Life is LIKE a Computer

Life is LIKE a Computer

            “Life is like a computer”, imagine yourself saying that half a century ago. You would sound like a sci-fi fanatic of a television show. People, even the inventors of the predecessors of the modern computer failed to predict how deep these machineries can be rooted to the human society. The very nature of these pieces of silicon and plastic is to lessen the ever-increasing burden of Mr. Adam O’Humanity. As what English philosopher Alfred Whitehead once said, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

Each day we open and close a number of windows.  A few might end up in the recycle bin, others in store as short-term memory, while some are carved for eternity. Like computers we can close a file of bad memories and open saved joyous memories of our lives.   Many of us would wish for our mouths to have backspaces. That life could have an Undo button or that life could simply be paused, played and fast-forwarded. Many times as well have we been confronted with the ever-so-popular multiple choice question in our screens, the Yes or No. In life we as well make decisions of our own, answerable by the two options previously mentioned. But human as we are we are, tend to give an even more complicated answer like, “maybe”, “umm… depends”, etc.

A few might have noticed that never did I mentioned that like a human being computers are capable of learning from a file of bad memories a.k.a. experiences and prevent it from happening again. A computer will simply just simply bid it goodbye.  It is because compared to computers we are capable of thinking beyond the box, beyond the codes and arithmetic operations which we programmed them to do. Man is born to err and to correct those mistakes; man is capable of comprehending the situation. Perhaps life can’t be paused then played or fast-forwarded as we wished, just to remind us to treasure each second of our lives. Perhaps life doesn’t have that Undo button we are speaking because we are taught to be responsible of our actions. Man is born with the ability to justify, decide and choose which is best for him. Eventually we came to know that we need more than just those series of commands and codes to win the game of life. In reality it is up to us to built our own foundations and paint our own canvases. Let us just bear in mind that, that canvas is not like what you find in Paint, which you can just simply undo and paint over.

           

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.  No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.  ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923

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