49

p What is typical of the current stage of scientific and technical development? It contains many strands, but the most salient ones are electronic automation of research and development itself, of material production, of circulation and everyday facilities.

p The development and rapid improvement of electronic computers (miniaturisation, a fantastic increase in the speed and volume of operations) and the ever lower cost of fabricating the computer core—the microprocessor—have opened up boundless scope for further automating various aspects of human activity. Computers are taking over more and more functions in controlling machines and mechanisms in accordance with pre-set programmes taking account of normative requirements for labour operations. There is massive fabrication and spread of machine-tools and machining centres with numerical control. Diverse electronic-mechanical manipulators, which were christened “robots” 60 years ago by the well-known Czech writer Karel Capek, are being ever more widely used.

p Alongside the automation of control of individual machines and 50 groups of machines performing a series of operations in a definite technological sequence, and the robot-manipulators, there has been a gradual development of electronic automation of the control process on a higher level as well. Enterprises, companies, and individual forms of human activity within the local, national and international framework have been put under computer control, but in the sphere where decisions and acts are rarely normative or automatic, computer devices are used above all for the accumulation, storage and issue on demand of extensive and wide-ranging information. Computers are also used for rapid cumbersome calculations and computations. Acting in this role, computers have been churning out a growing volume of new quantitative information, the basis of progress in all the sciences and technical creativity.

p Within less than forty years of coming on the scene, computers have travelled a truly unparalleled way of qualitative perfection, ever higher efficiency and adaptation to human needs. What are the main milestones on this way? What are its prospects until the end of this century? Here is a widely accepted chronology of the process.

p The first generation of computers was assembled on the same kind of tubes that were used in prewar radio receivers. One computer of this type, the ENIAC, built in the United States in 1946, occupied an area of 150 sq m and weighed 30 tons. It contained 18,000 tubes, some hundreds of which failed every day, and cost $5 million ($30 million in 1986 prices). Despite its large size, it could perform only simple calculations, such as anyone can now make on a pocket calculator.

p The second generation of computers came on the scene with the invention of the transistor in the United States in 1947-1948. This was a relatively small semiconductor which substituted for the tube. With the introduction of transistors, the prices, size and power consumption of computers were sharply reduced, and their capacity sharply increased. In the 1960s, transistors were miniaturised to a thousandth of their previous size, computer memory was amplified, and retrieval of accumulated information accelerated.

p The third generation of computers emerged and developed with the invention and rapid perfection of so-called integrated circuits, each of which contained on a single monolithic plate a large number of components transforming and processing the incoming information. In the first half of the 1960s, the level of component integration in one circuit was still relatively low ( smallscale integration) and involved some tens of components; in the second half of the 1960s came the stage of medium-scale integration (hundreds of components), and in the 1970s—large-scale integration (from thousands to millions of components). The process has still to run its full course, and one could well expect millions of semiconductors to be integrated in each of the superlarge integrated circuits (SLICs). These SLICs were used to develop the super-large high-speed computers now being widely used in various fields of information and computation. As early as 1975, 51 computers of the new design were able to perform a monstrous 100 million operations per second.

p The fourth generation of computers came with the invention of the microprocessor, a type of integrated circuit consisting of a silicon chip less than 1 sq cm in size. Thousands of semiconductors are positioned on the chip by means of a combination of photolithographic and chemical processes (and now also with the aid of lasers). The microprocessor—a microchip computer—was first developed in the United States in 1971 and consisted of 2,250 semiconductors. The computer memory was also switched to microchips and has undergone a fantastic miniaturisation: a chip with an area of 1 sq cm has the capacity to memorise with the aid of magnetic waves up to 5 million bits of information, but even that is not the limit, and the memory volume is expected to be trebled.

p The miniaturisation of the basic units of electronic computers has made it possible to fit them into very small mini-computers and microcomputers, and alsoy-and this is even more important—into any mechanisms and machines as the governing unit. It is the miniaturisation of processors and memory units, with a rapid reduction of their cost, that has paved the way for mass production and use of pocket calculators, robots, and electronic control units in producer and consumer facilities.

p The revolutionary development of electronic computers has proceeded with the further perfection of their quantitative parameters, such as speed, information volume and reliability, with greater flexibility and autonomous operation without human interference, and with ever more diverse forms in which information is acquired and retrieved.

