Stop don’t think

This is for real. I am in this supermarket buying odds and ends and the lady has done that code thing which automatically tallies the price and then when she has ended it I buy some chocolate for 30 riyals. The bill is 174 riyals. So now, what does she do she takes out her little calculator and taps in 174 riyals plus 30 riyals and makes it 204 riyals.
I could have told her that without really exercising my brain cells. I mean it is a microsecond calculation and it doesn’t need equipment.
A day later the same sort of absurd scenario replayed itself at a perfume shop where the attendant wouldn’t give me back 20 riyals from a hundred until he had done his maths on the screen.
It strikes me that we are allowing our other abilities to atrophy so dependent have we become on the computer and its ability to think for us.
As it is we have lost the ability to write our thoughts with any profound originality or control. Thanks to card sites and other people’s words and the e-mail the level of public eloquence is in a nose dives. Even the stamina for the long haul effort is now compromised by the abbreviated language of the information highway.
Now even our thinking is predicated to the machine. If we carry on like this all we will need are little appendages to hit keys and that will be adequate to muddle through our daily grind.
It is all so sad really. This lady couldn’t add 174 and 30, something a child of three would have done with the sort of education system prevailing these days. It was her training. It sang out only one lyric. Do not think for yourself, let the machine think for you. Imagine how it gradually erodes your self confidence and makes you subservient in every intellectual sense.
It is not even just the computer. Between video games and television the young mind has learnt the deviously destructive pleasures of indolence and physical inactivity. Now software tends to attack the mental alertness of the individual and make him a zombie.
Gradually, without even realizing how she is deteriorating that young lady and her tribe will stop all cerebral exercise, settling for the crutches of technology.
To so many of us, the need for reconfirmation of our natural abilities through the catalyst of a machine has become so compelling that the drop in self esteem is depressing even if we don’t recognize it.
We have stopped writing. We have even stopped talking, limiting conversation to mere social waffle. We don’t read because there is always spectator sport to watch, like 200 channels to choose from. Now, the computer has matured into this monster that controls our behavior patterns.
You think I exaggerate, that the computer is such a wonderful revolution that only a fool would criticize its potential. Exactly. It is a great support to your normal ability and should be used to enhance it, not suffocate it and make you feel inadequate about yourself.
This is the aspect that should worry us. Are we giving out a signal to a new generation that without the computer and the digital diary and the calculator and the e-mail and whatever other program there is that scorns the human factor, they will be useless and unreliable?
I believe we are.
I come home and share this scary futuristic scenario of millions of humans, their natural abilities shrunken and shriveled, their pea-sized brains now totally held to ransom by the Big Mac or the Big PC, only a handful of smart eggs running the unwashed hordes because they can count and add twenty to thirty without a machine.
1984 will be a romp in the park in comparison. Go on, don’t just sit there grinning, ask yourself if you dare do a sum or have an original thought without hitting a keyboard.