Creative Meditations

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. - Bernard Shaw

Of all the home appliances, the computer requires the most care and attention, for which we get the most benefit in return. In this respect, the computer, as it exists at present, is much more like a pet animal than a home appliance.

We play with it, teach it to do tricks and run errands (fetching and sorting the mail, for instance), and we take it to its own doctor when sick. Like your dog, it can even help you score a date with a stranger.

Of course, the office is a computer’s natural habitat, its domestication being a recent and still current event. The computer’s chief function is to aid in the organization and transfer of large amounts of data.

It may be useful to think of the computer as a living thing, but it is life-like only insofar as it is teachable - more so than the dog and even than ourselves. It need only learn a thing once to learn it well; whereas humans and animals need training in addition to teaching. When I sense that my computer should do more for me, more likely than not it is because my lack of training keeps me from teaching it to do more.

At the same time, computers are being taught to be more and more teachable just so we don’t have to be as trained to get the most of them. Here, unfortunately, we run into trouble: the more you teach it to be teachable, the more programming language you have to use to do so. The more language you use, the greater the chance of errors and conflicting commands - or what we call ‘bugs.’ Often these ‘bugs’ end up ‘corrupting’ the data we invented the computer to help manage in the first place.

Even without ‘bugs,’ how should computer programmers help us get the most out of computers when they themselves do not know how? Of the thousands of computer programming languages out there (hundreds are published every year) a well-trained, experienced programmer might be well versed in 4 or 5. The variety of computer architectures is nearly as great, if not greater. All programs and computer designs are born for some human purpose, sometimes common, sometimes obscure. A programmer’s job is only to teach the computer to function in a way that bends toward that purpose.

Yet even this job is a shared responsibility with the user - and the weight falls mostly on the user. Just as a well-trained border collie does not make a good shepherd, well-taught computers do not make well-organized offices or homes. In dysfunctional households, virus ridden or non-functioning computers are common - as are sick dogs and cats. The same goes for incompetent business operations.

More, it is one’s relationship with one’s own conscious objectives that determines whether full advantage is taken of any circumstance to fulfill those objectives. Replace the word ‘circumstance’ with the word ‘computer’ in the latter sentence and you have a central platitude of this essay: no matter how powerful or full of features, a computer is exactly as limited as its user, and a dog is as loyal as his master is dependable.