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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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45. Edward Teller

Professor Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1908. He studied physics at Leipzig where he received his Ph.D. in 1930. He taught at many institutions, including Yale University, London University, George Washington University and Columbia University.
From 1943 to 1946 he worked at Los Alamos Science Laboratory on the A-bomb. He later worked on planning and predicting the functioning of atomic weapons and the hydrogen bomb. Since 1952 he has been connected with the Livermore Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
He has written, among other works, Our Nuclear Future (1958), The Legacy of Hiroshima (1962) and The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives (1968).

There reigns deep concern in the scientific and humanitarian world about the future of mankind. Skinner1 calls it a matter of survival. The Club of Rome has made a start by looking into the question of how to manage the globe.

 

I happen to believe that the matter of survival is very important. People have always been concerned about it. They always had reason to be concerned about it. Preceding the year 1000, it was generally believed in the Christian world (perhaps not by everybody, but by many) that the world would come to an end in the year 1000.

This particular view many people share today. There seems to be a predisposition in many people to prophesy the end of the world: in the year 1000 because 1000 is such a nice round number, in the year 2000 for reasons of pollution, for reasons of nuclear explosions and for reasons of the population bomb. I believe that the arguments that are advanced today are by no means more reasonable than the arguments that were popular one millennium ago.

In the Middle Ages, when there was crowding in the cities, when they possessed much dirtier methods of transportation than we have today, the result was widespread epidemics. The black death indeed looked for a while as though it might wipe out mankind. In fact it was a menace comparable to any that we are facing today, although there are fully justified worries today.

I claim that with respect to reasons to be worried in our present situation, there is nothing new. There is something new in the type of answers that one gets. There are lots of people who think that they can in some scientific fashion predict the future, calculate the future. We are getting news from all over the world and since all this information is available now, people begin getting ideas that there is a chance to manage the world. I tend to believe that these people are greatly overestimating their powers of influencing the world and even are overestimating their ability to foresee what the essential questions will be.

It is my opinion that the way to deal with problems is to deal with them one by one. To deal with the small problems, to deal with the big problems and to be a little more modest than most operational analysts seem to be. Even perhaps more modest than most of the scientists seem to be.

I would like to repeat to you a very old story, a religious one. It is not part of the Christian religion, but a legend of a conversation with

Buddha. When one of his disciples asked Buddha how one should behave in respect to women, Buddha replied, ‘Do not look at them.’ The disciple answered, ‘But Master, I have already looked.’ Then Buddha said, ‘Then do not talk to them.’ ‘But Master,’ came the reply, ‘I have already talked.’ Then Buddha said, ‘In that case, my son, try to preserve a small amount of common sense.’ This is my advice to the operational system analysts. It's the same as Buddha's advice was to the young man: ‘Please retain a minimum of common sense.’

 

How do you view the future of computers in relation to assisting the management of the future of mankind?

 

I believe that of all remarkable inventions of the last decades, the fast electronic computers are in fact the most remarkable. They are so important because they can perform any intellectual function, with only one provision: that this intellectual function be really precisely described. Once the computer can perform, it can perform more rapidly and more reliably than any human. This, of course, may mean that our intellectual activities will become obsolete because the machine can perform them better. However, there is a small restriction, which I slipped in and which is very significant indeed.

This small restriction is that I must be able to describe an intellectual function with complete precision. I, for instance, have the ability to recognize a friend. But I am completely unable to describe in any detail how I am doing it. A computer therefore cannot be taught to recognize a friend (even if he had one) because the simple process of recognition is in fact not so simple and has in fact not been described as yet.

Generally it is the boring portion of our work which we are able to describe accurately. Computers can be used to carry out these boring tasks for us. On this basis a symbiosis can be worked out because a man and a machine together can be very much more effective than a man alone.

The danger arises when the man forgets to make his essential contributions and leaves too much to the machine. He makes a few assumptions which he did not think through sufficiently, and then lets the machine spew out the results. These results will never be any better than the original assumptions.

