Talking machine

“ The really efficient stenographer—one of the kind who expects to advance to the position of private secretary—will make a careful study of form paragraphs, fitting himself to handle the minor correspondence, thereby saving the more valuable time of the correspondent.
Talking Machines for Dictation. Every year sees an increase in the use of the talking machine for dictation. These machines have now been brought to a state of perfection which makes their use feasible, and in many large offices they are used to the almost complete exclusion of shorthand writers. ”

“ I think there are other causes besides the general use of the talking machine that account for the fact that there is less singing than there used to be. I think we do not live quite as close to nature as we used to, and that that is what used to make us sing.
Mr. Sousa. That is very true. But the more leeway you give the talking machine the greater encroachments they will make. If they are made to pay a royalty on all compositions that they use, perhaps they will not have so many bad ones in their records. ”

“ A long while ago, after we had perfected mechanical talking machines, somebody realized that we were wasting a great amount of time conversing with machinery when we couldn't understand our fellow men. ”

“ There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?—when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own? ”

“ Then the machines selected those few cases in which the patterns showed meaning instead of randomness.
A machine like the automatic typist, if made flexible enough, would be, of course, extremely useful. A great load of dull office work is now being thrown on clerks whose task is to translate from writing and typing into languages that machines can read, such as punch cards. At the present time, if punch-card machines are widely used in a big company, the company must employ large numbers of girls whose sole duty is to read papers and punch up cards. ”

“ Mediation, in its newest digital forms of enmeshed nature and evolving culture, causes boundaries to disappear between the elements involved in practical experiences of our self-constitution.
Literacy, Language and Market
Markets are mediating machines. In our time, the notion of a machine is very different from that of the industrial Machine Age associated with the pragmatics of the civilization of literacy. Today, the term machine is evocative of software rather than hardware. Machine comprises input and output, process, control mechanisms, and the expectation of predictable functioning. ”

“ The shortcomings of human speech are most evident in discussing complicated matters; and for this reason speech is supplemented in the engineering arts by drawings of different kinds. No man ever lived who could describe a complicated machine accurately to a listener, unless that machine differed but little from a machine with which the listener was acquainted. But hand a drawing of even a very complicated machine to a man who knows its language—and the whole nature of the object is laid bare to him ”

“ The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches will act as a Listening Machine.
A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward. Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand. ”

“ No one writes with his own hand if he can dictate to a stenographer, no one dictates if he can telegraph, no one telegraphs if he can telephone, and by-and-by, when the spirit of American invention has brought wireless telegraphy into thorough condition, a man will simply sit with his mouth at one hole and his ear at another, and do business with the ends of the earth in a few seconds, which the same machine will copy and preserve in letter books and ledgers. ”

“ Whether or not the computer really thinks remains a controversial question. Some top scientists claim that the computer will eventually be far smarter than its human builder; equally reputable authorities are just as sure that no computer will ever have an original thought in its head. Perhaps a safe middle road is expressed with the title of this book; namely that the machine is simply an extension of the human brain. A high-speed abacus or slide rule, if you will; accurate and foolproof, but a moron nonetheless. ”

“ It is a 670speaking machine which reproduces articulate speech, not produces it. Much ingenuity has been devoted to the construction of speaking machines which should be capable of producing the sounds of the human voice. By throwing into vibration the air contained in cavities of certain shapes, it was long ago found possible to produce sounds closely resembling those of a voice singing particular vowels, and a real speaking machine that could articulate words was exhibited in America before the phonograph had been brought out. ”

“ Never satisfied, computer designers pondered the problem of all the lost time entailed in laboriously preparing cards or tapes for the ravenous electronic machine. The results of this brain-searching are interesting, and they are evident in computers that actually read man-talk. Computers used in the post office and elsewhere can optically read addresses as well as stamps; banks have computers that electrically read the coded magnetic ink numbers on our checks and process thousands of times as many as human workers once did. ”

“ And finally from verbal Russian to verbal English. The speed limitation here, of course, is human ability to accept a verbal input or to deliver an output. Within this framework, however, the computer is ready to demonstrate its great capability.
A recent article in Scientific American asks in its first sentence if a computer can think. The answer to this old chestnut, the authors say, is certainly yes. They then proceed to show that having passed this test the computer must now learn to perceive, if it is to be considered a truly intelligent machine. ”

“ Today, we find a parallel situation in that there are those who refuse to accept the computer as an intelligent machine, though it is interesting to watch these objectors regroup and draw another line the machine dare not go past. ”

“ They show it in their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes around him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full of laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being. ”

“ The fact that the digital computer is just such a rigorously logical and unbending machine poses problems for it in certain of its dealings with its human masters. Language ideally should be logical in its structure. In general it probably is, but man is so perverse that he has warped and twisted his communications to the point that a computer sticking strictly to book logic will hit snags almost as soon as it starts to translate human talk into other human talk, or into a logical machine command or answer. ”

