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V. Afanasyev
Man and TechnologyMaterial production is the foundation of human civilisation. In order to further production man must have machinery, i.e., the man-made means that enable him to remake and harness nature. As the living and thinking element of the productive forces, man is inseparably bound up with machinery, with the other practical element of the productive forces. Together they comprise the man-machine system.
Evolution of the Man-Machine System
A special relationship exists between man and the machine. This relationship always bears the stamp of its times and is, essentially, a manifestation of a definite system of labour organisation which, in its turn, depends on the relations of production predominating in society. Man is not an abstract being. He is a social product and is linked up with an intricate network of social relations, which, in the final analysis, determine the nature of his relationship with machines. His role in this relationship is not confined to the physical manipulation of switches. This manipulation necessarily acquires a social hue.
From the purely technical aspect, there is no difference between the machines used in capitalist and socialist production, but the social role played by machines in these societies is different. The reason for this is that under capitalism machines are privately owned, while in socialist society they are public property. In capitalist society, machines come first in the man-machine system, and man is, more often than not, turned into an accessory of the machine. The capitalist’s principal objective is to preserve and speed up the rate of production in order to beat 227competitors and obtain the highest possible profits. To this end the capitalist improves technology and machines and is least of all concerned with man.
In socialist society man is the prime element in the man machine system. He not only operates the machine but owns it together with his fellow workers. Hence the concern to promote technical progress and increase labour productivity goes hand in hand with concern for the welfare of man, with the aim of furthering his intellectual and physical advancement. Under socialism there is a marked trend to design machines in such a way as to make them conform to man’s mental and physical potentialities and ensure conditions for normal work and periodic rest during work.
The man-machine system develops side by side with the growth of production with emphasis on freeing this system from man’s physical limitations. Man’s physical possibilities are limited and the general trend of technological development is therefore to surmount this limitation by gradually transferring more of man’s production functions to machines. This is giving man a new role in production. At the pre-automation phase of technological progress man’s role is chiefly that of a physical subject fulfilling definite physical functions. At that stage, by virtue of the inadequate level of technical development, these functions cannot be turned over to machines. But with the advent of automation, which converts production into a continuous process, man’s physical functions gradually give way to social functions such as adjustment, control and regulation.
The replacement of man’s physical functions by social ones is made possible by automation, by the creation of systems of automatic regulation. Here man ceases to be a mechanical component of the man-machine system in which he directly fulfils those production functions that the machine cannot fulfil. “The worker,” Marx wrote, characterising automated production, “is no longer what he used to be when he wedged a changed object of nature between himself and the object of labour; now between himself and inorganic nature, which he is harnessing, he is wedging a natural process that he is transforming into an industrial process. He is taking his place beside the 228process of production instead of being its principal agent.” The machine is becoming the chief element of the manmachine system (in the sense of the fulfilment of the production function proper), while man, Marx wrote, “with regard to the very process of production is its overseer and regulator".
Here it is not a question of man’s complete and absolute liberation from participation in production but of his gradual liberation from participation in production as a physical being and thereby of the liberation of technical progress from man’s restraining physical limitations. This is a process of man’s self-liberation and does not in any way imply a belittlement of his role in production or of his complete replacement by machines. The machines created by man free him from excessive physical strain, from fatiguing and monotonous mental work, but no machine can free him from his social functions, from his duties, acts and activities as a member of society. Even when comprehensive automation will have been achieved under communism, man will continue to participate in production and retain his decisive role in it precisely as a member of society, as a social being although this participation will be effected indirectly, through a system of signals and control.
It is of tremendous theoretical and, more especially, practical importance to study the principles underlying the designing and creation of integral systems of the manmachine type.
On the one hand, the freeing of machinery from the restraining influence of man as a result of the latter’s emancipation from physical participation in the production process makes it possible to design fundamentally new types of machines and mechanisms to meet the requirements solely of the objective course of the production process itself, of the laws governing this process.
