The revolutionary computer and our problems
CYBERCULTURE-THE AGE OF
ABUNDANCE AND LEISURE
BY ALICE MARY HILTON
IN A CHICAGO suburb, in a bakery as
large as a football field, bread and rolls
and cakes and cookies are produced for
millions of households throughout the country by a team of machines, called a system.
ALICE MARY HILTON is President of A. M. Hilton and Associates, and of The Institute for Cybercultural Research, Inc., New York City. She
is a member, or director, of numerous scientific
and professional organizations. Since the early
1950's, when the first computing machines intimated vast social changes, Miss Hilton has set
forth the argument for Living Certificates, entitling all to a basic income; several months ago,
the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,
of which she is a member, proposed that an income be made a constitutional right.
Cyberculture, she explains, is that way of life
made possible when an entire process of production is carried out by systems of machines monitored and controlled by one computer. The word
cybernetics (SIGH-ber-NET-ics, from the Greek
for "steersman") was put into modern currency
by M.I.T.'s late Norbert Wiener.
Miss Hilton has studied at the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, and the Claremont Graduate School. She
holds a B.A. with honors in comparative literature
from Oxford, and a degree in electrical engineering from U.C.L.A., where she has also taken
graduate work in mathematics. She edits a series
entitled The Age of Cyberculture. She is author of
Logic, Computing Machines, and Automation, and
numerous articles, in many of which she has made
specific recommendations to Government, Industry,
and Labor towards solving our general cybercultural problem. An earlier version of this present
essay served as a resource paper for Professor
Maxwell H. Goldberg's Seminar on Work, Leisure,
and Education in a Changing Industrial Society
sponsored by the Center for Continuing Liberal
Education at The Pennsylvania State University,
June 3-5, 1964. Miss Hilton will include material
from it in her forthcoming The Cybercultural
Revolution-Computing Machines, Cybernation,
and Society (World Publishing Co., 1965). @ Alice
Mary Hilton, 1964.
Factories have been growing larger, production has increased, and machines have
become complex for more than a century,
and size, increase in productivity, or the
complexity of machine systems have long
ago ceased to be newsworthy. In this bakery
the revolutionary change, unknown before
this decade, is not its size, productivity, or
complexity-impressive though they arebut its cybernation (or true automation)
which means that the entire huge operation is
run by a completely self-sufficient and selfcontained machine system. The enormously
complex business is guided, directed, controlled, and monitored by an electronic computing machine, the central and integral part
of the machine system that serves as nerve
and message center.
The mixing and blending of flour, sugar,
milk, butter, and all the other solid and
liquid ingredients is directed and constantly
supervised by the computing machine whose
electronic pulses busily carry instructions to
the other machines and bring information
from sensory devices about conditions, performance, and progress back to the central
computing machine. The mixing and blending is done according to recipes, or "programs," stored on magnetic tape, punch
cards, tiny doughnut-shaped "cores," magnetic drums, or similar devices.
Apart from the mixing, blending, and
baking, the computing machine controls supplies so that raw materials are ordered and
thriftily kept at the proper level-not so
much as to waste storage space or risk spoiling, and not so little as to keep any of the
mixing and baking centers idle. Baking time
and oven temperatures are computed and
continually adjusted to the slightest change
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