Personal computers are about to become a whole lot faster, now that a major chip producer says it will produce 64-bit processors, which on paper will double the speed of computers. Though there will be an initial premium price, within six months it is likely that competition will have driven the cost down, and as software companies produce programs that exploit the new speed, everyone will be expecting to buy one of the new, superfast computers.
The major beneficiaries of this new technology will be people like weather forecasters and companies with gargantuan amounts of numbers to crunch as quickly as possible.
For the rest of us, having a 64-bit processor, rather than the present 32 bit, will make not a blind bit of difference. It will be merely another chapter in a saga which has demonstrated that thinking is not in truth improved, judgments are not bettered and users not made any wiser by the high-technology boxes that they have sitting on their desks.
An old saw of computers coders has been “rubbish in, rubbish out,” meaning that a computer is only as good as the person using it. Information technology has for many become the message, when it has only ever really been the medium. Too many users have become mesmerized by the technology, sometimes to the exclusion of the tasks that they perform with it. There is much talk about the time saved by computer use. For sure, using a word processing program, the ability to revise and annotate drafts without the cumbersome business of re-typing vast swathes of information, has been a boon.
We live in a world in which timesaving has become the ultimate goal and computers the ultimate expression of that goal. Yet what do we do with all the time that we have saved? How much has our quality of life improved from the days when we had to sit down at a mechanical typewriter to produce a letter or a report? Some would argue not much.
The Internet is supposed to be a huge boon. A six-year-old child will happily discuss the merits of different search engines. There are over three billion different websites out there, and growing. Yet though an immense amount of data are available, are young people learning any more than their parents did?
The problem is that all the information in the world is no good unless the person downloading it has the judgment and discrimination to analyze and use it effectively. But that is not what computers encourage. Instead we have an alarming number of students who seek to pass their coursework by plagiarizing screeds of data lifted unedited from the Internet. This has nothing to do with the acquisition of knowledge and everything to do with laziness. As they become faster, computers have ever more to answer for.
