The potential of computers for increasing the control of organizations
or society over their members and for invading the privacy of those members has
caused considerable concern. The privacy issue has been
raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of data
files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files
of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social
research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom
or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. (2) While such
dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive
data files has never before been the limiting barrier to the suppression of
human freedom. Making the computer the villain in the
invasion of privacy or encroachment on civil liberties simply diverts attention
from the real dangers. Computer data banks can and must be given the highest
degree of protection from abuse. (3) But we must be careful, also, that we do
not employ such crude methods of protection as to deprive our society of
important data it needs to understand its own social processes and to analyze
its problems. Perhaps the most important question of all
about the computer is what it has done and will do to man’s view of himself and
his place in the universe. (4) The most heated attacks on the computer are
not focused on its possible economic effects, its presumed destruction of job
satisfaction, or its threat to privacy and liberty, but upon the claim that it
causes people to be viewed, and to view themselves, as ’machines’.
What the computer and the progress in artificial intelligence challenge is
an ethic that rests on man’s apartness from the rest of nature. An alternative
ethic, of course, views man as a part of nature, governed by natural law,
subject to the forces of gravity and the demands of his body. (5) The debate
about artificial intelligence and the simulation of man’s thinking is, in
considerable part, a confrontation of these two views of man’s place in the
universe.