p Intensive efforts are now being put into developing a fifth generation computer, above all in the United States and Japan, the two main rivals in this field. These computers will have the capacity to process non-numerical information, to “understand” human speech, photographs, graphs and other symbols used by man. By 1990, the Japanese expect, the computer’s vocabulary will top 10,000 words, and computers will be as easy to use as telephones. They are also expected to be much smaller than their predecessors and much faster in operation.  [51•1 

p This means, therefore, further progress in the creation of an "artificial brain", and the practical results could apparently be in evidence by the end of this century and the beginning of the next. What is more, there is the prospect of molecular electronics in the making, with the molecule, possibly including a molecule of living organism (biochip), being the memory unit medium.

p It takes vast amounts of capital to manufacture computers and machines in which they are used, and the result has been a marked increase in the science-intensiveness of many industries. Besides, from the outset the computer generated a new type of intellectual and occupational activity: the conversion of a part of man’s mental activity into computer operations, chiefly the development of 52 various “languages” for translating external information into numerical speech “understandable” to computers, and the development and multiplication of a rapidly growing number of programmes of ever greater complexity, in accordance with which computers perform operations required by man. Hundreds of thousands of specialists are already engaged in computer programming: only in the USA there were 360,000 of them in 1983. Programmes and their disk packs have become an integral part of all computer sets, a mass product of enterprises and firms specialising in this field, a commodity whose manufacture has attracted ever larger amounts of capital, and whose sales yield large and rapidly growing profits (in 1985, the capitalist world’s total was $13 billion, and in 1986-$17 billion).

p Finally, the computerisation of management and control at every level led to the development, improvement and increasing output of various devices linking up man and computer, both for the storage of information and for its use (all manner of transmitting and terminal devices).

p The following examples show the scale of production and use of computer hardware in the capitalist countries, and the profits capital has been reaping in this sphere of application. The sale of components and electronic equipment in 1984 came to nearly $163 billion in the United States, to almost $82 billion in Western Europe, and to over $75.7 billion in Japan.  [52•1  In 1985 alone, the American firms sold personal computers worth of $21.4 billion on the world capitalist market.

p What are the prospects for further growth in the use of computers under capitalism?

p In this context, it pays to have a look at robots, which are characteristic of the present and coming stages in the computerisation of material production.

p To begin with, let us note that no generally accepted definition of “robot” has yet been worked out, and it means different things in different countries. Thus the Robot Institute of America suggests a fairly precise definition: a "reprogrammable multifunctional manipulator"  [52•2  designed for the transfer of materials, components, tools or special devices by means of changing programmed movements. Among the basic technological processes and operations in which use is made of manipulators equipped with computers (containing the robot’s work programme), are point and arc welding, spray painting and surface conditioning, assembly-line batch production of components and some mechanisms, lorry loading, pressure smelting and casting of metals, handling of the object of labour and the finished product, and technical control. Although robots are still fairly primitive (and cannot completely imitate the workers for whom they substitute), these electronic and mechanical manipulators are capable of performing a great many production operations faster and with greater accuracy than man. It has been 53 estimated, for instance, that a welder spends no more than 30 per cent of his working time in actual welding, while a robot performs this operation during 90 per cent of the time of its "working cycle”.

p There are already many robots today, and there will be more tomorrow. In 1985 Japan had 65,000 industrial robots, the United States-14,500, the FRG-6,600, and Great Britain—2,600. In 1981, industrial-robot sales in the capitalist world first topped $1 billion, and the figure is expected to go up to $10 billion by 1990. According to US estimates, industrial-robot sales in the United States are to increase from $100 million in 1980 to $3 billion in 1995, with the number of industrial robots expected to go up quite rapidly. By the end of the century, the United States could well have hundreds of thousands of industrial robots.

