Electronic machines have a strong appeal and create new possibilities for users. When you do not know exactly how digital computers work and how programmers utilize the hardware, it is easy to be fooled into believing that computers are intelligent or will be soon. When you know exactly how digital computing works, you are less likely to believe in intelligent computers. In fact, a programmer knows that he or she has to tell the computer exactly what to do in precise and annoying detail.

Digital computers are dumb machines, but they are marvellously effective tools for humans skilled in programming and using them. The intelligence in machines was put there by humans. The advantage of investing your intelligence in a computer program is that your hard-earned procedural skills are retained and can be used by hundreds of millions of other humans for years to come. Groups of smart, dedicated people can perfect programs over time so that users have all the advantages of accumulated human experience. As everyone who programs and uses software knows, errors are common when programs are first constructed and are gradually eliminated as  the programs are used and “bugs” are corrected. The ability of a digital computer to calculate easily exceeds human ability. The impression is that a calculating computer is smart. Humans have difficulty doing calculations and only a small percentage of any student population will excel in mathematical ability. The ability to calculate quickly and accurately is overly impressive. The abstract reasoning that underlies advanced mathematics is more interesting and is independent of the ability to calculate. Most mathematicians are happy to do calculations on a digital machine and do not feel the least bit threatened that some computer will take over their job of abstract reasoning.

Digital computers have no sense of meaning, cannot perceive and are only able to make simple robotic decisions about the data they receive. They can store images accurately and will faithfully recall all stored data unless a malfunction intervenes. Output procedures are echoes of input procedures. The letter ”a “ input via a keyboard is encoded and stored as an 8-bit byte; when the time comes for the character to be output, the byte, is decoded and displayed as “a” on a monitor or printer. Computers are best appreciated as memory devices that store human intelligence as procedures and store information as a binary code for alphanumeric characters. The functions of a computer are to receive input from an intelligent being, allow the data to be manipulated arithmetically and by sorting algorithms, and to return that input as output through some sort of presentation algorithm on request.

Children adapt quickly to video games and hand held devices that beep and display characters. Hand-eye coordination skills develop quickly. Some children display astonishing speed interacting with video games but become frantic and robotic in this connection with electronic virtual reality. You can argue that electronic games are perverse machines since they occupy time and attention in a virtual reality that might be better spent enjoying and cultivating the real world. Television has been declared a perverse machine for the same reason – a virtual reality replaces the real world and sedentary viewers may become fat, sick and confused.

The real question is what humans really want? A better real world is a good answer. A better real world would be more natural, cleaner, safer, and more stable. A better world might be achieved, but not by the people who are preoccupied watching TV and playing videogames. Children are not well-served by television, movies, video games and games played with computers. I am certain that time spent watching television, paying video games and watching movies is negative time that damages children in variety of ways. Good parents face an increasing task of limiting virtual reality experiences and keeping children in the real world. While considerable effort has been made to rate television shows and movies and a few parents restrict access to violence and sex, the average child is hooked on virtual reality, is physically inactive, gaining weight, and not gaining a useful perspective on what is really going on out there in the real world.

The term virtual refers to the replacement of a real person or event with a substitute. "Virtual reality" has come to mean a computer-generated environment that is a facsimile of a real environment. You can create the illusion that you are walking around in a room by displaying pictures on a computer monitor and computer games routinely simulate three dimensions in two. If you wear the visual display as wrap around goggles, you can improve on the visual experience of a three-dimensional space, but the display is far from convincing. Movies often  create virtual realities and virtual characters are proliferating. Loose talk, fantasy and paranoia have become commonplace in movie and television plots that place computers at the center of some fantasized machine takeover of the world. The people who write these scripts apparently do not understand computers very well and understand the intelligence of living creatures even less.  A realist will note that there are no independently intelligent machines and there are no prospects for "intelligent machines" except in some vague fantasy. The only intelligence found in machines is human intelligence put there by people who design and program the machines.

