the artist. It can assist him. It can stimulate him. It can relieve him of mechanical labor. It can’t supply imagination and feeling. Those have to come from the artist.
“Take the music-writer. The composer plays, and the music writer writes down what he is playing. The machine doesn’t compose, but it relieves the composer of the drudgery of making notes on paper, and it permits him to compose without shattering his thread of inspiration every few notes so he can write something down before he forgets it. It’s an invaluable machine. Writers and poets have the word-selector. The machine doesn’t choose the word it merely reminds the writer of the possibilities. There are the theater amplifiers. No machine can make emotional expression out of a series of words—to a machine all words are equal—but the amplifiers can deliver the actor’s natural voice to the people in the rear so he doesn’t have to shout when he should be whispering.”
“How can a machine stimulate?” I asked.
“You’ve heard of the composing machines?” “I thought they were a joke.”
“They were as long as they were designed to follow a system. The music they wrote was perfectly correct and horribly dull and naive. Then someone built a machine that had no system at all. What it produced was absolute chaos, but scattered through that chaos were magnificent tonal effects that the machine happened onto by accident. It took a great artist to understand those effects and use them properly. The last and greatest compositions of Morglitz were inspired by the random beauties he found in composing-machine chaos.”
“Then where does the robot violin teacher come in?” I asked.
“It doesn’t. With the robot teacher, the machine becomes the artist, and the artist becomes the machine. It’s difficult to explain. Consider that robot Warren’s Feed Store uses to carry and load bags of grain. Supposing that instead of carrying that grain, the machine merely strengthened a man’s spine so he could carry larger loads himself. That’s what the robot teacher does. It gives the student proficiency without understanding and without ability. He can carry a bigger load while the machine is helping him, but without the machine he’ll be worse off than he was before the robot lessons started.”
“I still don’t understand what the robot does,” I said.
“The robot is a big box with a mass of tentacles that attach to the student. It tells the student when his violin is in tune. It places his fingers and arms in the correct position. The position is perfect, because the robot won’t let it be anything else. The student can’t play out of tune, or play a wrong note, because there’s a tentacle on each finger and the robot won’t let the student put a finger in the wrong place.
“The robot flashes the music on a screen, and the student knows just what he’s playing because each measure lights up as he gets to it and disappears after he plays it. If he bothers to watch the screen, he knows. If he doesn’t watch it, it doesn’t make any difference. The robot won’t let him make a mistake. I saw a robot demonstrated with young children who were frightened to death of it. It ignored their crying and went right ahead making them Play.”
“That sounds bad,” I said. “I’d think all kids would hate being taught that way.”
“Actually, the robot doesn’t teach anything. All it does is use the student like an instrument. The robot’s student can’t play without the robot any more than a violin can play by itself. A man in New York did a research project. He started one group of students with a violin teacher and another group with a robot. At the end of two years the teacher’s students were coming along nicely, and the robot’s students couldn’t play a thing. Except with the robot, of course. They could play anything with the robot.”
“What if we were to do a research project like that in Waterville?”
The professor
“Take the music-writer. The composer plays, and the music writer writes down what he is playing. The machine doesn’t compose, but it relieves the composer of the drudgery of making notes on paper, and it permits him to compose without shattering his thread of inspiration every few notes so he can write something down before he forgets it. It’s an invaluable machine. Writers and poets have the word-selector. The machine doesn’t choose the word it merely reminds the writer of the possibilities. There are the theater amplifiers. No machine can make emotional expression out of a series of words—to a machine all words are equal—but the amplifiers can deliver the actor’s natural voice to the people in the rear so he doesn’t have to shout when he should be whispering.”
“How can a machine stimulate?” I asked.
“You’ve heard of the composing machines?” “I thought they were a joke.”
“They were as long as they were designed to follow a system. The music they wrote was perfectly correct and horribly dull and naive. Then someone built a machine that had no system at all. What it produced was absolute chaos, but scattered through that chaos were magnificent tonal effects that the machine happened onto by accident. It took a great artist to understand those effects and use them properly. The last and greatest compositions of Morglitz were inspired by the random beauties he found in composing-machine chaos.”
“Then where does the robot violin teacher come in?” I asked.
“It doesn’t. With the robot teacher, the machine becomes the artist, and the artist becomes the machine. It’s difficult to explain. Consider that robot Warren’s Feed Store uses to carry and load bags of grain. Supposing that instead of carrying that grain, the machine merely strengthened a man’s spine so he could carry larger loads himself. That’s what the robot teacher does. It gives the student proficiency without understanding and without ability. He can carry a bigger load while the machine is helping him, but without the machine he’ll be worse off than he was before the robot lessons started.”
“I still don’t understand what the robot does,” I said.
“The robot is a big box with a mass of tentacles that attach to the student. It tells the student when his violin is in tune. It places his fingers and arms in the correct position. The position is perfect, because the robot won’t let it be anything else. The student can’t play out of tune, or play a wrong note, because there’s a tentacle on each finger and the robot won’t let the student put a finger in the wrong place.
“The robot flashes the music on a screen, and the student knows just what he’s playing because each measure lights up as he gets to it and disappears after he plays it. If he bothers to watch the screen, he knows. If he doesn’t watch it, it doesn’t make any difference. The robot won’t let him make a mistake. I saw a robot demonstrated with young children who were frightened to death of it. It ignored their crying and went right ahead making them Play.”
“That sounds bad,” I said. “I’d think all kids would hate being taught that way.”
“Actually, the robot doesn’t teach anything. All it does is use the student like an instrument. The robot’s student can’t play without the robot any more than a violin can play by itself. A man in New York did a research project. He started one group of students with a violin teacher and another group with a robot. At the end of two years the teacher’s students were coming along nicely, and the robot’s students couldn’t play a thing. Except with the robot, of course. They could play anything with the robot.”
“What if we were to do a research project like that in Waterville?”
The professor
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