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The Computer Networks: Potential applications of the computer made possible by microelectronics include a small computer in every home or a pocket computer terminal that can be connected to a powerful central computer via the telephone. Such devices may be used to solve our numerical problems (e.g., income tax, or our bank balance) or as a creative tool to relate our knowledge and experiences to our future actions.
And what of the computer? Olof Johannesson's 1966 novel, The Tale of the Big Computer (which first appeared in an American edition in 1968), offers a history of the development of computers as told by an advanced computer of the future. In an unemotional, utterly convincing essay, it describes the gradual obsolescence and disappearance of its creator, man.
Throughout the Western countries, the computer networks encode more and more information about our private lives, and the scientists increase their study of the human mind through drug and brain-wave research. Little by little, privacy is being destroyed because we tacitly accept the sophisticated spying made possible by electronic circuitry, microminiaturization, and drugs. If this trend continues, civil liberties will soon be replaced by formalistic rituals, and we shall have become socially tolerant of secret surveillance and spying.
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