Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

The likelihood, of course, is that she will be both.

The thrust toward some form of man-machine symbiosis is furthered by our increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. A great deal of much-publicized work is being done to facilitate the interaction of men and computers. But quite apart from this, Russian and American scientists have both been experimenting with the placement or implantation of detectors that pick up signals from the nerve ends at the stub of an amputated limb. These signals are then amplified and used to activate an artificial limb, thereby making a machine directly and sensitively responsive to the nervous system of a human being. The human need not "think out" his desires; even involuntary impulses are transmittable. The responsive behavior of the machine is as automatic as the behavior of ones' own hand, eye or leg.

In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, novelist, poet and pioneer aviator, described buckling himself into the seat of a fighter plane during World War II. "All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the 'intercom' running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart ..." We have come far since those distant days. Space biology is marching irresistibly toward the day when the astronaut will not merely be buckled into his capsule, but become a part of it in the full symbiotic sense of the phrase.

One aim is to make the craft itself a wholly self-sufficient universe, in which algae is grown for food, water is recovered from body waste, air is recycled to purge it of the ammonia entering the atmosphere from urine, etc. In this totally enclosed fully regenerative world, the human being becomes an integral part of an on-going micro-ecological process whirling through the vastnesses of space. Thus Theodore Cordon, author of The Future and himself a leading space engineer, writes: "Perhaps it would be simpler to provide life support in the form of machines that plug into the astronaut. He could be fed intravenously using a liquid food compactly stored in a remote pressurized tank. Perhaps direct processing of body liquid wastes, and conversion to water, could be accomplished by a new type of artificial kidney built in as part of the spaceship. Perhaps sleep could be induced electronically ... to lower his metabolism ..." Und so weiter. One after another, the body functions of the human become interwoven with, dependent on, and part of, the machine functions of the capsule.

The ultimate extension of such work, however, is not necessarily to be found in the outer reaches of space; it may well become a common part of everyday life here on the mother planet. This is the direct link-up of the human brain – stripped of its supporting physical structures – with the computer. Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the supercomputers of the future may be massed human brains. The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decisionmaking. Participants in a RAND Corporation study conducted several years ago were asked when this development might occur. Answers ranged from as soon as 1990 to "never." But the median date given was 2020 – well within the lifetime of today's teen-agers.

In the meantime, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis. In one of the most fascinating, frightening and intellectually provocative experiments ever recorded, Professor Robert White, director of neurosurgery at the Metropolitan General Hospital in Cleveland, has given evidence that the brain can be isolated from its body and kept alive after the "death" of the rest of the organism. The experiment, described in a brilliant article by Oriana Fallaci, saw a team of neurosurgeons cut the brain out of a rhesus monkey, discard the body, then hook the brain's carotid arteries up to another monkey, whose blood then continued to bathe the disembodied organ, keeping it alive.

Said one of the members of the medical team, Dr. Leo Massopust, a neurophysiologist: "The brain activity is largely better than when the brain had a body ... No doubt about it. I even suspect that without his senses, he can think more quickly. What kind of thinking, I don't know. I guess he is primarily a memory, a repository for information stored when be had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience."

The brain survived for five hours. It could have lasted much longer, had it served the purposes of research. Professor White has successfully kept other brains alive for days, using machinery, rather than a living monkey, to keep the brain washed with blood. "I don't think we have reached the stage," he told Miss Fallaci, "where you can turn men into robots, obedient sheep. Yet ... it could happen, it isn't impossible. If you consider that we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man, if you consider that we can isolate the brain of a man and make it work without its body ... To me, there is no longer any gap between science fiction and science ... We could keep Einstein's brain alive and make it function normally."

Not only, Professor White implies, can we transfer the head of one man to the shoulders of another, not only can we keep a head or a brain "alive" and functioning, but it can all be done, with "existing techniques." Indeed, he declares, "The Japanese will be the first to [keep an isolated human head alive]. I will not, because I haven't resolved as yet this dilemma: Is it right or not?" A devout Catholic, Dr. White is deeply troubled by the philosophical and moral implications of his work.

As the brain surgeons and the neurologists probe further, as the bio-engineers and the mathematicians, the communications experts and robot-builders become more sophisticated, as the space men and their capsules grow closer and closer to one another, as machines begin to embody biological components and men come bristling with sensors and mechanical organs, the ultimate symbiosis approaches. The work converges. Yet the greatest marvel of all is not organ transplantation or symbiosis or underwater engineering. It is not technology, nor science itself.

The greatest and most dangerous marvel of all is the complacent past-orientation of the race, its unwillingness to confront the reality of acceleration. Thus man moves swiftly into an unexplored universe, into a totally new stage of eco-technological development, firmly convinced that "human nature is eternal" or that "stability will return." He stumbles into the most violent revolution in human history muttering, in the words of one famous, though myopic sociologist, that "the processes of modernization ... have been more or less 'completed.'" He simply refuses to imagine the future.

In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that "Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell's laboratory and changed the world.

On the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the world that "No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances."