SPEAKER: I've Been Reading tonight,
Thinking by Machine by Pierre de Latil.
Here to discuss the book are Norbert Wiener,
Professor of mathematics at MIT, and Isaac Asimov, Associate
Professor of Biochemistry, Boston University
School of Medicine.
Your admin reading host is Pierre Albert Duhamel,
Philomathean Professor in the English Department,
Boston College.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Professor Wiener, I
imagine that most people reading the title of this book,
Thinking by Machine are going to leap
to one unforgivable conclusion, probably also a confusion.
Namely, this book is all about the wonderful automatic
calculators.
Is it?
NORBERT WIENER: I would say that it takes its origin
from the automatic calculators that represents the earliest
phase of the work.
But I think the chief merit of Pierre de Latil's book
is that it goes definitely beyond that,
and it presents an introduction to the general problem
of organization, both that of organization that's already
been planned and constructed in detail, programmed in detail,
and the newer problems of organizations which,
to a certain extent, have to program themselves so that it
goes well beyond that.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: But generally speaking, Professor
Asimov, wouldn't you agree it's a book about cybernetics,
something of which we know nothing,
but it's a vague subject which usually provides material
for science fiction writers.
Isn't that all it does?
ISAAC ASIMOV: Well, by a curious coincidence,
you strike on a subject in which I know something,
and this is rather difficult to do, mostly.
However, in science fiction, we have, indeed, done a great deal
with cybernetics.
But in speaking to Dr. Wiener, it seems to me,
we'll have to race a little to stay ahead of the science
or, at least reasonably, ahead of the science.
For one thing, in science fiction,
the thinking machine has, as its highest goal, usually,
the approach to the human mind itself.
And this, I now understand, is not necessarily, at all,
the highest approach of the machine.
You were saying something about that, Dr. Wiener,
and I wish you would repeat it.
NORBERT WIENER: Yes, I was saying
that the machine can be regarded from two points of view.
One is a machine that is already fully programmed,
where the imitation of the human mind
is fed into it by a specific wiring diagram, where
the machine does not organize itself
and such a machine is already reaching its limitations.
That is the problem of programming,
such a machine is, itself, a thing
that needs some automatization.
Now the next stage is to make a machine, which, in some sense,
programs itself, that means learns.
Now there are various levels of learning.
The learning itself may be a highly programmed.
You may have different orders of learning, but what you want
is a machine which, in some sense,
will work itself in by its own experience from a more
or less random organization.
That idea has been approached by Ashby,
and there are other people following in that direction.
This represents a real need.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: I suppose most people thinking
of a machine that organizes itself might think of some
of these machines that have been devised to play chess
or, I imagine, play checkers.
Is that a good example of such a machine?
NORBERT WIENER: It could be, because there are several stages
of such a machine.
Now, the first order of a chess playing machine
is, one, where the general policy programming
has been fed in completely from the beginning.
That cannot change itself.
If you are playing such a machine,
you would have the experience of playing against a rigid
personality, which cannot learn, cannot change,
but can act competently within its frame.
By the way, if you are playing a machine,
you are playing a personality.
You must see that.
If you remember that if you are playing a game of correspondence
chess, the chess is all that of the personality
that you are playing.
Now, however, supposing that your machine has
its programming, dependent on the actual past experience
of games that it has played.
Such a machine then would be a different machine
to a certain extent, according to the previous games
it had played.
And therefore, you would deal not only with the personality
but with a personality you feel to be a growing personality.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Professor Asimov,
is there a plot for a science fiction,
let's say, a man discovering he's been playing a machine all
the time by correspondence?
ISAAC ASIMOV: Well, I can think offhand of a variation of that.
That is, one has a machine, which,
for one reason or another, has gone out of order.
And the problem is then to deduce in what way
it has gone out of order and how it
may be brought back into order.
Now, Dr. Wiener would settle it by having it self-controlled so
that it brings itself back into order,
but that removes the plot, the suspense, everything else.
NORBERT WIENER: Of course, there was one thing people often
have the idea that because a machine performs,
it must perform perfectly.
That isn't necessary.
I mean, a machine can do less than perfect performance.
The idea that the machine will be free from any error
at all, I may say, that we can approximate to that
in the machine programmed in advance.
But one of the conditions for the self-programming machine
is that it can make mistakes.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Well, de Latil
describes the machine, which has the built in memory in the forms
of the waves going through the column of mercury,
where only one in five--
only once five 5 does the memory work perfectly.
But nevertheless, the machine always gives correct answers
because there are several circuits, each of which
independently solves the problem,
and only when all the circuits compare correctly--
NORBERT WIENER: Yes.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: --it does the answer come out.
