Visions 21: Questions for the New Century, Part 5
ANNOUNCER: CNN & TIME. Tonight, a special edition of</s>CNN & TIME: "Visions 21: Questions For the New Century." "Will We Plug Chips into Our Brains?"</s>RAY KURZWEIL, AUTHOR, "THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES": We'll be able to download knowledge, we'll be able to learn new skills.</s>ANNOUNCER: "Will Smell-o-Vision Replace Television?"</s>WEIRD AL YANKOVIC, COMEDIAN/MUSICIAN: In the future, we'll be picking our political leaders at least partially based on their smell. Commercials will be completely different.</s>ANNOUNCER: "Will We Close the Book on Books?"</s>ANNE RICE, AUTHOR: I'm really old fashioned, I want to hold a book on my hands and I want to sit back in my easy chair with it.</s>ANNOUNCER: "Will Cybercriminals Run the World?"</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You name the crime, we have a case where a computer is involved.</s>ANNOUNCER: "Will My PC Be Smarter Than Me?"</s>GARRY KASPAROV, CHESS CHAMPION: I don't think that any human brain, even a very superior human brain, can be compared to the computer.</s>ANNOUNCER: "Will My Child Love Her Smart Toys Better Than She Loves Me?"</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This generation, these next two generations are really at a watershed moment where we are changing the nature of our relationships with the objects around us.</s>ANNOUNCER: "Visions 21: The Future of Technology." Here now is Jeff Greenfield.</s>JEFF GREENFIELD, CO-HOST: Good evening, and welcome to this special edition of CNN & TIME. Tonight, part five of "Visions 21": the future of technology, how it will change and how it will change us. The boundary between man and machine has never seemed so porous. The artificial hearts, the smart machines, the industrial robotics of today are mere child's play compared to what's coming. Here's just one example: A group of neurobiologists in Philadelphia recently wired the brains of lab rats to a computer, allowing the animals to operate a robotic arm purely by thought. The reality of melding mind and machine led Bernard Shaw to raise this question: "Will We Plug Chips into Our Brains?"</s>BERNARD SHAW, CO-HOST (voice-over): One of the great joys in Tucker Davis' life is scuba diving.</s>TUCKER DAVIS, NEUROSCIENCE PATIENT: Somebody violated my scrap here.</s>SHAW: But the happiness he gets from the sport, or from anything else for that matter, he says he owes to a battery-powered generator wired to his brain.</s>DAVIS: Stimulate -- electrically stimulating my brain, OK? Without it, I lack the neurochemical balance. I would be, you know, right back where I was two years ago.</s>SHAW: Two years ago, he was in a deep depression, considering suicide. When medications didn't work, he signed on to an experiment at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and stepped into the future.</s>DAVIS: Coming from the generator.</s>SHAW: Doctors implanted in his chest a generator the size of stopwatch and connected it to a nerve in his neck.</s>DAVIS: It's two lead wires and a ground wire that are hooked up to the Vagus nerve on the left side here. The Vagus nerve goes on up to the brain stem into the limbic region of the brain, where our mood and emotions are controlled.</s>SHAW: Every five minutes, the generator sends a few milliamps of electricity to his brain. As a result, he's enjoyed less anxiety, a better appetite, more sleep, and a sense of optimism that's lasted for more than a year. The only side effect: a temporary change in his voice.</s>DAVIS: Now it's going off, OK? Now you notice that my voice is getting hoarse, as it's constricting the left side of my vocal chord as it's going off. This will last for 20 seconds, then after that my voice turns to normal, or I can take the magnet, put it on the generator and return right back to normal voice.</s>SHAW: Some experts say the technology that transformed Tucker Davis' life is only a first step toward a day when computers could actually be placed inside our brains. They predict it's inevitable, as computers become smaller and more powerful, and as we learn more about how the brain works.</s>KURZWEIL: Right now, our brains are constrained to a mere 100 trillion connections.</s>SHAW: Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. During the last quarter century, he's become an established visionary, who's also practical enough to create his own technologies. The synthesizer was the first to reproduce accurately the sounds of all the instruments in an orchestra from a single slim keyboard. He invented the first machine to convert any style print into audible speech.</s>COMPUTER: Scanner moving to top of page.</s>SHAW: Thus creating a reading machine for the blind.</s>COMPUTER: Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought upon this continent a new nation.</s>SHAW: What sounds to most of us like science fiction, Kurzweil describes casually as technology that will soon affect our everyday lives.