COLLOQUY Responses
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COLLOQUY Responses
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 With all the time and resources divested from other urgent priorities like health, education, job development, and social justice, to enable governments and businesses big or small to keep up to date in the "technological age," we can certainly question the fundamental goals of all this "upgrading" of our systems. When you watch the market, the first thing that comes to mind is that hardware and software producers are caught in a race to create artificial needs for their new "improved" products, of which every new version is obsolete in three months. Artificial needs are by definition volatile, they need to be renewed very often. How long will people be interested in such faddish products, when these products by definition shorten their already tiny attention span? Since we began using Internet applications 5 or 6 years ago, we have gone through dozens of versions of the ultimate solution to our information management problems. I already feel tired and disabused by the lack of seriousness of Microsoft and others who use their clients as beta sites. Another thing that worries me is the danger of a lowering of collective intelligence. While computer nerds may get more and more sophisticated in their closed world, there may be a loss of intelligence in the general public for which most daily tasks will be performed by pushing a button. We forget that the path towards a solution is often more enlightening than the solution itself: you sometimes have to work to get something, and it may even be formative and pleasant! Expecting most of your information or other needs to be satisfied by the application of a computer algorithm is not going to push our values and our knowledge further! I also concur with those of you who think that the Internet, except for a few jewels that are not that easy to find, is the biggest garbage can ever invented. The growing commercialization is making it worse by the minute. Finally, a computer has never made anyone more intelligent than they are; a gorilla with a computer is just that. It is our responsibility to find a creative and really useful place for computers amongst all the tools we have at our disposal for educating people. I think that moment is still very far away.
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