Intelligent computers

In the past month I've gone from San Francisco to New York, to London, to Brussels, to London, to New York and I don't remember such an extended jaunt on which I ever suffered less from cross-cultural shock. You wake up in the morning and peer out to a grey sky and damp streets and somebody down there holding on to an umbrella with two hands against a blustery wind and you look in the paper for the forecast and only in London is it all summed up in an honest, crisp four words, 'Showers, followed by rain'.

Well, finally, here in the east we're getting some decent weather, by which I mean not 20-minute bursts of sun and then black clouds and then more downpours, but honest-to-God cloudless skies and the buds bursting in the warm air. At last, as the Bible says, 'The time of the singing of birds is come' and the voice of the baseball bat is heard in our land.

Finally, too, the weather and all the interior gadgets were right for the launching of the second space shuttle. It was, the experts at Cape Canaveral announced proudly, only one eight-hundredths of a second late. Of course, they didn't say late, they said 'behind schedule', but as you must know by now, the words 'early' and 'late' have vanished from the language. If you're early, you're ahead of schedule or even of 'sked-yool' and if you're late you're behind schedule. What the space experts played down was the fact that the Challenger, the new shuttle, was behind schedule by ten weeks and four days.

The point of this shuttle launch was, is, to provide in space an information exchange network to be in touch with 26 orbiting spacecraft. It will replace – make redundant is, I guess, the more ominous word – many of the ground stations that, since the beginning of the space age, have been in the business of tracking and reporting on the movement of spacecraft. So bang will go several hundred or thousand more earthbound jobs, which suggests a frightening future for us all.

The data-processing boys, the computer manufacturers and teachers are all agog these days with the imminent arrival of what they call 'an intelligent computer', not just one that stores information and reassembles it and delivers complicated answers at a touch, not just a mechanical robot like the ones the Japanese use in large numbers to do the most precise welding and sealing jobs on automobiles, but a machine that will think or out-think you and me, not to mention President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Some scientist, a responsible and distinguished man, no fantasist, said the other day that he could foresee the time, maybe 30 years from now, when human beings would be the pets of computers, when humans would be, in fact, the computer's best friend. The dreadful prospect opened up to us by the Challenger is that of rendering all earthbound computers, trackers, machines, useless, leaving the care and feeding not only of us, but of our masters, the computers, to space shuttles beyond our reach. I'm happy to say I won't be here when it happens. I've had enough.

Last summer, I received an electronic chessboard which obligingly offers you four types, or stages, of competition – beginner, intermediate, advanced, tournament play. Well, since I've been playing chess on and off for over 60 years, I felt it obligatory to accept the challenge to an intermediate game. The opening moves went according to the books. I baited him with a pawn. He refused it. Fair enough, halfway dumb players have done that; maybe he was dumb, maybe he was cagey. I moved on. He moved on. I started strengthening the middle of the battlefield, as the most conservative teachers prescribe, by setting up a zigzag pattern of advancing pawns. There was a pause, a long pause, on his part.

I say that you notice his part, I don't know the gender of the invisible opponent. I can only tell you that the first pause of this hidden brain is eerie in the extreme. Is he puzzled or yawning or brooding? Is he trapped?

Well, this fellow was not trapped. He was probably laughing himself silly. He jumped a knight into a square it was never meant to be – not, anyway, in my form of chess. He asked me to take it. It was my time to pause. If I took it, he opened a line of attack by his bishop which, again, I could take, exposing, however, both my king and queen at a swoop. Well, I won't prolong the humiliating experience. I was mated in four more moves. The invisible man did nothing, just winked a triumphant light, saying, 'I've won! I've won! I've won!'.

I've buried this board at the back of a clothes closet. I don't intend to fetch it out again. I've had enough of being a computer's favourite laughing stock.

I think it was this nasty episode that decided me not to yield to the persuasions of a friend of mine, another journalist, to join him in a computer academy up the Hudson River to take a three-week course in computer data-bank handling. He writes a three-a-week column and I can see the great gain to him.

