Inventing the Future

In the application of computer systems, there are three areas where the need is desperate. These three areas are libraries, schools, and administrative organizations (including every organization–business, sociological, political). Because of the flood of reference material printed daily, the need for electronic libraries is a need of the highest priority. We need electronic national libraries and interconnected libraries that will not only store information but will scan references and select, from a potential of thousands of references, the specific viable combinations that will be worth examining. We need libraries that will store information in solid-state electronic memory systems and deliver the material in hard-copy form at the push of a button.

We must have teaching machines as well as electronic libraries. With a potential of ten billion neurons in the brain for use, the human brain represents the greatest example of unemployment in the world today. A child comes equipped with an unprogrammed organic computer (brain) that must be trained to the logic procedures needed for processing information and be supplied with information to process. To repeat, each child's computer must be trained to think logically and must be supplied with a store of correlated, disciplined information for use as raw material for thinking. I am convinced that, in time, we shall discover that electronic teaching machines can accomplish this initial training far more rapidly and efficiently than human teachers. Beyond this primary application, of course, teaching machines will be used all the way up the educational scale to graduate school; eventually, they will be associated with central libraries of information utilities and become a part of the learning center in every home of the future where learning will be a lifelong recreational activity. Computers must revolutionize teaching so that teachers can concentrate on the development of value standards and understanding. I am convinced also that computers must revolutionize business administration procedures and business thinking, as well as our political and social procedure systems and our international diplomacy. Admittedly, the greatest need for procedural revolution is in government administrative systems, where the attempts to supply value judgments are vitiated by the systems' complexity.

…Things are happening: At Massachusetts Institute of Technology a group, partially supported by foundation funds, is devoting full time to the development and design of an electronic library system. It has been predicted that within ten years the major university libraries of the country will be tied together by communications means to permit the almost instant exchange of information.

At MIT also, as in a few other institutions, a shared-time computer system has been placed in service with faculty and graduate-student communications stations. Several graduate students and professors participating in the test of the system have opened their files to each other, and they have arranged conferences and discussions that involve exchanges with the computer as well as with each other. Instant references can be called up, instant testing of ideas against stored information can take place, and instant decisions can be reached with the necessary tested references supplying the base for the decisions. This is the beginning of a man-machine symbiosis that might, with considered judgment, be characterized as a new way of thinking. I see the future managers of corporations using this pattern for decision-making meetings.

Excerpted from Inventing the Future, an address given by Daniel E. Noble, Vice-chair of the Board of Motorola, Inc., to the humanities students and faculty of Arizona State University, Tempe, April 17, 1967. The complete address was reprinted in the journal ETC. (Vol. 27, No. 4), published by the International Society for General Semantics, December 1970.