Introduction

Well welcome to EC 4000 (course number) and I believe it hits on Tuesday, Thursday and Fridays at 3 o'clock. 3 o'clock on Friday, right? 3 right? 3 o'clock.There's been some confusion. Locally I'm in Spanagel Hall (room) 518 x2655. I'm typically in during the mornings because I'm only teaching 1/2 time. So I go home and work in the afternoons. There are some notes here, and for those not here, or who didn't come I can't give you out sets of notes by mail because the book is being published by a publisher, and he has a right to profit by it. It'll be out within a year. But meanwhile students in this class can get a set of notes. If there aren't enough at the end of the day I'll bring some more tomorrow.

Orientation(style)

The first lecture is on Orientation. What am I trying to do? The purpose of this course is prepare you for your technical future. There really isn't a course with no technical content, although I'm going to talk about digital filters and all kinds of things, they are things you presumably know. I am concerned about style. I have studied great scientists ever since I was at Los Alamos during the war. What is different about those who do, and those who do not do, significant things? Mainly it's a matter of style. Many a person I have known worked just as hard as others, but didn't have much to show for it. So my problem is to instill in you something called style, so you will amount to something. After all, the Navy is paying a large sum of money to have you here, and it wants this money back, by your later performance. Now I will examine, criticize and talk about various people's style, mainly my own. but other people's - why can't we use it? Now there many of the things that I'm going to tell you, I wish somebody had told me. I had to find out for myself. This course is not a normal technical course. It's all about the topics they never told you in class, but they should have, because each course is taught this way, and a large amount falls in between. That's what I'm trying to pick up, Now style cannot be put into words. I can only approach it by particular examples, and let you infer what it is. Now there is a belief, that you probably have, that anything can be talked about. This goes back to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle in the early Greek times. They thought they could talk about the gods, truth, beauty, justice, love, all those things. At the time they were saying these things, there were the mystery cults in Greece, who said, "You must experience, you cannot talk." And if you remember the Middle Ages various saints said, "you can't talk about God, you got to experience him." In the same way the Mohammedans, on drawing Allah, "You can't portray him, you can't put it in pictures. You must sense." So there has long been a school which says, you cannot put everything into words, and one of them is style. I really cannot say what I mean. I can only give you these examples, and struggle, hoping that you will get the idea. Now to be effective in a course like this, I have found that I have to talk about myself. If I make abstract remarks, it just sounds like so many pious words. If I am talking about me and what I've done, maybe it will penetrate you. Now it gives the course an attitude of bragging. I'm always talking about myself... But I will tell you several mistakes that I made - lulu's - so you won't do the same sort of a thing. Similarly I have to get you to quit your modesty. I have to get you individually to respond to my challenge, that you're going to be great. Then you have to say to yourself, yes. If that guy Hamming can go out and become a great scientist, "I can." "Then I can become a great person." I have to get you to say to yourself that you want to, that it's worth the effort, and you're going to try to be something more than just the average person. Now, why do we speak of teachers? We are really coaches. I cannot run a mile the four-minute mile for you. I can comment upon your style, but you know, you must do the work. The same way, I cannot make you a great scientist. I can criticize style and other things, but I cannot by mere words make you a great scientist. You, out there running a four-minute mile, must do the work. Which means, you have to take what you hear and read. Think it over carefully, discuss with your friends, and see what you can adapt to yourself. There is no one style which is successful. Painters paint many different styles. You have to find a style that fits you, which means you have to take what fragments you can from other people, use them, and adapt them, and it becomes yours. You can't copy me directly. You won't get away with it! I will use the analogy of painting as an example. In painting, once you've learned color mixing and form and sketching and so on, you study under a master, who you temporarily accept as knowing what he's talking about. Well There are limits on what can be done. You know that if you copy the master's style exactly, you will not be a great painter. You know also that if you paint in the style he did, or she did, it's too late. The future wants a different style. Thus I can tell you about the style I used in the past, but that won't be the style you'll have to have, to cope with the future. You must manufacture the style which will make you a significant person in the future. So it's not easy. While I only talk about past ones, and make references to possible future ones, it's the problem you face. What I did would not make me successful if I were starting now. Just as my predecessors got successful on other things that I couldn't do and be successful on.