</s>KURZWEIL: Thirty years from now, we'll be building computers in a different way, we'll be building them as -- at the molecular level and they will be able to enhance our -- both our experiences and our intelligence by communicating with our biological circuits.</s>SHAW: Computers built like molecules plugged into our brains?</s>KURZWEIL: I actually think that the scenarios I'm describing are conservative simply because...</s>SHAW (on camera): Conservative?</s>KURZWEIL: I think so, because there is no way that I or anyone else can imagine all of the creative breakthroughs and innovations that everybody is going to think of. I mean, how could I anticipate every innovation? (</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "THE MATRIX") UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: How about combat training?</s>SHAW (voice-over): If Ray Kurzweil sounds like a character from "The Matrix"... (</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "THE MATRIX") UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Jujitsu?</s>KEANU REEVES, ACTOR: I'm going to learn jujitsu.</s>SHAW: ... that's because he shares the movie's vision of future technology. (</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "THE MATRIX") REEVES: Hell, yeah.</s>KURZWEIL: We'll be able to download knowledge, we'll be able to learn new skills, we'll be able to perceive things more quickly, think more quickly and more intelligently.</s>SHAW: But are we prepared? No, says Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and an expert in computer networking. He thinks many scientists ignore the dark side of their research.</s>BILL JOY, CO-FOUNDER, SUN MICROSYSTEMS: When these things come together, we have an unprecedented situation where individuals can cause harm on a scale that we've never seen before.</s>SHAW: Joy worries that using computers to enhance the brain could lead to a super-intelligent ruling class with little regard for anyone else.</s>JOY: I think it would perhaps be for those of us who weren't in that small privilege to lead the equivalent of a new Dark Age. The scary part is if everybody has it and lots of us are crazy, it's very likely that someone will do something crazy.</s>KURZWEIL: We've always encountered problems with technology, but few people today would really want to go back several centuries to the much shorter life spans we had, to the poverty filled, disease-filled lives we had hundreds of years ago.</s>SHAW (on camera): Fundamentally, you're talking about tampering with humankind. What about the human consequences, what about the uniqueness of the individual?</s>KURZWEIL: Well, I think that's something that we're going to enhance. We'll actually have much greater diversity among people in terms of our skills and interests.</s>SHAW: You use the phrase "enhancing the brain." Take the nine justices on the United States Supreme Court, they implant themselves with chips to do what?</s>KURZWEIL: Well, they'll have greater command of more knowledge and more information, and hopefully that will lead to better wisdom.</s>DAVIS: Those legal decisions always come back in the final analysis to a moral and ethical judgment, and you're not going to find any brain chip or any device that's going to put morality and ethics into a human being.</s>SHAW (voice-over): Tucker Davis, who lives each day as man dependent on machine, sees the technology as a mixed blessing.</s>DAVIS: To me it's a prosthetic device, it's no different in my mind than a hip replacement, you know, with the titanium ball and socket, or sewing my hand back on if I've lost it.</s>SHAW: At the same time, he's uncomfortable with the idea that we might soon download books to our brains as simply as we now copy data from one computer to another.</s>DAVIS: If you take away that effort by making it easier, I don't see that humanity is progressing. I think it's just a fundamental part of humanity that we suffer and we -- the harder we work at things, the better we perform, and I wouldn't want to take that equation out.</s>KURZWEIL: It's really an evolutionary process, one generation of technology provides more powerful tools, which means that the next generation can be created more quickly and can be more powerful, and so this process is going to continue. It's not going to settle down, it's going to continue to grow at an exponential rate.</s>ANNOUNCER: To chat live with futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil at 10:00 Eastern, 7:00 Pacific, log on to cnn.com/chat after the show.</s>GREENFIELD: Plug-in technology, artificial intelligence -- if we can digitize our thoughts and emotions, why not our senses? Coming up, from Weird Al Yankovic, this mind boggling thought: "Will Smell-o-Vision Replace Television?"</s>YANKOVIC: Pretty soon, your friends will come over for movie night and they'll be like, oh, you don't have Smell-o-Vision? We have to go.</s>ANNOUNCER: When "Visions 21" CNN & TIME continues.