Computers and science fiction – an essay - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 335

stops and with it, the dependent civilization. The movie Wall-E ( Fig. 17.1 ) is a
modern incarnation of this vision of humanity becoming overdependent on
machines.
In his later life, Wells wrote several noniction topics, including two
major historical surveys - Outline History in 1920, and The Work, Wealth and
Happiness of Mankind in 1932. In the course of writing these topics, Wells
realized the need for authors to have “information at their fingertips.” He
believed that combating ignorance by making information readily available
to the masses would reduce the likelihood of war. In 1937 he campaigned for
the creation of a “World Brain” that would contain, and continually update,
the knowledge contained in all the world's great libraries, museums, and
universities:

Fig. 17.1. The robot Wall-E was left
behind to clean up the Earth's garbage
after the humans had departed in
spaceships. The movie Wall-E portrayed
a world in which humanity had become
entirely dependent on technology for
their every need.

A World Encyclopaedia no longer represents itself to a modern imagination
as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of
mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are
received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared. It would be
in continual correspondence with every university, every research institution,
every competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the
world. It would develop a directorate and a staff of men of its own type,
specialized editors and summarists. They would be very important and
distinguished men in the new world. The Encyclopaedic organization need
not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network.
It would centralize mentally but not physically.… It would constitute the
material beginning of a real World Brain. 4

Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider may have laid the foundations for today's
World Wide Web and the Internet, but Wells was one of the first evangelists
for these ideas. With the Internet, the web, and Wikipedia, Wells would have
been delighted by the progress that has been made toward his vision of a World
Brain. Sadly, Wells was never able to realize the World Brain vision in his life-
time. After the terrible carnage of World War II, Wells descended into pessi-
mism: his last topic, Mind at the End of Its Tether , was written in 1945.
Wells never wrote about computers but Jules Verne did in Paris in the
Twentieth Century , a novel published in 1994, a hundred and thirty years after it
was written. The Paris of Verne's novel had some remarkable insights - great
avenues filled with horseless carriages, elevated railways and driverless trains,
electric lighting in the shops and streets, and mechanical elevators in all the
great buildings. His editor rejected the manuscript with the words “No one
today will believe your prophecy”! 5 Michel, the hero of the novel, is an appren-
tice at one of the huge banks that dominated the financial landscape:

Michel turned around and discovered the calculating machine behind
him. It had been several centuries since Pascal had constructed a device of
this kind, whose conception had seemed so remarkable at the time.… The
Casmodage Bank possessed veritable masterpieces of the genre, instruments
which indeed did resemble huge pianos: by operating a sort of keyboard,
sums were instantaneously produced, remainders, products, quotients, rules
of proportion, calculations of amortization and of interest compounded for
infinite periods and all possible rates. 6