Evening star., 1950-02-05
HERE COME THE ROBOTS!
Continued from page t,Oelue

faster slower according to the density of traffic.
The system has already cut accidents by 20per cent
The worlds first robot street-ighting setup was
recently installed in New Milford, Conn. Electronic
eyes react to changes in natural light = sudden
thunderstorm, early twilight, rainy morning -
and turn on street lamps according to need.
Traffic engineers are excited about new robot
eye which, mounted on cars bumpers, "buzzes"
the driver if the auto over the center ne or if he
is getting too close to another car.
Elevator traffic is another field where robot
system control is growing Westinghouse new
Selectomatic system sorts signals from waiting
passengers and sets up pattern of commands"
for starting, stopping, accelerating or braking.
Each elevator can almost sense waiting rider.
During peak periods the cars automatically parcel
out among themselves co-ordinated system Of
equally swift service for all floors.
They Even Know French
SOMETHING still for the future is voice-controed
elevators. A model recently demonstrated in BIZ
lingua Montreal rose at the sound of going up"
or "monter'' Gts French equivalent); it came
down when the voice said 'descendre or down
please"
brains. Their ability to solve infinitely complex
problems IL 900 times faster than any human genius
makes them essential tools of science. With vacu-
um tubes for gray cells, the wizard-like brains can
do such things as multiply hundreds of 10-digit
numbers in thousandth of a second One govern
ment bureau had to multiply lOO, 900 pairs of
figures each year and add up the results. 1t
took IL days for the staff to do the job. A
robot does it in 10 minutes.
The brains can trace the movement of the uni
verse, work out gambling odds, or add two and
two. They only make an error when vacuum
tube burns out. Even then the brain knows what @
has happened and flashes warning signal.
international Business Machines new "selec-
tive sequence calculator" is almost frighteningly
superhuman: it not only reads" its problems and
instructions, but knows when and how to use such
mathematical short cuts as logarithm tables which
it has stored in its electronic memory.
Will mankind ultimately create such efficient
robots that they will revolt and become masters in
stead of servants? DR. Norbert Wiener, of Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology, founder of cyber
netics - the science of the relationship of human
and mechanical brains - doesn't think so.
Coming - Mechanical Slaves
"A REAL mechanical brain, he said, would have
to be as large as the talest skyscraper and might
take all the power Niagara Falls can generate to
operate it"
But Wiener does think the production of hui
manod slaves will be fact within Is years.
"Its none too soon to consider how we shall use
such slaves" he said. eve are nearer to their
production now than we were to the development
of radar ten years ago. We may even be able to
build brains operated by chemicals instead of
by electrical impulses, brains that can re-
pair themselves and learn by trial and error.
Through them, we may also learn more about the
intricate patterns behind human psychological