Last week’s victory by Watson, the I.B.M. supercomputer, on “Jeopardy!” got me thinking about this sign, created by his namesake, Thomas J. Watson:
Watson created the THINK sign when he was the general sales manager of the National Cash Register Co. In 1914, he brought it with him to the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Corporation, which became I.B.M. Back then, computing machines looked like this,
and the people who did the “computing” (which was more typing than thinking) looked like this.
The THINK sign was not intended for machines or the lowly drones that operated them, but for executives.
As Watson’s sign became well known as the mantra of I.B.M., it became ripe for parody. This cartoon, from 1948, shows the result of too much contemplation.
And in this classic, from 1950,
Saul Steinberg prefigured the ironic treatment of the THINK sign in places like Mad magazine:
When Univac correctly predicted the results of the 1952 Presidential election, the public became aware of “thinking machines,” and New Yorker cartoonists began to endow what were then called “electronic brains” with the ability to manage more than numbers.
Some cartoons imagined that flashing lights and pulsating vacuum tubes could answer the central questions of existence.
Others were more skeptical, and saw that the quest for omniscience had a long way to go.
This Alan Dunn cartoon, from 1962, anticipated the oft-quoted aphorism “To err is human, but to really foul up you need a computer.”
Dunn’s cartoons about computers stood out in that his satire was always rooted in reality. In his drawings, the computers are not the usual conglomeration of lights and dials, but rather, as can be seen by the reference photo I’ve included, a fairly realistic rendering.
The caption of the cartoon was also prescient, because I.B.M. has done pretty much that with the “Jeopardy!”-playing Watson, which improved itself by analyzing its mistakes and altering its algorithms accordingly.
I.B.M. claims that although the human contestants lost on “Jeopardy!,” humanity won, because a question-answering machine like Watson will be a boon in business, education, and medicine. Dunn anticipated this, too:
I don’t think Watson would have any trouble with that problem—but we might.