Text A The Computer and the Poet
The essential problem of man in a computerized age remains the same as it has always been. That problem is not solely how to be more productive, more comfortable, more content, but how to be more sensitive, more sensible, more proportionate, more alive. The computer makes possible a marvelous leap in human proficiency; it pulls down the fences around the practical and even the theoretical intelligence. But the question persists and indeed grows whether the computer will make it easier or harder for human beings to know who they really are, to identify their real problems, to respond more fully to beauty, to place adequate value on life, and to make their world safer than it now is.
Electronic brains can reduce the profusion of dead ends involved in vital research. But they can't eliminate the foolishness and decay that come from the unexamined life. Nor do they connect a man to the things he has to be connected to - the reality of pain in others; the possibilities of creative growth in himself; the memory of the race; and the rights of the next generation.
The reason these matters are important in a computerized age is that there may be a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, and intelligence with insight. Easy and convenient access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they would lead.
Facts are terrible things if left spreading and unexamined. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.
To the extent, then, that man fails to distinguish between the intermediate operations of electronic intelligence and the ultimate responsibilities of human decision, the computer could prove a digression. It could obscure man's awareness of the need to come to terms with himself. It may foster the illusion that he is asking fundamental questions when actually he is asking only functional ones. It may be regarded as a substitute for intelligence instead of an extension of it. It may promote undue confidence in concrete answers. "If we begin with certainties," Bacon said, "we shall end in doubts but if we begin with doubts, and we are patient with them, we shall end in certainties."
The computer knows how to conquer error, but before we lose ourselves in celebrating the victory, we might reflect on the great advances in the human situation that have come about because men were challenged by error and would not stop thinking and exploring until they found better approaches for dealing with it. "Give me a good fruitful error, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections," Ferris Greenslet wrote, "You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."
The biggest single need in computer technology is not for increased speed, or enlarged capacity, or prolonged memory, or reduced size, but for better questions and better use of the answers. Without taking anything away from the technicians, we think it might be fruitful to effect some sort of junction between the computer technologist and the poet.A genuine purpose may be served by turning loose the wonders of the creative imagination on the kinds of problems being put to electronic technology. The company of poets may enable the men who tend the machines to see a wider range of possibilities than technology alone may inspire.
A poet, said Aristotle, has the advantage of expressing the universal; the specialist expresses only the particular. The poet, moreover, can remind us that man's greatest energy comes not from his dynamos but from his dreams. But the quality of man's dreams can only be a reflection of his subconscious. What he puts into his subconscious, therefore, is quite literally the most important nourishment in the world.
Nothing really happens to a man except as it is registered in the subconscious. This is where event and feeling become memory and where the proof of life is stored. The poet - and we use the term to include all those who have respect for and speak to the human spirit - can help to supply the subconscious with material to enhance its sensitivity, thus safeguarding it. The poet, too, can help to keep man from making himself over in the image of his electronic wonders. For the danger is not so much that man will be controlled by the computer as that he may imitate it.
The poet reminds men of their uniqueness. It is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate on it is gain.
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