My secretary for 30 years, Chris Bissey, God rest her soul, would often threaten to throw troublesome computers out into the street. She refused to have anything to do with computers at her home, telling her kids that she had quite enough to do with them during working hours. My son has become the Tech guru of the law mines, a role that used to be mine. Having never known a world without computers he has an affinity with them that is beyond my experience of the last 38 years. Technology marches on, often over those who lived before the latest developments.
While he was head of the Bureau of Naval Reactors, Admiral Hyman Rickover prohibited the use of digital instrumentation and controls equipment (microprocessors, micro-computers, etc.) back aft in the engineering propulsion plant. He never trusted software because all software has bugs, and when it came to reactor safety, no bug was tolerable.
Our culture is deranged in that we routinely accept things from computers that we would never accept from real people.
Rickover was wise.
This will only get worse as we lean in on AI and further confuse man and machine.
With electrical and electronic devices these days, everything is basically a computer. There is no escape. 🙂
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