I
H.
R. J. GROSCH
International Business Machines Corp., White Plains, N. Y.
The Future of Computing This is a tool or technology for every-day living, for increasing the quality or quantity of communication, that will influence the future in a more radical and challenging way than any discovery since fire and the alphabet
IHAYE
enjoyed the opportunity to work in many fields in which the interaction of the human and mechanical processing of data is important, and today I have to look further into the future than is common, certainly among the people who are engrossed in the day to day improvement in this art. The future may indeed be determinate but it is certainly unknown. I like to think that we are talking about a tool which is determining that future in a more radical and a more challenging way than any other discovery that man has made since the beginning of his adaptation of his environment, use of fire, and discovery of the arts of communication: language, writing. the alphabet. We are talking here about a development which, in the long run, will change our way of life, our way of thinking, more radically than even the steam engine, more radically indeed than the familiar transformation in the last couple of generations brought on by the automobile, mass production of luxury items, our emergence for the first time from the economy of poverty. Dr. Ulam stated that the hardware merchants are running ahead of the users. I envy the people in the hardware field because of their ability to pull electronic and transistorized rabbits out of ever larger and more expensive hats, while the poor users are struggling
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to figure out what to do with these wonderful discoveries. Mr. Hubbard has described the Stretch machine, which is 100 times as good as the fantastically good 700 series, Univac Scientific, and Datamatic machines which are currently available. I t is already clear that there is another generation beyond Stretch, a generation which has at least another two decimal orders of magnitude; with this development, we will begin to run into things like the finite velocity of electromagnetic signals. We can then hope to move into different domains, which will perhaps not be time-dominated in the sense of the past technology we now depend on, but which may be with respect to entirely different physical parameters. We can hope to work in the cryogenic field, where the central computer may be reduced to a small object that could be immersed in a tank of liquid helium. Some customer engineering techniques for maintenance of this device would be probably novel! Let’s talk about how fast we have already gone. Let’s talk about the fact that in 1949 the first commercially available electronic computer was delivered to Oak Ridge and was capable of doing a few hundred operations a minute, while Stretch, only 11 years later, will perform 500,000 per second. The IBM-604 (considered quite an ad-
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vance over the electromechanical and relay machines with which we were familiar) was capable of storing 60 or 70 decimal digits-five or ten large numbers-while Stretch is going to have many memories. including a fast memory of perhaps a quarter of a million large numbers as well as storage for many millions of numbers on magnetic tapes, Ramacs, and similar very adventurous and very rewarding storage devices. Reliability is increasing in the time domain, so that breakdowns are less frequent than they used to be, in spite of this fantastic increase in speeds and size. All these things have happened at the beckoning of the hardware merchants, and it is clear that they will continue to happen at a fantastic and challenging rate of speed. The chairman brought up the question of where we are now on the S-shaped growth curve. There are more S-curves than one that we should discuss. The designers are clearly on the linear portion. They struggled along for a while; the machines were broken down most of the time, they were clumsy, they were awkward, they required 18,000 vacuum tubes; but from them have emerged, as we climbed off the foot of the curve onto the linear portion, steadily more powerful families of computing devices. Yes, we are on the linear portion in hardware, but we are still down a t the toe of the
curve when it comes to what people can do with these things. Dr. Hopper spoke effectively on the art of making these machines more amenable to human instruction, an art which has been developed very rapidly and goes back only a few years. Contributions by her group, by IBM, and by university groups have come very fast indeed. We are clearly just beginning to explore this exciting possibility. But this is only the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of the use of these machines.
Aircraft Analogy
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Let me make an analogy about how to rebuild the control panel of this “aeroplane” we are “flying.” Pilots are tired of looking at a great assortment of dials, knobs, switches, and red and green lights. They want the aeroplane to present a picture with which they can make quick, accurate decisions Many of you are familiar with the movement that is afoot right now in the military and commercial aircraft fields, to present the total operational and navigational picture of flying the aeroplane on something like a flat plate cathode ray tube, so that you don’t have to integrate within the slow human brain all these little dial readings and lights that are shining and buzzers that are buzzing a t the present time. And beyond that lies the missile. First the instrumentation, then the integrated information, then the autopilot, but finally the man just gets to be too slow and becomes an obstacle to further progress. So, we have to look into the future when the computer is so much better than its human users that the human user is relegated essentially to the consumer. The aircraft analogy suggests another aspect. Mr. Miller commented about the way in which progress has come about in this field. I wonder if we can use the analogy of the aircraft and the bird to answer his analogy between computers and the human brain. .We will “fly” with our computers, but we may “fly” in a very different manner than the human brain thinks. This was clear again in Dr. Ulam’s remarks about chess playing and other topics. We have a power greater than that of the average use of the human brain within our immediate grasp and tremendous increases beyond that within the lifetimes of most people, but it will probably be a different use of the creative thinking process than that which is done by the human, the organic brain. We can see this clearly by the rate of development in aircraft. I n an aeroplane you start with the flexed control surfaces, the air foil, the air screw, and the internal combustion engine ; the ideas of Lilienthal, Langley, and the Wrights; and in 50 years you sweep u p to the point where we are now contem-
plating interstellar travel, accomplishing cis-lunar travel, talking about nuclear ramjets for high altitude work within the atmosphere. All of this in the length of time that it takes to blink an eye, if you think of the evolutionary process which is improving, I presume, the flight mechanism of the bird. In 50 years how much improved bird flight has ornithology observed? I presume zero, but if we could measure it it would probably be 0.00000001%. That does not mean that there is not a freedom to soar, a freedom to sweep in the eagle that is missing in the nuclear ramjet. I t doesn’t mean that the humming bird has been replaced by the jet fighter. There are many tasks that the human brain will accomplish more econ9mically, more rewardingly, and more amusingly, than giant computers no matter how far we look into the future.
