During class today, the issue of symbiosis was one of the first one's raised. The thought of a computer as a living thing was in debate, and then the idea that we need it and likewise, it needs us. All this discussion made me think about Y2K. Hey, don't ask why, it just did! ! I barely remember my crazy Aunt Amanda (and I'm sure we all have one) was stuffing food and supplies in her cupboard. No one ever really explained to me what the danger was. I am sure that a lot of people did not know what the real danger was. This made me think about something smaller, like when you're computer is acting funny, and you have no idea why. You feel helpless almost because you don't understand. Y2K was the same way only a bigger problem.
It is also interesting in this wikipedia entry to notice how the person who wrote it uses verbs that make a computer sound like a living thing, in the same way that Licklider does.
I remember the Y2K scare as well. I remember seeing printers printing out numerous records. Also, on New Years Eve, the news periodically showed people monitoring computers hoping they would switch to 2000 instead of 0.
It was such a big deal because we have become so dependent on the computer that it seems we would die without it. I thought Y2K would make humans question the use of computers, but it seems that we are clearly moving to a world where everything is on computers
Haha, I remember helping one my uber-christian neighbors fill up big water jugs for the approaching apocalypse.. take that as being as funny or scary as you want.. but the question really is, when will computers be as reliable as other technologies in our life? No one worries about a mass failure of paper and pens, or that wheels will break down, and all hell will break loose. How soon until computers reach this level of infaliability? I think it'll be a generation or two; defenitely into the ubiquitous computing phase.
I don't think computers will ever reach any level of infallibility. Your examples were paper, pens, and wheels. The only one of these that works in the analogy is paper because it, like computers, stores information. The real danger of computer failure is data loss: financial records, intelligence databases, etc. that goes along with storage. Pens and wheels fail all the time (my pens actually fail far more often than my computer does), but since they don't store information they can be replaced. Data loss from computer failure, on the other hand, is equivilent to paper records being destroyed. Luckily, digital data is easy to back up. It is far easier to duplicate a hard drive than it is to reprint an out-of-print book. Y2K was more threatening because it was so widespread: imagine every library burning to the ground simultaneously. The records would be unrecoverable. As long as all the computers on the globe are as interconnected as they are (via the Internet), they could suffer widespread damage if one horrible virus were unstopable. The difference is that storage areas of print records are not connected, so damage at Huntley wouldn't happen at the same time as the Library of Congress.