others, he phoned him just as Eric had hoped. “I wouldn’t want to
disappoint the boy,” Clarke said later. The Clarke-Meyer conversation
was brief—words to the effect that Clarke would be in Washington in 1984
and he wished Eric luck in the future—but it served its purpose. “It’s
the first time I’ve ever had an international call,” Eric said. “My
first phone DX!”
My computer DX reached me one Saturday morning at nine, an uneventful
occurrence except for a broken telephone connection when I dialed Clarke
back to start the modeming. Our two Kaypros clicked the next try. I
received a prepared file from Clarke of about one thousand words, and
afterwards we tapped out some 250 words:
Q. When will you be coming to Washington so I can tell Eric, who
naturally will want to attend your speech?
A. I am afraid it will be a very private affair, as it takes place in
the White House! But I expect to be in Washington in late April.[89]
Q. I am planning to call my ergonomics chapter “The Hal Syndrome,” and
if you’ve used that phrase before, I’d like to give you credit.
A. I don’t recall ever using the term, but it’s a good idea, and you’re
welcome, anyway.
Footnote 89:
President Reagan’s campaign schedule and trip to China forced him to
cancel his April 1984 meeting with Clarke.
That’s part of the conversation with the typos cleaned up—on-line typing
isn’t for the vain. Clarke was brisk at the keyboard. There wasn’t any
doubt I was “talking” to a professional author. Hyams was fast, too,
reaching maybe eighty or ninety per minute on good days; and yet as
Peter pointed out, typing speed didn’t matter that much, since you
normally would compose at leisure, then squirt out your prepared
file.[90]
Footnote 90:
In the postscript of _Ascent to Orbit_, Clarke described himself and
Hyams as “lousy typists.” They may be in terms of accuracy but not
speed—and, of course, with a computer, you can correct mistakes so
easily that accuracy becomes secondary to speed.
The Clarke-Rothman connection ran just fourteen minutes and cost $25.11
on my phone bill—a good case for the economy of global computer
communications. I didn’t know what Clarke’s rates might be. But if I’d
given a thousand words to a Telex service in Washington, D.C., a one-way
message to Sri Lanka would have totaled some $125. And if I could have
afforded my own Telex machine? Well, the connect charges alone still
would have exceeded $60. Moreover, my $25.11 charge was for a 300-baud
connection, a slowpoke one by some business computer standards. With a
1,200-baud link—a strong possibility since the connection had proved so
reliable for Clarke and Hyams at 300 baud—my phone bill might have been
well under $15 even on a weekday. And with everything sent already
typed, it might have been between $5 and $10. Imagine the thousands of
dollars a company could save using micros instead of Telex for regular
communications with faraway offices.
In one of the questions sent there Marco Polo fashion, Eric asked if
computers someday would replace secretaries who took dictation. Could
the machines display the words on their screens and electronically
police spelling and grammar? “We will certainly get computers that can
take dictation,” Clarke replied by modem, “and this may lead to two
desirable results—better elocution and rationalisation of spelling.”
Yes, yes. Maybe someday American and British computers could even spell
alike. Although Eric’s question was a very good one, it was passé in
many technical circles, as he himself must have known. Articles were
already appearing in micro magazines about low-cost computers that could
recognize simple commands like SAVE (to preserve material on a disk).
One of the big problems with speech recognition was usability with
different voices. But I had no doubt that practical machines with a
vocabulary fit for the business world would be taking dictation by 2001.
The keyboard would remain, however. Not everyone would want to dictate;
I suspected even two decades from now I’d still prefer the pleasure of
letting my fingers linger over the keys. Then again, how did I know?
Just a few years ago I could have seen myself at only a _typewriter_
keyboard.
As for spelling checkers—well, there again the basic technology was
already around. I myself would be proofing this chapter with The WORD
Plus, a 45,000-word electronic dictionary that would flag the places
where my spellings contradicted it. Not that The WORD Plus would ever
replace proofreaders at The _New Yorker_. It would let you use “his”
when you meant “this”; it was absolutely incapable of considering
spellings in context. Even by 2001 the checkers might lack that
capability. But eventually they would respond perfectly to context, as
would grammar checkers. That might require artificial intelligence, the
ability of computers to reason independently without their humans laying
out the machines’ tasks in detail. But the day would come.
Of course even the best prophets could err. In his 1945 article entitled
“Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio
Coverage?” Clarke predicted communications satellites but missed by a
mile in another area. “It seems unlikely that we will have to wait as
much as twenty years,” he said then, “before atomic-powered rockets are
developed....” Still, I appreciated Clarke’s general philosophy of
prediction: Experts are more often wrong in saying something _can’t_ be
done than in saying that it _can_.
“Do you think there will ever be a HAL?” Eric asked Clarke.
“Yes,” Clarke said, “HAL will arrive—but not by 2001!”
I agreed. But confusingly, HAL wouldn’t necessarily be a pure-bred
silicon creation; I could see him as a hybrid of silicon chips and
biochips, or maybe just the latter.
Created by an organic process, the biochips might have complexity and
power far beyond those of old-fashioned machines with silicon.[91]
Footnote 91:
In the early 1960s Clarke himself wrote in _Profiles of the Future_
that “the first genuine thinking machines may be _grown_ rather than
constructed; already some crude but very stimulating experiments have
been carried out along these lines. Several artificial organisms have
been built that are capable of rewiring themselves to adapt to
changing circumstances.”
What’s more, instead of a machine acting like a man, scientists might
help join men with machines, with everyone receiving brain implants at
birth. Men might turn into Hal before Hal became a man. For years
science-fiction writers had been predicting cyborgs, man-machine unions.
In some ways, humans might forever defy emulation. “Even with computers’
vast memories, I’m skeptical as to whether a machine could give
judgments based on ethics,” said another of the questioners, Jerry
terHorst. “How can executives live with this limitation? Might computers
have a way of taking the sharp edge off ethical questions? Quite often
you can put things in a machine or say things to a machine, but
maybe—because of the way it operates—you must conform to its system. You
can’t very well couch an ethical question for the machine, because I
don’t think a computer can weigh it ethically. It can certainly weigh it
procedurally, but whether it can weigh it ethically is another question.
I’m wondering whether computers might get in the way of having to make
some of the ethical decisions that businesses are always required to
make.”
Clarke replied, “It will certainly be some time before computers
understand ethics (not too many humans do, for that matter), but _in the
long run_ it is impossible to rule out any aspect of human activity
which cannot be reproduced or at least imitated by computer to any
desired degree of precision. Of course, some things will be too
complicated to be worth doing.” Elsewhere in the response Clarke did
say: “I know nothing about corporate or any other form of management,
but obviously in principle computers can assist decision making greatly.
However—GIGO!” Garbage in, garbage out!
Already electronic decision programs were available for businessmen,
helping them consider financial factors—but in most cases, not very much
more. Besides, the people who most needed guidance from “ethical”
software would be the least likely to use it. Imagine Richard Nixon
booting up a disk to ponder if he should cover up Watergate.
All this wasn’t an abstraction for terHorst. He himself had resigned as
press secretary in a disagreement with Gerald Ford over the Nixon
pardon. Now he worked as Washington public-affairs director for another
Ford, the car company. It undoubtedly had banks of computers, and like
any other automakers’, they must be toting up the costs of adding
various safety precautions to cars. Critics of the auto industry charged
that manufacturers considered only their ledgers—the cost of the
precautions versus that of lawsuits. Would software someday weigh the
ethical issues along with the numbers, and _should_ it? That was hardly
a question just for the auto industry. What about a construction company
evaluating building materials of different strengths? Or a book
publisher weighing its profitability against the menace to public health
that would result from publication of a fad diet book. I was reactionary
enough to consider those final decisions forever beyond the realm of
even computers as sophisticated as HAL. In the future, though, how many
executives would feel that way? Jerry terHorst’s ethics question was
easily my favorite.