</s>GREENFIELD: Now let's say you're a passionate gourmet, addicted to those cooking shows; you may cheer on the "Iron Chefs," or shout "bam" with Emeril, but you know you're missing something: the glorious smell of great food. But what if smells could be digitized? Researchers say it is theoretically possible -- scented TV. A weird thought, no? Well, that's why we turned to Weird Al Yankovic to answer our next question: "Will Smell-o-Vision Replace Television?"</s>YANKOVIC: It's inevitable, because every technology becomes obsolete. Once they've pushed the envelope as far as they can with audio and video, they're going to have to go on to the next logical frontier: Smell-o-Vision. Pretty soon, your friends will come over for movie night and they'll be like, oh, you don't have Smell-o- Vision? We have to go. It's going to change our entire TV watching experience. You'll be able to watch the Food Network and smell the garlic, and you'll cry when they cut the onions. You'll actually be able to smell Richard Simmons sweating to the oldies. Movies will be a lot different, too. You'll be able to watch "Apocalypse Now" and actually smell the napalm in the morning, and it will add a whole new dimension to the eating baked beans around the campfire scene in "Blazing Saddles." In the future, we'll be picking our political leaders at least partially based on their smell. And commercials will be completely different, like anti-perspirant commercials, you know, I used to smell like this, but now I smell like this. Well, not everybody is going to want Smell-o-Vision and I think that's why it's going to be an option. It will be like, you know, do you want your movies wide-screen or pan-stand? And then there will be people who can't really appreciate Smell-o-Vision, so they'll have to have subtitles for the smelling impaired. Have a -- you know, subtitles that say things like, smells kind of fishy. Of course, once we've bought every single piece of Smell-o-Vision hardware and software that exists, then they're going to come out with quadraphonic Smell-o-Vision. What's that smell behind me? Whoa, that's great!</s>ANNOUNCER: Next, from television you can smell, to literature online, "Will We Close the Book on Books?"</s>MARK BERNSTEIN, EASTGATE PUBLISHING: The future of reading, as much we can know what any future is, is going to be on screens, or things that come after screens, not on scrolls and not on chopped up trees.</s>ANNOUNCER: When CNN & TIME "Visions 21" continues.</s>GREENFIELD: This is a book, pages bound together with words printed on them in ink. If you show this to someone living 500 years ago, he'd instantly recognize it. It's got a heft, a smell, a feel that offers a sensory pleasure quite apart from the pleasures its contents provide. But it may be an endangered species. In fact, what is inside this vessel can now be accessed without ink, without pages, with the simple click of a button. So, "Will We Be Closing the Book on Books?"</s>BOOK PRINTER: Lutitia (ph) is my favorite place.</s>GREENFIELD (voice-over): Ten years ago, David Dice of Bradford, Vermont gave up practicing law and started making books by the letter- press print method.</s>DICE: It's a good job here. This is basically what Gutenberg did. I mean, he had wooden type obviously. This is the way books have been done for 500 years, more or less.</s>GREENFIELD: For Dice, it is an act of love.</s>DICE: I think people will always want to have a physical contact with a structure, with a book, to touch the paper or to experience the pleasure of actually turning pages.</s>GREENFIELD: Really? Right now, countless millions of people read newspapers and magazines not on paper, but on their computer screens, and there are clear signs that books are now migrating as well. Last March, famed author Stephen King released his latest book, "Riding the Bullet," only on the Web. And last month, prominent book publishers announced plans for a major move into e-publishing. And what of the threat to the joys of settling down with a satisfying feel of cloth, and paper, and ink?</s>BERNSTEIN: This is nostalgia for an imaginary past.</s>GREENFIELD: So says Mark Bernstein, who heads up Eastgate Publishing, a Watertown, Massachusetts-based e-book publisher. His books don't exist on paper at all, but on CDs and zip drives, and as bits and bytes speeding over the Internet. He publishes six to eight e-books a year and scoffs at the notion that something precious is at risk.</s>BERNSTEIN: First, we never curled up by the menorial fireplace with our big dog and our glass of Claret and our fine leatherbound books. That wasn't something most of us ever had the opportunity to do, and certainly not our ancestors. So the book as a finely crafted artifact is partly imaginary in any sense.</s>GREENFIELD: Of course we will read books, Bernstein says, just not the way we do now.</s>BERNSTEIN: The future of reading, as much we can know what any future is, is going to be on screens, or things that come after screens, not on scrolls and not on chopped up trees.