Some Views on the Computer's Impact

From the remarks by Prof. Thomas E.Kurtz, Director of the Kiewit ComputationCenter, at the dedication:

Mr. Dickey has mentioned several of the major partners in this enterprise and I simply do not want to underestimate, or have you underestimate, the role that the Dartmouth students have played. ...

The peculiar nature of the student role is that they have been, they are, and they will continue to be in the future, active partners on an equal basis in a very important aspect of the work that goes on here; that is to say, in the designing and construction of the many mysterious programs that make the computer do all the wondrous things it does. As far as I know, the contribution"' of the undergraduate student as an equal partner in this particular activity is rare, if not unique, among American colleges and universities today. And certainly the tangible evidence that we see today is a significant testimony to this contribution.

From the remarks by Prof. John G.Kemeny, Chairman of Dartmouth's Departmentof Mathematics, at the dedication:

We are now entering a new age of mankind. For better or worse, we are going to be living in the age of computers. And I'm afraid that, as usual, most of mankind is entering this age with fear and superstition. And therefore, liberal education must assume a new role. As it has throughout the ages, it must fight fear and superstition. It will become an important new component in liberal education to train man to use this, perhaps the most magnificent tool that mankind has ever invented, and to make him understand that no matter how magnificent it is, it is only a tool and no more, so he will remain master of his own destiny. ...

Our relatively small system is being replaced by a really large system. We are entering a great joint endeavor with the General Electric Company to develop a tremendous, hopefully tremendous time-sharing system. The equipment is here and it is operating. Most of the programs, for at least the phase one system, have been written. They have not all been checked out. They are in the process of being put together. With a little bit of luck, by January 1 we should be in operation. But we think of this as the beginning, not the end. We hope during the next three years, jointly with General Electric, to work out a system that we will be truly proud of, a system that we hope will become a major service to schools and colleges throughout northern New England, and a system that with a little luck may have a national impact.

As far as the Dartmouth campus goes, and this is after all my theme, I'm quite certain that this center will rank with Baker Library and Hopkins Center as one of the three facilities having greatest impact on the entire campus and that it will have a continuing impact throughout the indefinite future.

From the address, "The Computer andthe Structure of Education," given by FrancisKeppel, Chairman of the Board of GeneralLearning Corporation:

Four forces can be named that are now bringing about change in the structure of schools and colleges, and that can reasonably be expected to do so for years to come: they include the demand for more individual concern with the student; the demand for the more economic use of both human and physical resources; and the demand for higher quality at all levels and for all types of students. Cutting across all three of these is the fourth — an insistent demand for equality of educational opportunity. For many years our educational system will have to wrestle with the problems of trying to give an even break to handicapped children of all kinds - those who are disadvantaged physically, mentally, emotionally and environmentally.

The computer is one modern tool that can be expected to play a part in helping education to adjust its internal procedures and organizational arrangements in response to these four forces. Indeed it may provide a good way to solve the inherent conflicts that these forces bring to education. For it is likely that without new scientific aids to learning the school and the college will be hard put to it to make more economic use of human and physical resources and at the same time show greater individual concern with the student. ...

What might happen in the schools as technology expands has been called "education's industrial revolution." Some of the technology, such as closed-circuit and educational TV, derives its advantages (both pedagogical and economic) from its application to students in a group. Other parts, films and film loops, for example, can be used one way or another by groups or by individuals. But it is computer technology, uniquely, that realizes its power only as it helps individual students to learn. Only as a computer's enormous capacity for storing and displaying information and its ability to adjust sensitively and logically to new information, including the learner's performance, are put to use by individual students does that capacity and ability make teaching sense and economic sense.

It would be wrong, and self-defeating, for either the most ardent proponent or the most experienced researchers in the field to claim too much for computer technology as a learning tool right now. Its powers must be validated. Its advantages will have to be made available at a price schools can afford, and efforts are now being made by government, in the academic community, and by business to conduct research and work out ways of proceeding to that end. It seems hard to doubt that, given enough opportunity to do research and development work with real students in real schools, the power of computers can be harnessed to the advantage of both the individual student and the teacher who guides him.

From the address, "They Laughed WhenI Sat Down at the Teletype," prepared byDr. Louis T. Rader, Vice President of GeneralElectric Company:

It is indeed unfortunate that the real significance of today's event probably will not be recognized for some years to come. But, in my opinion, the work going on here will make it possible within 10 years for every high school in the country to use a computer for some instructional as well as administrative purposes.

If that sounds improbable, let me explain that when the General Electric Company entered the general purpose computer business 10 years ago there were less than 100 computers in the United States. Today, there are 30,000. At that time also, a Company official predicted at a high school mathematics conference that the day was near when high school students would have computers in their classrooms to help them solve math problems. The prediction received considerable mention in the press. Today, that prediction has already gone well beyond the mathematics classroom.

And, right here at Dartmouth, a business administration student can use the computer to simulate a segment of the economy as part of his assignment in business planning; a biology student might simulate the growth of cells; a science student can set up much more complicated laboratory experiments and let the machine do the calculations. And, an engineering student can save considerable time and effort in solving significant research problems.