NORBERT WIENER: That's quite possible to do.
And furthermore, the machines have
developed very considerably, since the stage
on which he is writing.
That is, they have better memories and machines, memories,
which are right a larger part of the time.
He, himself, had discussed that.
Some of these electronic storage devices
are better than the circulating column.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Well, Professor Wiener,
when people think about machines and getting machines
to do their work for them, aren't they
usually ambiguous in their thinking about them?
NORBERT WIENER: Ambiguous and ambivalent.
By that, I mean, what do people want of a machine?
They want effective performance, and effective performance
may mean something that would be analogous to intelligence
in the machine.
But you get the machine developed
beyond a certain point, and the person controlling
it may not be in complete possession
of that effective performance so that to make
the machine effectively performing
beyond a certain point brings it beyond control.
In other words, the machine will act
as if it had a will of its own.
It's the old Frankenstein problem.
It's the old problem of slavery.
You want two things in a slave, and you can't get them both.
You want intelligence in a slave,
and you want the slave to do the things that you want it to do.
In other words, you want it to do what you want to do,
but you don't know you want it to do.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Isn't this
somehow analogous to the difference
between a multipurpose machine and a unipurpose machine?
NORBERT WIENER: Most certainly.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: The more perfect
you get the machine in doing one particular thing, the faster
and the better, the less it is able to do anything else.
NORBERT WIENER: Definitely.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Whereas, if you
have a machine that is capable of doing a great many things,
it becomes very complicated, and it may not
do any of the individual things better than a machine designed
to do that one thing alone.
NORBERT WIENER: But the complication
itself means that the person who has designed it
has not fully penetrated what the machine is going to do.
The fact that it is a machine does not
mean that its predictable.
Predictability is not a thing that the machine alone,
but a relation between the machine and the person
who is running.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: De Latil gives a structure and ascending
complexity of machines of different levels of complexity.
One of the machines that, well, he thought was very infrequent
was one that was a self-organizing machine
on a random basis.
Professor, when you were talking before we
went on the air tonight about some very interesting
experiments that you were doing, which
seemed to be an amplification of this.
NORBERT WIENER: There's a good deal of work being done on this.
I want to say that the first fairly clear idea of this was
Ashby's.
Then some other papers have come since which
discuss model nervous systems, which
imitate the actual nervous system,
and in which certain random behavior organizes
itself, where the machine not only learns,
but learns in a way not programmed,
learns by its own failures.
But there are other cases where machines or structures-- and I'm
talking here both about machines and living organisms-- do
pull themselves together and organize themselves in behavior.
Now, one of the simple models for this
is a very mechanical machine, an electric lighting network.
You have a lot of generators there.
These generators are kept about at the same frequency
by governors on the engines that drive them.
Now, these have the tendency that when
you put a whole lot of these, on the same busbars,
there's the same electric connections
that the machines that are going fast
take more of the load than the rest.
The machines that are going slow take less of the load.
The result is they tend to even themselves out,
and you have a virtual generator,
which is better than the generator
of any single virtual governor, which
is better than the governor of any single generator.
The result is that you get the thing organizing itself
very accurately into, let us say, 60 cycles.
Now this is the machine end of the thing.
But we are finding that in the brain,
there is evidence that we also have some systems of oscillators
which also tend to pull themselves into phase,
and also, while they are about a certain frequency,
tend to make a virtual governor, which
holds, at least a part of the system,
much more precisely at a given frequency
than the individual ones can--
self-organizing.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Within the brain itself.
Is there anything like that in biology?
NORBERT WIENER: Well, of course, the brain
is biology, but let us take one very definite example.
Now, I am giving here speculation
rather than absolutely definite results, namely
in the formation of the embryo, the heart forms
as a lot of contracting cells.
These contracting cells, beating cells,
as they would go by themselves, would
be in a state, which we would call fibrillation,
each one beating independently of the others.
But very soon, they begin to beat as a tissue, as a heart,
and pull themselves into an organ.
Now, this problem is probably just
about the same as that of the electric system.
And it shows how mere putting things together,
mere arrangement of elements with certain properties
will produce the effect of what is called an organizer.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: I might say--
I might say that this same thing goes on within the cell, too.
The cell is controlled by chromosomes.
The chromosomes are themselves ordered arrangements
of genes, each of which controls some of the chemical substances
within the cell, which control its workings.
Now, when a cell divides, both daughter cells
must be supplied with these chromosomes,
and the two must have identical chromosomes.
It is, therefore, incumbent upon each individual chromosome
to form another one, exactly like itself.