</s>GREENFIELD: But how does that future sit with a Yale-educated man of letters, say a man like William F. Buckley Jr.?</s>WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., AUTHOR: The physical existence of a book has a -- really it's a certain kind of poetry that can't be duplicated in a chip.</s>GREENFIELD: He's written more than 40 of them, his two latest, a collection of speeches and a novel, "Spy Time," now grace the shelves of bookstores. But this founding father of modern conservatism was also one of the first prominent writers to become computer literate, and if the future is in e-books, that holds no terrors for him. (on camera): But is there something tactile for you about picking up a book with the binding and the pages, and turning those pages, that as far as you're concerned, a computer just can't replace?</s>BUCKLEY: I would say yes. If people were to ask me the same thing about a typewriter back in 1981, I would have said yes. There is absolutely no -- nothing to replace the sound of that key hitting the paper. Well, the answer is there is. So that the question you really ask is, how hard would the adjustment be? And my guess is it would be less difficult than the adjustment already made to a word processor.</s>GREENFIELD (voice-over): Anne Rice, author of the best-selling Lestat vampire books, and of high-toned erotica as well, has readily adapted to the e-world. Her Web site draws an estimated 360,000 page views a year. So how does she regard the prospect of a book without paper, or cloth, or binding?</s>RICE: I'm really old fashioned, I want to hold a book in my hands and I want to sit back in my easy chair with it, and I guess I want pages that I can not only turn and spill coffee on, but actually mark on with a pen.</s>GREENFIELD: Love it or loathe it, the real future of reading may be a device like this. It's called an e-book, it can store a dozen or more books that can be downloaded over the Net. Its screen is readable. Its portability ends the oft-repeated complain about reading on a computer: how can you take that thing on to a bus, or into the bathroom? From intercontinental travelers to kids with a heavy book bag, this could change everything.</s>BUCKLEY: There is nothing inherently here that doesn't satisfy your curiosity about what's composed there, and there is a lot that, on the contrary, makes life easier, pushing this button instead of turning the page.</s>GREENFIELD: But it's not just putting books in a device, or on the Net. Publishers like Mark Bernstein are using technology to change the way books are written and how they are read. It's called hypertext, and it works like this: when a word is underlined, the reader can click his or her mouse on it and find out more about that particular part of the book, or make a decision to skip ahead, or just simply read on.</s>BERNSTEIN: It means that we can show things from several different angles at once.</s>GREENFIELD: This has obvious advantages when it comes to reference books like encyclopedias, or guide books. A few clicks can provide everything from updated data to the latest restaurant menus. But what about literature, works where the author's narrative sense may be crucial? Bernstein says we may be talking about a whole different way of telling a story.</s>BERNSTEIN: There is a famous moment in the first released successful hypertext fiction where Michael Joyce, the author of "Afternoon," asks, "Do you want to hear about it?" The hypertext responds to yes or to no. No leads to, "I understand how you feel." Instead of simply stopping the conversation, it reacts as the speaker, the protagonist, and also as the author would want to react to the skeptical or impatient reader.</s>GREENFIELD: But as technology marches on, one invention may actually make the physical book more viable than ever before. It's called the "Bookbuilder," and it will make a book for you from a library of CDs.</s>ED EAKIN, PUBLISHER, EAKIN PRESS: You don't print X numbers, large numbers of copies and put them in the warehouse. You print them as you need them.</s>GREENFIELD: It may be coming to a mall or bookstore near you soon.</s>EAKIN: You will ask for a book and certain books, they'll go back and make it while you wait.</s>GREENFIELD: And even David Dice, the guy who still makes books by hand, is embracing technology.</s>DICE: I don't really feel any competition with the modern age in this at all, I sell my books on the Internet.</s>GREENFIELD: So the answer is, yes, of course there will be books around, books will survive.</s>RICE: Really, all of this is no threat to the printed book. People are predicting that the printed book is going to go out, but people have been predicting that for -- I'm trying to figure -- 40 years. So I don't think e-publishing is going to do away with the printed book. I think it may add a whole dimension, you know, it may reach a whole different audience, but it's not going to do away with the printed book.