Computers and Human Expectations

I GOT MY FIRST COMPUTER in the year 2000, when I was forty five years old. While driving it home, I was so excited I was a hazard to other motorists. I guess I waited until computers reached a sufficient level of sophistication to allow their use without having to learn a new language, or buy a user's manual several inches thick. During the green screen era, i stayed away. When in 1992 presidential candidate bill clinton made reference to an emerging "information superhighway", i had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He probably didn't either.

The first fifty years of the computerized world coincided roughly with the second half of the twentieth century. The first operational computer, demonstrably operational, no mechanical activity, all electronic, took the field at the university of pennsylvania in 1946, if I'm not mistaken. the machine was the size of a warehouse, and was housed in a building covering a full city block. Flocks of graduate students had the onerous task of pushing shopping carts up and down indoor boulevards, replacing burned out vacuum tubes with new ones.

By the middle of the nineteen seventies, any relatively inexpensive store bought  pocket calculator had more computational power than the first mammoth leviathon at Penn U. The computer onboard apollo eleven was weaker than a commadore sixty four. It just did a little math. But even from the outset, computer people were as giddy as i was with my first sixteen megabyte hard drive sixty four meg R.A.M. five hundred RPM ten horsepower machine, with what i recall was a thirteen inch monitor.

Early computer guru Alan Turing thought maybe computers would become the moral equivalent of human beings. Claude Shannon, another early cyber thinker, proclaimed that every particle of matter and every tiny unit of energy in the universe is in effect information, which might one day be programmed, in simulated form, into computers.

All this was well and good, save for the fact  that these sensational assertions were made in the nineteen fifties, which was a bit, shall we say, early. The term "virtual reality" took on an exaggerated meaning as well, and really has never lost it, because people seem to think of virtual reality as an identical substitute for, rather a simulation of, "the real world". All this hyperbole has lead to dissapointment. Computers are the only products of the industrial revolution which are expected to fail frequently and unpredictably during normal operation, points out modern computer person jaron lanier.

But we may be coming back down to earth. The blue screen of death, which many of us remember without great fondness, is a thing of the past. WE have tempered our expectation of what computers can and will actually accomplish. Ang tio be fair, Big Blue finally defeated a great human chess master, although we can always argue that our organic representative was having a bad day. Problem is, its now getting to the point wherein any reasonably powerful computer can defeat any human being in a chess match.

Now we are becoming worried that someday the world's computers might unite, and take the world away from the human race, adn make us their humble servants. This too was considered by early science and science fiction writers. WE had better hope to hell that it isn't true, because it darned well might eventually happen.