(2 of 4)
Other scientists too are apprehensive. D. Raj Reddy, a computer scientist at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, fears that universally available microcomputers could turn into formidable weapons. Among other things, says Reddy, sophisticated computers in the wrong hands could begin subverting a society by tampering with people's relationships with their own computers—instructing the other computers to cut off telephone, bank and other services, for example. The danger lies in the fast-expanding computer data banks, with their concentration of information about people and governments, and in the possibility of access to those repositories. Already, computer theft is a growth industry, so much so that the FBI has a special program to train agents to cope with the electronic cutpurses.
Dartmouth College President John G. Kemeny, an eminent mathematician, envisions great benefits from the computer, but in his worst-case imaginings he sees a government that would possess one immense, interconnecting computer system: Big Brother. The alternative is obviously to isolate government computers from one another, to decentralize them, to prevent them from possibly becoming dictatorial. But that would require considerable foresight, sophistication—and possibly a tough new variety of civil rights legislation.
Some of the most informed apprehensions about computers are expressed by Professor Joseph Weizenbaum of M.I.T.'s Laboratory for Computer Science. Human dependence on computers, Weizenbaum argues, has already become irreversible, and in that dependence resides a frightening vulnerability. It is not just that the systems might break down; the remedy for that could eventually be provided by a number of back-up systems. Besides, industrialized man is already vulnerable to serious dislocations by breakdowns—when the electrical power of New York City goes out, for example. Perhaps a greater danger, says Weizenbaum, lies in the fact that "a computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind." The machines can break loose from human intentions. Computers, he argues, are infinitely literal-minded; they exercise no judgments, have no values. Fed a program that was mistaken, a military computer might send off missiles in the wrong direction or fire them at the wrong time. Several years ago, Admiral Thomas Moorer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee: "It is unfortunate that we have become slaves to these damned computers."
Some social critics are worried that a democratization of computers, making them as common as television sets are today, may eventually cause human intellectual powers to atrophy. Even now, students equipped with pocket calculators have been relieved of having to do their figuring on paper; will they eventually forget how to do it, just as urban man has lost so many crafts of survival? Possibly. But the steam engine did not destroy men's muscles, and the typewriter has not ruined the ability to write longhand.