He no longer has to type his copy, correct it with such a homely antique as what we used to call 'India rubber' and Americans call an 'eraser'. No longer will he have to put his prose on a teletype machine. Now he can bang out his copy, look it over, get the machine to correct the spelling and reshuffle the paragraphs and realign and renumber the pages. He can be in Switzerland, where in fact he spends his winter, place a call to some central bank in New York or Chicago by pressing several keys and on the word 'Go' the copy is transmitted by laser beam to newspaper offices in the 150 or so papers that print him. I'm not going to take this course. I'm not even going to buy an electric typewriter which I've found hits back at you with letters you don't wish to use.

Another friend of mine, very much on the ball with every sort of modern convenience – it takes him only ten minutes to shave with an electric shaver, it takes me 50 seconds with a 35-cent double-edged French throwaway job – he saw me beating out my stuff one day on my dependable 30-year-old manual typewriter. He begged me to switch to an electric model. Why? Why? 'It'll come out so much better!' he said. He is a failed writer and I spared him no pain. 'But,' I said, 'it won't improve the prose.' We've never brought up the matter since.

Well, I'm back with my pen and pencil box and regular yellow paper and I'm looking into the park where the trees grow fuzzy not by remote control just yet, but from the sap rising through their limbs and I notice that the joggers are paced nowadays – interspersed, would be better – by more athletic, more determined figures, with sweaters round their necks and tennis rackets in their grip. I stopped one of them leaving my building, he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, he was elated by something or other. By what? I wondered.

'By,' he said, 'the great news.' It took a split second for me to reject in my mind the space shuttle, the opening of the baseball season, the Pakistani lawyer caught last weekend at Kennedy airport with $12 million worth of heroin inside the lining of his raincoat, the first isolation by scientists at Duke University of a cancer virus. He simply said, 'Miss Hu'. Ah, of course, that would be the big story of his day.

Miss Hu – Hu Na to give her the full resonance of her name – is a 19-year-old Chinese tennis player who found herself playing a match in Los Angeles last summer, liked what she saw there and defected. She applied for political asylum and, pending the determination of her case, has been living with a Chinese-American family in San Francisco. In the intervening eight months, there's been a lot of diplomatic bad blood coursing back and forth between Peking and Washington. In fact, it would be an understatement to say that the case of Miss Hu is a minor diplomatic incident. It went all the way up to the top man, Mr Deng.

At another time, it probably would have been handled grudgingly but routinely, but this is a time, as we keep hearing, when Moscow is asserting its conviction that full and cordial relations with Peking are just around the corner, when China is rethinking its relations with the United States, when it's unhappy, to say the least, about American arms sales to Taiwan, about America's new restrictions on Chinese textile imports and new restrictions on America's export of high technology.

The case of Miss Hu troubles a lot of people here in and out of Congress. There are thousands of Asians from Vietnam and Cambodia and Hong Kong and mainland China who are hungry and sick, who have for many months, some of them for years, been begging the State Department for political asylum. Along comes a tennis player who's young and healthy and talented and who now makes a complaint more than a case that she felt she was being pressed to become a member of the Communist party. Miss Hu guesses that her case has gone up to Mr Deng because she played doubles with a close friend of his. She was bothered, she says, by constant lectures on Communist ideology which is certainly to be expected from anyone who represents a Communist country in anything from medicine to trade to games.

Well, her claim prevailed. This week the Justice Department, which presides over the Immigration Department, granted her request. The Chinese embassy said bluntly, 'The United States government has no grounds whatsoever for this action. There simply does not exist any question of political persecution.'

It's a tricky business. Conscientious immigration officials can't help thinking of the thousands of pitiful Asians who yearn to get here for bread and health. As a guilty second thought, they have to reflect that for Martina Navratilova, for one, freedom has meant many pleasant things, including the amassing of several million dollars.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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