The Future Does Not Compute

This is Chapter 3 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.

Computers are tools of the past. They are perfectly designed to aid our understanding precisely insofar as it is a past-understanding. For example, if we want to know when lunar eclipses will occur in the year 2053, there's no better tool for figuring it out than a computer.

“But wait a minute. 2053 isn't in the past. That's a prediction of the future.”

Well, yes, in a trivial sense. More reasonably, you might say it's the past simply projected into the future. And the projection involves nothing new; it's nothing but the past. Everything in the “prediction” was already fully implicit in the celestial configuration of, say, 1857. All we're saying is, “Here's what the past looks like when projected onto the year 2053.”

What happens when we really turn our computers toward the future -- or try to? All too often, disaster. Disaster, for example, in the form of decision support systems wrongly applied. Human decisions clearly are (or ought to be) matters of the future. We make decisions in order to choose a future different from the one now approaching us. No analysis of ...