Friday, April 28, 2006

Ignorance Moving Machines

We are told, ad nauseam, that a computer has to go into every classroom to prepare us for the twenty-first century. We have not yet realized that the computers may simply be moving our ignorance around the planet at incredible rates of speed. As one wag put it, "We used to think that a million monkeys typing away at a million keyboards could produce the works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not the case." A fool in the back of a cart bumping along the road five hundred years ago is, today, a fool in the backseat of a Lexus. Certain things are not changed by the computer dashboard.

Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture, 176.

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