Essay Prompt: In the following excerpt from Computers, Lewis Thomas, one of the greatest scientific writers of the past fifty years, discusses how computers are overtaking our daily lives. Read the excerpt carefully. Then write a carefullly reasoned persuasive essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies this idea that humans will always be better than computers. Use evidence from your observations, experience, or reading to support your position.You can make computers that are almost human. In some respect they are superhuman; they can beat most of us at chess, memorize whole telephone books at a glance, compose music of a certain kind and write obscure poetry, diagnose heart ailments, send personal invitations to vast parties, even go transiently crazy. No one has yet programmed a computer to be of two minds about a hard problem, or to burst out laughing, but that may come. Sooner or later, there will be real human hardware, great whirring, clicking cabinets intelligent enough to read magazines and vote, able to think rings around the rest of us.
Well, maybe, but not for a while anyway. Before we begin organizing sanctuaries and reservations for our software selves, lest we vanish like the whales, here is a thought to relax with.
Even when technology succeeds in manufacturing a machine as big as Texas to do everything we recognize as human, it will still be, at best, a single individual. This amounts to nothing, practically speaking. To match what we can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room. And even so, they would all have to be wired together, intricately and delicately, as we are, communicating with each other, talking incessantly, listening. If they weren't at each other this way, all their waking hours, they wouldn't be anything like human, after all. I think we're safe, for a long time ahead.
Use the Checklist for Essays that Defend, Challenge, or Qualify to guide the reflective thinking, writing and grading of your essay.