Bell Labs

Now there is another part that's very difficult for you. When I went to Bell Telephone laboratories in 1946, I looked around since I was already somewhat of a great scientist. And I looked at what they did. And when I looked at what they did to become famous, it didn't look that difficult. They tend to do the easy problems. Now I found in the course of my time there a couple of holes they left, but fundamentally they did the easy problems. My generation did the somewhat-harder ones, and We left to the others, the harder-ones still. Every generation has more difficulties, but you stand on our shoulders to some extent, yet the task is harder. Having gotten a man to the moon, the next really good feat in space is going to be a lot harder. Therefore you have difficulty, it's very definite. Now why I came to Bell Labs there were four of us at the same time, about, We came in about the same time, and we were about the same age within a year. We tried to call ourselves the four Young Turks, and many many years later, I discovered top management called us the same. We were troublemakers. We didn't do things the way the previous generation did. We did new things. The previous generation didn't like it! We didn't do things right! For example, my boss Henry Voda in network theory had made a reputation doing network theory with complex variables, and knew that's how you do things. After all, that is what made him famous! This guy Hamming comes along and keeps using computing machines, which is not the way to do it! In his eyes. But it was the thing that needed to be done. This is a lesson which I want to get across to you, regularly. Supposing I am successful, and you do rise to the top.

What made you great is not appropriate for the next generation

Will you please remember, that what made you great, is not appropriate for the next generation? You know how to get great because, after all you are great. But the things that you did may not be appropriate for the next generation. All too often we have a troubled boss... they know by God, this is the way I did it, I got the top, it must be right! They are often wrong, and I want you to think seriously, when you rise the top, that your method of success is not appropriate, now that the world has changed. Now I want to talk to education.

Education

Education is what when and why to do things. Training is how to do it. Most of your courses have been training. I'm trying to talk about the education part. It's not easy. But the school has allowed me a great deal of latitude in putting this course together, which is concentrating on education. Now if you have one without the other it's not much good. I've had very able technical people reporting to me who've applied their technology and methods to the wrong problem, and it had to be undone. I have had other people who had all points of theory, but couldn't do anything. They're not much use either. You need both theory to guide you, and skill and technique to do. One without the other isn't too good. Now in a certain sense I'm engaged in education. I'm talking about education constantly because that's what you're going to have to do. You're going to have to educate yourself constantly. That's what the future says. Now I'm gong to constantly try and project forward what the world is going to be like. Let's look back first in history. The modern era in science engineering began with Sir Isaac Newton, roughly 1642. He was born Christmas Day, the same year that Galileo died, and he lived to be about 85. So we can say it's around 1700. From Newton's time until ours, we have about doubled in knowledge every 17 years. The doubling period of science from then to now is roughly 17. When I came to Bell Laboratories in 1946 they were trying to shrink down from war size down to 5,500 people. I watched through 30 years of management, putting in a hiring freeze and doing everything else like that. Doubled every 17 years, with small wiggles. They had to hire people to keep up with expanding knowledge. Publication of books, journals and so on, for example I think I have examples here... No, I guess I don't.

90% of the scientists that ever lived are alive now #exponentialgrowth

Now I'm gonna make a digression. oh Another thing about the situation is that 90% of the scientists who ever lived are now alive. It's a common statement. I'm going to now turn to a back-of-the-envelope calculation, which I learned by watching Fermi and other people, and Shockley and other people, I used to go to lunch with them. I'm going to suppose first that we have exponential growth in the number of scientists. That comes from a differential equation: the rate of change is proportional to how much you have. And the solution is, as you know, the exponential growth. Now if I assume that the amount of knowledge being generated is proportional to the number of scientists, this is the amount of rate and, up to 17 years ago, this is how much you generate. This is amount up to now. Now I put minus infinity on, because it doesn't matter what lower limit I put. It is so small doesn't matter. The exponential is very very small out there, so who cares. Well, I will simply work it out. I do the integration, and I come up with that, and the statement was Half the stuff that's been done - the doubling every 17 years from 17 years ago to now - we've doubled. That says the ratio is a half. I've got a formula for B. Now take the other statement, "90% of scientists who ever lived are now alive." From now, back... fifty-five years, that's what I'm gonna take for lifetime of a scientist. You probably don't mean a living scientist when he's two years old, you probably mean a scientist alive when he's become or beginning to be a scientist, and until they decay somewhere in their 80s. You can decide, so 55 years is a reasonable number. If I put that in over the whole, of all scientists who ever lived, I come up with this using that... whoops, this is a b I will come up with, using that substitution here, I come up with .89 which is close enough to 90%. Now let's see what happened. I got a clearer idea what I was talking about, and I had an answer to the question which I hadn't thought about, What did I mean by a lifetime of a scientist? Do you see those two statements are compatible? We double every 17 years and 90% of scientists who ever lived are now alive. You have seen enormous growth of science, from Newton's time to now. Well, let me project... Well, let me say now. A good estimate of the number of various branches of science which we have developed. In Newton's time we had only one thing called natural philosophy. Now we have lots of specialties. There are something like 10,000 specialties. It certainly is more than a thousand, and almost certainly is less than a hundred thousand, so ten thousand a good number. Now if I can check forward, doubling every 17 years for 340 years, That's a million fold, 2 to the 20th. That would make 10 million fields of specialty. Well, you don't believe it. You don't believe in three hundred twenty four years there will be 10 billion fields of specialty. Consequently science cannot go the way it has been, for the next three hundred twenty forty years. The doubling and the growth cannot go on. One of the things we have done is we've got an exponential number of people in the field. We can't go on with that either... Every one would have to be a scientist. So you know that the past is not too good a guide to the future.