p Robots are, of course, a tremendous stride forward in automating production processes and a fundamentally new superstructure over the mechanical, electromechanical and other types of automation extensively used in the “pre-electronic” period, mainly in mass and large-batch production. Such automation is not, of course, abolished by the development of electronics; the robots of today are still incapable of performing most of the operations in industrial production, because "most tasks are too complex and unstructured, involve too many uncertainties, or require too $iuch ability to see, feel and adapt to changing circumstances".  [53•1 

p Robots can be expected to be further improved by the end of this century as these substantial constraints in their structure and “capabilities” are eliminated. The robot of the 21st century is expected to have artificial "sense organs" (above all “sight” and “hearing”), to be able to learn from its own “experience” and modify action programmes on its own. US specialists say that this will require much research and design efforts before the goal is eventually reached. As a result, great scope will be given to the use of robots in branches of production.  [53•2 

p The expected improvement and spread of robots will signify an important advance towards complex automated engineering plants. The development and growing use of flexible automated systems points in the same direction. In their most consummate form, flexible automated systems consist of a group of machine-tools with electronic (programme) control linked up by an automatic transport-accumulator line (in particular, with robotised trolleys). These systems are “flexible” in the sense that they make it possible to machine components of varying size, for different periods of time, and in batches of differing size. There are still not many flexible systems in the capitalist countries (in 1985, the United States, for instance, had 70 to a total value of over $250 million). However, they are expected to spread fairly rapidly and to cause a real revolution in the manufacture of machines and all kinds of equipment. These systems are adapted to medium-batch electronic- 54 automated production, whereas their predecessors, the individual numerical-control machine-tools, were used in small-batch production.

p It is not only material production that is affected by computerisation, whose development leads, among other things, to the transformation of information activity at every level and to the formation of powerful information-industrial complexes, both national and international.

p The rapid swell of diverse information over the past several decades has been called the information explosion. What does this signify in the West?

p Considering the “explosion” of scientific information alone, it could be characterised as follows: at the beginning of the 19th century, scientific knowledge tended to double within a period of 50 years, in the 1950s, within 10 years, and in the 1970s, within 5 years. Soviet scientists have estimated that the number of scientific information documents transferred only through "formal channels" (scientific periodicals, books, pamphlets and special networks, etc.) could total almost 60 million units per year for the whole world by the year 2000.

p The volume of information consisting of economic, political and social facts has been growing rapidly; it is important not only for production control, corporate management and state administration, but also for the life of individuals and the behaviour of social groups and collectives. Without it it is impossible to take any decisions valid not only for the present, but also for the relatively distant future. Such information assumes various forms: verbal, numerical, visual and audible.

p Solid bourgeois prognosticates addressing the Fourth Assembly of the World Future Society in July 1982 estimated that 71 per cent of the labour force in industrialised countries will work in the information and communications sectors of the economy by the year 2000, a large increase from the estimated 50-55 per cent in the 1980s.  [54•1  The computerisation of this activity, which does not deal with material objects but with symbols in their numerical, verbal, figurative and other forms, is seen as one of the most important lines of the present stage of the STR in terms of consequences.

p Among the important component parts of the industrial- information complex in leading capitalist countries are large storage centres where diverse information is systematically processed and issued: hundreds of data banks, some specialised in the various fields of science and technology, and also computing centres equipped with large computers. They service general and special communications networks, with the relevant information received and transmitted via communications satellites.

p Every unit of the industrial-information complex and every result of its activity in the capitalist countries tend to become ever more important as a sphere of capital investment. Target information 55 itself has become a commodity in great demand: scientists and groups of scientists want to have information about the research and experimental projects under way in the world, about their results, abstracts and copies of the relevant publications, factqgraphic data on the Earth and outer space. Those who run military departments and production, commercial and financial enterprises must have data on the output and sales of various products nationally and internationally, stock-market and foreign-exchange rate quotations, the movement of capitals at various levels, and so on.

p Finally, there is a rapid growth of the "consumer component" in the form of a wide network of home-based information terminals, enabling the owner to use visual displays to perform various financial and commercial operations, to obtain instant information on the work of transit, entertainment and other public establishments without leaving the home.

p Computerisation has most rapidly invaded office, secretarial and managerial work. Electronic networks and devices for swiftly obtaining, processing and issuing information in facsimile, print-put, verbal and numerical form immensely increase the speed, reliability and efficiency of office work.

p The real proportions of the "information complex" will be seen from the following data. There are 1,300 data banks in the nonsocialist world, and more than 75 per cent of these are in the United States. The value of the information services market is estimated at several billion dollars.