On the other hand, these machines and mechanisms will ensure man’s active but indirect participation in this process, facilitate the development of his talents, embody his social experience and create the possibility for the comprehensive employment of this experience to achieve the greatest production efficiency. Machines and mechanisms must be designed in such a way as to make the most 229of man’s creative abilities, the flexibility of his thinking and experience, and his ability to take his bearings in diverse and frequently unforeseen circumstances, i.e., to utilise human qualities.
The combining of human and machine components in production and the establishment of the most effective and expedient relationship between man and machines is a complicated and difficult task which can be carried out only by pooling the efforts of engineers, psychologists, mathematicians, philosophers and other specialists.
With the growth of automation man becomes a link in extremely intricate production systems. Under these conditions the task is not to free him from participation in production and completely replace him by machines (which cannot be done), but to find the most expedient forms of relationship between him and machines, a relationship that conforms to his intellectual and physical possibilities and to his sociological experience. Inasmuch as in automated production man influences production indirectly, through a system of signals and control mechanisms, it is of particularly great importance to work out the most rational forms of relationship between him and these mechanisms. In this sphere machine designers are rendered invaluable assistance by cybernetics, which not only creates the most efficient systems of machines but also works out methods of operating intricate automatic installations and designs systems of regulation that conform to man’s possibilities and capabilities.
Will Machines Replace Man?
As we have just noted, presentday technical progress is characterised by the shifting of more and more functions to machines and gradually releasing man from direct participation in production. An interesting point is that with the advance in automation and cybernetics, machines are taking over not only man’s physical functions but some of his mental functions as well. We already have machines that carry out a number of logical operations. There are machines that produce computations, operate mechanisms, control technological processes, make translations, play chess and draughts and even write poetry and compose music. Naturally these machine translations, poems and music are a far cry from 230those that are created by man, but there are some things in which machines surpass man’s thinking ability. Machines produce computations incomparably faster than man can make them (tens, hundreds and thousands of times faster). They are much faster in producing generalisations, in statistically analysing such a huge number of variants as to defy the greatest intellects. Machines can operate in places that are either hazardous (say, the study of atomic and many chemical processes) or inaccessible to man (exploration of distant outer space).
Moreover, there already are self-teaching automats, which produce solutions to problems, operate without man’s direct assistance, and formulate expedient responses to action from without. In other words, they react to their perception of the external world. There have been marked advances in the creation of self-reproducing automats as well as automats that effect repairs on themselves and replace damaged parts. It must be noted that cybernetics is, essentially, only taking its first steps, but its possibilities of reproducing the functions of human thinking are truly staggering.
The successes of cybernetics in building machines capable of accomplishing logical operations are grounds for characterising them as thinking machines. Having attributed to machines the ability to think, some cyberneticists, sociologists and, in particular, writers and journalists have now begun to speculate on the possibility of building a thinking machine that would surpass man’s thinking abilities in all respects, undertake all his mental functions and ultimately replace man himself. It is asserted that the era of man would give way to an era of robots. This assertion is to be found, for instance in The Robot Era, a book by the English sociologist P. E. Cleator, who maintains that with the improvement of robots, the society of these robots would “without force or bloodshed" gradually replace human society and forever wipe people off the face of the earth.
We do not share this dreary outlook.
Firstly, there are no grounds whatever for attributing the specifically human property of thinking to robots. Machines cannot think. They only imitate or model individual logical functions, and even then only those functions 231that submit to formally logical processes. The fact that the range of these functions is steadily growing does not change matters. Thinking has been and remains a substratum of the brain, a living product of biological and social evolution. It has been and remains social by nature. Even the most perfect machine has been and remains an inert physical and chemical product created and operated by man.
Man thinks without the aid of machines, but without the aid of man a machine cannot fulfil even purely mechanical functions, let alone logical ones. A machine “thinks” in accordance with a programme given it by man and carries out those operations prescribed for it by man. The self-teaching and self-improving automats are not exceptions to this rule. The only difference is that their programme is more general than that of ordinary automats; all they contain are the basic laws which govern the link between stimulation from without and responding operations, thereby giving them certain freedom in these operations.
