Word: wrongs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thank you for the article on Governor Jerry Brown's energy and space programs [Jan. 30]. I find more and more to like about that renegade politician; he seems to wield his power with intelligence and without dollar waste. Right or wrong, the man has both courage and vision...
Other scientists too are apprehensive. D. Raj Reddy, a computer scientist at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, fears that universally available microcomputers could turn into formidable weapons. Among other things, says Reddy, sophisticated computers in the wrong hands could begin subverting a society by tampering with people's relationships with their own computers?instructing the other computers to cut off telephone, bank and other services, for example. The danger lies in the fast-expanding computer data banks, with their concentration of information about people and governments, and in the possibility of access to those repositories. Already, computer theft...
...that may be much different from what you had in mind." The machines can break loose from human intentions. Computers, he argues, are infinitely literal-minded; they exercise no judgments, have no values. Fed a program that was mistaken, a military computer might send off missiles in the wrong direction or fire them at the wrong time. Several years ago, Admiral Thomas Moorer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee: "It is unfortunate that we have become slaves to these damned computers...
...true sense of the world. Oblivious to elitist protocol and disdainful of pork-barrel politics, he innocently seemed to believe that solving the nation's problems was more important to Congressmen than their re-election worries, debts to special interests and status in the Capital Hill Club. He was wrong. The new breed of young, educated, "professional" Congressmen have gained the appearance of competence (due mostly to their staff's), but they are practically incapable of making the tough choices Carter has been asking them to make...
DeNiro's kooky, then homicidal aimlessness comes on very right for the times, but the world Scorcese has him encounter comes off very wrong. It seems that Scorcese figures that anyone who isn't down and out these days has turned into a plastic offspring of Madison Avenue. (Hence Cybil Shepard as the Tab-drinking campaign worker DeNiro falls in love with and the slick, wind-up presidential candidate he tries to assassinate.) So with nothing else but Barbies and Kens to identify with, Scorcese saves the film by throwing DeNiro into the arms of today's real myth-maker...