Technology will save us!
Pick up any newspaper or tune into any tv news channel and you'll hear all sorts of jargon sprinkled with spectacular unfounded statistics about how computers will one day take over the world. This, for the most part, appears to capture and easily bind the audience in these sensational stories about the future use of computers. We read of them playing chess, choosing emotionally engaging music, passing the Turing test (not the best way to test computers in 2017) and provide electrical pulses to robotic fingertips that can be sent to the human brain, and the impression is given that electronic machines are ready to take over. In all of the this, the cautious qualifications of the experienced appear to be ignored in favour of those who have never experienced the struggles and difficulty presented by the use of computers. They, at least, have painstakingly learned that computers are no substitute for human thought: in fact, that preparing to put work on to a computer at the levels ...