He also asked, “What about the general issue of trust among people
communicating by computer? Can people make policy, sign contracts,
settle multimillion questions without shaking hands? You can have two
people with computers in different locations calling up the same
statistics from the same memory bank. Yet isn’t it possible that the
necessary trust may not occur until the two get together in person?”
“Your point that people must meet to establish trust is one theme of my
novel _Imperial Earth_,” Clarke replied. “After that, they can work
together through telecommunications.
“I had unexpected confirmation of this idea from a visiting reader who
happened to be the Russian ambassador-at-large in charge of the Indian
Ocean. He said, ‘You’re quite right. You have to look into the other
fellow’s eyes before you can negotiate.’”
In _Imperial Earth_ a man from a moon of Saturn visits Washington in
2276 to celebrate the U.S. quincentennial and cultivate his family’s
terrestrial political contacts. Wreckers have razed the original
Watergate complex—over the objections of the Democrats, who wanted it
saved as a national monument—but in many ways politicians and statesmen
are the same as in the darkest twentieth century. They seek personal
contact with each other. “Only after that contact, with its inevitable
character evaluation, had been made, and the subtle links of mutual
understanding and common interest established,” writes Clarke, “could
one do business by long-distance communication with any degree of
confidence.”
A booster of telecommuting might nod. He’d insisted that we meet
_face-to-face_, and I suspected I could have enjoyed slightly better
cooperation from a few other interviewees for this book if we had been
in the same rooms. Wires and satellites could never eliminate travel.
Granted, some researchers might say the next year that people tended to
use stronger words in computer conferences, perhaps to make up for the
lack of body language and other visual clues. Reportedly, the decisions
from such conferences tended to be more radical—involving much more risk
or not enough—than those made face-to-face.
Just the same, computer “meetings” could greatly reduce travel once the
people at the various ends had established the basic trust. Clarke had
written two decades ago, “The business lunch of the future could be
conducted perfectly well with the two halves of the table ten thousand
miles apart; all that would be missing would be the handshakes and
exchange of cigars.”[92]
Footnote 92:
Clarke’s conjecture about the business lunch of the future appears in
_Profiles of the Future_, Harper & Row, New York, 1962, p. 194.
That might or not be with television contact. The absence of it,
however, wouldn’t be the ultimate disaster. In concentrating on the
other person’s _message_, you might be less vulnerable to misleading
clues from facial expression, body movement, or clothing. Clarke himself
enjoyed creating different personae for different audiences; once his
sarong had shaken up an IBM convention. A Washington reporter described
him at another time as “a paunchy fellow” with thinning hair,
“math-teacher glasses, discreet hearing aid ... red velvet slippers and
unbelted pants” who looked “like some kind of GS-12 from the Bureau of
Poultry Audits. And he wants you to see his Kermit the Frog doll.”[93]
Yet this same man could don dark suits for book jackets and deliver
august speeches to statesmen.
Footnote 93:
The “Bureau of Poultry” description of Clarke comes from Curt Suplee’s
_Washington Post_ article of November 16, 1982. Suplee also saw Clarke
in nonbureaucratic attire—the sarong.
Beyond reducing the opportunity for visual distractions, long-distance
contact by phone or computer offered another advantage in my opinion.
You could reach more people in a given time to confirm their facts; you
weren’t twiddling your thumbs in cabs and airport lobbies or wearily
working the horn locally from a hotel room with a bed fit for a
steel-spined dwarf.
That still left the question of what kind of office you would talk to
the world from. Margaret Phanes of Kaypro wanted to know. The week
Margaret asked about the office of 2001, she said she was in the middle
of reading Clarke’s novel _Rendezvous with Rama_. In her opinion, Clarke
brought about “synchronicity.” He himself, in fact, had once told of
“preposterous” coincidences in his own life, and he’d peopled _Imperial
Earth_ with characters like “George Washington,” a twenty-third-century
Virginian who lived on a museum’s plantation named Mt. Vernon. If
“synchronicity” or other coincidences had worked for Dickens, then why
not Clarke and Phanes? Or Rothman? Trying to puzzle out some technical
details of my computer-to-computer link with Clarke, I’d run into two
noncelebrities who had met him. And what about his neighbor—visiting
Washington—through whom I’d passed the questions from Margaret and the
others? Coincidence needn’t be mystical. I was happy enough for it
simply to be useful.
