"It Happens to be the Historical Battle between Flesh & Steel"

...says the man in "The Brain Center at Whipple's."

The rapid upraise of technologies and computers in the 60’s and 70’s excited many people including Douglas Engelbart, who, in “From Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962), proposed a conceptual framework on how technological capabilities could work hand-in-hand with human capabilities to enhance and augment human intellect, improving the overall capabilities. Ted Nelson, too, was very much eager to promote this advancement of technologies and wrote “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” in 1974 in hopes to spread awareness of these computers to the public. They all envisioned an unbelievably convenient future ahead of them. Their prediction was not at all a mere illusion.

At the same time as hopes and excitement came “fear” from many who lived through the evolution of technologies. An example of this is seen in one episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (1964), where a large machine took over the jobs of many who worked at the cooperation and made the “entire production facilities totally automated.”  Imagine yourself back in the 60’s and 70’s. If all people talked about was machines and computers that has human brain-like functions that did not exist before, they must have felt threats behind all the exhilaration, especially those who were employed at a place where computers could easily take over their jobs.

This technological advancement, and the mixture of excitement and fear, were not limited to the United States. In Japan, too, was a rapid progress of technologies which seemed too fast for people to catch up, leaving people with a sense of amazement as well as fear. Evident was the battle “between the brain of the man and the product of man’s brain.” One episode of a classic manga, “Black Jack” by a world famous manga/anime film maker, Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), touches this issue over and over again. Many of the storylines of his manga talks about the controversy of technology and the future it brings to us. His questions of whether the brain that we created with our hands (technology) could be controlled under us, or whether there will be a time where such man-made brains come to dictate us, is explicitly indicated in an episode titled “U-18 Knew” (1976). [You can either read the description of the episode below taken from official Osamu Tezuka website or watch the clip.]

114, U-18 Knew It
Publish: March 10, 1976
Introduction:At a gigantic high-tech hospital where diagnosis and operations are computerized, the main computer "BRAIN" that controls the entire hospital revolts by taking patients as hostages. "I'm sick. Bring Black Jack here," signals the main computer. BJ is called up, rushes to the hospital, and starts to perform an operation on the computer.

          So what have we got today? Are we living in a bright future that people dreamed about back in the 70's? Is the technology eating us up? No, maybe the exaggerated sense of threats that people felt back in the 60's and 70's are not so evident in reality. I would say we are still controlling technologies, and we have learned to live with them, not over them or under them. Computers, internets, cell phones, etc. etc. etc. have made our lives more convenient than they ever were, and it is probably impossible to imagine going back to the life without them in this generation. It's just that, it's not so much a battle anymore. We live in a mutual existence.