Beckoning new millennium

THE NEW MILLENNIUM which Sir Arthur Clarke should have been waiting for ever since he wrote his 2001: A Space Odyssey more than three decades ago has at last arrived though it may not live fully up to what he had anticipated in the book which was quite a classic by itself. He still remains far ahead of his time if we recall the workings of the robot in his novel, suddenly seized by a frenzy which would have killed the lone cosmonaut sharing the space ship with it had he not responded just in time to the danger he was exposed to and destroyed it. Its deactivation called for the performance of ``frontal lobotomy'' which eventually reduced the high intelligence of the robot to utterances of gibberish as the spaceman, seized by an instinct for survival, pulled out one plug after another.

There might be some concern if the possibility of the by-passing of all the body's sense organs by the ultimate input-output device and passing its signals directly to the brain as foreseen by Arthur Clarke were to come true. It is, however, not clear whether one will have to go for such a device - the ``brain cap'' as he calls it - especially if it has to be fitted as a helmet to the head with the unwelcome prospect of the wearer having to make himself completely bald. We can be sure that the human mind (incidentally, we still do not seem to know whether we should place it higher than the brain from which it appears that the high-powered supercomputer could fully take over) which alone could have actually visualised all the inventions would always remain ahead of artificial intelligence (AI) and sense the lurking dangers as Clarke himself had written in his Space Odyssey. But the likelihood of the robot reducing its human creators to despair by making it impossible for them to know whether it is really dumb and ignorant or is just pretending to be stupid has also been envisaged. Such a robot is a presence in one of the stories of Isaac Asimov to suggest that that AI could also pick up the talents for fooling as easily as any other human skills.

Clarke distinguishes himself from other science writers who resort to fantasy just to win for themselves a readership by making his forecasts conform to what could be scientifically achieved. This should explain how satellites which he had foreseen earlier have now become a reality. A welcome feature of the importance he had foreseen for the satellites is that his interest was not restricted to their remaining just as hi-tech presences of relevance only to the space scientist. It led to the launching of the ATS-6 (Artificial Technology Satellite) for India by the U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) for promoting mass literacy in rural areas. It is an illustration of how major scientific inventions may not be wholly irrelevant to human welfare.

Though Clarke, in his Space Odyssey, did not pursue further the possibility of other species far more advanced than the human race having evolved in the rest of the universe the thought was never far away from his mind. At the end of this absorbing fiction, he takes the reader to a reception room in a far away planet to wait for the arrival of one he expected to be far too superhuman. At a time when the human negative instincts seem to be very prominent, the Space Odyssey dreamed up the heights to which the human race could rise with the immense possibilities being laid for it by space. Clarke's fiction recalls H. G. Wells whose soaring imagination was inspired by his grasp of how the fantastic could become real when scientists eventually could make it possible. He had explained, for instance, how his Invisible Man was based on such invisibility becoming possible if the human refractive index could be made the same as that of air. The imaginary is conjured up by the real for Clarke as well.

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