learning Now, let me come a little closer down to earth. You’ve heard some of these tools described. The first machines were fast, the later machines were flexible, the current machines are being told how to talk to people fairly economically. What lies beyond in getting up off the toe of that curve? Well, we have to develop still more sophisticated technique in working with these machines, and a one-word description of this is “learning.” Ipitial experiments going back almost 5 years now have been made in persuading computing machines to learn by experience. By inserting random processes akin to those that Dr. Ulam mentioned, we have enabled the machine, when it has no better idea of what to do, to try something a t random. Human sophistication then tells the machine in some way or another to remember the consequences and when this same situation comes u p again to act in a more biased way toward a favorable result. Now, initially, the human brain plays the key role in determining the mechanism of assessment, and this is our weak point a t present. We don’t know how to tell the machine to bias its preferences in a multiparameter, Gestalt type of situation. If we are designing a refinery process, where we have some idea of a figure of merit based on size, economy, speed of construction, need of repair, etc., we can have some idea of how to improve a situation. When we are talking about a machine to compose music, how to tell it how to improve its techniques is difficult, but not insoluble. However, as we make more and more progress, the human role will be relegated more and more to determining the objectives of the work, and there we have for a few years a t least a role to play. I think the self-motivating computer is several generations ahead, although I believe, in principle, we can expect to
see it. You might think of the missile as a self-motivated aircraft. Tools have been placed at our disposal by current developments in computing machines which we can use to step up this process. Human beings, like birds, progress rather slowly. One of the reasons that computers are clearly going to make us obsolete is the fact that we are not changing fast enough. Of course, with a little more fall-out, the mutation rate will undoubtedly pick up but I don’t see any immediate prospects of its overtaking computing machines, where the improvement rate has been tenfold per year, relatively, since the beginning of the development of the field. Simulation is one of these techniques. Mr. Miller, who is trying to rescue the analog field from impending oblivion by simulating future analog machines on digital computers (a technique which will get him out of the hardware business very rapidly indeed), looks a t this from one point of view. Dr. Hopper, who constructs a computing machine which is easy to program by superimposing a programming system on a hardware machine is, in a sense, using simulation in another way. Mr. Hubbard, who described a way in which an existing computer was used te improve the breed, was thinking of perhaps a still more advanced use of the machines and one currently in use in industry. All these possibilities of building a model before you actually commit yourself to expensive, slow-to-construct, hard-to-test hardware have a fantastic power in improving the breed.
Information Retrieval In your own field of chemistry, we are terribly hampered by our ignorance of the work of others. Other sessions of this Society’s meeting have dealt with information retrieval: what to do about the tremendous and increasing reservoir of new knowledge, which we should be aware of, which would help us to avoid duplicate experiments, whick would help us to proceed link by link through our research thinking: one idea checked in the library leading to another concept, this checked in the library leading to another concept which requires experimentation, back to the library, and so on to greater things. This is hampered by human beings; human beings who write poorly, abstract poorly, and insist on reporting their work in the Russian language. Here we have clear prospects of help from computers in the next 5 or 10 years. There has been an economic barrier and there is still an economic and conceptual barrier, but we can see progress ahead that will impinge on everyday engineering and scientific work, not just on those few enthusiasts who have worked in this field the past few years. This will be another tool that will make human users VOL. 50, NO. 11
NOVEMBER 1958
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of computers and appliers of computers to problems in chemistry and many other fields more alert, more powerful, and quicker to render themselves obsolete. Language is a subclass of this sort of thing. We already have some experiments in translation from Russian to English and English to Russian, but they are not sophisticated and not as good as human ones. At present. they are probably not as cheap as the work done by human beings. Input We have prospects of more flexible input devices. Voice listeners and script readers are a long way off and probably will never be economical. When it comes to printed pages which are already embedded in our culture, we currently would have to transcribe them onto paper or magnetic rape (using key punching techniques). In the very near future an economic and practical technique will make available a tremendous reservoir of old, printed matter at a much lower cost than current retyping; many remote transmissions of currently produced information parallel the production of the printed record. Time magazine is transmitted over telegraph and radio links to mechanical typesetting devices in remote locations. And the reels of perforated, paper tape which parallel the printed magazine are stored away and will be available for information retrieval, without retyping. All books composed on monotype have at some stage in their evolution reels of paper tape which is sent to the actual typecasting machines and could be translated by computer techniques into magnetic tapes for memory and other similar devices of storage ready for retrieval when the techniques (semantic and programming) of information retrieval are ready. So here are new possibilities of input. As our civilization becomes more and more closely knit, as it becomes more and more necessary to know the bank balance of your branch manager in Prague or your traveling salesman with his Diners’ Club card, we can expect more and more mechanical transmission of digital information ready to go into the computing machine. output Now as to output, you have heard me disagree with the long-term view of Dr. Ulam about the value of the human being, on the grounds that you can’t afford to let human beings into the loop in the future. The machine which draws a picture for him on the cathode-ray screen may be costing anywhere from $5 to $50 a minute, and, while he sits around and makes decisions, money is clicking away a t the cash register. If those decisions are of sufficient importance and we do not know how to mech-
