the atomic age of nuclear power and the world’s most dreadful weapons, they changed the world far less than the other avenue of effort – machine intelligence.

Computers were first designed with cog wheels and spindles; but these were too complex to build and so remained mainly theoretical. Charles Babbage designed a machine called a ‘difference engine’, which could perform complex mathematical functions, but was never able to build it. He then imagined and designed an ‘analytical engine’ which was a general purpose computer. It would have filled a warehouse, and would have been made of wheels and gears, with punched cards for input, and a printer for output. Again, funding was not forthcoming. Modern consensus is that it could have worked, but would have been very slow.

Computers built from electro-mechanical relays were then financed by IBM. Other computers were built of vacuum tubes. Certain of these were useful in code-breaking during the war, and others were used to calculate gunnery aiming tables. After war’s end, the availability of war surplus tubes allowed research to expand, till the first real computers (still warehouse-sized) were built.

Although the development of the transistor and solid-state electronics shrank the size of computers, they were costly and few, and their use was restricted to time-shared batch processing. There is the odd story of the VP or marketing at IBM, who forecasted the world demand for computers at around seven! Another marketing genius predicted that there would never be any use for a computer in the home.

Computer use expanded slowly till the emergence of integrated circuit processors. In 1969, it was predicted (by my professor of materials science) that integrated circuits could possibly contain as many as 100 transistors or other devices. These are currently running at several million, in low-priced home computers.

The computer is, of course, an extension of the human brain, in the same way that the bicycle or the car extends our legs, and the factory extends our hands. It was the next step in the creation of a virtual world, where human extensions magnify our individual power. Today you have a computer in your DVD player, and another controls your flat-screen TV.

Apart from appliance controls, the computer became a common home and business appliance once it could be linked to communications. This gave birth to the Internet, which now functions as an extension of the human nervous system, placing not only eyes and ears, but our very minds into a global net. Not only has it spurred the creation of McLuhan’s global village, but it has upset social habits, mores and styles of living. It has led to online gaming, social networking, and blogging.

The marriage of computer and Internet has had far greater impact on human life than the development of atomic theory. But that is because we have yet to absorb into our thought process the cousin of atomic science– quantum theory. To use computers we have had to change our living habits. To fully appreciate quantum theory we will have to change our entire world view.