Back of the envelop modeling example

Now the reason why I want to put those back-of-the-envelope words in is, it's widely used. I observe that Fermi and Shockley and those who see it (garble), they did back the envelope, and you saw what I had to do. Not only that but it also does two things. It puts the thing firmer in your mind, having shown you the calculation you may retain it a little longer, plus it gives you practice in quick modeling. Nobody pretends this is really accurate. I don't pretend seventeen is exactly the number. It's somewheres around there. But "back of the envelope" calculations are useful. I have found it very very useful, when I hear things over TV or something else: radio, read newspapers and so on, do a quick modeling and ask myself, are these numbers possible? and very frequently two things emerge: (a) either they're not possible, or (b) you didn't even know what they were talking about to make a model. You found that they failed to tell you what they were talking about, just gave you a spectacular answer. So doing back-of-the-envelope modeling is a very very big help. Now, this doubling business is a very serious one. I have had to live through my life with that fact. So I put it in here in a table. Double in 17 years, triple in that, four five six seven eight nine ten times, is about 56 years. Something like that. Tell you how you read that. One way is, "ask the time from now to retirement." Look at this column, that's how much knowledge will be... ... that much times of what what you now have, if we go on the same way. You face a rather horrendous future. Another way to look at it is this. Suppose you were 34 when your child was born. Now your child goes to college. There's four times as much knowledge. Not just mathematical theorems, recordings of Beethoven's 9th, where to go skiing, what channels to read or listen to on TV. There's going to be four times as much knowledge for your poor child to face. Now you remember when you hit college, how much there there seemed to be? Don't be surprised if your children are somewhat more disoriented than you were... and God knows you were sometimes disoriented. This is what that means. Furthermore the doubling, all the doubling occurs worst in the last period. Almost half the area below the curve occurs in the last doubling period, and that's what causes the saturation. Saturation comes on quite rapidly. So another way of looking at doubling is simply this table here, which is disconcerting. If you think you'll be chief of staff in, say 44 years, no say 39 years. There'll be five times as much knowledge needed to run the Navy as is needed now. That is what you face. Well, what's my answer? My answer to that is learning to learn. It was the only thing I could do.

Things become obsolete

Things become obsolete. Something like half of what we have taught you, lovingly in other courses, will be obsolete in 15 years. Either we're no longer doing it, or it's been replaced by something else. Consider what I had to live through. I came to Bell Laboratories in 1946 and they were running vacuum tubes and so on, it was a very important part. So I started, having a mathematical background, studying electrical engineering, what vacuum tubes were, and so on. But... In some years, I began eating with the physics department, and I ate with the guys while they were perfecting, not when they started, but when they were developing engineering size of transistors. I did a great deal of calculation for them on transistors. I obsoleted all the knowledge I knew! I haven't seen it vacuum tube for long while except when in my friend's office, where he keeps one around to show students what a vacuum tube is. You don't see them very often. Now you can say, well the original transistor held three cans and three legs. Now there's a million of them on a chip that size. I've had to endure that. At Los Alamos we calculated atomic bomb designs on relay calculators, which probably averaged maybe an operation over a second, or maybe a second and a half. Around-the-clock, six and a half days a week, for a month. Sometimes three months, but typically about a month to get one solution. Now you can punch in a modern machine, go boop boop, and there's the answer. I've had to live through a tremendous change. Furthermore I was educated as a mathematician. I certainly had no course in numerical analysis. I never knew about a computer. I knew a little physics, but Los Alamos taught me some more, but fundamentally when I went to Bell Labs because I believed that for the computing I did, I should understand the nature of the problem. I had had to learn something of the breadth of physical sciences, some chemistry, as well a lot of physics, some social science, and a little bit of biological science because the laboratories had such departments, and some social science. I spent a lifetime getting background knowledge on something. You have to have background knowledge, enough to penetrate jargon. Which I'll talk about extensively, at a later date. Now one thing you can do is to try and cling to fundamentals, which is very glib, until you you ask, what do I mean by fundamentals?

