The factory robot that crushed a man to death in Japan last year did little to silence the talk that machines are a threat to human preeminence. That talk has been alive ever since people first discovered that they could manufacture tools vastly superior to themselves; in Samuel Butler's satire Erewhon (1872), the citizens establish a museum of old machines in which they at once deposit and abandon their mechanical inventions, which they believed would swallow up their souls. When machines possess artificial intelligence, like computers, the human fear of being overtaken seems both more urgent and more complex. Science-fiction writers from Capek to Asimov have built much of their genre around robots, androids, computers and their kin—each fairly boring and predictable as characters, but all presenting the same basic paradox: that they will eventually take command of the world, and that a man can beat them every time.
This proposition is not as contradictory as it sounds, since, for one thing, the fact that it takes real (i.e., natural) intelligence to create the artificial kind would seem to give humanity a perpetual edge; and, for another, people are able to hold contraries in their heads simultaneously—a feat that is reassuring in itself, since it is one of the things that distinguishes men from machines. Indeed, man tends to search out such distinctions even as he endows his machines with increasing sophistication, as if to make sure that his evolution is no slower than that of his creations. Still, it is sometimes nerve-racking to read what these boxes can do. Joseph Weizenbaum, of M.I.T., who has recently come to criticize computer education for children as a context for "toy problems," nonetheless got more than a toy gasp out of the public in 1968 when he unveiled his project ELIZA—an IBM 7094 programmed by Weizenbaum to "practice" psychotherapy—and then published a "conversation" between ELIZA and a real patient:
Patient: You are like my father in some ways.
ELIZA: What resemblance do you see?
Patient: You are not very aggressive, but I think you don't want me to notice that.
ELIZA: What makes you think I am not very aggressive?
Patient: You don't argue with me.
ELIZA: Why do you think I don't argue with you?
Patient: You are afraid of me.
ELIZA: Does it please you to believe I am afraid of you?
The elements of parody notwithstanding, it is no joke to see a machine become a man, especially in an era whose main (if somewhat pro forma) worry centers on men becoming machines.