The warning ran in a Los Angeles afternoon paper. Computers were writing poetry, it said, and getting closer to joining the human race. The year was 1961. Bob Greene dug the story out for Tuesday's Journal, and it reads like this morning's news with a crew cut.
Almost nobody used the words artificial intelligence back then. The Los Angeles Mirror, an afternoon paper that folded long ago, had a strange story out of Glendale. Engineers at the Librascope division of General Precision had the machines writing verse. The poems weren't Robert Frost. One began, “Oh, panic not to this docile juice.” The goal wasn't art. The engineers wanted faster, cheaper ways to get the machines to react with something like thought. The computer could store more than a person, recall all of it, and weigh far more possible answers. Someday, the paper warned, the machine might come up with fresh ideas on its own.
Late 1961 was a busy time. Americans were watching the space race and buying color TVs. Mantle and Maris had just spent a summer chasing the home-run record. A computer lab in Glendale was a sideshow. One detail would sound familiar today. The first machine on the project got so smart it outgrew its hardware and needed a bigger one. The Mirror predicted that one day a computer would write a book.
Then Bendix spoke up
Within days, word came from Bendix Corp. An executive named Tom Horan said the company's G-15 had already written one. The book was a 511-page hardcover called Angular Indexing Tables. It covered dividing a circle into any number of equal parts. Two workers gave the machine the basics. It took 112 hours to turn that into a book. Horan admitted “the book will never make the bestseller list.” It had still sold more than 300 copies. Mirror columnist Matt Weinstock offered the human race a little hope. He had a feeling that “if and when computers are admitted to the human race they'll want out.”
Our read
This is a behavioral piece (Behavioral), and the lesson is calm. The fear that the machines are about to pass us is at least sixty-five years old. So is the hype. In 1961 the breakthrough was a book of circle tables that sold a few hundred copies. Today it's giant data centers. The scale changed. The feeling didn't. Markets run on that feeling, in both directions. The trend is real, which is why the house owns the build-out at weight. NVIDIA (NVDA) in 31 books, Microsoft (MSFT) in 29, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) in 30. Nothing added. The headlines are mostly noise, which is why nothing gets bought or sold because of one.
The concrete thing is the share of your money riding on this one story. This week, add up what you hold in the AI names, the chip makers and the funds that are heavy in them. If that share is bigger than you'd want on any single idea, that's the fix, and it has nothing to do with this week's headline. We'd rather check the roof while the sun is out. Bring the statement, and we'll add it up together.