Claim the fundamentals

Well, I have two criteria, which are not adequate. One is, from the fundamentals you can derive the rest of the field. Secondly, they've been around for some time. But the fundamentals of the application which were vacuum tubes doesn't count now. True partly... the formula for gain... I have trouble with names frequently, I'll come to it pretty soon... Nyquist. Nyquist formula is still good, the gain form is used out of vacuum tubes is still useful although we have to apply to other things. Feedback is still the same, but a lot of things are not. Now I need to discuss science versus engineering. Science, if you are doing it, you shouldn't know what you're doing. If you know what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing it, not in science because science is supposed to be exploration what you don't know. Engineering, you shouldn't be doing it unless you do know what you're doing! Well nothing is pure. Science involves a great deal of engineering and engineering involves a great deal of new material. So it's a great blend. But what is painful to you, what is going to be worse, is that the two fields are growing together because of a simple fact. Again going back to when I first came to Bell Labs, when something was discovered in physics, the telephone company was not in that great a hurry, to get it developed and into the field. After all, they had pretty much a monopoly. Why hurry? Now as you know we are not willing to wait for scientific principles to develop. We want it in the field tomorrow. So the two fields have come together like that. and the leisure which we used long ago, and which we are still using some extent, to develop the ideas first and then apply it, is going to be less and less acceptable. When an idea is first around, you want to apply it. I just read last night that when the president's steward was at a museum, one of these World's Fairs, was shot and the bullet was in his back. Right in his back bone. The doctors refused to operate because they didn't know where the bullet was. But there at the museum were x-rays being demonstrated. They didn't use a new technique that was right, readily available. They could have wheeled in there and gotten the picture... No, they were conservative. We don't allow that much anymore. We're pushing very hard, and you're going to be pushed very much to go from idea to develop the item, and get it on the market rapidly.

Methods of predicting the future

Now I once read that there were 76 different methods of predicting the future, which is why I'm engaged in doing it, to some extent. One is to predict tomorrow will be like today. Whatever temperature it is today, predict tomorrow is the same. It's a pretty good prediction. A somewhat better one is to note the linear trend, and predict a linear trend. That's good for a while, but not too long and furthermore it depends on which variable you pick to be linear. If you pick the coefficient in front to be linear, it's one thing. If you pick the exponent, it's something else. It doesn't work too well. I made many predictions on how much computing I'll do pretty soon, because I needed to know how much capacity we would need, and so on. I was regularly wrong, on the low side. So one time I got miffed and said I will predict high. So I got out some formulas and predicted real high. A couple of years later, the piece of paper turned up on my desk. I looked at it. I was low again. The growth of computing has been unbelievable. On the other hand, on the other side, take artificial intelligence. The predictions made by almost all the experts, 10 20 30 years ago, have not been realized. So You can't always go on things, nevertheless there's a saying. Short-term predictions are optimistic, long-term predictions are pessimistic. The reason is very simple. The long-term ones are pessimistic because nobody can believe in geometric progression. I say again, when we got transistors going, Nobody in his right mind would have predicted a million transistors on a chip that big. Nobody. It's beyond belief, but that's what we did and you know it. So predicting the future is a very very hard business. But you have to do it! History is important.

