(3 of 4)
Certain precomputer skills should be taught so that they do not vanish. But as Leibniz observed in 1671: "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used." Einstein had to have help with his calculations; they are drone's work anyway. Says Author Martin Gardner (Mathematical Carnival): "There is no reason why a person should have to sit down and compute the square root of seven. The computer is freeing the individual for more interesting tasks."
The rapid proliferation of microcomputers will doubtless cause many social dislocations. But the hope is that the burgeoning technology will create an almost limitless range of new products and services and therefore a great new job market. Though one expert estimates that it would take the entire U.S. female population between ages 18 and 45 to run the nation's telephone system if it were not computerized, Ma Bell now employs more people than it did when its first automatic switching service was introduced.
All of the prodigies of technology leave many people not only nostalgic for simpler times but alarmed by the unknown dangers that "progress" may bring with it. Those who first used fire must have terrified their generation. Practically any breakthrough in knowledge carries with it the possibility that it will be used for evil. But with microcomputers, the optimists can argue an extremely persuasive case. The Industrial Revolution had the effect of standardizing and routinizing life. Microtechnology, with its nearly infinite capacities and adaptability, tends on the contrary toward individualization; with computers, people can design their lives far more in line with their own wishes. They can work at terminals at home instead of in offices, educate themselves in a variety of subjects at precisely the speed they wish, shop electronically with the widest possible discretion. Among other things, microtechnology will make the mechanism of supply and demand operate more responsively; customers' wishes will be registered at the speed of light.
Some, like Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, envision a "more egalitarian society" because of the computer. Transferring so much work to the machines, thinks Lipset, may produce something like Athenian democracy; Athenians could be equal because they had slaves to do their work for them.
Says Isaac Asimov, the prolific author and futuristic polymath: "We are reaching the stage where the problems that we must solve are going to become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." Many people have great expectations and doubts about the new technology, especially in a century when they have felt themselves enslaved and terrorized by the works of science. Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, argues for a longer perspective: "This is a story that goes back to the beginning of tool-using animals, back to the rocks the earliest man picked up in Africa. As soon as he started picking up rocks, his hands started changing, his brain started changing. Computers are simply a quantum jump in the same co-evolutionary process."