Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...calendar of triumphs, defeats and contortions of the human spirit during...
Psychotic Calculators. If calculators are like human brains, do they ever go insane? Indeed they do, says Professor Wiener. Certain forms of insanity in the brain are believed to be caused by circulating memories which have got out of hand. Memory impulses (of worry or fear) go round & round, refusing to be suppressed. They invade other neuron circuits and eventually occupy so much nerve tissue that the brain, absorbed in its worry, can think of nothing else...
...cures administered to psychotic calculators are weirdly like the modern cures for insanity. One method is to overload the calculator with an extra strong electrical impulse in hope that the shock will stop the machine's oscillations. This is rather like the shock treatment given to human psychotics. Another cure is to isolate part of the calculator's mechanism, hoping to cut off the source of trouble. This is "like the lobotomies which brain surgeons perform. Lobotomies sometimes work (for both machine and brain) but are apt to reduce, in both cases, the subject's judgment...
...years ahead: "Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb," he says, "it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil . . . The first industrial revolution . . . was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery . . . The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and routine decisions . . . The human being of mediocre attainments or less [will have] nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money...
...whiskered shmoo and a certain Chicago newspaper publisher, the book was "one of the finest satiric creations since Gulliver's Travels." (No, said Capp modestly, that was overrating Dean Swift.) To Dr. Frederic Wertham, a Manhattan psychiatrist who crusades against comic books, the shmoo offered "a solution of human problems on the same spurious level as Nietzsche's superman or the Superman of the comic books. It is a super-animal...