p The computerisation of information activity at every level calls for vast investments and current outlays. We have estimated, for instance, that the cost of setting up and using various information systems came to over $20 billion in the United States in 1970, over $40 billion in 1975, and over $80 billion in 1980. Even if these outlays will not double every five years for the rest of the century, as they did in the 1970s, by the year 2000 they could cost hundreds of billions of dollars, a vast expenditure that capital would, understandably, not have risked but for the promise of vast profits. It is, of course, extremely hard to obtain any exact figure for actual and expected profits in the various fields of the production and use of information, the production and sale of electronic information devices, but even the estimates are highly impressive.

p According to some estimates, electronic informatics has enabled some corporations and enterprises to save up to 7-10 per cent on managerial costs, and up to 7-20 per cent on general overhead expenses. A sizable part of these economies has been made from the marked reduction in the inventories of raw materials, intermediate and finished products as a result of swifter and more precise coordination of supply and demand for goods and services.

p A great future is predicted in the capitalist countries, notably in the United States, for "stay-at-home work", i.e., the performance of various assigned duties without leaving the home, at a workplace equipped with diverse electronic devices and communication links with a great many offices, including the employer and his central 56 computer into which is fed everything that has been done "at home". There are now several thousand men and women doing such work in the United States (they are called “teleworkers”), and forecasters have estimated that by 1990 the number will have increased to 10 million.  [56•1  Experiments with electronic-based " stayat-home work" are also being conducted in Japan. It is assumed that this form of labour organisation is most suitable for translators, programmers and other specialists whose constant presence at their workplaces is not necessary and does not affect the results of their activity. Among the advantages of "stay-at-home work" is working according to one’s own schedule, reducing tiredness, and economising on fuel when driving a car or on public-transit faressomething that is of considerable importance in present-day conditions.

p There is no point here to describe in detail all the fields and forms of the ongoing and expected computerisation of human life and activity. One need merely mention the wide spread of electronic computers and technologies in medicine (notably in diagnostics), in design and development work, in teaching (in the United States, for instance, minicomputers and microcomputers are widely used in schools), and in the entertainments industry.

p Electronics have also invaded households, naturally of wealthy families in the first place. By the end of the century, robots are expected to handle all house-cleaning and vacuuming, and even washing windows. "...You could leave for work in the morning, tell the robot the number of the recipe you want for your evening meal, and it would have all the ingredients and utensils laid out for you when you get home. After you cooked the meal, the robot would come and clean up. We even envision the robot being used as a baby-sitter and as a warning system to alert the family in case of fire or other emergency. And remember this: the robot does not have to sleep. So it can perform a whole list of household chores and repairs for you during the night.”  [56•2 

p Discoveries in the biological sciences and their practical application—the emergence of biotechnology, which has been developed along new lines, especially with the appearance of so-called genetic and cell engineering, are justifiably regarded as the second revolution iri mankind’s productive forces along with computerisation.

p Both these trends have, at any rate, progressed through the development of a set of biological and allied sciences, among them biochemistry (including bio-organic chemistry), biophysics, cell biology and technology, and genetics. The prospects before biotechnology and genetic engineering in particular are simply fantastic.

p The improvement and ever wider application of biotechnology along its traditional lines includes the industrial use of biocatalysts, 57 micro-organisms and living cells, with the positive prospects here involving, among other things, the development of continuous processes on the basis of durable biocatalysts, i.e., those that can be recycled for multiple use, instead of the now common one-off biocatalysts, so helping to slice costs in many technological processes. Much attention is being given to improving the technology and increasing the scale on which various farm and household waste and sewage are biologically treated, as this could yield sizable quantities of industrial chemicals and energy carriers.

p But it is the emergence and rapid development of genetic engineering, which makes it possible to develop new organisms with pre-set genetic properties, that opens up the main prospects for the "biological revolution", including progress in the chemical industry. Impressive results have already been achieved in this field, thus making a substantial contribution to industrial biochemistry, medicine and agriculture. But the main successes in this field are expected to be achieved over the next 10-20 years.

p The purposeful and inherited changes in some characteristics of bacteria are already being done outside the laboratory, in industry on a wide scale for obtaining new and highly important medicaments and chemicals, such as insulin and other hormones, interferon, vitamin B₂ and various other organic compounds used in medicine, which have had to be extracted from various living beings in costly and complicated procedures yielding but tiny quantities of the final product that could not be used on a mass scale.

