!! spellx done 
29  Our Pal, the Computer
    The Washington Post, Sunday, January 29, 1967

     That electronic technology like computers might dehumanize our
culture is almost a cliche.  However, I have yet to hear that any
computer has committed a homicide.  If per chance some human has
suffocated in a sea of output paper, or been clogged by informational
bits or strangled by magnetic tape, there was no malice aforethought.
Or if there was malice, it belonged to some soulful human.

     Yet we know that in many aspects of life, individuals may become
digitized.  People prefer ambiguity, resent being called precisely to
account whether for traffic violations or income tax.  This preference
may be fundamentally irrational.  If we demand some set level of
compliance with law, and the social order eventually does, we must
also give the police the means to enforce it.

     Faced with the hard choice, I prefer the certain justice of
having the Internal Revenue Service computers analyze my bank account
over having to submit to a capricious third degree.  Nevertheless,
relentless justice may still be labeled inhuman.  We ask: Are there
ways in which the computer can bolster individuality?  Do we submit
to Marshall McLuhan's fatalistic dogma that "The medium is the
message", that accidental technology shapes more than it serves human
aims?  Or do we perceive that biology, the multiplication of human
numbers, presents the demand for printing press technology, that the
abundance of people is the most powerful dehumanizing force?

     In a recent issue of Scientific American magazine, Prof. John
McCarthy of Stanford University paints a more optimistic picture.

     "The speed, capacity and universality of computers make them
machines that can be used to foster diversity and individuality in
our industrial civilization, as opposed to the uniformity and
conformity that have hitherto been the order of the day.  Decisions
that now have to be made in the mass can in the future be made
separately, case by case.  To take a practical example, it can be
decided whether or not it is safe for an automobile to go through
an intersection each time the matter comes up, instead of subjecting
the flow of automobiles to regulation by traffic lights.  A piece
of furniture, a household appliance or an automobile can be designed
to the specifications of each user.  The decision whether to go on to
the next topic or review the last one can be made in accordance with
the interests of the child rather than for the class as a whole.  In
other words, computers can make it possible for people to be treated 
as individuals in many situations where they are lumped in the
aggregate".

     Some examples are already working.  When a bank calculates
interest daily, it rewards the individual depositors fairly and
congenially.  

     Scheduling programs help to minimize the disappointments when
students try to take advantage of flexible curricula offered by
schools.  A similar matching game places interns and residents
in hospitals that optimize the balance of mutual preferences, without
tedious negotiations under unfair pressures.

     One of the most utilitarian matching services was recently
advertising in San Francisco, registration for computer carpools: the
computer would then cluster riders by where they live and work.

     Telephone, computer, television and the laser, welded together,
would make the most creative technology for the expansion of human 
individuality.  With its person-to-person selectivity, the telephone
already stands in marked contrast to mass communications.

     Television, as such, is a debatable medium for educational
purposes.  Ought we not better ask a videotape library for the news
or the art or science or literary criticism we wanted to see and hear,
rather than passively submit to the tastes of a centralized bureau
in its choices of simultaneous broadcast?

     Before we make large scale commitments to mass diffusion, we
ought to make a careful study of selective choice, a la telephone,
supported by computerized traffic management.  The video-telephone
would be prohibitively expensive with today's techniques and
organization; but cheap wideband communications by laser need not
be more than a decade away if we focus on it as an important human
need.

     If electronics restores individual choice of communication and
helps resolve the paradox of manifold loneliness, would we deny its
rightful acclaim as rehumanizer of an overpeopled world?
----------------------------------------------------------------------