Soundings

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32542, 27 February 1971, Page 6

Soundings

by

DENIS McCAULEY

I see a Mr Joseph Beer has filed an $ll,OOO suit against the Olivetti Corporation of America because the corporation’s computer is blackmailing him. It sounds rather bizarre, but the way Mr Beer explains it you can see he has a point Instead of making out a cheque for the amount the corporation owes Mr Beer, the computer has been sending him bills for the same amount progressing then to “nasty notes" and a final notice. The computer is blackmailing him, Mr Beer says, because it would be cheaper to pay the bill than take the case to court.

I can sympathise with Mr Beer because we had the same experience although a far cheaper one a year or so ago. My wife, being a regular contributor to a certain magazine, was on its free mailing list Which was fine until the end or the year when the computer sent us a bill for $O.OO. We thought it was quite amusing at the time. But a month later there was another bill, couched in far from flattering terms, and then a final notice, promising legal action if we did not pay.

Not wanting the lawyers to go to all that trouble for literally nothing, we sent a cheque for $O.OO. But such smart-aleck tricks do not, it seems, go down too well with computers and we were struck off the mailing list. Only a week or so ago there was the case of an Oamaru boy who found the Education Department’s computer had fouled up his university entrance exam marks and some of the testimony to a United States Senate subcommittee investigation of computer dating services was appalling matching a 34-year-old widower with five children and a 76-year-old woman was bad enough, but the man lived in New York and the woman in Miami. I suppose everyone knows of at least one example of computer incompetence, even it is not always firsthand knowledge, and a lot of people might feel inclined to sympathise with one American group, the Committee

Against Computers, dedicated to the eradication of the computer, by sabotage if necessary. But is it really the computer that is at fault? According to my brother, who is a computer programmer, the computer is the dumbest animal God ever invented, and the computer programmer the second dumbest. His point is that a computer cannot do anything it is not told to do, and

computer programmers frequently neglect to tell the computer all it needs to know. Therefore computers go wrong. You might feel sympathy for Mr Beer when he says: “The only Way you can beat a computer is to stick a screwdriver through it,” and you might even feel a sneaking sense of admiration for the militants who do the job with a sledgehammer, but the fact is, if you really must sabotage a computer it is far easier to let the computer do the job itself. All computers have a built-in sabotage system. For example, a computer may have three input channels, for voice, punched cards and magnetic tape. All you have to do is tell the computer to disregard all input on each channel in turn and there is absolutely no way the computer can be given instructions.

Presented in this light, the computer becomes rather a pathetic thing, not the ogre it is often made out to be. When we blame the computer for making mistakes it will nearly always be the fault of a man. It is a bit like blaming the horse rather than the huntsman for the cruelty of the hunt. The computer is a docile thing and should be recognised as such. Perhaps a “Be Kind To Computers Week” and for those of us who think like my brother that the computer, is the dumbest of God’s creations there could be something like the R.S.P.C.A. (the Royal Society for the Prevention of computer Antagonism, for instance). And if you ever get a bill for $O.OO just think of it this way: if the fool who had programmed the computer had been sending out the accounts, the bill would probably be $lOO.OO