Replying to Margaret’s questions about what the office would be like in
2001, Clarke had a problem. For decades he had been working at home. “My
‘office,’ if you can call it that—it looks like a snake-pit with all the
cables on the floor—is just ten feet from my bedroom. I can appreciate
your questions are very important, but they’re outside my frame of
reference.”
Clarke may have replied in a limited way to Phanes, however, when he
answered a question from Seymour Rubinstein.
He’d asked Clarke about the possibility of briefcase computer tapping
into worldwide networks to do complicated processing of information.
Just how would that affect people?
Years ago Clarke had said a business eventually wouldn’t even need “an
address or a central office—only the equivalent of a telephone number.
For its files and records will be space rented in the memory units of
computers that could be located anywhere on earth. The information
stored in them could read off on high-speed printers whenever any of the
firm’s offices needed it.”[94] And now Clarke was predicting little
portables capable of using the giant networks and memory banks. “It
seems to me that as computers become more and more portable and networks
more universal (and systems standardised—a MUST!) there may no longer be
any question of ‘micros in the office.’ The office will be in the
micro—and _that_ will be in an attaché case.” Rubinstein himself already
knew that Epson was about to market its little lap-size machine with
WordStar built into the read-only memory.
Footnote 94:
Clarke’s prediction of a business having “only the equivalent of a
telephone number” is from _Profiles of the Future_, p. 194.
Rob Barnaby, the WordStar programmer, asked a slightly overlapping
question covered by the same answer. There was something else for them
from Clarke, however—his thanks.
“I am happy to greet the geniuses who made me a born-again writer,” he
said. “Having announced my retirement in 1978, I now have six books in
the works and two portables—all through WordStar.”[95]
Footnote 95:
Discussing WordStar, Clarke was careful to point out that he had
“never used or even seen any other word-processing system” and had “no
frame of reference,” but found “only a few small nits to pick with my
version. (Release 3 of 1981, WU644275C).” Among other things he
repeated a complaint I myself have against WordStar 3.0. “I do wish
one could see the printed instructions actually operating on the
screen text,” Clarke said, “so it wasn’t messed up by those ugly
control characters. That would also have the enormous benefit of
preventing the sort of boob I made for the first few weeks—not closing
the print instruction, with horrid results, e.g., underlining to the
end of the manuscript!!”
James Watt, the descendant of the Scottish inventor, also figured to an
extent in Clarke’s work, in the sense that the Haunted Book Shop sold
it. “A computer disk the size of a phonograph record can hold about
54,000 frames of pictures,” Watt observed in his questions, “enough for
a large encyclopedia. Does that mean we’ll see the end of going into a
bookstore and buying a best-seller? Are we going to lose the printed
word as we know it today? Will ‘book’ buying become a computerized
activity? Will I call up XYZ computer firm and then peruse disks at my
leisure?”
“Nothing will ever replace books,” Clarke reassured him. “They can’t be
matched for convenience, random access, nonvolatile memory (unless
dropped in the bath), low power consumption, portability, etc.
“But information networks will supplement them and replace whole
categories, e.g., encyclopedias and telephone directories (as is being
planned in France).”
Clarke was more sanguine about Watts’s fear that computerized shopping
might “dehumanize us” and clerks might vanish. He said, “I believe
personal service will become more and more important and hopefully more
and more available as older occupations disappear. We’ll ‘window-shop’
through home terminals but will still discuss important products with
salesmen, even if they’re hundreds of kilometers away!”
The seventh questioner, Lynn Wilson, had worked several decades for the
Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, only to see computers do away
with the rotary switches he had so lovingly attended.
