Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation

Chapte

r 1

ISAAC’S KIDS

1950

Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands!

—Isaac Asimov, Astounding magazine

I was born in the middle of the big, fat fifties, a decade stuffed with lardy piecrust, Fluffernutters, and fear. According to the Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, my birth year saw the first known use of Cold War terminology like first-strike, dirty bomb, antimissile, Turing test, and postapocalyptic. With the Doomsday Clock of the Atomic Scientists set at an alarming two minutes to midnight, the world was closer to Mutual Assured Destruction, better known by its grim acronym MAD, than it would ever be again, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis.¹

I not only picked the wrong time to be born, but the wrong place: huddled on the border between Canada and western New York State, the Niagara Peninsula may have seemed a sleepy backwater, all farms and factories and tourist traps, but as my dad pointed out, We’ll be the first to go. His favorite magazine, Popular Science, said that Niagara Falls was a first-strike target for the Soviets because the hydroelectric station powered America’s eastern seaboard, right down to Washington, DC.

The possibility of death from above was a gray thundercloud on the robin’s-egg-blue sky of my childhood, starting with the basketball-sized Soviet satellite, Sputnik. We arrived about a year apart: I, on October 15, 1956, Sputnik on October 4, 1957. I had barely blown out the candles on my first birthday cake when the Soviets were at it again, launching poor little Laika the dog on Sputnik II. Meanwhile, down on Earth, I slept my cozy baby sleep, my capitalist cats curled in a box, safe from being blown into orbit. But the grown-ups had bigger worries than pets in space: the Soviets had the jump on us. They not only had the H-bomb, but, with Sputnik, eyes in the sky. The metal mouths of air-raid sirens gaped from the rooftops of high buildings and a red-and-black flyer appeared in our mailbox with a checklist to help us turn our cellar into a bomb shelter: stock up on canned goods, radio batteries, and water, and get ready to ride it out. The flyer also explained how to brace yourself for a nuclear attack: crouch against a good, solid wall and put your arms over your head.

Kryptonite appears after the atomic age begins.

Even the Man of Steel was not immune from the nuclear threat. In 1949, Superman comics introduced Kryptonite, a deadly radioactive by-product of the atomic blast that destroyed the Man of Steel’s home planet, Krypton.²

I enjoyed looking at the drawing of the nuclear family in the flyer, the little girl taking cover in her crinoline dress. I guessed that the Russians had attacked while she was on her way to a birthday party.

Every Saturday morning, high-pitched as a dentist’s drill, a thirty-second tone bled into our cartoons, followed by a voice reassuring us that this is a test, this is only a test. If this were a real emergency, you would receive instructions for the Niagara Frontier.

We knew that the Emergency Broadcast System tone would be the last thing we’d hear before atomic light flooded our cellars and crawl-spaces, and our retinas scorched and our irradiated skin sloughed off like wet Play-Doh. One day, the alert would be real, but until then we could go back to laughing at the hapless Russian spies Boris and Natasha on The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show. Fear became a reflex that we exercised until it hardened into muscle memory. As cultural historian Spencer R. Weart has pointed out, Many children understood that no matter how nicely they obeyed instructions, their chances of surviving an attack might not be very high.³

It seems remarkable today that kids my age didn’t grow up to be chronically anxious, paranoid, and suffering from low-level PTSD. (Or, maybe we did—it could go a long way toward explaining my generation’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, from narcissism and helicopter parenting, to our habit of overmedicating and over-insuring ourselves.) In the 1970s, research into the lasting effects of nuclear fear on the psyche of an entire generation found that young adults clearly remembered and even relived their childhood fears of the bomb.⁴

I’m sure the authorities have everything under control, Johnny!

At the movies, monsters were dredged up out of radioactive sludge to entertain teenagers, the most famous being Godzilla (1954), a Japanese dinosaur-like creature blasted off the ocean floor by nuclear testing. Soon, gigantic irradiated insects, animals, and even vegetables were crowding movie screens, often starring a teenage hero who tries to warn the grownups about the looming threat, but is dismissed with a statement like: The authorities have things under control, Bobby/Janie/Billy/Sally: go to your room and do your homework.

There was only one safe place: the future, also known as the World of Tomorrow, when technology would leapfrog over the nuclear threat. World leaders and their brilliant, rescued-from-Nazi-Germany rocket scientists would surely come up with clever ways to save civilization (at least, the capitalist part of it, not those populated by godless Communists). We needed spaceships to help us escape our Krypton, and intelligent machines that could think more clearly than we could, if we had any hope of survival as a species.

