At around 3pm on October 24 1968, a sharply dressed executive from the computer manufacturer Control Data Corporation took the stage in the auditorium of the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
He was addressing the audience of the second annual symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics.
The society, a nexus of academics, spies, policymakers and businesspeople, was dreamt up a few years earlier by a CIA operative. It was designed to counter the USSR’s growing clout in computing and mastery of “cybernetics”, the precursor to today’s artificial intelligence. Consensus in the US of the late 1960s was fractured by foreign and domestic conflicts, but cybernetics promised to reassert control, deploying computers to tame the chaos and make life predictable again. The man from Control Data Corp, himself a CIA confidant, was there that day to sell a plan for what he called “communal information centers”, to make CDC’s supercomputers serve the public by providing news, recipes, public health monitoring, even dating advice. Computers, he told the audience, were going to be our “willing slaves . . . employed in the service of mankind”.