Name: Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Vision of the Computer-Dominated Future
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Sir Arthur C. Clarke was a British science-fiction author who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Watch this interview with Sir Arthur C. Clarke for The Mind Machine (1978.)

Sir Arthur C. Clarke was a British science-fiction author who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Vision of the Computer-Dominated Future

Watch this interview with Sir Arthur C. Clarke for The Mind Machine (1978.)

Tech & Engineering

Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Vision of the Computer-Dominated FuturePublished: November 5, 2024Arthur C. Clarke: I think that what we're doing now is in a sense, creating our own successors. We have seen the first crude beginnings of artificial intelligence. It doesn't really exist yet at any level because our most complex computers are still morons. High-speed, morons, but still morons. Nevertheless, some of them are capable of learning and we will one day be able to design systems that can go on improving themselves, so that at that stage we have the possibility of machines which can outpace their creators and therefore become more intelligent than us.It's perfectly obvious that the development of such computers would restructure society completely. They would clearly remove much of the mechanical, if you can use that term, the routine work, which of course has taken so much of society's time, time of the human race, and they're already doing this in many ways because our society now would collapse instantly if the computers that run it, were taken away, and these are very simple, low-grade computers.And this of course raises tremendous social and philosophical problems, not just a question of displaced people. What will they do? What will the people who are only capable of low-grade computer-type work, what will they do in the future? There's a much profound question of what is the purpose of life? What do we want to live for? And that is a question which the intelligent computer will force us to pay attention to.

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Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Vision of the Computer-Dominated Future

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