As explained at the beginning of the video, in 1961 programmers at IBM created the program that generated for the first time, a close (at least for the time) approximation of the human voice as well as a musical accompaniment to the nineteenth century song Daisy Bell written by Harry Dacre. I vividly remember seeing this on TV, and it could not have been long after the program was created, although I may have been a little too young, 2 years old in 1961, for it to have made an impression on me at the time.
But Daisy was a song that my father sang to me while I was riding on his shoulders walking through Humboldt Park on the West side of Chicago (an act I repeated for my own son in the same place), so it may not have been very long after that. For the record, my father sang the song better than the computer. Not so sure about my version.
There had been many depictions of artificial intelligence in science fiction for decades before 1961, so I'm guessing this first attempt to reproduce the human voice with a computer (which in this case doesn't even come close to AI), must have seemed rather crude at the time.
One of my earliest and fondest memories of fictional intelligent creatures created by human beings, was the character of Robot from the science fiction (perhaps science farce would be a better term) prime time TV show Lost in Space. Along with his superhuman strength and computational acumen, the character, which for the TV show was controlled by an actor inside a robot costume, also was given human characteristics such as emotions and even empathy.
Here is our Robot, encountering another not so nice robot, in a scene from an early episode of the series:
Perhaps a more enduring, and definitively more threatening example of artificial intelligence in popular culture from the same time is the character of HAL (short for Heuristically Programmed Algorhythmic Computer), in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1968 film, 2001, A Space Odyssey. Based on a 1950's short story by Arthur C. Clarke (who helped Kubrick write the screenplay and reworked his story into a novel to coincide with the film), HAL does not have the anthropomorphic physical features of Robot, but instead is visually depicted by a lens on a control panel which flashes in time with the robot's voice.
HAL is employed to control the spacecraft's journey to Jupiter as well as to interact with the crew on a personal level, including playing chess with them.
At first, Hal was a reliable member of the crew but eventually the machine begins to malfunction, and the astronauts decide it is imperative to the mission to disengage HAL. The machine has other ideas however and given his superior intelligence, putting him down proves to be quite the challenge. NOW here's the spoiler alert: when astronaut Dave finally succeeds in taking down HAL, the machine slowly devolves, and his final parting words are can you guess? The lyrics to Daisy.
Quite a brilliant move by the screenwriters which I'm afraid is lost on most younger viewers of the movie who wouldn't get the reference.
Popular culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century was rife with depictions of the future, fifty years or so hence. Well today, it's fifty or so years hence and it's interesting to see what they got right and what they didn't. Alas, flying cars which seem to appear in practically every version of our future, at least those set on earth, are still a thing of the future. That's probably a good thing. In fact, most of the predictions they got wrong had to do with transportation. That's not hard to understand, as I pointed out in this post, in my grandmother's lifetime she lived to see both the invention of the airplane, AND the lunar landings. In 1970 there was no reason to believe that the next fifty years or so would see similar quantum leaps in technology.
However, since the last Apollo mission to the moon in 1972, we have not returned. While we have sent a number of unmanned missions to the planets, including landing on Mars and Venus, no human being has left the earth's orbit since December 7, 1972, although plans are in the works to change that. But if you had told anyone back then that people wouldn't even be considering trips to the moon and beyond for fifty years, they would have laughed in your face.
The same goes with earthbound means of travel. Again, considering my grandmother's lifetime, when she was a child, if you didn't want to walk, the streetcar was the best way to get about town. The automobile was around but only a reality for the wealthy few who were also a bit on the adventurous side. Horse drawn buggies were still around but they were the exclusive domain of the wealthy who were on the less adventurous side. If you wanted to travel long distance, trains were the best option for both the rich and the poor, and for really long trips, ocean liners.
By the time my grandmother turned sixty, the automobile had become commonplace, and indeed an integral part of most Americans' lives. The heyday of train and ocean travel came and went during those sixty years, both having been overtaken by the airplane and the automobile in the case of trains. By the time my grandmother turned seventy-five, thanks to the Concorde and supersonic airline travel, you could fly from New York to London in about three and one half hours, although for the record, my grandmother never took advantage of that marvel of technology.
Well it so happened that just a little later in the decade, a perfect storm of events and attitude shifts took place that changed people's minds about bigger, faster, and more comfortable means of transportation.
One of these was the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 which greatly reduced the nation's supply of crude oil, thusly ending forever the idea of "cheap gas". It wouldn't be long before the boat like, high performing, gas guzzlers with V8 engines that we of a certain era grew up with, would be replaced by smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. I'm not even certain that a new car's MPG rating was even considered before this time, but it certainly was afterward.
Another result of the "Gas Crisis" was the federal government's imposition of a 55 MPH maximum speed limit on all the nation's roads and highways. One of the not-necessarily intended benefits of the nationwide speed limit was the reduction of traffic injuries and fatalities, which helped put the concern for safely at the forefront of the design of new cars.
Perhaps the most profound attitude shift of the seventies was the environmental movement which was given a great boost by nothing less than the moon missions, especially by the photographs of earth taken from outer space which showed our home as a beautiful gem in the midst of vast emptiness. Perhaps for the first time, the general public realized that although our natural resources were abundant, they are not infinite. The visits to the moon and later to Mars and Venus drove home the point that there's no remotely close, hospitable place that we can escape to if we fail to take care of our own planet home.
And speaking of the moon missions, while they were great accomplishments in their own right, it became abundantly clear that as far as space exploration is concerned, you get way more bang for the buck by sending robots into space than people. You don't have to feed them, create a cozy livable environment for them, or keep them entertained. Plus, you don't have to bring them back to earth and as everyone knows, a one-way ticket costs less than round trip. Most important, you don't have to take the unbearable risk of losing crew members, as we in the States painfully experienced with Apollo 1 and the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia crews.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of a future with bigger, faster and more comfortable means of transportation took place on the 25th of July, 2000 in Paris when a Concorde crashed just after takeoff killing everyone on board as well as four people on the ground. The result was the permanent grounding of the entire fleet of supersonic passenger jets.
Ironically, today, it typically takes us longer to get where we're going, but we're getting there safer, cheaper and with less harm to the environment, than we did fifty years ago.
While the Sci-Fi books and films of the mid-twentieth century got the means of transportation part wrong, they hit the jackpot with computers and artificial intelligence, which has made everything from fuel efficient, safe automobiles, to interplanetary space travel, to helping cure once deadly diseases to everything in between, possible.
And yes, we worry justifiably about its implications as well.
So why do I bring all this up?
Because about one month ago, I downloaded after considerable thought, the AI app Chat GPT. I've reached my limit with this post, so I'll have to save my report on the experience for the next post.
I'll just give you another spoiler alert, Chat GPT has left me overwhelmed, flabbergasted, blown away gob smacked and worried in an existential way, all at the same time. But is it life-changing?
Could be.
Oh and one other thing, this post has been written entirely by Chat GPT.
Seriously.
Now take me to your leader.
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