</s>GREENFIELD: The future of books, whatever the form, may be secure, but the digital age has already begun to breed some chilling insecurities. Still ahead on "Visions 21," "Will Cybercriminals Run the World?"</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any 12-year-old can download some of the software and use it to commit major crimes without even thinking about it.</s>ANNOUNCER: When "Visions 21" CNN & TIME continues.</s>GREENFIELD: Welcome back to "Visions 21." They have beguiling names like Melissa, and the Love Bug, but these are devastating computer viruses posing as harmless e-mails, virtual infections that spread fast and have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Hardly a week goes by that we don't hear stories about some type of new virus or about a hacker breaking into our most secure institutions. With vulnerability leading to more and more online insecurity, here again is Bernard Shaw, and the question: Will cybercriminals run the world?</s>SHAW (voice-over): Tim Runsberg (ph) says the Internet helped someone murder his stepdaughter.</s>TIM RUNSBERG: The Internet, I think, made it possible.</s>SHAW: Liam Ewens (ph) had been stalking Amy Boyer without her knowledge. He knew where she lived but was afraid to go there. He didn't know where she worked. Over the Internet, he paid money to find out her Social Security number. He also paid to find her employer's address in downtown Nashua, New Hampshire.</s>RUNSBERG: He knew just where to find her because of the information he found off the Internet. There's no question in my mind that that information directly led to the death of Amy.</s>SHAW: On October 15th last year, not long after getting the information from an Internet search company, Ewens took a semiautomatic handgun and drove to Amy's office. He waited for her to leave. He murdered her. Then he killed himself. On his Web site, which had been up for two year, he wrote about his plans to kill Boyer. Ewens also wrote, "It's actually obscene what you can find out about a person on the Internet."</s>RUNSBERG: For two and a half years this diary was on the Internet for the world to see, yet not one phone call by anyone, to anyone.</s>SHAW: Tim Runsberg is campaigning for new laws to protect privacy on the Internet.</s>RUNSBERG: This killer purchased the domain name Amy Boyer from register.com and created these Web sites in her own name.</s>GLEN KLINKHARDT, ANCHORAGE POLICE DEPARTMENT: We've had several; cases involving homicides where the computer has given us valuable information.</s>SHAW: Glen Klinkhardt is a cybercop for the Anchorage Police Department. He's not surprised by the Internet angle to Amy Boyer's death. He says cybercrime covers the spectrum, from hacking to homicide.</s>KLINKHARDT: You name the crime, we have a case where a computer is involved. You want to separate this as evidence?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.</s>KLINKHARDT: OK.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's go ahead and do that.</s>KLINKHARDT: OK.</s>SHAW: A few years ago, there were no jobs like Klinkhardt's. A few years from now it could be one of the hottest tickets in law enforcement.</s>KLINKHARDT: I believe that computer forensics and the use of computer evidence is going to be as popular in five years as the use of fingerprints and DNA is today.</s>SHAW: The computers may be new, but the crimes aren't. Much of the cybercrime that Klinkhardt sees involves theft or fraud. But he also sees new sorts of crimes, like attacks which cripple computer systems, and new sorts of criminals. Some of them are getting younger and younger.</s>KLINKHARDT: The software is getting easier to use -- it's point and click -- and yet it is much more sophisticated. It's able to do more. So any 12-year-old can download some of the software and use it to commit major crimes without even thinking about it.</s>SHAW: Klinkhardt also expects to see more crimes against children.</s>KLINKHARDT: We're starting to see child pornography coming in from Russia. That's one of the new big ones.</s>SHAW: He worries that the Internet is actually making it easier for pedophiles to act out their fantasies.</s>KLINKHARDT: All of a sudden, the Internet has given them a sense of, I'm not alone, there's other people out there. There are literally now pedophile support groups online that are telling each other it's OK to sexually assault children.</s>SHAW: Klinkhardt foresees more repeat offenders.</s>KLINKHARDT: In police work a lot of times, we say that 10 percent of the population causes 90 percent of the problems. And we're seeing it as well in the computer world. There are names that I keep, that I have, that I know I'm going to be seeing five years from now.</s>SHAW: Glen Klinkhardt says he's always been something of a hacker, ever since he was 12. And that helps him think like the cybercriminals.