"Are people becoming obsolete?"

Trump: Wait, these things might check up on my income taxes?  We need to ban computers.

And with that, happy 80th birthday to electronic computing!  Here's how the NYTimes reported the dawning of a new world:

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 14—One of the war's top secrets, an amazing machine which applies electronic speeds for the first time to mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and cumbersome for solution, was announced here tonight by the War Department. Leaders who saw the device in action for the first time heralded it as a tool with which to begin, to rebuild scientific affairs on new foundations.

Such instruments, it was said, could revolutionize modern engineering, bring on a new epoch of industrial design, and eventually eliminate much slow and costly trial-and-error development work now deemed necessary in the fashioning of intricate machines. Heretofore, sheer mathematical difficulties have often forced designers to accept inferior solutions of their problems, with higher costs and slower progress.

The "Eniac," as the new electronic speed marvel is known, virtually eliminates time in doing such jobs. Its inventors say it computes a mathematical problem 1,000 times faster than it has ever been done before. The machine is being used on a problem in nuclear physics.

The Eniac, known more formally as "the electronic numerical integrator and computer," has not a single moving mechanical part. Nothing inside its 18,000 vacuum tubes and several miles of wiring moves except the tiniest elements of matter-electrons. There are, however, mechanical devices associated with it which translate or "interpret" the mathematical language of man to terms understood by the Eniac, and vice versa. 

Ceremonies dedicating the machine will be held tomorrow night at a dinner given a group of Government and scientific men at the University of Pennsylvania, after which they will witness the Eniac, in action at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where it was built with the assistance of the Army Ordnance Department.

The Eniac was invented and perfected by two young scientists of the school, Dr. John William! Mauchly, 38, a physicist and amateur meteorologist, and his associate, J. Presper Eckert Jr., 26, chief engineer of the project. Assistance also was given by many others at the school.

Army ordnance men had been on the lookout for a machine with which to prepare a large volume of ballistic data, which in turn was needed to break a threatened bottleneck in the production of firing and bombing tables for new offensive weapons going overseas. Without the tables the guns could not be used effectively.

War breeds innovation.  

Anyway, when I was teaching about computer architecture back in the 90s, I'd always start the week with an episode of The Machine That Changed the World, which is where I first saw that newsreel above.  It also talked quite a bit about a guy named Alan Turing.

There's a little clip from the show that I wanted to share, but I can't embed only the snip so I'll just link to it.  Here he (or Derek Jacobi, at any rate) is talking about machine learning:

[T]he logic of a computer is really very simple: all it does is to read a list of instructions and then carries it out methodically, and the only thing you have to do is to write down exactly what you want done in a language the computer understands. This is what we call a program. 

Now, many people say that a computer can only do what it's been told to do. Well it's true that we may start off that way, but it is only the start. A computer can be made to learn. Suppose for example it was set to play chess...well it could find out but itself in the light of its own experience which were winning and which were losing strategies, and then drop the losing ones. After time we wouldn't know what instructions it was actually following.

Indeed.  

Inspired by one of Turing's computers "try[ing] its hand at creative word processing", I thought it fitting to mark today's anniversary by asking Brother William to compose a haiku:

Thirty tons computed death—
Now we carry war machines
In our pockets, smiling

Well, it can't count syllables worth a damn, but perfectio secundum quid (Latin for "close enough for government work").  And now I'll retired to Bedlam.

<exits singing, Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do>