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42 The Making of Kubrick's 2001
modern thought and rests very much on the blurring of distinctions
between living and nonliving matter.
I think it is generally and rather naively assumed that extraterrestrial
life will be benign. That there will be philosopherkings
reigning in the cosmos. Professor Freeman Dyson of the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton made the point that
if we detect signs of extraterrestrial life, what we'll detect first
will really be advanced technologies. We will detect signals
generated by some very advanced technological system, and it
is by no means clear that a civilization capable of such advances
in technology is going to be a very benign civilization. The more
technological our own civilization becomes in many ways the
worse it becomes, and one could imagine terrible civilizations
with a very high degree of technology.
One might hope that a civilization which has been going for
hundreds of thousands of years might have worked out all of its
aggressions and internal problems, but I think it is just as likely
to have blown itself off the face of the Earth. I don't know —
that's one of the fascinating things that either we or our descendants
will learn.
Freeman J. Dyson
Professor of Physics, The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University
I don't believe that electronic machinery is going to go very
much further than it is now. This is, of course, something that
we'll find out in the course of time. I may be completely wrong,
but there seem to be some natural limitations on what one can
do with electronics, which fall very short of what the human
mind can do, so I would not believe that anybody with existing
types of electronic machinery could build anything that resembles
a human mind. But, on the other hand, I would say when
we learn how to use biological techniques ourselves, and to
build machines with biological materials, then it will be very different.
Then it may well be possible to go far beyond anything
we have at the moment, and we shall probably be able to create
intelligence, and whether we will call that machine intelligence
or not is of course a matter of words. I think it will not look like
an electronic computer, but it will look much more like a living
organism.
I know the biologists are in general very optimistic concerning
the things they are going to do — they believe they are on the
threshold of great things. I'm not able to judge independently,
but I would think it's very likely.