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\date{February 13}		% Letter date
\business
\to {Professor P. Masani\cr
Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics\cr
University of Pittsburg\cr
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260}

{\noindent Dear Professor Masani:}

I am returning the papers which you sent me on January 26th.  It was most
thoughtful for you to include copies of the Weiner papers.

The ``spacial inferiority'' of the computer as compared with the brain, to
which Professor Weiner made frequent reference, is still with us but the
gap has been greatly narrowed of late by the development of VLSI (very
large scale integration) devices.  We can now confidently expect the
computer to invade many of the domains that Professor Weiner saw as
excluded.  Progress will not be easy and a very large amount of work
remains to be done, in developing smaller, more complicated and faster
devices, in adding to our basic understanding of the nature of many of the
tasks that are still only done by people, in writing the necessary
computer programs and finally in accumulating the vast stores of data that
must be reduced to computer-readable form to codify what Professor Weiner
calls ``the whole experience of a lifetime''.


Professor Weiner's later obsession with the dangers of automation would, I fear,
have been greatly increased had he envisioned these recent developments.

This reviewer still feels strongly that those who follow Professor Weiner's
point of view, as put forth in this paper, are doing science and civilization
a disservice in flaying the computer for man's failings.

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\sign{Arthur L. Samuel}
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