It can be maintained that every man is perfectly familiar with at least one thinking machine, because he has a late-type model sitting on his shoulders. For if the brain is not a machine, what is it?
Critics of this viewpoint (who are probably now in the minority) may argue that the brain is in some fundamental way different from any nonliving device. But even if this is true, it does not follow that its functions cannot be duplicated, or even surpassed, by a non-organic machine.
As soon as the borders of electronic intelligence are passed, there will be a kind of chain reaction, because the machines will rapidly improve themselves. In a very few generations—computer generations, which by this time may last only a few months—there will be a mental explosion; the merely intelligent machine will swiftly give way to the ultraintelligent machine.
Perhaps 99 percent of all the men who have ever lived have known only need; they have been driven by necessity and have not been allowed the luxury of choice. In the future, this will no longer be true. It may be the greatest virtue of the ultraintelligent machine that it will force us to think about the purpose and meaning of human existence. It will compel us to make some far-reaching and perhaps painful decisions.
The main problem of the future—and a future that may be witnessed by many who are alive today—will be the construction of social systems based on the principle not of full employment but rather full unemployment.
Tomorrow’s world may differ from ours so radically that such terms as labor, capital, communism, private enterprise, state control will have changed their meanings completely—if, indeed, they are still in use. At the very least, we may expect a society that no longer regards work as meritorious or leisure as one of the Devil’s more ingenious devices. Even today, there is not much left of the old puritan ethic; automation will drive the last nails into its coffin.
My favorite competitor is the old lady who objected to space exploration because we should stay home and watch TV, “as God meant us to.”
Since all the immemorial forms of “getting and spending ” will have been rendered obsolete by the machines, it would appear that boredom will replace war and hunger as the greatest enemy of mankind.
It is unfortunate that, to most people, “science” now means incomprehensible mathematical complexities: that it could be the most exciting and entertaining of all occupations is something that they find impossible to believe. Yet the fact remains that, before they are ruined by what is laughingly called education, all normal children have an absorbing interest and curiosity about the universe that, if properly developed, could keep them happy for as many centuries as they may wish to live.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God—but to create him.