If you’re like me, you spend way too much time on the computer: checking email, updating your Facebook page, looking up that actor you saw on TV last night (wasn’t he in that movie from a couple years ago, the one with Jack Nicholson?). Unless I check the Internet every few hours, I feel cut off from the world. That’s odd, considering I come from a time before every Tom, Dick and Harriet had a computer.
I graduated from high school in (gasp) 1972. (Really? Am I that old? Oy vey!) I had a conversation with a classmate back then. It was our last day of school. He proudly showed me a thick stack of wide, folded paper. He said this was a “computer program” he’d made in one of his classes. I tried to act interested. “Very nice,” I said, walking away thinking: Where’s the future in that? Of course, today I imagine my long-ago classmate is someplace in Silicon Valley making a billion dollars a year. (Trust me when I tell you, I’m making considerably less.)
Okay, I’m not a very good predictor of the future when it comes to computers, but let me try again: Computers will never completely replace human beings, because we have something that computers don’t. I make that prediction after seeing that IBM’s Watson computer is taking on a couple of past “Jeopardy!” champions on the TV game show. I have no doubt that Watson will one day win; if not in this contest, then in a future one. I remember many years ago another IBM computer eventually beat a world chess champion.
Computers can store tons of information and spit it out on command. Humans can do the same thing; you know, as long as we don’t have a “brain freeze” or a “senior moment.” (I wonder if computers also think of just the right comeback in an argument at 3 in the morning.) But human beings are more than just our minds. We have what psychologists might call a “personality” and what the religious might call a “spirit.” It’s that spark, that human spirit, that makes us human beings, which I don’t believe IBM or Microsoft or even Apple could ever duplicate in a computer.
To take an obviously silly example, I suppose IBM could program a computer to say, “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” but I imagine that even people who believe that’s all it takes to be a Christian wouldn’t count that computer as a member of their church, even if the computer were baptized. (A word of warning: I spilled a little tea on a computer keyboard once and it didn’t work right for a couple days; so if IBM is thinking of having a computer baptized, I wouldn’t recommend full immersion.) To become a Christian, a computer would at least have to live with Jesus in its non-existent human spirit (or heart), not to mention doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God, as described by the prophet Micah.
On the bright side for computers, except for HAL, the evil computer in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” computers can’t sin; they don’t know right from wrong. So computers can’t go to hell, if it exists. Unfortunately for computers, if heaven exists, they can’t go there either. Which is too bad, because if heaven exists, and through some miracle my human spirit makes it there, how will I check my email?
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