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anize them-and this is a typical research situation-then I’ll build him a cathoderay screen and he can sit there and look a t it by the hour. And I’m sure for our culture and for Los Alamos and for the AEC that this will pay off, but it is sure one hell of a way to run an accounting department, and we don‘t propose to do nonresearch tasks that way. Economics
I’ve come back again and again to this question of economics. A little empirical observation, which I made in the late ~ O ’ S ,is still current, still valuable for broad estimation purposes. Apparently current advances still conform to this rough rule, which is that as the power of the computing machine goes up the economy goes up roughlv as the square root. If you build a machine like Srretch, that is a 100-fold improvement over the 704, it will be a success if it is only ten times more expensive. Let me phrase it another way. If you want to do a job twice as cheap, you’ve got to do it four times as fast. Surprising how closely a very wide range of equipment, not just IBM, not just electronic, in some cases not even digital, has conformed to this rule. There is a magnificent place in the IBM profit and loss statement and in our American civilization for the medium and small machine. There are 80,000 key punches and verifiers installed in IBM customers’ offices at the present time. While they don’t rent for very much a month, the total looks mighty good. There is a place for that sort of device. There are wcll over a thousand of the 650 computers (the mediumsized drum calculators which were just a flicker in peoples’ eyes 5 years ago) currently running and a couple of hundred of these large computers, with which my predictions today are largely concerned. Now this square root law indicates that if we are talking about front-running machines, machines to learn how to be berter machines, machines to translate Russian, machines to replace the human being a t his creative tasks. they are going to be big and cost a lor of money. Ergo, we can’t afford to have human beings in the loop except a t the research level and then as little as possible. Time on them-where it now costs a few dollars a minute-is going to cost a few dollars a second before we run out of hardware skills. Effects
Think of the people who had vision when the automobile was first discovered. They took off the whip socket and put in an internal combustion engine and they said, “Gee whiz, we’re sure going to have fast communications now. Why, a guy will be able to go from his house at one end of the village to his
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place of business at the other end of the village in a quarter of the time that it takes with a horse and carriage; he won’t have to rig up all that harness, he won’t have to feed the poor beast before he starts out. There are other economies, but the main one is time. We’re going to shrink our little village right down.” And what happened? I t takes hours to get across from one part of the New York suburbs to another and an hour to cross Manhattan Island, and the reasons are those fast-moving automobiles. The heavy traffic, the shortage of parking, the development of Suburbia and Exurbia caused an over-all change that was different from the one predicted. Now this. of course, is my way of wiggling out of all the things I have said so far. I, unlike a computing machine, am a very imperfect predictor. When the automobile boys thought that their horseless carriage was going to make a big change they were right, although in many cases they weren’t too sharp in figuring out what the changes were going to be. And I am posirive that this is a tool or technology for every-day living, for increasing the quality or quantity of communication in our society, that is going to be of extreme importance in the future. An audience with varied interests from a field that is not too deeply immersed in the technology I a m describing always wants to know how this affects them. Should I go home and sell my adding machine? IVhat is going to happen in my own bailiwick? How can I affect this process and how can I join in it? The answer is that every one of you many times a day is confronted with a situation that warrants the thought of mechanization. I don’t mean to imply that this is economically feasible, that all the hardware necessary to do the job is tested out and in existence, that the intellectual disciplines like automatic programming and learning and all that are developed far enough to tackle some of the things you see, but your part of this job is to look at these things with an open rather than a jaundiced eye, to say: “Here is something that I wish could be done in a computer, here is a way that I would like to be relieved of a burden, here is a way 1 would like to make my department operate more efficiently.” Keep abreast of what is happening in this and related fields. Find out what is gcing on that you could use and, with this positive approach and this open eye, you can help us get off the toe onto the linear portion of the curve, and bring increased sophistication, increased wealth, and I hope increased happiness for all of us. RECEIVED for review April 16, 1958 ACCEPTED August 8, 1958 Division of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Symposium on Computers in the Chemical World, 133rd Meeting, ACS, San Francisco, Calif., April 1958.
