Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Another 10,000 pioneers are already equipped with artificial heart valves made of dacron mesh. Implantable hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressure, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will also carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized "stimulator" attached to the spine. By turning a midget "radio" on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push-button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients.

Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medicalelectronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the uman outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle – preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components – we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the population. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. Sir George Pickering, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has warned that unless we watch out, "those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the earth. I find this," he added rather unnecessarily, "a terrifying prospect." Just such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain – which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society.

Today we struggle to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to replace. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing "super-people," so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; lovers with sex-intensifying neural machinery. In short, we shall no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it – to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us.

Under these circumstances, what happens to our age-old definitions of "human-ness?" How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, sex, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when the body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of man and machine – called "Cyborgs" – are closer than most people suspect.

Today the man with a pacemaker or a plastic aorta is still recognizably a man. The inanimate part of his body is still relatively unimportant in terms of his personality and consciousness. But as the proportion of machine components rises, what happens to his awareness of self, his inner experience? If we assume that the brain is the seat of consciousness and intelligence, and that no other part of the body affects personality or self very much, then it is possible to conceive of a disembodied brain – a brain without arms, legs, spinal cord or other equipment – as a self, a personality, an embodiment of awareness. It may then become possible to combine the human brain with a whole set of artificial sensors, receptors and effectors, and to call that tangle of wires and plastic a human being.

All this may seem to resemble medieval speculation about the number of angels who can pirouette on a pinhead, yet the first small steps toward some form of man-machine symbiosis are already being taken. Moreover, they are being taken not by a lone mad scientist, but by thousands of highly trained engineers, mathematicians, biologists, surgeons, chemists, neurologists and communications specialists.

Dr. W. G. Walter's mechanical "tortoises" are machines that behave as though they had been psychologically conditioned. These tortoises were early specimens of a growing breed of robots ranging from the "Perceptron" which could learn (and even generalize) to the more recent "Wanderer," a robot capable of exploring an area, building up in its memory an "image" of the terrain, and able even to indulge in certain operations comparable, at least in some respects, to "contemplative speculation" and "fantasy." Experiments by Ross Ashby, H. D. Block, Frank Rosenblatt and others demonstrate that machines can learn from their mistakes, improve their performance, and, in certain limited kinds of learning, outstrip human

students. Says Block, professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University: "I don't think there's a task you can name that a machine can't do – in principle. If you can define a task and a human can do it, then a machine can, at least in theory, also do it. The converse, however, is not true." Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly.

Despite setbacks and difficulties, the roboteers are moving forward. Recently they enjoyed a collective laugh at the expense of one of the leading critics of the robot-builders, a former RAND Corporation computer specialist named Hubert L. Dreyfus. Arguing that computers would never be able to match human intelligence, Dreyfus wrote a lengthy paper heaping vitriolic scorn on those who disagreed with him. Among other things, he declared, "No chess program can play even amateur chess." In context, he appeared to be saying that none ever would. Less than two years later, a graduate student at MIT, Richard Greenblatt, wrote a chess-playing computer program, challenged Dreyfus to a match, and had the immense satisfaction of watching the computer annihilate Dreyfus to the cheers of the "artificial intelligence" researchers.

In a quite different field of robotology there is progress, too. Technicians at Disneyland have created extremely life-like computer-controlled humanoids capable of moving their arms and legs, grimacing, smiling, glowering, simulating fear, joy and a wide range of other emotions. Built of clear plastic that, according to one reporter, "does everything but bleed," the robots chase girls, play music, fire pistols, and so closely resemble human forms that visitors routinely shriek with fear, flinch and otherwise react as though they were dealing with real human beings. The purposes to which these robots are put may seem trivial, but the technology on which they are based is highly sophisticated. It depends heavily on knowledge acquired from the space program – and this knowledge is accumulating rapidly.

There appears to be no reason, in principle, why we cannot go forward from these present primitive and trivial robots to build humanoid machines capable of extremely varied behavior, capable even of "human" error and seemingly random choice – in short, to make them behaviorally indistinguishable from humans except by means of highly sophisticated or elaborate tests. At that point we shall face the novel sensation of trying to determine whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty girl or a carefully wired robot. (This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between men and machines, including emotional and even sexual relationships. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that manmachine sexual relationships may not be too far distant. Pointing out that men often develop emotional attachments to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the "ethical" questions arising from our treatment of "these mechanical objects of our affection and passion." A serious inquiry into these issues is to be found in an article by Roland Puccetti in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 18 (1967) 39-51.)