Computer generated "virtual realities" are limited and limiting but there is increasing evidence that at least some children prefer these virtual realities (VR) and withdraw increasingly from the real world (RW) if they have a choice. In VR you try to create a hermetic world that is more predictable and mostly under your control. Every environment that humans build is a step in the direction of creating an ultimate virtual reality.

The living room equipped with drapes and a television set with remote controller is the most common virtual reality machine. You close the drapes to tune out the real world; with remote controller in hand, in the tradition of the most powerful person in the universe, tune into the virtual reality of videospace. With the push of a few buttons, you can skim the video envelope surrounding planet earth and adjust the picture and volume to your liking. What you experience is another matter. Videospace is full of gossip, fantasy, noise, confusion and violence. The worst of human behavior seems to receive the most attention. While it is challenging to exaggerate human perversity that actually exists in the RW, television VR programs often succeed. Perversity is amplified, exaggerated and sustained beyond any reasonable notion of entertainment or artistic license.

It is easy to argue that humans are unrealistic about all the virtual realties they create. Illusions of security and comfort are routinely accepted even when a VR is manifestly dangerous. The car is a virtual reality machine. Inside a new luxury automobile you are in a dream space; you feel comfortable, secure and in control.  A new car is hermetic and the designers have thought of many comforts and conveniences. You carry this sense of hermetic perfection with you as your drive and may not comprehend that in 60 seconds your luxury vehicle could be transformed into a pile of rubble and you could be seriously injured or dead.

Children are notably unrealistic about the dangers of driving cars. If they are trained on virtual cars in video space, they will become dangerous drivers. You could argue that they will develop superior hand-eye coordination and should be technically better drivers, but the flaw is that they have no sense of how the real world operates, have practiced aggressive and dangerous driving and have poor judgment about the hazards they face and the hazards they impose on others.

Bob Hebert, writing in the New York Timessaid:” I do think that millions of American adults have lost all sense of what are appropriate forms of play for children and teenagers. And the country as a whole behaves as though there is no real-world price to pay for a culture that has so thoroughly desensitized us to violence that it takes a terror attack or a series of suburban sniper killings to really get our attention… The biggest-selling video game over the last couple of years has been a PlayStation 2 game called Grand Theft Auto III. It actually carries a voluntary "M" rating, which means it's not recommended for kids under 17. But teens have no problem buying "M"-rated games, and they love the various incarnations of Grand Theft Auto. This is a game in which all boundaries of civilized behavior have vanished. You get to shoot whomever you want, including cops. You get to beat women to death with baseball bats. You get to have sex with prostitutes and then kill them. (And get your money back.) The game is a phenomenal seller. At close to $50 each, millions of copies are sold annually. The latest version, Grand Theft Auto, Vice City, is expected to be one of the biggest sellers this Christmas…”

In the fantasy about computers becoming intelligent, willful and taking over the world, there is an imbedded and legitimate concern about human dependence on machines. There is an associated concern about human limitations. As computer networks expand, humans become dependent on them and have more difficulty understanding how the whole system works. Human experience is always paradoxical. Human information and intelligence is being distributed more widely than ever before and this distribution depends on a technologically elite group. If you tend to be paranoid, you are afraid of the technology and fear that a sinister elite group will take over and control the world. Science fiction paranoia tends to emphasis machine autonomy and fears machine dominance. If you are paranoid, all sinister plots are plausible and you cannot differentiate a realistic fear from an imaginary and unrealistic fear.

The problems of bad food and eating excesses are embedded in the virtual reality of television and all other marketing media. The supermarket is a virtual reality that presents real food along with packaged, processed and junk foods. Again parents are confused and easily lose perspective on what is the correct food to feed children. Children, of course, responding to television advertising and store displays, demand and usually receive the wrong foods. I think it is necessary for parents to fully comprehend the two pronged assault on their children’s well-being; bad information and bad chemicals combine to produce disturbed or sick children. Normal is not normal. In addition, it is necessary to fully comprehend that children learn by copying the behavior of others and become skilled through practice. If you want to raise terrorists, feed your children junk food and give them PlayStation 2 Grand Theft Auto III for Christmas.

Hebert,B. The Gift of Mayhem. New York Times. Nov 28 2002.

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