Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicted the Rise of Artificial Intelligence & the Existential Questions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

We now live in the midst of an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence boom, but it’s hard­ly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been sub­ject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-fifties. Even­tu­al­ly, those busts — which occurred when real­iz­able AI tech­nol­o­gy failed to live up to the hype of the boom — became so long and so thor­ough­go­ing that each was declared an “AI win­ter” of scant research fund­ing and pub­lic inter­est. Yet even deep into one such fal­low sea­son, AI could still inspire enough fas­ci­na­tion to become the sub­ject of the 1978 NOVA doc­u­men­tary “Mind Machines.”

The pro­gram includes inter­views with fig­ures now rec­og­nized as lumi­nar­ies in the his­to­ry of AI: John McCarthy, Mar­vin Min­sky, Ter­ry Wino­grad, ELIZA cre­ator Joseph Weizen­baum. It also brings on no less a tech­no­log­i­cal prophet than Arthur C. Clarke, who notes that the dubi­ous atti­tudes toward the prospect of think­ing machines expressed in the late sev­en­ties had much in com­mon with those about the prospect of space trav­el dur­ing his youth in the thir­ties. In his view, we were already “cre­at­ing our suc­ces­sors. We have seen the first, crude begin­nings of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence,” and we would “one day be able to design sys­tems that can go on improv­ing them­selves.”

If com­put­ers were there­by to gain greater-than-human intel­li­gence, it would, of course, “com­plete­ly restruc­ture soci­ety” — not that the soci­ety he already knew would­n’t “col­lapse instant­ly” if its own rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple com­put­ers were tak­en away. Clarke not only asks the ques­tion now on many minds of what “the peo­ple who are only capa­ble of low-grade com­put­er-type work” will do when out­stripped by AI, but more deeply under­ly­ing ones as well: “What is the pur­pose of life? What do we want to live for? That is a ques­tion which the intel­li­gent com­put­er will force us to pay atten­tion to.”

Few view­ers in 1978 would have spent much time pon­der­ing such mat­ters before. But pre­sent­ed with footage of all this now-prim­i­tive pro­to-AI tech­nol­o­gy — the com­put­er chess tour­na­ment, the sim­u­lat­ed ther­a­pist, the med­ical-diag­no­sis assis­tant, the NASA Mars rover to be launched in the far-flung future of 1986 — they must at least have felt able to enter­tain the idea that they would live to see an age of machines that could not just think but, as the nar­ra­tor puts it, pos­sess “the most cru­cial aspect of com­mon-sense intel­li­gence: the abil­i­ty to learn.” Per­haps anoth­er AI win­ter will fore­stall that age yet again — if it’s not already here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Instan­ta­neous Glob­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Remote Work, Sin­gu­lar­i­ty & More

Before Chat­G­PT, There Was ELIZA: Watch the 1960s Chat­bot in Action

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.