</s>KLINKHARDT: Every day there's something new. There's new computers, there's new software, there's new techniques and there's new crimes. So you have to be open to that. You have to be willing to zig when they zag.</s>SHAW: Zigging when others zag has never been a problem for this man, known in the computer world simply as "Mudge." Like Klinkhardt, his roots are in hacking, figuring out how computers and software work. Mudge advises the United States government and corporations on cybersecurity. (on camera): Can cybercriminals rule the world? "</s>MUDGE": I hope not. The security in place right now leaves a lot of things very vulnerable. The generic operating systems you're putting on your desktops are not designed with security in mind.</s>SHAW (voice-over): Mudge says the Internet can make some crimes possible, and profitable. "</s>MUDGE": If you have a person who's a pick-pocket and they steal two cents from a person, and on average they get one out of every 1,000 people that goes by them and they can steal two cents, this person is going to starve in the real world. But on the Internet, on the electronic world, this is a very viable attack. If you're looking for computer security then the Internet is not the place to be.</s>SHAW: He has warned Congress that Internet service itself is vulnerable to a crippling attack. "</s>MUDGE": We said at that time -- this was two years -- we could disrupt service for the entire Internet in less than 30 minutes. The problem still exists.</s>SHAW (on camera): It does? "</s>MUDGE": Sure, absolutely.</s>SHAW (voice-over): Mudge sees a recent attack that hit major e- commerce sites as a warning that worse could be in store. "</s>MUDGE": That was a very trivial attack. There could be much nastier ones done on the infrastructure routing protocols, which is what moves a packet or a bit of information from, you know, the West Coast to the east Coast. When you start having the big ones that are branching further out, those end up being larger organizations. And if you started lopping off all of those, you could isolate, in turn, you know, each individual state or each individual geographic area into its own island, unable to communicate with the outside world. These black ones here are military. Here you go.</s>SHAW: Mudge now runs research and development for At Stake, a computer security firm. (on camera): Does it take a hacker to catch a hacker? "</s>MUDGE": It takes the understanding of how you have to think that way. You have to understand the motive. You have to understand the various tools and techniques, because if you can't understand how they're getting into your place, you're never going to be able to understand how to fix it.</s>SHAW (voice-over): The future calls for more strategic thinking, says Mudge, designing systems with security in mind from the beginning. (on camera): What does the landscape look like for the next 10, 15 years or so? "</s>MUDGE": If people start going down the route of not just putting bandages on the surface wounds and addressing instead the actual sickness or illness that they might have, I think we're going to see the small viruses start to go -- start to diminish. That's if people start looking at it in the strategic mindset.</s>SHAW (voice-over): But even Mudge concedes staying one step ahead of the cybercriminals is a tough job. (on camera): Ever been hacked? "</s>MUDGE": Not that I'm aware of.</s>GREENFIELD: The solution to cybercrime may be more intelligent computer systems, but that raises another troubling question. Coming up, Gary Kasparov with, will my PC be smarter than me?</s>KASPAROV: we will not be able to even come close to the way a machine is exchanging information, the database and calculating billions and billions of possibilities.</s>ANNOUNCER: When "Visions 21," CNN & TIME, continues.</s>GREENFIELD: If there's anyone who knows how frustrating it must be to be outwitted by a machine, it's Gary Kasparov. In 1997, Kasparov, one of the best chess players of all time, was beaten at his own game by a supercomputer known as Deep Blue. With that in mind, we asked Kasparov this question: In the future, will my PC be smarter than me?</s>KASPAROV: I think first we have to define what it means that computers getting smarter than a human being, because we don't know how computers exactly approaching different problems. But what's more important, we do not understand how the human brain is approaching the same problems. The match had such enormous public interest because it reflected the fear of every housewife about the future of her children that could be potentially threatened by computer dominance. I am a firm believer that the machine will always lack human creativity. And without this creativity, the whole issue of machine getting smarter than humans is absolutely irrelevant. I think chess can be used as a model for many scientific experiments. And a man-versus-machine contest is a part of that experiment, no matter who wins. Because as long as we are able to win one single game, we are still doing fine. Chess is still a decision- making game. And if I play the computer, I'm still basing my decisions on my assessment of computer psychology. And computer as my opponent is an opponent with sort of an alien mentality. Even with the computer, we're still bringing chess to, you know, one-one encounter of two individuals, quote-unquote. Now I play against it. I mean, I can play this game. It's not very convenient now because with this mouth, you know, you don't have a chance. I didn't have time to win. But anyway, so it's a game. And normally I play with a better mouse.