It does this by drawing out of the substance
of the cell, simple compounds, which
it will combine into these long strings of genes.
And it does, in this manner, produce a duplicate of itself,
creating greater organization out
of lesser organization by virtue of its own organization.
It is a self-organizing system.
And the interesting thing is that, occasionally,
this self-organization is not perfect,
and it is this very imperfection that
is of the first importance to life.
Because of the production of an imperfect chromosome,
there is occasionally produced a cell,
which is superior to the original cell
as far as adaptation to its environment is concerned.
And as a result of many of these things,
we have what is called evolution,
the gradual development of organisms
to fit their environment or, perhaps better,
the gradual elimination of organisms less fitted
for their environment.
ISAAC ASIMOV: Well, on a very simple level,
at the start of the discussion of cybernetics,
you always become involved with the feedback or the server
method.
NORBERT WIENER: The feedback, yes.
ISAAC ASIMOV: Now, everything that you have been describing
is actually--
or all of these are examples of very complicated feedback,
aren't they?
Much more complicated than the de Latil himself points out.
NORBERT WIENER: Yes, de Latil thoroughly
understands the feedback, but he only discusses it
at the simplest stage, what we would
call the linear feedback, the organization where inputs
added give outputs added.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: What's a good example of this?
A simple example of a feedback, Professor Wiener.
NORBERT WIENER: Well, supposing I'm
driving my car down the street, now I
don't determine in advance that I'm
going to make such a turn at a certain place, such
a turn in another place.
Not at all.
What I do is if I find my car beginning
to deviate to the left, I turn it to the right.
If I find it beginning to deviate to the right,
I turn it to the left.
In other words, I keep my behavior organized
by a continual correction so that any deviation serves
as an input that produces a deviation
in the opposite direction or cuts down that deviation.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: You wrote a story
about an automobile once, didn't you, Professor Asimov?
Called Sally, I think?
It was Sally, the automobile that worked by feedback.
ISAAC ASIMOV: Yes, it was.
And what's more, without the necessity of a human operator,
which is what appeals to me.
Now, obviously, driving a car is a relatively simple function
of the human being.
There are relatively few impulses
that need be-- that are relatively few impacts
of the environment upon the human being that
are necessary to driving a car.
You observe the other cars.
You observe the signals, the turns, and so on.
It's nothing near as complicated as writing a story,
for instance.
Now it should be, theoretically, easy
to build a machine which would respond
to these impingements of the environment
and make its own turns, avoid other cars, and so on.
Of course, one would have to instruct the machine
first as to which turns it was necessary to make
to go to a certain objective.
And I skip all the fancy stuff, of course, in my story
and deal only with the finished product.
I'm leaving the fancy stuff to Dr. Wiener
because he says it's simple.
NORBERT WIENER: What I say is this,
that this scheme of doing things, which is fictional
and remote with a car--
fictional because it's difficult.
Fictional because it is not immediately needed
to that extent--
it's certainly needed in control missiles
and is coming to be needed in the modern airplane.
As a matter of fact, I don't think
it will be many years before we will
have to have that sort of a device
to solve our air traffic problem.
So that I don't think that this is going--
this is pure science fiction.
I think that it's very near to science fact.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Well, you're
referring, of course, to horrible accidents
like that, which occurred near the Grand Canyon recently.
NORBERT WIENER: Yes, but as the traffic
increases, horrible potential accidents of that sort
are not rarities.
And we will have to organize our traffic to contemplate them.
ISAAC ASIMOV: Where airplanes avoid one another.
NORBERT WIENER: Where they avoid one another.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Professor Wiener,
in the construction of these machines,
am I right in believing that there are probably two
ways that you can go about it?
You could go about it, let's say, empirically,
where you might attempt to construct something
in an approximation or an analogy
to a human network of a nervous system.
Then, wouldn't there be another way
of going about the construction of one of these machines
where you would make them applications
of mathematical principles?
NORBERT WIENER: You have to do both.
On the one hand, you can take the particular construction
and try to summarize it by mathematical principles.
On the other hand, you can see general mathematical principles
and try to realize them by particular constructions.
Science is never a one-way road.
There's always an interaction between different approaches.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: But as you
work on the mathematical basis of the random organization
of these nine--
NORBERT WIENER: I'm trying to work on it now, yes.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Once you arrive at these,
wouldn't it be possible to make these mathematical principles
operative in any number of machines, which probably--
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Without any doubt, it would.
And that's what happened, of course,
with the original feedback notion when the people first
began working on that for electronic circuits.
But I don't think that we can say that invention or discovery
follows a unique track.