Unquestionably, the techniques developed here in both time-sharing and simplified languages literally have made the computer a living tool for all students. ...

John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz envisioned the day when a central computer would be available to a large number of students. Moreover, they reasoned, the students must be able to use the computer without taking a great deal of time to learn programming and machine operation. In other words, Professors Kemeny and Kurtz had to develop a new, simple language that didn't require the user to learn non-essential details.

The language they developed is known as BASIC and has made remote access and time-sharing an economic reality. The Dartmouth system was developed by the joint effort of a great many people, faculty, students and industry, but' if it were not for the efforts of John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz, the events of today would still be in the future.

The Impact on Knowledge

From the panel remarks by Prof. YehoshuaBar-Hillel of The Hebrew University,Jerusalem:

The realization that one can get along, that science can progress by working with partial, interpretive terms and partial incompletely interpreted theories - this I regard as one of the greatest insights of recent philosophy of science. And if this is so, I think it might indicate why it will be so hard, or close to impossible, in the near future for computers to come up with important, interesting new concepts which are not reshuffiings of old ones, or with new theories which are not recombinations of old ideas. ...

So, as for the role of computers in science and in enlarging our new knowledge, I would say that we should realize that computers will not play any role whatsoever in the near future in serious, new-concept formation or in serious, new-theory formation - autonomous on their own, of course - but only as enormously valuable aids in our own concept-formation as a means to enable us to check much better, perhaps, when we are clever enough and don't waste our time on delusions. We will thus be able to check our new theory and concept formations, and computers will thereby become, I hope, an enormously helpful and valuable tool for the enlargement of human knowledge.

From the panel remarks of Marvin Minsky,Professor of Electrical Engineering atM.I.T.:

There is a lot of mathematical dirty work to be done, and nobody is doing it. We haven't gotten the mathematicians interested in this sort of thing; we haven't gotten them interested in computers. In general, their old stuff is pretty nice, too; I am usually tempted to go and do mathematics rather than work on this. But I think there is a profound, theoretical difficulty all through computer science. Just the question what's the difference between serial and parallel computation is something you will not find discussed, anywhere. Everybody has an opinion; everybody thinks somebody else proved a theorem about it - they haven't.

We are not going to make progress in this field. In fact, my gloomy prediction is that the things computers do will most likely be, for a very long time, very far ahead of what we understand theoretically. But it would be nice if one could get one up on the experimentalist by having some theory. ... People don't know the situation is this bad. Everybody thinks everybody else is doing the theory of computers, and they aren't. The funny part is that the theory of finite-state machines - which is what computers are - has by and large told us less about programming languages than the theory of recursive functions, which is only about infinite computations. It's a beautiful paradox, and yet it's true.

From the panel remarks of Dean MyronTribus of Dartmouth's Thayer School ofEngineering:

As time is measured in colleges and universities, the appearance of computers on campuses is quite recent. The computer era itself is only about 25 years old. Yet, in this short time the effects have been most dramatic, particularly as measured by displacement of human labor and the extension of calculational ability. As one wag has put it, "We can now make mistakes a million times faster than ever before!"

The only comparable revolution in man's history is the power revolution which can, in retrospect, be seen to have started with Watt's steam engine in 1769, the year in which his patent was issued and also the year in which Dartmouth was founded. ...

The broader effects of the steam engine were achieved through the development of the science of thermodynamics, a theory which describes all manner of physical change. Today the devices and the considerations of this field of inquiry bear scant relation to the steam engines which inspired the new philosophy two hundred years ago. ...

The important point to be gained from the history of the development of the modern theory of thermodynamics is that what started out to be a theory of steam engines ended up as a theory governing all forms of physical change. In the end the theory has had an enormous impact on human philosophy. We can expect the same thing to happen again with computers. ...

Computers, like the early steam engines, are displacing human labor and are extending our abilities. But most of all, they are giving us something new to think about. There is now developing a body of theory aimed at their improvement. This theory is far from complete and is developing on so many fronts that no man can say for certain that he is abreast of it. Some ten years of attention to this field convinces me that the theory goes far beyond computers. We are now, I believe, on the way to a useful and viable theory of knowledge.

The Impact on Education

From the panel remarks of John Carr III,Professor of Engineering, University ofPennsylvania:

There can be a use of the machines which I think is going to be very important in the future and which is opposite to most of the uses that have been proposed up to now with respect to education. This is that there will be a tutor/student relationship between the machine and the pupil, but it will be the other way around, in many cases, in that the human being must, of necessity, conduct a long and elaborate tutelage of the machine. ... And one of the educational activities a university will perforce find itself forced into will be that of having the students learn about themselves by attempting to be introspective and to pass on this knowledge of themselves to the machine.

So, from this point of view, the act of teaching will be to develop growing machines that have learned from human beings and, in the act of doing this, the humans, as John Donne was wont to say, "will have learned to do." ...