I do not believe that we are going to become obsolete. It will take

a long time before you, as a journalist, will prefer to interview a machine, rather than to interview a fellow human being.

 

Freeman Dyson2 mentioned to me von Neumann's3 initial notes on the manufacture of a self-producing machine, ‘machines that are sophisticated enough to reproduce themselves.’ Like computers, these apparatuses would be unable to blush, but in what way would this development influence the possibilities for the survival of the human race?

 

There will be no influence. The human race will survive. Whether we shall be better or worse depends on the question whether we use or misuse our new tools.

But let me mention a task for the machine that is simpler than the task to blush. The rules for limericks can be spelled out in a reasonably explicit manner. We can make machines that could write limericks. If we could then publish a volume of mixed limericks, partly man-made, partly machine-produced, and if the reader could not pick out which is which, then we might have made progress in understanding what that peculiar word ‘humor’ means.

 

José Delgado4 does believe that a man-machine will be possible in the future, at least on the basis of activating what is already present in the human brain.5 In the study of cybernetics and the modern mind, apparently scientists did succeed to transmit emotions by computer from one human to another and back.

 

For that you hardly need a machine. You can have it in any marriage.

The greatest danger of the computer is that when used by fools, these often claim that they are scientists. What is worse, they are believed.

The great promise of the computer is that it can give a wider scope and a more rigorous control to human imagination. Of course, our imagination is limited. But in the long run imagination is apt to win.

 

Some psychologists believe that the more we know about the function of the brain, the less we run the risk that technology will be used as in the case of Hiroshima.

 

I do believe that it would have been much better to demonstrate nuclear

explosives before using them in anger. I am not one of those happy people who are convinced that they are right. I feel strongly that the war should have been ended with the help of science and without bloodshed. Science would be incomparably better off in that case, and mankind would be happier.

But while I feel this strongly, I am not convinced that I am right. Arguments can be made on either side. The clarity and the simplicity which could decide such complex questions is lacking, and the more I talk with the people who are most imaginative and have the most critical minds, the more my doubts multiply, though my feelings (against the bombing of Hiroshima) remain unchanged. The functioning of machines requires a very special kind of clarity and simplicity. In decisions of this kind a contribution by machines, whether such contributions are direct or indirect, are in the distant future - if indeed they ever should become possible.

It is only simpleminded people who are, in their opinion, always right and who believe that science or machines can save us from mistakes. It may be justified to call these people fanatics.

The fanatics among the scientists are no less dangerous than the fanatics in religion. In fact science is the religion of the modern age, and in that sense we must beware of scientific fanatics more than of any other kind.6

 

Recently you made a trip to Asia. What were your impressions? To what extent could technology ease poverty and misery there?

 

I did visit the peaceful parts of the Far East. In almost all countries I did see misery, but I also did see a definite will to develop, and I saw that this will is being translated into action. The Indonesians know very clearly that technology is an absolute requirement if they are to attain a way of life that is fit for a human being.

I also noticed practically the same government in every one of these countries. They are relatively mild forms of dictatorships, with some limited free speech, and with two great saving features: none of them are proud of being dictatorships and all of them use the not-so-democratic powers in order to accelerate progress. This holds for Taiwan under the old Chinese regime and it holds for Singapore under a younger Chinese, the most ingenious and cultured Lee Kuan Yew (who was a socialist

and whose strong measures are therefore not criticized by the liberal press), as it also holds for General Suharto, who saved Indonesia from a slide into a worse dictatorship and who initiated practical progress for which a most desperate need still exists.7

In all of these places technology stands in as high a respect as was the case in the United States during those decades (which now seem to lie in the distant past) during which the foundations of the power and prosperity of the United States was established.

It was a remarkable contrast at the end of my trip to visit Japan. Their technology and democracy are highly developed. The Japanese seem to be able to do everything faster than anybody else. They perfected technology more rapidly than any other country and switched from dictatorships to democracy at a breathtaking rate. Now their society seems to be well under way toward disillusionment in technology and maybe also in democracy.

