Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 12/83 - checked

December 1983

I've been sitting here wondering if I have the nerve to suggest that the personal computer is, perhaps, the worst thing that ever happened to personkind. The old mainframe computers were bad enough; after all when such machines were first developed it was thought that there might be application, for half a dozen of them around the world. But now, all these personal computers are just making the situation horrendous.

In offices and shops up and down the country, all around the world, there are small computers cranking away at all sorts of terribly important jobs, all intent upon making life easier, more efficient, more tolerable, more generally neat and tidy for their hard pressed and harassed owners. They are adding at an exponential rate to the amount of terribly important jobs being performed already by mainframe and minicomputers in the vain hope that things will get even easier, more efficient, more tolerable and more neat and tidy.

When thinking these thoughts I am, for the time being, dismissing the vast plethora of home computers that now infest the country. They can be dismissed because they are generally being employed for the sole purpose of running excruciatingly brain-numbing games programs. These tend to keep people off street corners and away from thinking about doing anything `real' or `meaningful'. Once home computers join in with the mainframes, minis and personal systems in attempting to make things neat and tidy for us, that may well be the time to bail out.

All these computers have been sold, and are being sold, to unsuspecting owners on the basis that they are somehow going to make life so much easier, more tolerable, and so on. Yet I suspect that they are, in practice, achieving the exact opposite, and will continue to do so for some time.

To explain why I feel this is the case will entail me in waxing philosophical for a moment. I realise that it is presumptuous of me to postulate the concept that I can wax philo-thingie, but I shall attempt to anyway.

Let us assume that the path to be taken by the human race, collectively, is towards some form of greater wisdom (whatever that wisdom may be found to constitute on arrival). This is, after all, the fundamental tenet of most of the world's religions and philosophies. so maybe there is something in it. If this is accepted then it can also be assumed that the artifacts and experiences we gather and keep around us, both individually and collectively, will be those that can be considered likely to help us on this 'journey'. Since it has not been dismissed as a passing fad, like the hula hoop, the computer in all its guises may presumably be considered as an artifact we have collectively taken to be 'useful'.

But is it? To shoot off at another tangent for a second, look up 'wisdom' in the Concise Oxford Dictionary: possession of experience and knowledge together with the power of applying them critically or practically, it says. Does the computer actually help us with any of this? Certainly it can apply the power to use experience or knowledge, but use it critically or practically? Not really. Does it supply the knowledge? Well, at first this looks more promising, but again the dictionary helps us. To 'know' is (among other things) being able to distinguish, which in this context means making decisions about, and/or between a limitless variety of experiences. Though at first sight this might seem to be where the computer fits in, it has (as some people insist on saying about other people) a long way to go.

For there are, in my own humble opinion, two stages that precede knowledge, in the same way that knowledge precedes wisdom. These are information and, at the bottom of the pile, raw data. From a distance it is possible to see the tidy linear progression from raw data, through information and knowledge, and on to wisdom. Once you get inside it, however, in everyday living, the picture gets to be much more cluttered, and this is where the computer is actually a hindrance rather than a help.

You see, the vast majority of computer systems are being used to produce raw data, intergalactically vast gobs of the stuff. One or two are being used to produce information, it is true, but the majority are just stuck there churning out data - and are starting to get in the way, for most people have no idea what to do with the stuff.

They don't know, not because they are intellectually incapable, but because there is so much of the stuff around now that it is impossible to wade through it effectively. Here is an example. A business person often used to make decisions on a purely empirical basis, but felt that this was inadequate, that opportunities were being missed because of lack of information. Maybe much time was spent seeking additional data just in case. So, sold on the idea of a computer, one is purchased. Now there is data in abundance: databases, spreadsheets, modellers, etc, churn the stuff out endlessly. The business person is left holding so much data, most of which apparently points in different directions, that a rational decision based on this input becomes all but impossible.

The time is coming for the computer industry to sit back and consider what it is actually selling to the market, and what it ought to be selling, for I feel that the time is fast approaching when the industry must think in terms of defining knowledge as a product, and create systems that provide it.

To give some idea of what I mean, let me take one more digression. Examine for a moment what you are reading right now. It is a magazine called Personal Computer World, which has been written and edited by people who have a strong interest in the subject of computers, and, to a greater or lesser degree, know a considerable amount about them. By reading this magazine you are acquiring not just information, but filtered and applied information, which can be considered knowledge.

It is filtered by the existing knowledge and experience of the people writing and editing it, and it is filtered in a certain way. At the broadest level of filtering it is about things pertaining to personal computers, so if that is the subject in which you are interested, you will understand from just the title of the magazine that this is probably a better place to look for information than, say, Car Mechanics.

But PCW looks at the personal computer business in a certain way and filters the information it receives accordingly. Though it has good coverage of games programs, it also covers business applications and other subsets of the industry. If your interest is only in one specific subset then the filtering provided by PCW may not be enough (or indeed may be too much), and an alternative source of information, tailored more precisely to your needs, may be required.

All this may sound terribly obvious, and it is, until you have seen the inside of an editorial office and participated in this filtering process. Such offices are habitually the depository for every press release ever written by anybody who ever thought they might get something in the papers. They range from the immediately relevant - brand, new personal computer announcement - to the frankly inane. They take in every stop in between as well. They all have to be read and filtered by the knowledge and experience of the editors (don't laugh, it's true).

To see how this is important, try to imagine what the alternative would be like. Imagine receiving your copy of PCW every month to find it filled with every press release that had been received. They would appear in the magazine in order of receipt through the post and would be 'pasted down' onto the page with no consideration given to content nor subject matter. Finding what you wanted among this morass of raw data would be your responsibility.

The point of all this digression is that computers are still at the level of providing a platform or format for raw data (in the above example that would be analogous to the pages of the magazine). Rarely do they rise above this to even the first level of filtering, let alone move on to what most users really need. Among other facilities, this is the ability to specify randomly any criteria that come to mind for selecting, from a vast pot of raw information, only those bits that are required.

Now I know there will be many people within and without the industry who will jump up and down and say 'databases' very loudly, and l will say 'No, l don't think so.' Databases are good for storing and retrieving related data that the user already knows about. What they are not much good at is doing something journalists (for example) do all the time. That is, making connections (sometimes silly, sometimes fatuous, but sometimes inspired) between apparently disparate bits of information that no one 'knew' they were looking for.

A computer product that offered that sort of facility would be starting along the road to exploiting knowledge properly. It is from the ability to make such connections that most development and growth towards 'wisdom' has come. It is a mark of this `wisdom' that, in humans at least, the ability to know of things (facts 'n' info) and retrieve them at will (like a database) does not represent either knowledge or wisdom. As much as anything, this comes from knowing what information to get rid of. Now, someone needs to teach computers . . .

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