Although many writers anticipated the tend toward greater involvement of computers in everyday life, the internet and the advent of the
personal computer did not take quite the course
that most expected during the 1940s and 1950s.
Like most of his peers, Isaac ASIMOV assumed that
computers would become larger and more centralized. In “All the Troubles in the World,” Multivac,
the computer that effectively runs the world’s government and economy in several of his stories, is so
large that it virtually covers Washington, D.C. Although Asimov never describes how the world
made the transition to rule by this benevolent machine, he hints that it was a logical decision based
on some of the obvious advantages of an objective,
sleepless intellect. Multivac evaluates so much
input that it can make predictions with very high
degrees of probability, anticipating crimes or shortages and preventing them.
However, security and prosperity do not come
cheaply. In order to ensure that Multivac has all
the information it requires, every adult in the
world must regularly interface with the machine,
their personalities becoming just another array
of data. Echoing The HUMANOIDS by Jack
WILLIAMSON, Asimov describes a world in which
we have exchanged privacy for safety. Not only are
citizens protected from criminals, but the criminals
are themselves protected from their own antisocial
urges. But something has gone wrong. Technicians
read a prediction they find so unnerving that they
do not even tell their superiors, convinced it must
be some kind of error. When an apparently innocent man is put under house arrest, his teenaged
son, not old enough to be directly interfaced with
Multivac, goes to the computer in search of answers. The consequences almost result in the
death of the computer itself, and subsequent investigation reveals the truth: Multivac has become
self-aware, and it is weary of dealing with all the
world’s problems and wishes to die.
Computers and robots were invariably portrayed in science fiction as being superior to mere
flesh and bone, but Asimov superimposed the suggestion of a human personality over his supercomputer. Multivac is a direct ancestor of Hal from
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, by Arthur C. CLARKE,
and Harlie from WHEN HARLIE WAS ONE, by
David GERROLD.