My strongest impression from this trip is the simple statement that people are people, whether in the East or in the West. They need technology, and they have not really solved the problem yet how to live with technology.

I strongly suspect that the answer to the question is a thousand times more complex than the answer proposed by the Club of Rome.

 

Please permit me to ask a question related to your own field. Expectation that fusion power could be obtained as a significant energy source until recently was deferred to the twenty-first century. According to the Atomic Energy Commission, scientists at a fusion reactor at Princeton University achieved the highest densities and temperatures ever reported. As we understand it, the problem was how to take a thin gas of hydrogen plasma and raise it to the enormous temperatures required to permit fusion and the generation of more energy than is employed to start the reaction. Do you expect an early breakthrough in the use of H-bomb power in the world's energy crisis?

 

I hope for early results. But that will amount to no more than a demonstration - a toy of the scientists. Even if that toy is big and expensive it will not solve the energy crisis.

For that we need engineering. In this century fusion will not contribute a decisive chunk of economically useful energy. It is always easier to get an uncontrolled reaction than a controlled one, particularly if you must produce at low cost. Fusion power will not contribute to the solution of the present crisis. Perhaps it will help in the next one.

The energy crisis is a particularly good example of a self-induced catastrophe produced by the prophets of doom. They have exaggerated dangers from pollution. In part they are right, but they now oppose the building of nuclear reactors, which are among the cleanest of all sources of energy. They talk of thermal pollution and seem to worry about the fish which have to swim in water, whose temperature is raised by three degrees, rather than about people who are deprived of needed energy. They complain of added amounts of radiation which are much less than the levels of natural background radiation to which we have been exposed from our very inception. Indeed, our quadruped ancestors have been irradiated by what is now called the ‘maximum permissible dose’ starting at the time when living beings emerged from the ocean. At that time the environmentalists among the fish should have warned about the unnatural conditions living beings will encounter on dry land. But the fish were mute. This, one may consider fortunate, or else a disaster - depending on one's point of view.

If nuclear reactors could be built at a rate which is reasonable according to the state of technology, and if this development were not impeded by the exaggerated fears of those who see the end of the world approaching, then a considerable contribution could be made to the demands for more energy by reactors.

There are other ways to approach the same problem. One of them, which lies in my field of specialty, is the use of Plowshare, the constructive employment of nuclear explosives. By using nuclear explosives we could stimulate gas reserves which are contained in rock of small pore size and which cannot be pumped out by conventional methods. We could utilize oil shale at a modest price. We could get the residues of oil of depleted oil fields as the Russians are doing now.

Free speech is a wonderful thing and we must insist on it. One also should listen to that free speech with some criticism, otherwise countries in which free speech is suppressed, as in Russia, will win the race of technology. Indeed, in Russia the Club of Rome has little influence. This is an advantage for the Russians. But I would rather have a thousand Clubs of Rome than one Politburo.

There is one point on which one must lay great emphasis. The energy crisis is not the result of wasteful use of energy in the United States (even though this is asserted by many Americans). It is primarily the result of the rest of the world catching up with American standards. In Western Europe and in Japan this process is in full swing. In the developing world it is just getting under way, and indeed is getting under way much too slowly. People are entitled to a better way of living and new

pathways in research could produce the needed technology to combat pollution and at the same time to provide everyone with plenty of energy.

I have mentioned only a few ways to alleviate the energy shortage. There are many more. All of them utilize research and technology. Many of them are bound to succeed.

 

You have expressed disagreement with those who see great difficulties in the future. What would be your own prediction?

 

I believe that in the year 2000 the world will be very different from its present state, which is unstable and is not likely to endure. Life will be either much better or much worse.

Which will be the case depends on all of us. Discussions about the future undoubtedly are full of wrong statements (I would be quite willing to apply this to my own answers). But irrespective of these mistakes, discussions of this kind are needed. They constitute a powerful influence which will form the future.


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