“ There is even less of a need to maintain between the human being and the machine a mediating literacy that is awkward, inefficient, stamped by ambiguity, and burdened by various uses (religious, political, ideological, etc.) . The new languages, whether interfaces between machines or between humans and machines, are of limited scope and duration. In the dynamics of work, these new languages are appropriately adapted to each other. Our entire activity becomes faster, more precise, more segmented, more distributed, more complex. ”

“ We can begin to investigate the question of computer intelligence by again looking up a definition. The word “compute” means literally to think, or reckon, with. Early computers such as counting sticks, the abacus, and the adding machine are obviously something man thinks with. Even though we may know the multiplication tables, we find it easier and safer to use a mechanical device to remember and even to perform operations for us. ”

“ When the communication environment is such that each linguistic transaction cannot have an immediate conclusion or effect in the object domain, then it is essential that the domain model be used to determine if a particular makes sense. Otherwise the machine will make any inferences about the information it and the dialogue may become a monologue the human. The efficiency will deteriorate, particularly will be accepting information later when it is handled in Individual user models. language is to accommodate of the transfer for naive users. ”

“ And, as the sensitive cells in the head received the signals from the visor-screens and the radio-speakers the arms shot about the key-boards and pressed the proper buttons just as our men are doing now. The work of the world went on, without a falter, with only the master machine to direct it. Yet a year ago, when I first spoke to you of the idea, you told me it was impossible!"
"You have won," I responded; "you have taken the last step in the turning over of the functions of man to machines—the last step but one. ”

“ There are five components that make up a computer: input, control, arithmetic (or logic) unit, memory, and output. As machine intelligence expert, Dr. W. Ross Ashby, points out, we can get no more out of a brain—mechanical or human—than we put into it. So we must have an input. The kind of input depends largely on the degree of sophistication of the machine we are considering.
With the abacus we set in the problem mechanically, with our fingers. Using a desk calculator we punch buttons: a more refined mechanical input. Punched cards or perforated tapes are much used input methods. ”

“ The addition of eyes and ears plus limbs and locomotion to the computer, foreseen now in the photocell eyes of Perceptron, the ears of Cybertron, and dexterity of Mobot and Hand, will move the computer from mere brain to robot.
Some people profess to worry about what will happen when the computer itself realizes that it is thinking, calling to mind the apocryphal story of the machine that was asked if there was a God. ”

“ With this added function a vast added complication may come, after which, if it develops that the new function may with economy be performed by the machine, the process of simplification again begins, the whole design finally taking on an indefinable elegance which appears only when each part is so made as to be best adapted in composition, form, and strength to the work it is to perform.
Achievements in the past teach us that a machine may be made to do almost anything automatically if only the time, patience, skill, and money be brought to bear. This is also true of a telephone system. ”

“ Different users will have different expectations concerning the values of implicit parameters of the conversation, and will have different underlying assumptions. In order not to burden each user with the necessity to make all of these explicit, it is necessary to make these assumptions and defaults a function of the type of user. Dialogue model The machine must have a working knowledge of what constitutes an acceptable dialogue. ”

“ If we are to admire the telegraph or the telephone, we shall not be satisfied with considering the exterior forms, the network of wires, the keys, the receivers; we shall be impressed rather by the ideal beauty, by the idea of a vibrating spark leaping over countries and whole continents. A machine is not wonderful on, account of its rattling, rusty, iron framework, but [Pg 85] by the idea, deep-seated in its body, which is the principle of its magical activity. ”

“ But it seems that the only way to interfere with one of these great reading-machines is to stop the machine. One would say theoretically that it would not take very much to stop it—a mere broken thread of thought would do it, if the machine had any provision for thoughts. As it is, one can only stand outside, watch it through the window, and do what all outsiders are obliged to do, shout into the din a little good advice. ”

“ These machines are used for transcribing and general correspondence in every part of the globe, doing their work in almost every language. Any young man or woman of ordinary ability, having a practical knowledge of the use of this machine may find constant and remunerative employment. ”

“ There is another reason for the digital machines ubiquitousness, a reason it does not seem proper to list as merely a relative advantage over the analog. We have described the analog computer used as an aid to psychological testing procedures, and its ability to handle a multiplicity of problems at once. This perhaps tends to obscure the fact that the digital machine by its very on-off, yes-no nature is ideally suited to the solving of problems in logic. ”

“ The fact that the language of the machine is a new language, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a language, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry in machinery.
The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it does not seem to express. ”

“ When you want to change the number stored by your fingers, you move them: perhaps you need a half second to change the number stored by your fingers from 3 to 2, for example. In the same way, a machine can change a stored number by changing the arrangement of some equipment: the electronic brain Eniac can change a stored number in 1/5000 of a second.
LANGUAGES
Since it is not always easy to think, men have given much attention to devices for making thinking easier. They have worked out many systems for handling information, which we often call languages. ”

“ The lessons in the Machine-tool Laboratory will not be described in detail as in the other laboratories. The processes are so delicate and so intricate, and the resulting products in machines so closely approach the marvellous, as to beggar description. The poverty of words as compared with things asserts itself with unexampled force in the presence of a great variety of tools, each of which seems to be endowed with the power of reflection, and each of which, instead of whispering a word in your ear, drops into your hand a thing of use to man. ”