What about the ordinary everyday effects of these machines upon you and me as an individual? We can see that the new machinery will apply on a small scale even to us. Small machines using a few electronic tubes—much like a radio set, for example—and containing spools of magnetic wire or magnetic tape will doubtless be available to us. We shall be able to use them to keep addresses and telephone numbers, to figure out the income tax we should pay, to help us keep accounts and make ends meet, to remember many things we need to know, and perhaps even to give us more information. For there are a great many things that all of us could do much better if we could only apply what the wisest of us knows. We can even imagine what new machinery for handling information may some day become: a small pocket instrument that we carry around with us, talking to it whenever we need to, and either storing information in it or receiving information from it. Thus the brain with a motor will guide and advise the man just as the armor with a motor carries and protects him. Chapter 12 SOCIAL CONTROL: MACHINES THAT THINK AND HOW SOCIETY MAY CONTROL THEM It is often easier for men to create a device than to guide it well afterwards: it is often easier for a scientist to study his science than to study the results for good or evil that his discoveries may lead to. But it is not right nor proper for a scientist, a man who is loyal to truth as an ideal, to have no regard for what his discoveries may lead to. This principle is now being widely recognized. Many scientists today—both as individuals and as groups, and especially the atomic scientists—are considering the results of their scientific discoveries; and they are sharing in the effort to render those results truly useful to humanity. It would be easy to leave out of this book any discussion of how machines that think may be controlled, any consideration of how they may be made truly useful to humanity. But that would be hardly right or proper. In concluding a book such as this one, that touches on many aspects of machines that think, we need to consider what can and should be done to make such machines of true benefit to all of humanity. So, we come to the most important of all our questions: What sort of control over machines that think do we need in human society? MACHINE THAT BOTH THINKS AND ACTS From a narrow point of view, a machine that only thinks produces only information. It takes in information in one state, and it puts out information in another state. From this viewpoint, information in itself is harmless; it is just an arrangement of marks; and accordingly, a machine that thinks is harmless, and no control is necessary.