There's got to be an interaction between suggestions
at both ends of the game.
On the one hand, you see a machine,
and you try to see what organization would do it.
On the other hand, you see a mathematical theory,
and you try to see how you can realize it.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: What I was getting
at was the danger in cybernetics of the limitations
of the man seeing things in terms of the man.
I mean, you see man, and then you
think in terms of a machine that might approximate.
In other words, there's always a tendency.
How does the cyberneticist-- if that's
the way you make an operative noun out
of the term of the science-- how does he
detach himself enough from his anthropomorphic thinking?
NORBERT WIENER: He's got to work from both ends.
He's got to do what Grey Walter, for example,
has done-- construct machines that
imitate some of the human purposes
and see how they behave.
On the other hand, he's got to examine human behavior
and see what gadget would do something like that.
I mean, he's got to go both from the machine and the man.
As a matter of fact, in using the word cybernetics,
I definitely said the study of communication and control
in the living being and the machine,
and I had to bring in both that the two were interacting,
that you neither approach the thing completely
from one standpoint or completely from the other.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Well, Professor Asimov,
you wrote the introduction to this book,
Thinking by Machine, which you make, I think, much of the point
that this is a new area of knowledge where one must bring
to bear several of the disciplines, which,
up to this time, have been independent.
What are some of the disciplines or knowledges, for example,
that you're bringing to bear in this illustration
of the self-organizing material in either the generators
or the self?
ISAAC ASIMOV: Well, Dr. Wiener, I think, in his discussion
right here on this program has already made it
quite plain, that although he, himself, is, I think,
primarily a mathematician, he yet
has to concern himself with the neurons of the brain,
the cells of the heart.
This is biology.
There are applications in the chromosomes
and the biochemical organization within the cell.
He has taken-- he has taken examples
from electrical engineering.
When one gets sufficiently broad,
one finds that all the various branches of science
are manmade partitions of one truth with a capital T,
except that I'm not going to define what I mean by truth.
One must be-- one must play it safe.
And as a matter of fact, I think that there
has been an increasing danger that people
will forget that the partitions are manmade
and concern themselves with one segment of science of knowledge
to such an extent that there will be a negative feedback.
It will be impossible to progress, simply
because in order to progress in a particular field,
one must have a knowledge of other fields
which one will not have, you see.
And I think that the important thing about thinking machines
is that it will, in a sense, free the human mind from too
great enslavement in limited fields
and make it possible by the help of machines to,
once more, return to the days where a person could have
a general knowledge of science, the way, for instance,
Leibniz did.
And this, I think, will act as a positive feedback
by accelerating the advance of science.
NORBERT WIENER: I agree with you completely.
I don't think that one can build up cooperative research
by having a number of people each
work on their own specialty, each match up
to the frontier, present arms, turn around, and march away
again.
It is necessary for cooperative research for everybody
significantly involved in it--
I mean everybody-- to understand what the other person is doing,
to have at least a passive and, to a certain extent,
an active participation in the other work.
Then you can get real cooperative research
that means something.
But the idea of a research being done
on the pattern of a big company is the worst possible way
for doing work with really new ideas.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Really, the assumption
behind that kind of cooperative research
is that if you were to string beads on a piece of string.
At the end, you have a unity.
Whereas much, of this book, a part of it,
which I don't think we ought to go into,
is a statement of the way in which
the problem of various effects can be stated mathematically.
And unless you can state these things mathematically,
the mathematician cannot really communicate with
the philosopher.
NORBERT WIENER: It's necessary to go into all
the branches of this field.
For example, when I'm working with the physiologists
on brainwave work, as I'm doing now,
I must know how the data are taken.
I must know how the instruments are built
by which one works up the data.
I must know what the troubles are.
I must know what the physical analogs are, have them in mind.
If I can't do that, I'm hamstrung.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: When people
think about the machine and the elaborate machines which
have been built for us, they eventually want
to ask, I suppose, the question, what are the limitations
to the machines that we can build,
or are there any limitations?
NORBERT WIENER: Well, obviously, we
find it very difficult to ask about things
we haven't thought of.
To say that the limitations are rigid and specific
is a very hard thing to say.
One of the misleading things in all this, that hampers us
tremendously is that the words, which we usually
use, mechanism or life, are words
which fit a particular stage of knowledge and words
which have no absolute content.
The questions which we most easily
ask and seem to be most significant
are the questions, in many cases,
which can't be asked at all.
If we ask, when we have made a machine which
simulates certain phases of life, is this living or not?
Is that really a significant question?
We can't even answer whether a virus is living or not.
I think you could say something about that.
