Word: wieners
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...YEAR 2000 by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener. 431 pages. A/lacmi...
...their discipline. Herman Kahn, 45, mathematician, physicist and author (On Thermonuclear War), is director of New York's Hudson Institute, a policy-research center that specializes in educated guesswork for such clients as the U.S. Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense. Sociologist Anthony Wiener, 36, is a member of Hudson's research staff. Their book, relentlessly technical and deliberately undramatic, is as far removed from Jules Vernean fantasy as sober analytical methodology can carry it. Kahn and Wiener cannot unlock the future's doors, but they know where to knock...
...Kahn and Wiener find it probable, for example, that the next 33 years will bring $20 battery-run TV receivers, three-dimensional film, home computers, prisonless penology and electronic prying into the human brain. Less likely, though still possible, are the laboratory synthesis of fetuses (possibly human ones), robot athletes competing in the Olympic Games, thought control, programmed sleep and laser beams capable of boring tunnels, taking a portrait of the atom, and detecting enemy missiles within a tolerance of inches...
...were to be as "intellectually unprepared" for change as it was in 1929, 1941 and 1947, write the authors, it would be "subjected to some very unpleasant surprises." Man cannot safeguard himself against the surprises of the future, but he can try to prepare for them by reducing what Wiener calls "the role of thoughtlessness." In that task, their book will help...
...first U.S. satellite, in making a soft landing on the moon and in taking close-up pictures of the moon and Mars. At the same time, such speculative M.I.T. thinkers as Physicist Charles Townes, who worked out principles that led to thet maser and laser, and Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, whose theories helped lay the foundations of automation, make M.I.T. much more than a producer of management specialists. Ironically, both schools have also contributed to Red China's nuclear missile capability by training its missile expert, Tsien Hsue-shen (see THE WORLD), who earned his M.A. at M.I.T...