Module 10

 “A logic named Joe” a science fiction story by Murray Leinster (1946)

         Is this short story really written in 1946? I had to look it up to see for myself. This is CRAZY!! Just blows my mind. This short story we had to read this week is about a prediction of massively networked personal computers and their drawbacks. This story is one of the first stories to describe something akin to a computer connected to the internet. There is a notion of user identity but I guess the machine believes you won’t lie, it also had “Censor circuits” filter information it will reveal.  In the story the logic performs tasks that computers do all the time today. Today more than a billion people use the internet for everything they need like shopping, reading, navigation, research. 

        I find it fascinating just how close Jenkins (the author) predication came to our now days reality of what we are dealing with.  In this story the “logic” named Joe is kind of like a computer, but the “logic” is made of relay, which relay is a kind of switch they used in the olden days in long distance telegraph circuits as amplifiers. So Joe has a malfunction and it allows it to get access for people to television programs, person to person phone calls and any kind of information you want to know. 

        I think it’s crazy that the author of this story, Will Jenkins, predicted that a machine could provide information how to do things by just typing in the question like sex advice, how to commit murder, how to rob a bank, how to find someone. I read he was also an inventor so no wonder how he understood how much power the computer (machine) would have over our day to day lives.  

     The narrator in the story says “logic’s are all right though, they changed Civilization”. I agree, the internet has changed civilization for good and bad, sometimes I wish we could do what he does in the story and just turn it off and get rid of it, make everything better in the world.