Perhaps the tech gurus who, by their own account, have brought us to the brink of human extinction should have read a novel published in 1965 before they recklessly rushed ahead with AI development. The Tin Men is the first novel by Michael Frayn who went on to a prolific career as a novelist and playwright. He is one of my favorite authors and this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. I reread it recently and found it just as funny as the first time, though now there is a dark foreshadowing that wasn’t discernible back in the 1960″s.
The Tin Men is set in the fictional William Morris Institute of Automation Research. Here a motley crew of scientists and their bureaucratic overlords think up ways to put a cumbersome new invention, the computer, to some practical use. As Michael Frayn explains in his introduction to a new edition:
Computers – the tin men of my title – were beginning to make their importance felt, if only by their ponderous size and cost. They were produced, mostly by IBM, for a small elite of academic and commercial users, and they were as imposing in their way as the great steam engines that had ushered in an earlier technological revolution.
The book was written in the era of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and shares the same satirical, irreverent, and absurdist outlook. Thus we have a researcher spending his days feeding typical newspaper headline phrases into his machine, which regurgitates them in random combinations. No need for a human headline writer. Another muses on teaching a computer to write pornographic novels; after all there are only so many variables to program. Perhaps computers can even do our praying for us. Prayer is so tedious and time-consuming, surely automated prayer would be just as pleasing to the Almighty.
But the heart of the story is the work of the Ethics Department. Led by the obsessive Macintosh they are investigating to what extent computers can be programmed to follow codes of ethical behavior. Macintosh’s pet project is Samaritan. The scenes in his laboratory, which holds an enormous water tank, stuck in my mind vividly for all the fifty plus years since I first read it.
Continue reading “The Tin Men & AI”‘Launch her,’ called Macintosh. A crane on the gantry swung a raft out over the water and started to lower it. On the raft, gazing at each other sombrely, sat Macintosh’s Principal Research Assistant, Sinson, wearing an inflated yellow life-jacket, and his ethical machine, Samaritan II. A great echoing silence fell over the tank. Macintosh had concentrated all his department’s efforts on the Samaritan programme. The simplest and purest form of the ethical situation, as he saw it, was the one in which two people were aboard a raft which would support only one of them.