While surpassing man in some fields, machines can in no way match him in qualitative analysis, in the ability to change reality, in creative work, to say nothing of man’s deep and diverse range of feelings, thoughts, experiences, interests and requirements; in short, in all manifestations of life which are the realm of man. Man can rejoice and mourn, revel in pleasure and suffer, love and hate. He can create according to the laws of real beauty. The machine, on the other hand, is denied all this. It is created by man and blindly carries out his will.
In the same way as ordinary mechanisms have tremendously increased the power of man’s hands and muscles, thinking machines enhance the potentialities and capabilities of human intelligence. But they cannot replace the human brain, just as an excavator, which imitates human hands, has not replaced man’s hands proper.
This does not mean that there are some fundamental limitations to the improvement of thinking machines or that it is impossible to build a robot to imitate (we repeat, imitate) the human brain. To maintain this would mean adopting an agnostic stand and showing no confidence in the power of human intelligence. However, an electronic 232brain, if and when it is created, would be created not to replace man but in order to free him from monotonous and fatiguing mental functions.
Moreover, it should be borne in mind that it is one thing to create an electronic brain in principle, but quite another matter to make it. Between the possibility of modelling the human brain and the actual building of such a model there is a huge and formidable chasm.
In Design for a Brain, W. R. Ashby, one of the founders of cybernetics, says that it is possible to model any mental process and, at the same time, calculated that man would need several thousand million years to mode] even a simple adaptative act of the living organism. Note, a single adaptative act! How long would it then take to model the entire diversity of the thinking processes of the human brain? This problem has been dealt with by Academician A. N. Kolmogorov of the Soviet Union. Writing that in principle it was possible to create an automat that would, say, write poetry on the level of the great poets, he emphasised that to build such a machine would be tantamount to “modelling the entire development of culture of the society in which poets actually develop”. This is practically impossible to do.
Attention must be focussed on this aspect of the problem, on the enormous abyss between the possibility and reality of creating a model of the human brain, otherwise the daring hypotheses of cybernetics would become the most commonplace Utopias.
Mankind is not threatened by machines and will not yield its place on earth to clever and formidable mechanisms. The threat to people comes from another quarter, from the capitalist system, which subordinates them to machines and uses scientific and technical achievements against them.
In capitalist society, as we have already said, technical progress is full of contradictions. On the one hand, machines make man’s work lighter, increase the productivity of labour and give man power over the elemental forces of nature. On the other hand, they worsen the position of the working people, causing unemployment, intensifying labour and draining man’s physical and spiritual strength. Moreover, the most reactionary imperialist circles have 233accorded science and technology the monstrous role of a means of mass extermination of people and unprecedented destruction of the fruits of their many centuries of labour. The ideologists of the old world cannot help but see the contradictions of capitalist technical development or its pernicious influence on the masses. In spite of that, some of them seek the reason for these contradictions not in the capitalist system but in technology itself, anathematising technology and regarding it as a threat to the human race. Others, on the contrary, regard technology as a means of succour from the evils inherent in capitalism. They maintain that machinery will resolve all contradictions and, therefore, “down with the class struggle and revolution, down with the ideological struggle, and down with the accusations that capitalism is inhuman and amoral".
Socialism offers tremendous possibilities for utilising all the potentialities of technology. In socialist society technology is a friend of man. Freeing him from heavy physical work and from brain exhausting mental effort in fields that bring no creative joy, machinery and modern automation enable him to apply his talents in the loftiest spheres of spiritual creative endeavour. “Isn’t it possible,” writes the Soviet scientist V. Parin, “that from among the millions of people released from such work by electronics and cybernetics there will emerge scores and perhaps hundreds of poets, writers, sculptors and other creative workers? This will be the result of emancipation from the labour that can and must be turned over to machines.”
Communism and Labour