History(Future and the Past) #Individualsdomatter

Now some people believe that history repeats itself, and some people believe exactly the opposite. But one thing you can be sure of. What we now regard as the past, was to some people the future, and what you think is the future will be the past. There will be a time when some of you will be in the history books. Yes. You live long enough and do enough, and you end up in the history books. So what you think is the future will become the past. Now another thing against history is Henry Ford senior's remark, "History is bunk." I think he said it for two reasons. One is, history is rarely reported correctly. There are a great many descriptions of what happened at Los Alamos during the war. No two of them agree, and they don't agree with what I think happened. Indeed one time, a mathematician who wrote his experience about the matter and published it. I came into Los Alamos for our regular summer visit and said to my friend, I just read all his book. That isn't how I remembered it. He said, that isn't how I remembered it either. I was just going to say, "How do you remember it?" and I suddenly realized, no two people remember it the same. Now you're familiar with this. An accident, several witnesses see it, they report different things. There is no reliable report of what happened in the past. It's what it has come down to, and is accepted. Secondly, I think in Ford's mind was the fact that the past is being more rapidly disconnected from the future. The invention of the computer tells you how much the world is different, than what it was before computers appeared. It's a change in the way we do things. Engineering now is, to a great extent, getting a computer to do the job right. You program it, and put in some terminal equipment around it to affect the real world. The heart of much of engineering now is a computer. Now some historians, when you read them They will give you the impression that that it was inevitable this was going to happen, it was inevitable Rome would fall, or this or that. And, on the other hand they will tell you the future is very open-ended, many things are possible. Can this be true, that the past was very determined, the future is very open? It seems unlikely. So you're left with saying, maybe the past was not so determined. For example, consider the individual lives of Alexander The Great, Napoleon and Hitler. If they had died in their childhood, would not the world be very different? On the intellectual side: Pythagoras, Aristotle, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein are examples of people who, had they died in their youth, the world would be rather different. So individuals do matter. I suggest that the past was less determined than the historians like to make, and the future is less open-ended than you would like to believe. But there's a great many possibilities for you. The future has got great possibilities. Now one other thing against history is, unforeseen technological inventions can ruin anything. Like I told you, transistors. The development of vacuum tubes was practically cut off. Technological invention can change completely the history of something, and one can hardly foresee technological inventions. But there are also social inventions, which are important. You people have been trained mainly in the physical side, and I've got to make you more sensitive to the fact that all of your life takes place in a social society, which has restraints. Thus I will claim that the future of technology will be less determined by what technology can do, than social, legal and other restraints on what we can do. Thus if you stop to think about highway controlled, computer-controlled highway traffic, it sounds good. Do you ask yourself, "Who do I sue in an accident?" And you begin to decide, you know, it's going to be a very very difficult thing to get going. Very difficult. Social conventions are going to stop a great many things from happening.

Drunken Sailor

Now I want to talk on another thing, a story which I'll use several times, the story of the drunken sailor. He staggers a couple steps this way, and he staggers this way, and he staggers this way, he staggers this way, In N steps, typically he'll get the square root of N distance. In a hundred steps, he'll get about ten. In ten thousand steps he'll be about a hundred times away... He may be right where he started, he may be further away, but that's typical. On the other hand, if there's a pretty girl over there... He started like this, back like this, over like this... He's going to get a distance proportional to N. If I can create in you a vision of where you are headed, you will make a progress proportional to N. If you do not have a vision, you will wander like a drunken sailor and get very little. So one of my major purposes is to get you to form a reasonable vision of what you are going to do in your future, what kind of person you're going to be. Now you're going to say to me, "but Hamming how do I know the future?" I'm gonna say it doesn't matter much, from what I've examined in life. What goal do you set? What do you want? March that way that way or that way? If you have a goal, you'll get somewheres near it... If you don't have a goal, you're a drunken sailor. My problem is to make you form your goals, and to some extent, try to achieve them. To make you something important rather than just drifting. Now it's comfortable to drift through life, and a great many people when questioned closely will assert they're perfectly content to drift through life. I don't think that's too good an idea about the whole thing. Now It's none of my business what goal you take. It is my business to force you, one way or another, to set up some reasonably decent goals to try and achieve something in your life. Again, the society is paying a great deal of money for your education. It's entitled to something. Those who do something generally have some kind of goals and see where they're headed and their lives add up. Those who don't are just a bunch of isolated events. They did this, they did that, they did another thing, but nothing added up. So my problem is to get you to choose your goals. Even if you want to be a very great guitar player, I don't mind. So long as you set a goal, there is struggling. That is the essential part that I'm really after. That's what this course is about, to some extent. Forcing you, somehow or other, to do more than you would have done otherwise. Now the standard method of teaching is to have departments. Departments break things up to the subject matter like calculus, linear programming and so on. Too much falls between and this course is an attempt in one way to plug all those holes in the engineering courses you had. You had a lot of engineering courses, they taught you this that and others, there are vast holes between them. The optimizing of the components, the individual courses, is not optimizing a total education as I will come to in system engineering. Now another goal I have is, to show you that in spite of different departments, there's an essential unity of all knowledge.