But what exactly would our future look like? And would we manage to reach it before we blew ourselves to kingdom come?

When it comes to predicting the future, we citizens of the twenty-first century are an arrogant bunch. In a world of T.E.D. Talks, and Futurist as a job description, we’re confident that we have a handle on what our lives will look like in twenty or thirty years, unlike those knuckleheads in the 1960s who were obsessed with jet packs, moving skywalks, and flying cars. Our parents’ generation was advanced enough to put a man on the moon—how could they not have seen the Internet coming?

Yet, if you look further back in time, to the late 1940s and early 1950s, it’s remarkable how much a few influential thinkers actually got right about the future, predicting information management systems, intelligent automation, and machines that could think and learn. Their prescience is especially surprising when you consider the limits of day-to-day technology, circa 1950: TV was new (and there still wasn’t much to watch); telephone lines were usually shared (and a trans-Atlantic call had to be booked, in advance, through an operator); a computer wasn’t a machine but a human who did calculations; horses delivered milk, bread, and eggs; and iceboxes and wringer washers were standard household appliances. In my little Canadian border town, people were still running the British Union Jack up the flagpole instead of the now-familiar red maple leaf.

Yet two visionaries from that era anticipated the future that is unfolding around us now, more than sixty years later. Both were scientists and writers. Both would write bestselling books that captured the public’s imagination in the years immediately following World War II. Both believed in a future dominated by thinking machines (i.e., computers), sentient, trainable robots and what we would now call artificial intelligence. Both invented new words to describe fields of study that didn’t yet exist. But while one, Isaac Asimov, believed robots would be our saviors, protectors, and benevolent governors, the other, Nor-bert Wiener, believed the value of intelligent automation to humanity might be offset by its potential to dehumanize us.

Wiener seems like an unlikely candidate to write one of the bestselling books of his time. Born in 1894, a child prodigy and the son of a Harvard professor, he grew up to be a brilliant, stereotypically absentminded mathematician who joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1920. He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy you’d invite to a dinner party for his sparkling personality: a number of the anecdotes that crop up about Wiener center around the fact that he was an unrepentant cheapskate with a tendency to pontificate. Nevertheless, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine went through at least five printings in 1948 alone, and more in the years that followed, despite being peppered with mind-numbing mathematical equations. Cybernetics anticipated a number of technical fields that didn’t exist yet—information technology, computer science, and artificial intelligence among them. Wiener predicted that one day intelligent machines would not only perform repetitive tasks but also think and learn. This could be great for humanity, suggested Wiener, or catastrophic: it was completely possible that machines might take control away from humanity and render us obsolete.

Because Wiener’s book was written primarily for a technical audience, no one was more surprised than Wiener himself by its popularity. One New York Times book reviewer enthused that it was one of the most influential works of the twentieth century and compared it to the work of Galileo, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill.⁵ British technological historian Jeremy Norman recently described Cybernetics as a peculiar, rambling blend of popular and highly technical writing and wryly observed that despite the vast number of copies sold, most were probably not read in their entirety by their purchasers⁶—perhaps not unlike copies of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988) that never saw their spines cracked.

In 1950, Wiener followed up Cybernetics with The Human Use of Human Beings, an easier read for nonscientists that included less math and more human-centered philosophy and politics. Wiener, who had been involved in the war effort as a designer of antiaircraft systems, was opposed to scientists working closely with government or the military because he saw mathematicians as potential armorers in future wars—a nod to the role of scientists in developing the fearsome atomic bomb.

The word Wiener invented—cybernetics, from the Greek word for steering or navigation—is only used in technical fields today, but cyber lives on as a prefix for all things digital: cyberspace, cyberpunk, cybercrime, Cyber Monday, and so forth. More importantly, Cybernetics explained information technology and computers (although Wiener didn’t call them by that name) in a way that most Americans could understand—that is, if they actually read the book.

Just as Wiener predicted, less than a decade after the publication of Cybernetics, banks and other large businesses started using mainframe computers manufactured by IBM, General Electric, Univac, Honeywell, and others to process payments and store large amounts of information on punch cards and magnetic tape. Computer brains—the first computer chips—held out the possibility of a rapid acceleration in computing power that could in turn produce the trainable robots Wiener also had written