Posted by
Dawnsblood on Friday, October 06, 2006 6:17:55 PM
Just in case you
missed it:
Of course the Dobsons have a television set. But it is connected
with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when
Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they
also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man
is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those
taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination;
samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her
shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her
inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.
Automatic electronic inventions that seem to have something like
intelligence integrate industrial production so that all the machines
in a factory work as units in what is actually a single, colossal
organism. In the Orwell Helicopter Corporation’s plant only a few
trouble shooters are visible, and these respond to lights that flare up
on a board whenever a vacuum tube burns out or there is a short
circuit. By holes punched in a roll of paper, every operation necessary
to produce a helicopter is indicated. The punched roll is fed into a
machine that virtually gives orders to all the other machines in the
plant. The holes in the paper indicate exactly how long a reamer is to
smooth the inside of a cylinder, just when a stamping machine is to
pass a sheet of aluminum along to its neighbor with orders to punch 22
holes in indicated places. There are mechanical wrenches that
obediently turn nuts on bolts and stop all by themselves when the bolts
are in place, shears that know exactly where to cut a sheet of metal
for a perfect fit. Every operation in the plant is electronically and
automatically controlled.
One of the more remarkable electronic machines of 2000 is a
development of one on which hundreds of thousands of dollars had been
spent in the middle years of the 20th century by Dr. Vladimir Zworykin
and Dr. John von Neumann. The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von
Neumann automaton is to predict the weather with an accuracy
unattainable before 1980. It is a combination of calculating machine
and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of separate equations
in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the computer’s
instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950,
meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that
should have been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours
in advance.
Following suggestions made by Zworykin and Von Neumann storms are
more or less under control. It is easy enough to spot a budding
hurricane in the doldrums off the coast of Africa. Before it has a
chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward
Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft.
Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing
hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that
some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain.
Read the whole thing at the link. They were so close in a few places, but laughingly wrong in others.