Today, a new machine in your life. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
I've said a lot about the
way machines touch our lives. We've watched one
device after another change us. Machines extend our
reach, they take us where our legs cannot, they
amplify our voices -- they even give us wings.
I talk about machines extending our bodies, because
that's the way they touch us so powerfully. But
replacing our legs with an automobile or our backs
with a forklift is nothing compared to what
computers do. They sit right beside our brains --
they assume a kind of partnership practically
inside our heads. Our relations with machines have
always been awfully personal, but with our
computers they're terrifyingly so. Just how
personal, recently came home to me in a very real
way.
For five years I've written everything on a word
processor -- papers, talks, letters, and two books
-- well over a million words of finished copy and
several times that in discarded drafts. Imagine, if
you can, my intimacy with that now-obsolete
machine. It's held my thoughts and given them back
to me.
Now I have a flashy new computer, and it's working
diligently to reshape my mind. It has ten times the
memory of the old machine, 200 times the storage
capacity, and a colorful new screen. It thinks with
blinding speed. It plays chess and Othello with me.
It handles several manuscripts at the same time. It
corrects my spelling, indexes my texts, and tends
my files and addresses. It suggests better words
for me to use. And it has a hundred tricks it
hasn't even shown me yet.
On the other hand, it's so demanding! If I say the
wrong thing, it sulks and feigns ignorance. It
tells me its secrets only if I say just the right
words to it. During the first month it kept me on
the rack -- rewarding me now and then by tossing me
a new bone -- some yet-unrevealed Turkish delight.
Now the transition is completing itself. It isn't
yet the comfortable old shoe that my old computer
had turned into. But it's getting there, and it's
getting there by changing me.
It's in the transitions among our machines that we
come to appreciate their power in our lives. Do you
remember your first bike or your first driver's
license? Think back for a moment. That bike was
like a flying carpet. It changed you irrevocably.
Some people like to ask if these transitions occur
for good or ill. But that's not very helpful,
because machine-making is an inseparable part of
us. The question isn't whether we'll let them
change us, but rather how fruitfully we'll let them
do so.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
