The computer may be incompetent in itself--that is, unable to do the work for which it was designed. This kind of incompetence can never be eliminated, because the Peter Principle applies in the plants where computers are designed and manufactured.
Sensing my delight at seeing his laptop, Tom asked me, "William, have you ever seen the Internet?""No."In a quiet conference room, Tom sat me down at his computer and explained the track pad, how the motion of my fingers guided the arrow on the screen."This is Google," he said. "You can find answers to anything. What do you want to search for?""Windmill."In one second, he'd pulled up five million page results-pictures and models of windmills I'd never even imagined.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
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Sensing my delight at seeing his laptop, Tom asked me, "William, have you ever seen the Internet?""No."In a quiet conference room, Tom sat me down at his computer and explained the track pad, how the motion of my fingers guided the arrow on the screen."This is Google," he said. "You can find answers to anything. What do you want to search for?""Windmill."In one second, he'd pulled up five million page results-pictures and models of windmills I'd never even imagined.
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To paraphrase Hannah Arendt__s portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name__he Nazi war criminal__ actions stemmed from her well-known phrase __anality of evil,_ not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss__ case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler. To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, __ormal,_ sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.
Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue."But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?""It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting...