By Jamie Kanter
Arizona Daily Wildcat
September 10, 1997

Computers Scare Me

Arizona Daily Wildcat Jamie Kanter

I always see ads on TV that talk about how my shopping receipts are used by stores to purchase computers for local elementary schools. I was fortunate enough to attend a school that benefited from the program and I have fond memories of my days on the Apple.

Every week my classmates and I would be ushered into a classroom and we would sit in front of black-and-white screens for about an hour. They would slip a floppy disk (a disk that was actually floppy) into the disk drive and we would spend our time trekking across the West on the Oregon Trail. We were captivated by the pulse-pounding excitement of a wagon train and we were delighted to see the amazingly realistic graphics. (When Atari is your home computer, anything seems impressive.)

As I look back now, I yearn for the days when I derived such simple, unadulterated pleasure from the computer. I now see the computer as the scourge of the modern day, an experiment in convenience gone horribly wrong.

Sure we can surf the Net. Sure we can send e-mail to friends thousands of miles away. Sure we can check out the latest happenings at Bernie's Boob-o-Rama. But, at what cost?

Everything we have, everything we know, and everything we are is now stored on some computer system. Our Social Security numbers, our financial records, our grades, our class schedules, our personal correspondence - all of it is now on the computer. I can even find a map saying how to get to my house simply by punching in the letters of my mother's name. That scares me ... a lot. And yet we keep feeding more information into these damn computers.

Didn't anyone see "Tron"? Jeff Bridges was innocently going about his computer-related business when the master computer simply took over the company. The next thing he knows, Mr. Bridges is inside some demented computer game racing high-speed motorcycles, driving tanks and throwing some wicked Frisbees. Give it enough time and today's computers will be smart enough to do the same thing.

And how about "War Games"? In that movie a hapless, pre-Ferris Matthew Broderick stumbles onto the brink of thermonuclear warfare simply because the computer went off and got some crazy idea about blowing up the world. Do we really want computers to make those types of decisions? I didn't think so.

We want computers to help us to perform the functions of our everyday lives. A noble pursuit, no question about it, but it is frightening to think that they are becoming a necessity rather than a luxury.

There are just so many things that we can't do without a computer. Freshmen cannot look at the entire academic catalogue without the assistance of a computer; many class notes and homework answers are only available via the Internet, and many professors will only communicate with students using e-mail. It seems only a matter of time before we need a computer to go to the bathroom, brush our teeth and make our beds (although most of us could probably use that last one).

I will accept the title of doomsayer if I must, but computers scare me. They are useful for producing essays, spreadsheets, data tables and the like, but our reliance upon the computer is spiraling dangerously out of control. We no longer need to be able to write, or read, or spell or count ­ we have computers to do all of that for us. All we need to do is to be able to breathe, eat and sleep until we die because the computer can do the rest.

This computer mumbo-jumbo is supposed to be icing on the cake of our lives, an added bonus to sweeten the pot of existence. However, the icing is becoming a more prevalent part of our cake and, if we're not careful, we may wind up with a huge lump of icing on our plate.

Got milk?

Jamie Kanter is a senior majoring in Spanish and psychology.