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intelligent humans have gone computer-mad. It
starts early: teachers despair of time-telling when
all the kids sport terrible digital watches that peep,
play tunes, start and stop, even show firework
displays, but instill no sense of the hands moving
majestically round a clock face. Instead of
learning mental-arithmetic they grow up thinking
that calculators are their right.
Computers breed laziness and discontent. A
couple came to my house and gazed in disbelief
at the battered old Olympia on which I'm typing
this.
I go to a library and see my beloved dusty
manuscripts and old newspaper cuttings replaced
by gleaming terminals, so you cannot actually
handle the stuff. Then I hear from a friend that he
is going to spend money on a cosy "home
computer", so that all the little details of his life
can be stored in its cold brain. As for organising,
our computers will do it for us. All the science
fiction fantasies of computers taking over the
world, or being used to make a plan of some devil
overthrow of government are not far from the truth
I see all around me.
That modern myth foretells the hidden corruption
of man by his own little invention
The computer generation (God help them)
assumes that it is better to calculate, buy petrol,
tell the time, work out your holiday plans, pay your
bills, and even shop, with the aid of a computer.
After all, our civilisation is founded, now, on the
certainty that we can kill by remote control, and a
computer error could unleash Armageddon. The
age of the computer is the age of dehumanisation.
As for feeling our computers won’t do that for us.
3
4
5
6
checked the oil and even did
the tyres, before an infernal till
was reading off the digits and
charging you accordingly.
C A genius has decided that
we wait too long at
supermarket check-outs, and
so he has developed a
considerate computer.
D "Gosh, we'd have thought
you would have a word
processor by now."
E Significantly in my old
Oxford dictionary the word
‘computer’ does not exist
except as a subheading - a
person who computes or
calculates. Now the person
has gone.
F Myths are rooted in a need
to explain to ourselves the
workings of the universe, and
of human nature.
H We are now so dependent
on computers, that it is hard to
go into a bank, when their
main computer is broken. Just
try to appreciate the chaos,
that would occur if computers
were suddenly removed world-
wide.
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