p Considerable successes in producing a great many organic chemicals for medical and nutritional use will undoubtedly be achieved in the genetic transformation of microorganisms, but the greatest prospects are being opened up by the modification of inherited properties of agricultural plants and animals with the employment of the techniques of genetic engineering, all the way to the creation of altogether new species with improved properties useful to man. A new "green revolution" could well be in the offing when agricultural plants are made capable of fixing nitrogen directly from the air, increasing the quantity and quality of their substances assimilated by man, such as proteins, sugars and vitamins. Genetic scientists say that one will see growing in the fields some twenty years from now a plant "with edible leaves, like those of spinach, rich in proteins, like beans, with potato-like nutritious tubers, roots assimilating nitrogen from the air, and stems yielding a useful fibre".  [57•1 

p Genetic engineering could well bring about a real revolution in livestock breeding. Artificial insemination, the transplantation of embryos, sex control and various other techniques have already been markedly improved through genetic selection, so radically transforming the age-old methods in the breeding of farm animals: results which used to take centuries to achieve, can now be had within months. It has been estimated that improved breeding on the basis of a better knowledge of the mechanism of heredity could 58 well help to treble annual milk yields per milch cow.

p It is true that for the time being the restructuring of the genetic system of the higher animals is confined to laboratory experiments, but one could well expect great advances in this field over the next ten years. Modern industrial livestock breeding is being radically transformed and its efficiency boosted through the extensive practical application of these achievements.

p Those were only two of the STR lines which hold promise of cardinal and largely revolutionary advances in production and the whole of social life over the next several decades, but substantial results are also bound to be obtained and realised in practice in many other fields of science and technology in that period.

p Permanent orbital stations, inhabited by more and more people, shuttle-type vehicles, and other devices will help to infrastructure outer space. Much of what is happening down here on the Earth can be better discerned, comprehended and recorded by space hardware. More and more pure and specific products which cannot be made in terrestrial conditions will be fabricated in space. Ever larger flows of information over ever longer distances will be transmitted across space. But it should be stressed in this context that imperialism has a destructive role to play in the exploration of space, too. The US MIC regards space as just another sphere for the spread of militarism, working to improve and develop space weapons and to prepare for Star Wars. It is regrettable that public opinion in the capitalist world has yet to respond adequately to this mortal threat posed by US imperialism to mankind down here, on the Earth, and out there, in space.

p The peaceful uses of the atom have far from been exhausted. Industrial thermonuclear reactors could well be started by the end of the century or shortly afterwards as the generating core of a totally new type of electric-power plant. This will mean a great advance in nuclear energetics, and will help to make the fuel and energy complex more economical and less dependent on mineral fuels.

p Nor is there any doubt that before the end of the century there will be a wide spread of substantially improved energy-saving hardware and technology of all types, including that based on electronics. Solar energy, heat from the depth of the Earth, and the temperature differential of sea water will be ever more widely used to generate electricity. The production of synthetic liquid fuel from coal, bituminous sandstone and other potential sources will develop and spread.

p The development and treatment of various materials could well be expected to show marked progress. Important practical results have already been achieved, for instance, in fabricating "such unconventional materials as ceramics and polymers that conduct electricity, ductile ceramics that can be stamped to shape, metal powders that can be combined to yield alloys never before made, plastics derived from nonpetroleum sources, and new fibre- reinforced polymer composites that will offer unparalleled performance". Technology is being developed for "cooling molten metal so fast 59 [using superlow temperatures] that it does not have time to form its customary crystalline structure. Instead, it solidifies as an amorphous, or glasslike, metal [of improved strength and resistance to corrosion]. Progress ... promises to spur the growth of composite materials and make them ’what aluminium was in the 1920”’.  [59•1 

p Scientists are using the tools of microscience to develop new ways of machining the surfaces of metal items, in particular at the molecular level. By adjusting the molecular structure of the surface of a part, for example, it may be possible to improve dramatically its resistance to corrosion or abrasion. That is a highly important line of technical progress: the US corrosion bill, for instance, is estimated at between $70 billion and $90 billion a year.  [59•2 

At the turn of the third millennium, science and technology are expected to make a substantial advance along the most different lines. Let us now try to imagine what this will do to the society and human beings.