Unity in all problems: knowledge is homogeneous

When you face a difficult problem, of unknown type, it doesn't matter whether this comes from chemistry physics or anything else.You have to find the answer. Knowledge is pretty homogeneous then. It's no longer divided up into courses. No longer divided up in the process. Although at Bell Labs I was in the math department almost all the time. In fact it was great... I was doing statistics, I was doing computing. I was doing physics. I did a lot of other things, chemistry... We did not observe every division but for purpose of organization, you do have to have some structure. But I want to get in your minds, knowledge is sort of a homogeneous body which we have specialized with certain names, but it's always connected together. Now the course will center around computing. Not, I like to think, because I'm prejudiced - I spent my life in computing - but rather in fact they are going to dominate science and engineering. And there are reasons for this, very powerful reasons. Economics, for example. Computers are far far cheaper than human beings. Are cheaper, and they're getting cheaper by the year. Humans are getting more expensive by the year. Speed: far far faster. Your nervous system, if you drop something on your toe, signals up to your head about a hundred meters per second. Light is 300,000 kilometers per second. You aren't in a league. You can't even touch electronic speeds. There's no way you come near it. So speed is overwhelmingly on the side of the machine. Accuracy: namely number of digits of arithmetic they can carry, yes they can be quite precise. They can do double precision if necessary. You would have trouble doing double precision arithmetic probably, if you try doing it. You can work it out, but you'd have trouble. Reliability: they're far far ahead of you. God or nature, however you want to do it, didn't make you to be a reliable thing. You've been walking for years, but still every now and then, you trip and stumble. You can't do anything really reliable. That's why man ended up at the top of the heap. He has the flexibility built in, but don't ever try to get humans to do something reliable. Take for example bowling. All you do is throw the ball down the alley exactly the same way every time, have a perfect game. Perfect games are rare, even among the most skilled experts. Precision flying and other things are very hard to do. We recognize that being very precise, drill teams and so on, are something remarkable. Human animal wasn't really designed to do that. He was designed for something else. Rapidity of control: because machines have rapid control, we are now building airplanes which are basically unstable, and we have a computer, every millisecond, that is correcting the instability. So we get better performance out of it, but the pilot couldn't do it. If that computer goes out, the pilot is through. The pilot is left with the large scale, the broad planning, but the millisecond to millisecond is left to the computer, because a human just can't act that fast. And the other one we try to dwell on very much: freedom from boredom. It sounds trivial. You cannot put a human being on a job to look for something for three years, and then when it happens, respond promptly. You can put a computer on the job. You could put the computer on the job to watch for the rare event: "if such as such a shift happens in the atomic pile, do this." Well it hasn't happened for four years. Now the dial goes over like that... the human being isn't going to do very well. You guys know looking at a thing, for the last two and a half years even. You can't get humans to be freed from boredom. Machines don't know what the word is. Bandwidth in and out: in any rapidly changing situation, the person in charge can only get so much information in and out, and there's a general belief that really, you can process only about fifty bits per second, maybe 60, something like that, but you can't process ten thousand bits per second. A machine's got enormously more bandwidth than either visual or auditory. I'll pull all your inputs together, they won't match a modern machine for bandwidth. Not only coming in, but giving orders out. For central control, the humans simply cannot, in a complicated situation, compete with a machine if it is merely bandwidth in and bandwidth out. If it is making judgments, that's another story, but the machines simply cannot cope with it. We no longer have a crew aiming a gun at an airplane, we have it self-contained. The human is too slow. He just isn't much good. We need much more rapid things than humans can cope with. The bandwidth in and out, which is really speed of getting information, is fundamental. Computers have got it all over you. Ease of retraining: training to a great extent is you learn to do something, and now when I change the equipment, you've got to unlearn the old habits and learn some new ones. And you've got to repeat them many many times to learn them. With a computer, I change the program. Then it's done. No elaborate training. No endless hours of constant practice. Think, just put in a new program and the machine behaves a new way, very easy. Hostile environments: outer space, under water, high-radiation fields, warfare, manufacturing situations are unhealthy, and so on. I can put machines in those situations where the humans are very very difficult. In space I've got to keep this human being in an atmosphere somewhat like what he's used to. Oxygen and so on has to be employed, high radiation will kill them, and so on. How we're going to manage to get people to Mars and back in a radiation field that is coming from the Sun, I don't know. Whether we're sort of radiating them early, or maybe you decide not to send human beings that far. It's a problem. Now personnel problems is another one. That's one I'm much sensitive to.