</s>ANNOUNCER: Virtual intelligence and children: High-tech playthings threaten to become all too real.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: These new toys have their own agenda.</s>ANNOUNCER: Parents wonder, will my child love her smart toys better than she loves me? When "Visions 21," CNN & TIME, continues.</s>GREENFIELD: At this year's American-International Toy Fair in New York, the prevailing theme was basically this: There is no such thing as too much technology in a toy. Today's children are too sophisticated, it seems, for the playthings of yesteryear. When the gift-giving holidays roll around, parents can look forward -- if that's the right phrase -- to a whole slew of microchip-enhanced toys, some of them so lifelike it may be difficult for kids to understand that their new playmate isn't real. From interactive dolls to animatronic pets, parents now get to ask themselves, will my child love her smart toys better than she loves me?</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, TV COMMERCIAL) ANNOUNCER: Miniature toys provide a world a child can manipulate.</s>GREENFIELD (voice-over): It's been true for generations... (</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, TV COMMERCIAL) ANNOUNCER: Playing out his fantasies of reproducing his actual life.</s>GREENFIELD: ... when children play with toys, they bring their understanding of the world to the dolls and the trucks and the playhouses, their emotions, their joys and sorrows. And for at least the last half century, those who study children have worried about what it means when kids spend their time where others imagine for them, when they stare at a TV or play video game. Well now...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wake up Furby baby for you -- me the baby.</s>GREENFIELD: ... there's a whole new generation of toys that makes those past diversions child's play.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They'll respond to, you know, clapping, you know, loud noises.</s>GREENFIELD: There's Furby...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably when you go to sleep.</s>GREENFIELD: ... a computerized toy that appears to carry on whole conversations with your kid. Or Poochy, a dog that sings, barks, talks to other Poochies...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can also feed them with a bone.</s>GREENFIELD: And responds to the offer of a bone with hearts in his eyes. He likes you -- he really, really likes you. Or interactive Yoda, a toy that goes on the market next week, a toy that really seems to be teaching you how to use the Force.</s>YODA: Let the force flow.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Time to wake up.</s>GREENFIELD: Or My Real Baby...</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There you go.</s>GREENFIELD: ... a toy that is expected to hit the stores this Christmas season.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes you are, you're a very ticklish little girl.</s>GREENFIELD: It's been designed to show emotions far more subtly than toys of the past. It does more than laugh or cry, its facial muscles responds the way a real infant's would.</s>JONATHAN KLEIN, IROBOTS: What we've done is we've taken technology that enables us to enhance a traditional doll in a lot of -- in a number of really interesting ways.</s>GREENFIELD: Jonathan Klein is director of iRobots interactive toy division, the makers of My Real Baby.</s>KLEIN: We've given her the ability to smile, the ability to frown, the ability look surprised. She can laugh, she can cry. In fact, we've given her a whole broad range of emotions, as well as a lot of needs.</s>GREENFIELD: This, says Klein, is the wave of the future.</s>KLEIN: Kids are going to be able to interact with their toys in some sense like they're other people and other creatures. It's going to be a very magical time for toys.</s>UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: Cool.</s>GREENFIELD: But that magical time may not be good news for children or parents, says Sherri Turkel (ph), professor of the sociology of science at MIT. She has spent years studying the interaction of kids and toys, and she raises a warning flag about how these smart toys work.