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She had discovered long ago that you could use a computer without understanding how it worked. Just as you could use an automobile, a vacuum cleaner—or your own brain.
Book was written in 1971 yet is even more poignant 54 years later
In thinking about computer hardware, we distinguish between central and peripheral equipment. That is, the main computer is considered central
Why keyboards and such are called periphals
In one area, the new computer brain has total control. And therefore the patient’s biological brain, and indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and he is as helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.
Where the title comes from
“That man is an elad,” one of them said. And sighed. The elad concept had caused a lot of interest and some detached academic concern. The notion of an electrical addict—a man who needed his jolts of electricity just as some men needed doses of drugs—had seemed almost fancifully speculative. But now they had a patient who was clearly a potential addict.
An interface was the boundary between two systems. Or between a computer and an effector mechanism.
Goedel’s Theorem: that no system could explain itself, and no machine could understand its own workings.
Los Angeles could not survive without the automobile, as it could not survive without water piped in from hundreds of miles away, and as it could not survive without certain building technologies.
However LA at one point DID have a great public transit system at one point
“The Watershed. Computer scientists all over the world knew it was coming, and they watched for it. It happened in July of 1969. The information-handling capacity of all the computers in the world exceeded the information-handling capacity of all the human brains in the world. Computers could receive and store more information than the 3.5 billion human brains in the world.”
It was an odd sensation: the first time he could recall being in a room littered with computers. He realized that he had made some mistakes about Benson. He had assumed that Benson was pretty much like everyone else—but no one who worked in a place such as this was like everyone else. The experience must change you. He remembered that Ross had once said that it was a liberal myth that everybody was fundamentally the same. Lots of people weren’t. They weren’t like everybody else.
But now it's the norm in 2025
Computers to design computers—maybe they were taking over, after all.
“Right now, their objective is to apprehend him. If we tell them more, they’ll kill him.” “But innocent lives may be involved. If the projection—” “The projection,” McPherson said, “is just that. A computer projection. It is only as good as its input and that input consists of three timed stimulations. You can draw a lot of curves through three graph points. You can extrapolate it a lot of ways.
There was no sharp line between health and disease, sanity and insanity. It was a spectrum, and everybody fitted somewhere on the spectrum. Wherever you were on that spectrum, other people looked strange to you.
The truth was that everybody’s mind was controlled, and everybody was glad for it. The most powerful mind controllers in the world were parents, and they did the most damage.
We’re trying to correct that violent behavior with surgery. I don’t think that’s a despicable thing. I think it’s a noble goal and an important goal.” “But isn’t that mind control?” Ellis said, “What do you call compulsory education through high school?” “Education,” the reporter said.