“They’ve sent all my equipment to the smelter’s to reclaim the metal,”
he said. “I don’t know if anyone’s still in the building. Maybe a few
times a week someone goes by. The equipment tests itself twenty-four
hours a day and flashes a red light for the serviceman next time he’s
there.” Just a few boxes had replaced the long rows of devices that
connected the dial phones in the area of Alexandria, Virginia.
But Lynn didn’t feel any futility. The telephone and teletype themselves
had superseded another invention he used—the Morse Code telegraph.
He’d pounded out messages at up to forty words per minute for the
Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad, and he still recalled an old saying
reflecting his pride in his craft:
“If a telegram takes more than twenty-four hours to be delivered, it has
whiskers.”
My friend had a feel for the scraps of history. For years he’d kept a
Teletype message announcing the Third Reich’s surrender, and I asked
about the ARC-5 receiver that he’d given me: could it really have flown
over Germany? “Go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington,” Lynn said,
“and you’ll see a cockpit with an ARC-5. I’ve even seen an ARC-5 with a
.50-caliber bullet hole right through it.”
Lynn was hardly a foe of every piece of post-ARC-5 technology. In late
1983 he hoped to be among the hams talking on the two-meter wavelength
to an astronaut aboard the space shuttle.[96] Just the same, Lynn feared
the years ahead—not so much his own fate as other people’s.
Footnote 96:
Alas, Lynn tried but did not successfully make radio contact with the
space shuttle.
“Aren’t computers turning people into useless objects against their
will?” Lynn asked Clarke. Gene Meyer, Eric’s father, of course had
wanted Eric to ask a somewhat similar question. But it meant more coming
from Lynn.
“Computers eliminate people, who take vacations, sick leave, and
retirement,” he said. “I myself haven’t suffered. I took voluntary
retirement at full pension at sixty-two. But computers were why I left
then instead of sixty-five. I would have had to go to school for three
years, and by then I would have been ready for regular retirement. So it
didn’t make sense for me to stay. But not everyone can retire at full
pension when the new technology takes over. What do you do about the
people being forced out? What’s the answer?”
“Anyone who can be turned into a useless object against his/her will
_is_ one!” Clarke said. “You obviously weren’t.”
That was too pat an answer for me. The other day I’d talked to my old
state editor, who’d visited Lorain, Ohio, west of Cleveland on Lake
Erie. He feared that Lorain might become a husk of a town. A decade ago,
when I’d been a reporter there, more than eight thousand had worked at
the U.S. Steel mills, and Dick worried that the company might pull out
of Lorain except for a bare-bones plant employing just a few hundred.
Downtown, he’d seen dozens of shattered store windows. Oddly, however,
the newspaper enjoyed some new subscribers—Dick said some of his friends
could afford to do little more than watch television and read. Were
Dick’s friends to be shrugged off as “useless objects”? In _Imperial
Earth_ Clarke had told of stringent population control, of an American
Midwest replanted with forests, of steel mills neatly preserved as
museums; but three centuries earlier, Lorain untidily abounded with
angry, idle men. Cheap steel imports were one threat to them. So,
perhaps, was the eagerness of many steel-company officers to pour their
capital into more profitable industries. But computers and other high
tech also had helped deprive Lorain of some steel jobs.
In the future, however, couldn’t even a factory technician
telecommute—overseeing robots from home and using them to turn out
custom-crafted products requiring a human “touch”? Ideally, America in
2001 would be producing something besides “information,” Big Macs, and
look-alike toasters. And ideally, too, average workers could afford to
enjoy the cornucopia. In fact, widespread genetic enhancement of IQs
might _eventually_ make everyone capable of appreciating high tech at a
high level, so that “workers” in the old sense disappeared. Huxley’s
_Brave New World_ hierarchy might never exist, and in the twenty-second
century we might all be Alphas smarter than any of today’s computer
wizards. Robots would be our real Epsilons.
Meanwhile, regardless of the traumas of society at large, some of the
most unlikely people could befriend new machines. Jack LaVriha—the
cigar-chomping newspaperman in Chapter 8 who dated back almost to the
_Front Page_ days—had done fine in the Lorain _Journal_’s electronic
city room.