THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 6, 1996 TAG: 9609060020
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: 80 lines
Like Dr. Jekyll after drinking his own elixir, I feel something strange coming over me. I have drunk deep of technology and am about to produce one of my periodic Luddite outbursts.
I know the conventional wisdom, that life in a digital age is garbage in, garbage out. That any problem can ultimately be backtracked to humans. Don't you believe it! If these machines aren't actually malign, they at least have a wicked sense of humor.
Readers of these pages know that we recently had a blank space where an editorial was supposed to be. To add insult to injury, quite a few people called and wrote to let us know it was one of our best editorials ever.
There were human suspects in the case, but some computer gear was also implicated. Technologists have figured out what humans can do to prevent a recurrence. But as far as I can tell, they are essentially trying to outwit the machines. Same plot as ``The Terminator.''
One of the high-tech marvels that helps put out the newspaper is called Oman, which sounds suspiciously like one of those temperamental djinns in the Arabian Nights. On more than one occasion, Oman seems to have developed a mind of its own. Spooky.
This is the kind of thing imaginative writers have been warning us against since computers were invented. The first were given creepy names like Brainiac and it didn't seem farfetched to suppose they might soon get beyond our control.
In The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, a computer wakes up, develops a sense of humor and becomes the Sam Adams of an extraterrestrial revolution. In The Forbin Project, the nations of earth entrust their nuclear weapons to a computer that promptly uses the nukes to gain control of the planet and enslave its people. And so on.
Techno-enthusiasts normally pooh-pooh such fears as bubbling up from places in our heads where logic doesn't apply. But there are plenty of real world cases to suggest the fears are well-grounded. Maybe we are putting too much power into the hands of fallible technology.
Oman plays practical jokes and odd things happen to the newspaper. Lights go out in several states and it's a computer glitch. Phones go out and a software malfunction in New Jersey is to blame. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies rushing to do business on the Internet are beginning to have second thoughts. Having become reliant on it for order processing, communications and other vital functions, what happens when the net unravels?
There have been several cases in which an air-traffic-control system has gone black due to technical problems. Crash, as in computer crash, is not a word you want to hear when airplanes are involved.
Often the technology that is supposed to save us work and simplify our lives seems actually to be making them harder and more complex. For starters, we all seem to be spending a lot of time getting trained to do work we used to know how to do.
But maybe we are just living through a transition period, climbing the learning curve on hands and knees. Maybe I am simply a hopeless dinosaur. Young children raised on mouse and web seem to have no trouble getting their wetware in sync with cyberlife. But I am unable to dispel my concern.
When Dylan Thomas came to America he said it was all a terrible mistake but it was too late to fix it. That's what I think about cyberlife, especially since my wife has vanished. She was trying to make a fairly simple purchase, had selected the item she preferred, filled out some necessary paperwork and handed over a credit card. That's the last I saw of her.
The computers at TRW credit wouldn't approve the transaction. No, not because she had exceeded her credit limit. Not because she was a notorious deadbeat and they had her record. In fact, the exact opposite. She had no record. She had ceased to exist.
According to the computer, she was a nonperson, more effectively removed from the scene than if she'd been a Soviet dissident. It did no good to point out to the salesperson that there was a human being standing in front of her. That she had several credit cards and a credit history to go with them. As far as the machine was concerned, my wife was gone. And that was good enough for the salesperson.
In fact, she wasn't just gone. She had never lived. She had never established a line of credit or paid a bill. She had never been born or issued a Social Security number. She had no address, utilities, nothing. She had disappeared, vanished, been erased, rubbed out, atomized, reduced to electrons and dispersed. We're still trying to get her back. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB