Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...Phipps has a view of human nature which makes it as malleable as a baseball game where the batters make sacrifice plays for each other. Perhaps this dugout philosophy has truth in it, but that the rules for happiness and self discovery should effuse from the straight-jacket mind of Wally Troy is repulsive to anyone's sensibility. Ruby Troy's loneliness, which Wally fails to understand or aid, is the most genuine problem, which Phipps fails to develop, since it would interfere with his pat ending...
...population is badly distributed, internal migration is a possibility. In the lush valleys of eastern Bolivia, labor is so scarce that soldiers have to be called in to harvest the sugar crop; yet one-third of Bolivia's population continues to live in the Andes, scratching a barely human existence out of dwindling tin deposits. In Indonesia, three-quarters of the nation's close to 90 million people live in cheek-by-jowl squalor on the island of Java, while most of neighboring Sumatra is left in jungle. But habit and human contrariness being what...
Even rather simple computing machines, Wiener pointed out, act much faster than humans and with much more precision. "This means that although they are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until a time long after it is relevant. By the very slowness of our human activities, our effective control of our machines may be nullified...
...play checkers, some modern computers have learned, after only 20 hours of play, to beat the man who programed them. When the machines get a little brighter, they may learn economic games, such as figuring out the production schedule of an industry or manipulating the stock market. Once their human masters have set them to work, it is quite possible that an overeducated machine may sweep its masters to disaster before they realize clearly what...
Wiener foresees a time when modern pushbutton war will become so swift and complex that only computers can think fast enough to make its strategic decisions. They will train themselves by playing war games, as human generals do now, and will figure out more quickly than humans when it seems necessary to push the fatal buttons. But Wiener does not trust the motives of even the brightest war-making machine. "If the rules for victory in a war game," he says, "do not correspond to what we actually wish for our country, it .is more likely that such a machine...