=1 "What the computer did to man"

What the computer did to man

After the computers took over the menial tasks of the laboratory workers – first calculating, measuring, weighing and analyzing, then cataloguing and analoguing – now finally, in any line of experimental research you can think of, man simply programmed and after a few minutes, or sometimes a few months, scientists everywhere received the results and had hardly time to read the abstracts.

Eventually physical sciences came to be considered easy elementary preparation for the younger students, while the scientists themselves concentrated on the nonphysical aspects of nature just as was done in the first ages of mankind. To do that, of course they had to develop their psi faculties. Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis became the hallmarks of a great scientist. Then psi phenomena were studied, with the help of psi-sensitive computers that could test the P.K. Faculties of a candidate for a scientific career, and this led to the exploration of other space-time systems much more powerful and energetic than the ‘physical world’ of former times.

The old police methods were completely changed. Psi faculties exclusively were used in defence against a-social thoughts. Long before a crime was committed, when a certain alarm threshold of aggressiveness was overstepped by some potential criminal the social workers stepped in.

For the first time society became coherent and truly planetary.

Even before computers were used as individual intelligence amplifiers and I.Q. boosters, they had a tremendous influence on the evolution of man's mind. By the simple fact that they were available as a tool they forced man to refine his own thinking processes and to evolve into a luminous mirror of truth.

Before computers came, plenty of people could ride bicycles, but nobody really knew how it was done. Few cyclists, or even engineers or bicycle manufacturers, knew the exact formula for counteracting the tendency to fall: turning the handlebars so that for a given angle of unbalance the curvature of each turn or twist of the cycle would be inversely proportionate to the square of the speed at which the cyclist is proceeding.

Many of man's skills were performed ‘automatically’ if not unconsciously. Simply because he was living with the computer, man had to become aware of the different levels of his consciousness.

And to be aware meant to conquer. Up to that time man thought that he alone was intelligent. Through the computers he learned that intelligence is a tool, an instrument of the soul and omnipresent. But since the time of the Renaissance he had been confusing his soul with his mind. Now he could discover it again.