Stork: What about economic systems, those are very large, very complex. They learn, they react, stock markets, people trading.
Clarke: Yes, the worlds economic systems, they're certainly organisms. I wrote a short story many years ago called "Dial F for Frankenstein", where I assumed the world's telephone system at a certain point became an entity, became critical. The last link and it suddenly started to think and it took over the world. I wrote that in the 60's, I think it appeared in Playboy. "Dial F for Frankenstein" is dated now because you know longer dial of course, and if I did it now it wouldn't be the world's telephone system it would be the internet. And that of course is a real possibility. When will the internet suddenly take over?

Stork: Any suggestions, any thoughts?
Clarke: I think the internet has already taken over. I spend 90% of my time now on the internet dealing with email, so maybe it's already happened.

Stork: But it's not yet intelligent I think you would agree.
Clarke: I guess the internet is not yet intelligent, nor are most of the people who use it. I sometimes think that I'm not intelligent wasting so much time.

Stork: Computers are ubiquitous. We deal with them in many different ways. We type with them, we talk to them, we use pens with them. HAL had several different ways. Would you like to speculate the growing methods and emerging methods by which humans and machines communicate?
Clarke: At the moment we communicate with our computers with the keyboard of course. And more and more with speech and them being able to talk to us. Very soon in fact, I think we'll be able to have direct brain inputs and that's in experiments- that's already being done. In the last week, a boy's been given a bionic hand controlled by his mentalÉbrain. That's the obvious next step, and in one of my novels I had the brain cap that sits on your skull. And with lots of micro electrodes, I won't go into the technical details, I'll leave it to the engineers. And we have direct mental communication, electronic telepathy if you like with computers and of course with each other. It would revolutionize society. It is the subject of course of many science fiction novels.

The one thing that worries me is the enormous amount of information being stored. When will we run out of storage space? It doesn't seem likely because the storage devices are getting more and more able toÉ there's a whole list of bytes going up to incredible numbers. I live in a country where almost everybody believes in reincarnation. My problem with reincarnation is: what is the input-output device, and what is the storage system? This is a question that I've never had an answer to, but it's a rather interesting one I think. If we are somehow stored after our deaths and could be revived then there is the question- if no information is ever lost, if it is stored somehow in the fabric of the cosmos, then anyone who ever lived could be reincarnated- and this has been the subject of serious philosophical speculation.

Stork: So you foresee a blurring of the distinction between man and machine?
Clarke: Men and machines will merge. Already, of course, there are people with lots of machinery inside of them. Artificial hearts. One day we'll have artificial brains. We'll be able to download our thoughts, our personalities into a computer. I think that's inevitable. It doesn't worry me. The fact that I'm a carbon-based biped, I wouldn't look down on a silicon-based biped.

Stork: Equal rights?
Clarke: Equal rights for robots.

Stork: HAL existed in a spaceship for highly educated scientists and engineers and astronauts, but much of the action in computer science has been commercial. The average person having a desktop computer, or a personal digital system, or a digital watch. That seemed to be a big trend that seems to have been overlooked or not predicted in 2001.
Clarke: Nobody ever imagined how computers would take over our world. The chairman of IBM is famously quoted as saying back in the 1940's that he thought the world market for computers six or five, I don't remember what the exact number was, but every household in the world now has that number of computers. Almost one in every room. No one, not even us crazy science fiction writers, except I think Isaac Asimov may have even had a palm top in one of his stories. Isaac may haveÉI certainly didn't.

Stork: How did we... how did you miss it?
Clarke: The obvious we see eventually.

Stork: You're so prescient about orbiting satellites. Tell us about your foresight.
Clarke: Well, the concept of an orbiting communication satellite is a fairly straightforward simple one. If I hadn't written up my paper in '45 I know about 10 people who would have done it in '46.

Stork: But, describe it for us.
Clarke: In 1945, I was working with the most advanced radar in the world at that time. Approach radar, which used the incredible frequencies of 3cm wavelengths. It was one of our greatest secrets. I remember that when one of our magnetrons which generated the energy had to go back to storage for repair, I had to draw a gun to carry it in case German paratroops stole it. I don't think that I would put up a very good resistance. Anyway, that's how secret the magnetron was then, now there's one in every microwave. I was working on this advanced radar with very narrow beams- and of course I'd been interested in space travel all my life and had been one of the members of the British Interplanetary Society, which was formed in 1936 in Liverpool. In 1945, when it looked as if the war would be over fairly soon, some of us premature space cadets got together and said, well how can we make some money from rockets to build our spaceship to go to the moon. While we were thinking about this the concept of using satellites as relays came up. I can never be sure now that the original idea didn't come up in this discussion of about six of us. I was the one who wrote a paper on it and then developed it into a full-length paper. The paper included everything that's happened since, including something that's only been used recently which was the use of optical links between satellites, and they've only just got round to doing that.

Stork: So of the two major developments in world communication, satellites and the internet, you got half of them.
Clarke: What I did not foresee, and I don't think anybody did, was the extraordinary comeback of cables. I wrote a book about the Atlantic Cable. No one ever dreamed that simple hairs of glass would far outperform any copper cable and take over many of the functions of satellites- but they're limited point to point, and you need satellites for global coverage and mobile.

Stork: During the making of 2001 you saw bits and pieces. The first time you saw it in totality was on opening night. How did it impress you?
Clarke: I think I saw the complete film shortly before it was released, but only very shortly, and until the very end, Stanley was chopping and changing, and I can't remember my feelings when I saw it first in a theatre, which was in the Uptown in Washington. In fact, I had on three successive nights, had to be in Washington, New York, and LA wearing a penguin suit. It was so long ago, and I wouldn't trust my memory of the event. It was rather fraught because President Johnson had just announced his resignation, and MLK had just been assassinated, and so many things were happening in the background. We really didn't know what we'd started.