Computer Power and Human Reason

PREFACE
This book is only nominally about computers. In an impor-
tant sense， the computer is used here merely as a vehicle for m~)ving
certain ideas that are much more important than computers. The
reader who looks at a few of this book s pages and turns away in
fright because he spots an equation or a bit of computer jargon here
and there should reconsider. He may think that he does not know
anything about computers， indeed， that computers are too compli-
cated for ordinary people to understand. But a major point of this
book is precisely that we， all of us， have made the world too much
into a computer， and that this remaking of the world in the image of
the computer started long before there were any electronic comput-
ers. Now that we have computers， it becomes somewhat easier to see
this imaginative transformation we have worked on the world. Now
we can use the computer itself--that is the idea of the computer--as
a metaphor to help us understand what we have done and are doing.
We are all used to hearing that the computer is a powerful
new instrument. But few people have any idea where the power of a
computer comes from. Chapters I to III are devoted to explaining just
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