[397]
Ibid., 7.
[398]
Quoted in Weizenbaum, Computer Power, 5.
[399]
Kenneth Mark Colby, James B. Watt, and John P. Gilbert, “A
Computer Method of Psychotherapy: Preliminary Communication,” Journal
of Nervous and Mental Disease, 142, no. 2 (1966): 148-52.
[400]
Weizenbaum, Computer Power, 8.
[401]
Ibid., 17-38.
[402]
Ibid., 227.
[403]
John McCarthy, “An Unreasonable Book,” SIGART Newsletter, 58
(June 1976).
[404]
Michael Balter, “Tool Use Is Just Another Trick of the Mind,”
Science
NOW,
January
28,
2008,
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/128/2
.
[405]
The Letters ofT. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898-1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 144. As for Nietzsche, his affair
with the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball turned out to be as brief as it was
intense. Like many of the early adopters of new gadgets who would follow
in his eager footsteps, he became frustrated with the typewriter’s flaws. The
writing ball, it turned out, was buggy. When the Mediterranean air grew
humid with the arrival of spring, the keys started to jam and the ink began to
run on the page. The contraption, Nietzsche wrote in a letter, “is as delicate
as a little dog and causes a lot of trouble.” Within months he had given up on
the writing ball, trading the balky device for a secretary, the young poet Lou
Salome, who transcribed his words as he spoke them. Five years later, in one
of his last books, On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche made an eloquent
argument against the mechanization of human thought and personality. He
praised the contemplative state of mind through which we quietly and