One comes to the conclusion that perhaps in this idea of humans teaching machines one may see a far more powerful addition to the human's understanding of his individual potential and what he can do than we have with the alternate proposals which are very much extant today - that of machines teaching human beings in a mechanistic fashion.

From the panel remarks of Donald L.Kreider, Associate Professor of Mathematicsat Dartmouth:

To me, the great emphasis on computing is evidence that the revolution, is, in fact, in progress; we can't deny the noise that is going on. But, I won't admit that this revolution is complete until we don't hear any more about computing, until we all go home and forget the whole darned thing and the computer simply recedes into the background once again.

Now I don't mean receding in the sense of simply not being there, as it was five years ago, but I mean receding in the sense that it will become a silent partner to each individual in some sort of time-sharing scheme. Being such a silent partner, it should permit each individual human being to spend a maximum amount of his time not on computation but on creative thinking, which is what We hope he is capable of doing.

From the panel remarks of John W.Tukey, Professor of Statistics, PrincetonUniversity:

I am convinced that the title of this conference is wrong — is and will remain wrong. The computer, alone, will have little impact on anything. It is only when it has grown up to be, quote, a computation system that it can have impact on anything except the aching heads of the machine-language programmers. It is not an accident that Dartmouth's vital contributions have been in inventing and building master programs called "software," not in inventing and building new physical objects called "hardware." ...

I do not disagree with those who see great possibilities in computer-guided learning. I do see, however, rather more change in the real intellectual structure of our colleges and universities and a greater role for computation as a way of exploring both data and archives through a much wider range of fields of knowledge.

I do not see the absence of theory as the vast hindrance to progress that some have suggested; one cannot expect a map to precede the first explorations. I agree that this absence complicates curriculum construction in the formal training of new generations, but the challenge of the open frontier is often the only proper stimulus to the pioneer.

The Impact on Society

From the panel remarks of Richard WHamming, Bell Telephone Laboratories:

In some respects the social consequences of the computer have attracted more attention than any other aspect of the computing revolution, and it is perhaps fitting that we should end on this topic. There seems little disagreement in this audience that computers are probably the most important invention since the invention of language, and it is just about as hard to figure out what machines will do and mean to humanity as it is to figure out what the invention of language meant.

It is completely true that machines can do only what they are told to do, and it is also completely false. This tool, like any other tool that is sharp enough to do any good, is also sharp enough to cut you. It is very common to say that the evil does not lie in the tool, it lies in the use - and that statement is, again, completely true and completely false.

From the panel remarks of Martin Shubik,Professor of Industrial Economics, YaleUniversity:

Undoubtedly others can and will make comments on improving the innate capabilities of individual human beings, but I think it is worthwhile observing that our new data-processing devices are improving at a considerably greater rate than the individual human being.

The basic thesis I wish to offer is that the computer is a necessary but by no means sufficient device to provide enough coordination in a complex, multi-billion-person society to be compatible with the preservation or enlargement of individual freedom.

In the previous sessions we have talked more about the computer than about the problems in society that the computer poses, and the computer isn't going to answer that problem for you. But it certainly has posed a problem, and I don't think it was the wicked computer that did it, because without the wicked computer this society, if it keeps on having the same growth in numbers and the same increase in technology, would fall to bits under its own weight. Because you just couldn't do the paperwork you more or less have to do to keep a society of this size and complexity afloat.

From the panel remarks of Robert M.Fano, Director of Project MAC at M.I.T.:

Let me start out by reaffirming what Dr. Shubik said about a fundamental problem that I think is affecting society today - namely, all of us are hitting our heads against the ceiling of complexity. We are frustrated by it.

My thesis is that computer systems - specifically time-sharing systems that have evolved into full-fledged public services - do provide a fighting chance to lift this ceiling of complexity. I also contend that without some help of this sort our society is due to crumble from the weight of complexity. ...

It has been said that the help of a computer system comes in the form of its acting as a personal assistant to the individual in all his intellectually pertinent activity. We envision this as taking place as a discourse between the man and a computer system in which the computer does indeed act like a very knowledgeable assistant.

Now, the real important issue here is that for a computer system to be a really effective assistant it must talk with a lot of people, not just with one. This is really the justification for time-sharing. ...

The trick that makes this process of intellectual communication work is to have programs that really help people, so that individuals will want to use them and not be "forced" to. In the process the individual gives data to the system which is then used by other people in doing the work they have to do, and so on. ...

We are going to have problems such as that of privacy and conflicts between what has to be done to survive in a complex world and the acceptance on the part of the population of the change of attitude that must go with it. In guiding the evolution of this field, we have to maintain a real concern that the individual will gain from change. Otherwise it won't work and is going to produce tremendous resentment in the population. And we may still see people smashing computers. It may happen.

Plans to publish the conference proceedingsas a book this coming spring have beenannounced by the General Learning Corporation.

Hershner Cross

Francis Keppel

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel

Robert M. Fano

Martin Shubik

Marvin Minsky

Donald L. Kreider

Richard W. Hamming

The panel on "The Future Impact of Computers on Education and the University"