Endnotes

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  1. Semantic Memory, by Ross Quillian, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., 1966. Hearsay has it that the situation cited is less dramatic in 1970 -- but that just confirms the point I am making. [Back]
  2. See, for example, Real English -- A Description of its Operation, by David Klappholz, March 1970, University of Pennsylvania, Moore School of Electrical Engineering. [Back]
  3. Recognition of a limited vocabulary is considered practical already. Cornell University has been experimenting with a system in which the statements of a simple programming language are spoken into a phone and recognized by the computer. A "moment of silence" is required between each pair of words, and the computer must "know" the speaker. See "On the Feasibility of Voice Input to an On-Line Computer Processing System," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June, 1970. [Back]
  4. Accomplishments Summary 1968/1969 of the Biological Computer Laboratory, ed. Heinz von Foerster, Illinois University, Urbana, Illinois, June, 1969. [Back]
  5. Brain, Mind, and Computers, by Stanley L. Jaki, Herder and Herder, NYC, 1969. The book may be recommended for a lively, if somewhat paranoid style, and for bringing in a sense of philosophical history that is rare in technical discussions. As for the rest, it is consistently wrongheaded. I've been trying to secure a copy in a spirit of investment: I figure that in twenty years it will be a valuable addition to my "famous losers" collection. (I've regretted all my life that I didn't buy a copy of the one I saw in a library back in 1946, "proving" that space travel was impossible.) [Back]
  6. "Robot Control Strategy," by Leonard Friedman, in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, May, 1969. [Back]
  7. Both the terminology and the point of view are borrowed from ethology, the study of instinctive behavior. Cf. Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, by Konrad Lorenz, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. This is another whole field whose findings suggest programming as a basic part of behavior. Lorenz distinguishes among three kinds of behavior: instinctive, conditioned, and insightful. The first two can be construed as programming with no difficulty at all; the last is more controversial. [Back]
  8. See A Mobile Automaton: An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques, by Nils J. Nilsson, in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Washington, D.C., May, 1969. [Back]
  9. I could be pretentious and let on that I saw this in the AFIPS Conference Proceedings, Vol. 34, 1969 Spring Joint Computer Conference ("Assembly of Computers to Command and Control a Robot," by Louis L. Sutro and William L. Kilmer). To tell the truth, though, I saw it first in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, where it was reprinted. [Back]
  10. It's safe to assume that the U.S.S.R. has a similar project. Lunaxhod, the explorer robot which they have already put on the moon, is probably not much smarter than a remotely-controlled garage door. When they get to Mars, however, they'll have the same reasons as M.I.T. to want a machine that can supplement its instructions with a little independent "judgment." [Back]
  11. Computer-Controlled Robots, by H. A. Ernst, IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, N.Y., 1970, report #RC-2781. Perhaps it's a mite unfair to ask that engineers give robots what Socrates couldn't define for Charmides. [Back]
  12. The scene is from Mad magazine. I'm just speculating what was said. [Back]
  13. op. cit. (Brain, Mind, and Computers, by Stanley L. Jaki). [Back]
  14. At least, she offered to. The local juice men decided that the royal word would do. [Back]
  15. And all those Indian souls saved, into the bargain! [Back]
  16. One often has to eat one's words in these matters almost before one can utter them. I had no sooner written the above, than my wife overheard a news item and called it to my attention: "Dr. José Delgado of Yale University," it said, "has achieved direct communication between brain and computer."

    I wrote for information and hit a mother lode: a reprint of an article from Excerpta Medica International Congress Series No. 180 ("The Present Status of Psychotropic Drugs -- Proceedings of the VI International Congress of the C.I.N.P., Tarragona, April, 1968.")

    I think my statement can still stand: in the ambitious sense which was intended, nobody has read out and decoded any message from the nervous system. What Delgado reports, however, is that we can read out certain signals which are regularly associated with particular types of (chimpanzee) behavior, or with particular moods. By electrically stimulating the areas from which these signals arise, we can trigger the same sort of behavior or the same sort of mood. That, of course, is not the same thing as cracking the code; the signals that are fed in don't have to match the ones that are normally emitted.

    I don't count the following item: "The first man to communicate with a computer via brain waves appears to be Dr. Edmond Dewan of the Air Force Cambridge Research Labs, who, controlling the alpha rhythms of his brain, sent Morse code to the computer (aided by an EEG) to spell out 'cybernetics.'" (Quoted in the ACM SIGART Newsletter, No. 19, Dec., 1969.) That's an amusing stunt, but it doesn't use the signals as the nervous system uses them; the meaning is imposed by artifice. Presumably, all Dr. Dewan had to do was roll up his eyeballs, which is known to produce bursts of alpha waves, for the duration of each "dot" or "dash." [Back]
  17. You can read it for yourself in an Everyman's Library edition, 1963, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. [Back]
  18. Reprinted in Science-Fiction Thinking Machines: Robots, Androids, Computers, edited by Groff Conklin, the VANGUARD Press, Inc., NYC, 1954. [Back]
  19. War With the Newts, by Karel Capek. There's a paperback edition by Berkeley Publications, 200 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. [Back]
  20. Asimov's robot stories are collected in two anthologies: I, Robot, 1963, and The Rest of the Robots, 1964, both by Doubleday & Co., New York. In the introduction to the latter of these two books, the author states explicitly what he was up to. [Back]
  21. "Turing's test" may well have been suggested to Turing by some of Asimov's stories, for in them, robots that try to impersonate humans are forever getting tripped up by questions that they can't answer the way a human would. [Back]
  22. The Living Machine, National Film Board of Canada. Don't miss it. [Back]