Soundings

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32981, 29 July 1972, Page 6

Soundings

by

DENIS McCAULEY

I was going through some old letters this week when I came across one written in reply to some nasty words I had to say in this coloumn several months ago about computers. The letter said, briefly, that despite the propaganda from both pro and anti-computer factions, the impact of computers on society is still very slight. Computer services affect directly only small, and generally more affluent, sectors of society.

This is true, yet many individuals agree in perceiving the computer to be a source of social crisis. The root of this widespread anxiety associated with the computer may be found in the scientists* assertion that the brain is only a neat machine. The computer really is the first powerful autonomous machine built by man; it’s a device capable of acting out internalised programmes independent of moment-to-moment external control. As such it resembles man. Man's need to understand himself has led him time and time again to explain his being in terms of the metaphors of his era. The proffered explanations have usually been accompanied by a recognition, if not of their limitations, at least of their dangers to man’s self-esteem. The Biblical prohibition against man’s construction of graven images and the horror attached to the Frankenstein myth may be understood in that light. Today man considers himself (wrongly, I think) to be free of the need for myth. Indeed, extreme technologists believe man to be a machine not in a metaphorical sense but as a demonstrably objective fact. Their success in putting those of us on the defensive who believe that man can’t be fully understood in objective terms at all rests, in part, on a profound abuse of the computer. A computer is a machine that behaves; it’s the computer’s programme that determines its behaviour. Any programme that satisfies certain elementary criteria can make a computer perform. But, just as you can have a military commander who has

no military or political theory but still issues orders to his army, so you can have computer programmes that have no theoretical foundation, but still create complex behaving systems. Man has long since passed the threshold of computer programming complexity beyond which commonly used programming systems can’t come to be understood, even by their authors, before the effects of their use become irreversible. Yet many individuals and institutions are so dependent on computer systems that they can’t abandon them. Nor, in absence of understanding, can such systems be changed. To the extent then, and it’s a very large extent, that policymakers base decisions on systems they don’t and can’t understand, they have in a profound sense abdicated their responsibility to the machine. In that sense at least, men have become machines.

One of the consequences of the renunciation of ideas generated by man in favour of “what the computer says” is that man unnecessarily constrains his freedom. He permits technology to pose questions on which his dignity, and perhaps his very survival, may depend. For example, United States policymakers speak of huge machine systems as being responsible for maintaining international peace. Who gave these systems that responsibility? To whom do we complain if they fail? Also the psychological distance between the policy-maker acting on the responses of such systems and the human consequences of his decisions is so enormous as to insulate him for any imaginative contact with the human "objects” who are among the parameters of his system equations. Finally, questions formulated by technology, by virtue of their very premises, almost always permit only technological answers. A myth of technological inevitability is thus fostered which, again, seduces man into believing himself to be merely a machine.