ISAAC ASIMOV: Well, the one thing
about a virus which causes us to say that it is living
is that within the cell, it will reproduce itself,
not parts of the cell that it is feeding on, but itself.
And after the cell dies, there are
hundreds of viruses identical with the original one.
Outside the cell, there is nothing
about the virus we can call alive so that there it is, right
in the boundary line.
Incidentally, I would like to say this,
that people who ask whether any limitations to the machine,
I think, sometimes, use the word limitations as a derogatory
term, implying that machines must have limitations,
just because they are machines and, therefore,
inferior to, quote, "living things," unquote.
But everything, by the very nature of its substance,
has some limitation.
For instance, the human being has the limitation that he
cannot fly simply by flapping his arms.
Well, there is a limitation.
This does not make him less a human being,
and it would not make a machine necessarily a lower level
because it had a limitation.
NORBERT WIENER: There's one thing very interesting.
The late Professor Von Neumann reflected on this question
whether a machine could reconstruct itself,
as the virus does as a living organism.
And he pointed out that when you reach
a certain degree of complexity, it most certainly could.
That is beyond a certain point, there is no reason why a machine
cannot build something more complicated than it is.
Because the number of combinations of things
is greater--
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Than the number of things.
NORBERT WIENER: Yes.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Yes.
Yes.
And as a matter of fact, working in the opposite direction,
if you s a mass of hydrogen gas of sufficient mass,
it will automatically create a star.
NORBERT WIENER: Certainly.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Well, listening to you
people talk, it's rather a humbling experience for someone
who's reading mostly in the humanities.
This, to me, was the first book in this area for, let's say,
the general reader, with the exception of possibly a few.
Professor Asimov, do you know any other books
in this area on the same subject?
ISAAC ASIMOV: There is one, really,
that affected me as much as this one did,
and that was entitled The Human Use of Human Beings
by an author whose name I forget.
And perhaps, you can supply it, doctor.
NORBERT WIENER: I never happened to meet the gentleman,
but I think it's Norbert Wiener.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Well, I want to thank you very much,
Professor Wiener, Professor Asimov, for coming tonight.
Is there anything that you would like
to add, either about the book or about the subject itself?
Let's say Professor Asimov first.
ISAAC ASIMOV: Well, there is this--
cybernetics and all the things that are growing out of it
is an infant science that is young.
Like all infant sciences, it is very malleable and plastic.
People keep getting new ideas about it.
It's growing in all directions.
And for that very reason, the subject itself may be confusing.
It hasn't got the solid background of material one
can work on, but all the more promising for the future.
NORBERT WIENER: But I'm trying, and other people
are trying to fill it out in just exactly
that direction-- to develop measuring techniques and idea
techniques that can be made more specific
than they are now, measurement techniques
and techniques of study of mathematical organization.
And I think we are not too hopelessly
far from doing just that.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: I can envisage
a future in which the grammar school students learn
how to handle computers before they learn how to memorize
the multiplication table.
In fact, they may not have to memorize the multiplication
table.
Why should they?
Let the machine memorize it.
NORBERT WIENER: Well, the trouble--
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Yes, professor, go ahead.
NORBERT WIENER: The trouble is that there
are too many of them are forgetting
how to do their mathematics now and hoping that the machine will
do all of it.
PIERRE ALBERT DUHAMEL: Well, thank you
very much, Professor Wiener and Professor Asimov.
I think that anyone picking up Pierre de Latil's book
will find it very intriguing.
But if they've been listening tonight,
they've also have seen that some of the things that Mr. de
Latil was thinking have already been outdated, not by a machine,
but by the inventor, actually, of the science,
Professor Wiener himself.
So thank you very much and good night.
SPEAKER: I've Been Reading, Thinking by Machine
by Pierre de Latil, published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Here to discuss this book have been Norbert Wiener, Professor
of Mathematics, MIT, and Isaac Asimov, Associate Professor
of Biochemistry, Boston University School of Medicine.
Your I've Been Reading host has been Pierre Albert Duhamel,
Philomathean, Professor in the English department,
Boston College.
Next week the book under discussion
will be the Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard.
Joining Mr. Duhamel at that time will
be David Bacon, visiting lecturer on Clinical Psychology,
Harvard, and associate professor of psychology,
University of Missouri, and Richard O. Howe, Vice President
of the advertising agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine,
and Osborne and manager of the Boston office.
I've Been Reading as simultaneously recorded
for broadcast on WGBH FM, Wednesday at 8:00,
on Sunday at 6:00, and on WCOP on your AM dial,
Sunday evenings at 10:00.
This program was produced and directed by Lewis Barlow.