</s>SHERRI TURKEL, MIT: The new toys ask something very different of the child. They ask the child to nurture them. So this is now the first generation of children who are going to be growing up seeing their toys, seeing these computational objects, as something that need to be taken care of and nurtured in order for the child to be gratified.</s>GREENFIELD (on camera): And this is different from, say, a kid playing with a Raggedy Ann doll, treating the doll as a baby and feeding it and stroking it and scolding it.</s>TURKEL: Yes.</s>GREENFIELD: Because?</s>TURKEL: Because when the Raggedy Ann doll -- it's a great question. When the child is playing with the Raggedy Ann doll, the child is projecting on to the doll the child's needs to take care of, the child's needs to discipline -- you've been a bad doll -- the child's needs to love or be loved -- or to be disliked. The doll's mad at them that day. These new toys have their own agenda. They tell the child, I love you. They tell the child, take care of me. They tell the child, I'm unhappy now. So you have a situation where you move from projection to engagement to interaction. They believe, at least for a while, that the Furbies -- they take the Furbies at their word that the Furbies love them.</s>GREENFIELD: Roger Schiffman (ph) is president of Tiger Toys, which makes the Furby and the Poochy. He says kids aren't all that confused between what's alive and what's not.</s>ROGER SCHIFFMAN, PRESIDENT, TIGER TOYS: I think they just actually realize that this is a cool toy, they like it, they think it's cute, and they want to try it and see what they can make it do. But, you know, clearly people know that it's not living and it's not human and it's not a dog. But, you know, it's a live toy-type product in some kids' minds, and they understand that very clearly.</s>GREENFIELD: It's not just these smart toys that are changing the way children play and learn. For nearly 20 years, the computer has been making its way into our living rooms and bedrooms, and experts like Dr. Stanley Greenspan, child psychologist, professor and author, argue that parents have been all too willing to leave their children alone with their machines.</s>DR. STANLEY GREENSPAN, CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST: Well, kids need humans. That should be the new saying. I want to put that on shirts that everyone can wear: Kids need humans. When you play with a video game or play with a fancy toy, you're using only a few of your mental capacities, and by and large you don't have that rich emotional interchange which is the orchestra leader, which guides the whole operation. So in our latest research, we found that the emotions are the orchestra leader for our intellect, but you need human interaction for that orchestra leader to learn how to work.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He was 2 years old when he first began his interest in computers. You hungry?</s>GREENFIELD: The Garalus (ph) family of Chicago watched their son Pascuali (ph) become entranced by machines from near infancy. Now, they say, his fascination has driven them to take action.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When he comes home from school, if we don't stop him he'll go directly to using the computer. And so what we do is we kind of schedule him into, like, you know, playing catch with me for a little bit. It's more our choice for him to do, although he likes doing those things, But he counts the minutes and says, OK, are we done yet?</s>GREENSPAN: Technology is a two-edged sword. If used properly, it can really enhance human interaction, enhance all these skills that we need to develop. In many, many families now, it's being misused. It's being used instead of human interaction.</s>KLEIN: There are 16 different motors in IsaiB (ph).</s>GREENFIELD: For parents and for children, that challenge will be tested by a future in which toys may take on a life of their own.</s>KLEIN: Dolls are going to be able to be smarter...</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Here you go.</s>KLEIN: ... they're going to be able to have more sophisticated emotions, they're going to be able respond in more interesting and more sophisticated ways.</s>TURKEL: We're seeing toys now that are the tip of the iceburg of a development in toy making and the objects around us that is going to be continuing. And now is the time to really think it through about what are the child's needs and whether -- you know, why do we need these toys?</s>GREENFIELD: With all of these fears for the future we've been talking about, we want to end with a note of reassuring uncertainty. Often those considered most qualified to predict the nature and shape of things to come can be astoundingly, gratifyingly wrong. Lord Kelvin used fluid mechanics to prove that no airplane would ever fly. And IBM's Thomas Watson estimated the worldwide market for computers would peak at half a dozen. Imagine what futurists will be certain of tomorrow. And that's it for this fifth and final edition of "Visions 21." I'm Jeff Greenfield. Thanks for joining us.