A Step Farther Out by Jerry Pournelle Page A

been for Freudian psychoanalysis, she enthusiastically agreed.
    One does want to be careful. There are many charlatans in the biofeedback business; some sell equipment, others claim to be "teachers." The field is just too new to have many standards, in either equipment or personnel, and the potential buyer should be wary. However: there is definite evidence, hard data, to indicate that you can, with patience (but far less than yoga demands) learn to control many allergies, indigestion, shyness, fear of crowds, stage fright, and muscular spasmodic pain; and that's got to be good news.
    After I left the 1976 AAAS meeting in Boston I wandered the streets of New York between editorial appointments. On the streets and avenues around Times Square I found an amazing sight. (No, not that; after all, I live not far from Hollywood and thus am rather hard to shock.)
    Every store window was filled with calculators. Not merely "four function" glorified arithmetic machines, but real calculators with scientific powers-of-ten notation, trig, logs, statistical functions, and the rest. Programmable calculators for under $300. (Since 1976 the price of programmables has plummeted: you can get a good one with all scientific functions for $50 now; while the equivalent of my SR-50 now sells for $12.95 in discount houses. JEP)
    Presumably there's a market for the machines: which means that we may, in a few years, have a large population of people who really do use numbers in their everyday lives. That could have a profound impact on our society. Might we even hope for some rational decision-making?
    John R, McCarthy of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratories certainly hopes so. McCarthy is sometimes called "the western Marvin Minsky." He foresees home computer systems in the next decade. OK, that's not surprising; they're available now. (Since that was written, the home computer market has boomed beyond anyone's prediction; in less than two years home computers have become well-nigh ubiquitous, and everyone knows someone who has one or is getting one. I even have one; I'm writing this on it. JEP) McCarthy envisions something a great deal more significant, though: information utilities.
    There is no technological reason why every reader could not, right now, have access to all the computing power he or she needs. Not wants—what's needed is more than what's wanted, simply because most people don't realize just what these gadgets can do. Start with the simple things like financial records, with the machine reminding you of bills to be paid and asking if you want to pay them—then doing it if so instructed. At the end of the year it flawlessly and painlessly computes your income tax for you.
    Well, so what? We can live without all that, and we might worry a bit about privacy if we didn't have physical control over the data records and such. Science fiction stories have for years assumed computer controlled houses, with temperatures, cooking, menus, grocery orders, etc., all taken care of by electronics; but we can live without it.
    Still, it would be convenient. (More than I knew when I wrote that; I don't see how I could get along without my computer, which does much of that, now that I'm used to it. JEP)
    But what of publishing? McCarthy sees the end of the publishing business as we know it. If you want to publish a book, you type it into the computer terminal in your home; edit the text to suit yourself; and for a small fee put the resulting book into the central information utility data banks.
    (So far I have described how I now, only two years after I wrote the above, prepare my own books. The difference is that after I have them composed on the TV-like screen, and edited to my satisfaction—a computer-controlled typewriter puts it onto paper, which is mailed to New York, edited again, and given to someone to type into electronically readable form for typesetting. Obviously that stage will be eliminated soon; why can I not