The Personal Computer of the ‘90s Shapes Up as the Be-All and End-All : Technology: Experts predict a blend of 3-D television and quadraphonic stereo with the hand controls of a video game machine and more speed than car-sized mainframes of the 1980s.
Imagine what would happen if thousands of bright but bored Nintendo fanatics, Walkman freaks and TV channel flippers went to college and studied computer science.
What would happen is the personal computer of the 1990s--a blend of 3-D television and quadraphonic stereo with the hand controls of a video game machine and more speed than car-sized mainframes of the 1980s.
Silicon chips burning through a billion instructions a second will be able to surround the user with the sights and sounds of an early morning in Paris or an erupting Hawaiian volcano.
“Multimedia” computers will rival television for attention on a Tuesday night. More importantly, experts say, they will help educate the next generation of video-hungry schoolchildren.
A computer is the most patient teacher, which is why many students blossom when they practice math or spelling on it. Computers of the ‘90s will simulate a four-lane highway for driver’s ed or a flask of hydrochloric acid for chemistry.
“You could have a tremendous explosion of human knowledge over the next decade. This could not only accelerate people’s learning process but make a boatload of money,” said William Zachmann, president of Canopus Research in Duxbury, Mass.
“Infotainment” and other trends in computers are being propelled by a ceaseless decline in the price of computing power, a decline that opens up previously unimaginable possibilities.
Cheaper chips will add smarts to things people use every day, from toasters to the telephone system. They will become so common that people will stop remarking on them, the way people stopped talking about “transistor” radios once all radios had transistors.
In contrast to electricity, which is a powerful force of nature, computing is an abstraction. No one ever was killed on a golf course by a bolt of computing. But computers add capability to machinery, and in the 1990s they will extend the human reach in every field from weather forecasting to sex therapy.
“We increasingly call them people amplifiers,” said Earl Joseph, a futurist who heads Anticipatory Sciences Inc. in St. Paul, Minn.
Any dependence can be dangerous, and the dangers from computers range from power failures and accidental bugs in the software to maliciously planted viruses and the ever-present threat of Big Brotherism.
Computer viruses are the social disease of technology and will be combatted by limiting things that made computing fun in the 1980s, like sharing software and communicating in networks.
As for Big Brotherism, Los Alamos National Laboratory is exploring using brainlike “neural networks” for voice identification. That could allow computers to monitor phone networks and locate people by the calls they make, although that’s not Los Alamos’ intention.
Harvard University researchers are experimenting with similar machines that recognize faces. Theoretically they could be used in airports and bus terminals to search for enemies of the state--again, not Harvard’s intention.
Along with the threat of cold efficiency comes the threat of computer-aided blunders, as with the Michigan man who was arrested five times after a murder suspect stole his wallet and used his identification.
“There are two broad dangers,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology sociologist Gary Marx has said. “One is that the technologies work and the other is that they don’t work.”
Stanford University’s Terry Winograd tells the parable of a man who climbs out on a long limb that starts to shake. He has two choices: to invent an intricate, computer-controlled, limb-stabilizing system, or to wise up and get off the branch.
Too often, Winograd says, people fall in love with technology and forget the second option. Still, computers are here to stay. They will change life, mostly for the better, in the coming decade:
* Machine translation of language will help put Americans in touch with the rest of the world. Computers already can crudely translate printed material, and automatic translation of live speech is on the way. But beware: One system in Europe translated the French “nous avions” (we were having) as “us airplanes.”
* Telerobots with human guidance will clean up crippled nuclear reactors and scour sclerotic arteries. Unlike their crude ancestors, they will be able to go about their work without moment-to-moment instructions. One unnerving possibility is military robots--”telegladiators”--that would lower the threshold of war by removing people from the battle scene.
* Artificial intelligence is not going to create a human brain in silicon by the end of the ‘90s. That dubious achievement may lie another century off. But spinoffs will be everywhere, such as an “agent” that scans data to assemble an electronic newspaper tailored to its boss’s interests.
Computers will continue to take over unskilled jobs; society’s challenge is to retrain those who are displaced to do more creative work. Joseph, the Minnesota futurist, is optimistic:
“The short-term displacement will be horrible. But the key word is cooperation, to make humanistic use of people. I think it’s going to be one of the greatest decades.”
