Crossing the technological Rubicon
By Charles Miller

Many years ago I was honored with an invitation to speak at the national meeting of an educational scholarship foundation, attended by teenage students from around the country.

The format was a series of panel discussions featuring professionals from many different disciplines.

A series of motivational speakers had the young audience really pumped up prior to my panel. A young lady came to the microphone to ask me the question, “Do you believe my generation will reach a point of dependency on computers and technology that we will be unable to survive without?”

I was perhaps a little nervous since this was my first experience speaking before an audience of several thousand people. I answered by saying I thought we had already passed that point before she was born. To my relief, and before she could ask a follow-up question, a telephone company executive on the panel jumped in to confirm that without the computerized systems used to route phone calls, the phone system would come to a crashing halt.

Since that day, the young lady’s question has come back to me over and again. When did our society cross the technological Rubicon?

It is easy to find examples. My friend Bailey has a solo-practitioner law practice doing the same kind of legal specialty as did his father before him. The difference between father and son is that the father had a support staff of a half-dozen typists, researchers and a bookkeeper. The son has one assistant, a computer and access to the internet to do all the jobs done by his father’s staff.

The financial markets are another example of the influence of automation. The ability to move words, orders and money electronically has contributed to an exponential growth in the markets. In the old days of the mechanical stock ticker, the machine would sometimes run an hour or more after the market closed. Today, the mechanical ticker could never keep pace.

These are examples of jobs that might take longer and require more people if the computer or modern automation was suddenly unavailable, but the jobs could still be done; it would just take more time and labor.

Many early computers were used in code-breaking operations. During World War II, the Germans relied on their Enigma, basically a mechanical computer, to send coded messages. The Allies used their own computers to break the code quickly enough that they could make use of the intercepts. This example illustrates how the computer was needed in order to do that job within the required timeframe.

As I look back on everything I have read about computers and automation, I find the earliest example of a job that might never have gotten done at all without modern automation goes back to the nineteenth century. In 1880 the US Census Bureau needed seven years to count and tabulate all the forms from that census. They estimated that, with anticipated population growth, they would need 12 years to do the same job for the next census.

Obviously, if you have a job that takes 12 years to complete and you have to do it every 10 years, that is an unachievable goal. The Census Bureau was rescued by tabulating machines built by one of the founders of what later became IBM.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.