Personal problems dominate management

Personnel problems dominate management. There are all kinds of troubles with people... With machines there are no pensions. There are no personal squabbles. Two machines don't get squabbling with another, but I've had two girls squabble that wouldn't even share the same room together. Unions: no. Personal leave: no. Egos: no. Death of relatives - "his mother died" - machines don't have that. Recreation: if I turn the machine off, that's the end of it. If I have a human being, I have to provide reasonable recreation. Machines have got it all over humans. Now all of you probably already been saying oh, yeah but what about the advantages humans have? I won't have to list those, you're trying to do it already. But I gave you a bunch of details, which you could find very hard to get around... the machine has got great advantage in many places, and because it's economically sound, you are going to see more and more machines running organizations. Some computer... well, let's say computers. The design of chips is under computer control to a great extent. Some computers are actually being assembled heavily by machines. I was on the board of directors of a computer company for a while, and at one point, more than half the computers coming down the production line we were grabbing, to mechanize a production line. We were mechanizing the building of computers, more than half the computers. We sold less than half of them because we were mechanizing the line and getting production much cheaper. That shows you how rapidly a company in the computing business was really mechanizing itself. One of my friends said he ordered a bunch of machines. The message came in overnight. A bunch of machines assembled those particular computers they wanted, and the next day those computers were on the loading dock, designed, just what they wanted with the parts they wanted. Now lastly this is, in a certain sense, a religious course. I am preaching a message, that with one life to lead, you ought to do more than just get by. Now there are great many religions, and I don't want to get involved in one or the other too much. It is however an emotional matter I'm really appealing to.

Goals: the struggle

Now it is frequently said that a happy life is one who has some goals they achieve. Well studying the matter over, and reading about it, and talking to people, everybody pretty much agrees with me that it's not the achiever of the goal that really is the best part. It's the struggle. The struggle to success is what makes you what you will be. Remember for your old age you gonna have to live with yourself. There's no escaping living with yourself in your old age. You're stuck with yourself, and in old age you can't change much as you can when you're younger. Consider the kind of person you wish to be in your old age, and start now being that kind of a person. This is what the course is all about, really, in one sense. Now it's an opinion. It's not a fact. It's an opinion that most people believe that the struggle to do, to achieve excellence is worth the struggle. Also when you look at people's lives, I can tell you the story which I may repeat a couple of times. As a child I went to a movie. They were called Nickelodeons in my day, but we actually spent a dime to go to the movie. One Saturday I went with a friend of mine, and it was one of these... You laughed and laughed and laughed at all the ridiculous situations. We walked out and he said to me, "You know that wasn't a very funny movie." I thought for a little while, said "You're right." All the laughter did not make the movie funny at all. In the same way with life... the pleasant life is not the one sum total of the pleasant moments. Somehow or other it is added up very very differently. The good life is not the life of pleasure from moment to moment, and you know it. In fact you are well aware, that you cannot get up in the morning and say, "I shall be happy today" and make it work. The good life has to be "snuck up upon" and I'm saying, an opinion of myself and many other books, the way to do that is to take yourself in hand, and manage yourself to be the person you wish to be, to achieve the goals you wish, and be more articulate than just idle drifting like a drunken sailor.

The unexamined life is not worth living

Now in ancient Greece, our boy Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." So what I'm saying goes back that far. I was crossing the Yale campus one time as consultant for a present job, I hoped they would put together. I walked across, and I heard a professor walking across the campus right ahead of me, saying to a student "the unexamined life is not worth living." And in the course of crossing one quadrangle, he managed to say it three times. So I'll repeat the third time. "The unexamined life is not worth living." See you... Thursday, right, and there are notes here on the course, and if there aren't enough I'll bring some more tomorrow, Thursday.