The Future Does Not Compute

And the Word Became Mechanical

This is Chapter 18 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/.

On a black night in the early 1980s, a fierce scream congealed the darkness deep within MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The late-working engineer who went to investigate discovered Richard Stallman -- one of the nation's most brilliant programmers -- sitting in tears and screaming at his computer terminal, “How can you do this? How can you do this? How can you do this?”/1/

The image is no doubt provocative, revealing as it does a striking urge to personify the computer. And yet, perhaps we make too much of such occurrences. After all, the computer is hardly unique in this respect. Don't I curse the door that jams, implore my car's engine to start on an icy morning, and kick a malfunctioning TV with more than just mechanical intent? The fact is that we manifest a strong tendency to personify all the contrivances of our own devising. The computer simply takes its place among the numerous other objects to which, with a kind of animistic impulse, we attribute life.

This may be the point worth holding on to, however. Once we acknowledge our anthropomorphizing ...