Felicia Leicht
CS10
Tim Berners-Lee Article
9/11/02
Berners-Lee ideas for modifications of the Internet seem ideal, but in fact are very dangerous. He takes the theories of Bush and Nelson, creating a mechanical/electronic device that will augment human memory, a step further with his idea to create social machines that administer every aspect of our lives. He discusses the mechanization of all bureaucratic processes, interactions taking place only from computer to computer, leaving humans free to think creatively and use the Internet to learn and create. This is a dangerous level of mechanization. Already interpersonal communication skills are not as developed as they were once forced to be because people can now, if they choose, interact more with computers than other human beings. To place all of the administrative needs of our daily lives in the hands of computers does not benignly free people from otherwise banal tasks. It removes all human elements from those interactions. Rather than augment human memory to catalogue those things humankind must not forget, it could allow humankind to, out of sheer laziness, never learn how to do those "banal tasks" in the first place, much in the same way that a generation of students now is dependent on calculators to do even the simplest computations. Our society is increasingly becoming dependent on instant gratification (as can even be seen when Berners-Lee complains, "the bother of making a phone call wrecks the idea of instant availability." It would be disastrous if our lives became so dependent on such instant computerized interactions that any sort of failure in the system could bring our lives to a crashing halt. While an increased ability to communicate via the Internet, to hold a board meeting, teach a class room, hold a court session, does hold a certain appeal, it decreases humans ability to communicate interpersonally, to behave without the benefit of the computerized system. It also mirrors the period in history when machines began to replace human workers in factories, putting many people out of work. By creating unemployment, as computers replace human workers, Berners-Lee's system is hardly making it possible for all people to afford or access his new and improved world wide web, which defeats his desire for a completely universal system.