Word: aikens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cybernetics Shock. Professor Aiken need not worry: bigger problems are on the way. The success of the automatic calculators set off an explosion of high, wide & handsome pondering that is still reverberating. One of the first recorded tremors was a small, extraordinary book called Cybernetics (John Wiley & Sons; $3), by Professor Norbert Wiener of M.I.T. (TIME...
...behind the question-answering machines. Mark II, the first calculator built at Harvard for the Navy, is ten times as fast as Bessie. Mark III is 25 times as fast as Mark II and 250 times as fast as Bessie. Machines now abuilding will be faster still. Says Professor Aiken, head of Harvard's Computation Laboratory: "We'll have to think up bigger problems if we want to keep them busy...
Their opponents retort that computers are mere tools that do only what they are told. Professor Aiken, a leader of the conservatives, admits that the machines show, in rudimentary form at least, all the attributes of human thinking except one: imagination. Aiken cannot define imagination, but he is sure that it exists and that no machine, however clever, is likely to have...