The Age of Miracle Chips

It is tiny, only about a quarter of an inch square, and quite flat.

Under a microscope, it resembles a stylized Navaho rug or the aerial view of a railroad switching yard. Like the grains of sand on a beach, it is made mostly of silicon, next to oxygen the most abundant element on the surface of the earth.

Yet this inert fleck—still unfamiliar to the vast majority of Americans—has astonishing powers that are already transforming society. For the so-called miracle chip has a calculating capability equal to that of a room-size computer of only 25 years ago. Unlike the hulking Calibans of vacuum tubes and tangled wires from which it evolved, it is cheap, easy to mass produce, fast, infinitely versatile and convenient.

The miracle chip represents a quantum leap in the technology of mankind, a development that over the past few years has acquired the force and significance associated with the development of hand tools or the discovery of the steam engine. Just as the Industrial Revolution took over an immense range of tasks from men's muscles and enormously expanded productivity, so the microcomputer is rapidly assuming huge burdens of drudgery from the human brain and thereby expanding the mind's capacities in ways that man has only begun to grasp. With the chip, amazing feats of memory and execution become possible in everything from automobile engines to universities and hospitals, from farms to banks and corporate offices, from outer space to a baby's nursery.

Those outside the electronic priesthood often have trouble grasping the principles of the new microtechnology or comprehending the accomplishments of the minuscule computers. The usual human sense of scale, the proportion between size and capability, the time ratio assumed between thought and action, are swept into a new and surreal terrain. Consequently, people tend to anthropomorphize the computer; they are superstitious about it. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the companionable computer HAL turns rogue in outer space and methodically begins assassinating its masters. In a B-movie called Demon Seed, the world's most advanced computer actually impregnates a scientist's wife, played by Julie Christie; it is so smart that it yearns to be alive—and scarily succeeds. Some manufacturers of computer games have discovered that people are disconcerted when the computer responds instantly after the human has made his move. So the computers have been programmed to wait a little while before making countermoves, as if scratching their heads in contemplation.

A fear of intellectual inadequacy, of powerlessness before the tireless electronic wizards, has given rise to dozens of science-fiction fantasies of computer takeovers. In The Tale of the Big Computer, by Swedish Physicist Hannes Alfven, written under the pen name Olof Johannesson, the human beings of today become the horses of tomorrow. The world runs not for man but for the existence and welfare of computers.