Passage Two 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
their opportunities of blackmailers. 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 divers attention from the real dangers. Computer data
bank files can and must be given the highest degree of protection from abuse.
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 down social processes and to analyze its problems. Perhaps
the most important question of all about the computer is what it has come and
will do to man’s view of himself and his place in the universe. 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 progress in artificial
intelligence challenge are 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 nature law, subject to the forces of gravity and the demands of his
body. 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. What lessons can be learned from the past in this decade
A. Private issue has always been associated with data collection.
B. Attacks on freedom are new.
C. The accumulation of data encourages oppression.
D. Privacy has been a neglected issue.