A very short post today.
Edmund Berkeley wrote this in 1949:
“We can even imagine what new machinery for handling information may some day become: a small pocket instrument that we carry around with us, talking to it whenever we need to, and either storing information in it or receiving information from it.”
Berkeley, writing in 1949, yes, that’s right, 1949, predicted our current AI age in remarkably precise ways in his book Giant Brains or Machines That Think.
Here are a few passages:
“It is often easier for men to create a device than to guide it well afterwards … What sort of control over machines that think do we need in human society?”
“What shall I do when a robot machine renders worthless all the skill I have spent years in developing?”
“Social control must also be concerned with how the advantages from robot machines are to be shared.”
- Giant Brains or Machines That Think, 1949
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