TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061190/0611310.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 131 lines

                ₧                                                              TECHNOLOGY, Page 58

Dashed Hopes and Bogus Fears


The Smithsonian chronicles an unpredictable information age

By EUGENE LINDEN


    At a time when data moved on horses and ships, Samuel Morse
inaugurated the information age in 1835 by translating messages
into electric signals and telegraphing them at nearly the speed
of light. With 20/20 hindsight, it is tempting to view today's
networked and digitized world as the inevitable culmination of
Morse's breakthrough technology. That would be a mistake,
however. Technological change has been marked by fits, starts
and left turns, and the clues to the future have often been
hidden in the clutter of the present.

    This is the message of a new $10 million permanent exhibit
at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American
History in Washington. Titled "Information Age: People,
Information & Technology," the show brings together 700 objects
and artifacts, ranging from Morse's telegraph to an early Apple
computer. Through re-created scenes and videos, the exhibition
tries to capture the mood of each period during the information
age, which has repeatedly confounded both the hopes and fears
of society. "Our goal was to display technology as a human
enterprise," says curator David Allison, "subject to all the
foibles and failures of people."

    In the early 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray
both discovered the possibility of voice transmission, but Gray
ignored the potential of the telephone in the erroneous belief
that telegraphy would remain the dominant means of
communication. In the early 1950s, technicians used the newly
invented transistor simply as a substitute for bulky vacuum
tubes. Only later did designers realize that the transistor
could revolutionize electrical engineering by providing a tiny,
universal electronic component that could be organized into
integrated circuits and programmed to perform millions of
different tasks.

    Predictions of the social impact of mass communications and
computers were equally myopic. Bernard Finn, of the
Smithsonian's division of electricity, notes that the sending
of the first transatlantic cable message in 1858 was widely
hailed as an event that would introduce an era of world peace
because it would enhance communication between different
peoples. Shortly afterward, the U.S. Civil War broke out, and
the opposing armies took over telegraph offices, establishing
a coupling between information technology and warfare that
continues to the present.

    If the information age has not lived up to early hopes,
neither has it justified later fears. Instead of mass
unemployment, automation permitted the expansion of the economy
and created new jobs. Abuse of the electronic media did not
create the thought-controlled world predicted by George Orwell
in 1984. Decades of attempts to control information in the
Soviet Union backfired in the worst possible way: the
government could not convince people they lived in a worker's
paradise, but it could dampen the knowledge flow sufficiently
to stifle the innovation necessary for a robust economy.

    Though sweeping, the actual transformations wrought by
computers and mass communications have been more subtle than
predicted. Between 1860 and 1980, the proportion of the U.S.
economy derived from information processing and communications
rose from 7% to more than 50%, creating a demand for a new type
of worker. Computers and communications equipment do not
require strength or aggressiveness, and this has helped
transform the role of women in industrial societies. These
changes go on today at the edges of the information age. In New
Guinea, for example, rural men skilled in warfare and hunting
are by turns mystified and mortified when they have to deal
with women as equals if not superiors in modern banks and
offices.

    In America computers and the media continue to reshape life.
Still, the very ubiquity of information technologies has also
exposed their limitations. Businesses and policymakers, awash
in data and images, have discovered that information is not
useful without expertise. With the most sophisticated
intelligence-gathering tools at its disposal, the CIA could not
accurately portray the disarray of the Soviet economy or
predict the collapse of communism. Instead of making people
redundant, the high-tech economy has only underscored the
irreplaceable contributions of human knowledge and common
sense.

    In recent years computer companies have begun to sell
software systems that emulate specific human expertise, raising
fears that experts will be the next group to be replaced by
computers. But there is little reason for concern. Unfounded
claims that an artificial intelligence is around the corner
date to the 19th century. The more likely result is that these
new systems will extend, rather than replace, human knowledge,
freeing experts to work on novel problems.

    People will continue to err when predicting the future if
only because of the human tendency to fit new events into
familiar categories. In a celebrated 1950s experiment,
psychologist Jerome Bruner showed that ordinary people would
"see" a red ace of spades as a regular black one if it was
salted into an otherwise normal deck. The Smithsonian exhibit
demonstrates that inventors are fooled in the same way.

    Allison and his fellow curators have wisely refrained from
predicting the future, focusing instead on the discoveries that
have brought humanity to its present juncture. Perhaps, though,
one of the many schoolchildren visiting the exhibit will look
with fresh eyes at its displays and have the flash of intuition
that holds the key to the next technological revolution.