Time Essay: Toward an Intelligence Beyond Man's

Robert Jastrow is director of NASA 's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of Until the Sun Dies. Computers play a daily role in his work and influence his vision of the future. Here, for TIME, he looks ahead to a new relationship between computers and people:

A5 Dr. Johnson said in a different era about ladies preaching, the surprising thing about computers is not that they think less well than a man, but that they think at all. The early electronic computer did not have much going for it except a prodigious memory and some good math skills, but today the best models can be wired up to learn by experience, follow an argument, ask pertinent questions and write pleasing poetry and music. They can also carry on somewhat distracted conversations so convincingly that their human partners do not know they are talking to a machine.

These are amiable qualities for the computer; it imitates life like an electronic monkey. As computers get more complex, the imitation gets better. Finally, the line between the original and the copy becomes blurred. In another 15 years or so—two more generations of computer evolution, in the jargon of the technologists—we will see the computer as an emergent form of life.

The proposition seems ridiculous because, for one thing, computers lack the drives and emotions of living creatures. But when drives are useful, they can be programmed into the computer's brain, just as nature programmed them into our ancestors' brains as a part of the equipment for survival. For example, computers, like people, work better and learn faster when they are motivated. Arthur Samuel made this discovery when he taught two IBM computers how to play checkers. They polished their game by playing each other, but they learned slowly. Finally, Dr. Samuel programmed in the will to win by forcing the computers to try harder —and to think out more moves in advance—when they were losing. Then the computers learned very quickly. One of them beat Samuel and went on to defeat a champion player who had not lost a game to a human opponent in eight years.

Computers match people in some roles, and when fast decisions are needed in a crisis, they often outclass them. The human brain has a wiring defect that prevents it from absorbing several streams of information simultaneously and acting on them quickly. Throw too many things at the brain at one time and it freezes up; it evolved more than 100,000 years ago, when the tempo of life was slower.

We are still in control, but the capabilities of computers are increasing at a fantastic rate, while raw human intelligence is changing slowly, if at all. Computer power is growing exponentially; it has increased tenfold every eight years since 1946. Four generations of computer evolution—vacuum tubes, transistors, simple integrated circuits and today's miracle chips—followed one another in rapid succession, and the fifth generation, built out of such esoteric devices as bubble memories and Josephson junctions, will be on the market in the 1980s. In the 1990s, when the sixth generation appears, the compactness and reasoning power of an intelligence built out of silicon will begin to match that of the human brain.