Machines and Societies 
to acquire a new cogency in the light of the facts we have 
considered. Even more important, the general theory does 
suggest definite lines along which democratically acceptable 
solutions could be sought without necessitating a reactionary 
reversal of the arrow of “progress”’. 
DELEGATION OF REGULATIVE FUNCTION 
So far we have discussed mainly the possibility of understand- 
ing existing social systems and their elements in terms, of 
information-flow models. For many readers, however, my 
title may have first suggested a different question. If certain 
regulative social functions can be modelled in mechanical 
terms, can they not also be taken over by machines? 
At a low enough level the possibility is now a commonplace. 
Not only the woodman and the watercarrier but the lift 
operator, the train driver, the filing clerk and even the pro- 
duction superintendent have already found some _ useful 
mechanical rivals. The benefits and threats of these develop- 
ments to the well-being of our society have been widely 
discussed, notably by Norbert Wiener in The Human Use of 
Human Beings+, and need not detain us here. 
More interesting, perhaps, are the possibilities of so-called 
teaching machines. In principle these are no more than a way 
of taking a student through a book of instruction at a pace 
adjusted to his performance. In the more elaborate kinds the 
statistics of performance (right and wrong answers) are 
evaluated by an electronic computer and fed back to govern 
the programme which presents information and questions to 
the student. 
It may justly be objected that education is much more than 
imparting information, so that these machines can at best be 
a substitute for only one of a teacher’s functions. But it must 
be said that in this particular function they can apparently be 
even more successful (partly because of the individual self- 
pacing of the course) than many human teachers with large 
classes; and especially in underdeveloped areas we may expect 
such devices to carry an increasing share of the burden of 
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