Introduction
Everyone in this room would agree that we are moving into something called “the computer future,” a future in which everything will be different because of the presence of computers and other new technologies. In some departments of life, the computer presence is already visible. Coming here from my home, I passed through an airport and bought airplane tickets. The computer terminal has become an integral part of that transaction — you buy airplane tickets by dealing with somebody at a computer. In some of our airports in the United States, you don’t even need the person. You can deal directly with the computer: put in your credit card, and out comes the ticket.
These manifestations of the computer are perhaps superficial. They have not changed our lives very much. It even takes the same amount of time to get your airplane ticket. But there are other departments of life in which no one would say that the use of the computer is superficial. No one who owes his or her life to CAT scans in medicine would think that the role of the computer in transforming medical practice is a superficial matter. We are meeting here this week to talk about the computer in a department that, up to now, has been touched only superficially: learning, education, and the lives of children. The presence of the computer in this area will have a very deep impact, not only upon the nature of schools themselves, but upon the whole of human society. The way that the computer enters into learning will play a determining role in the way that both technology and the larger culture evolve in the coming generation.
So we are entering this computer future; but what will it be like? What sort of a world will it be? There is no shortage of experts, futurists, and prophets who are ready to tell us, but they don’t agree. The Utopians promise us a new millennium, a wonderful world in which the computer will solve all our problems. The computer critics warn us of the dehumanizing effect of too much exposure to machinery, and of disruption of employment in the workplace and the economy.