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Clairvoyance. I looked it up in my thesaurus. I didn't use the thesaurus built into my word processor, not that synonym lister. I used my real thesaurus, the the dog eared, yellow paged Roget's. The book. (You remember what a book is don't you?) The one that groups words into a rich and wonderful structure that reaches beyond the simple meanings of words and into the meanings of thought.
Words Relating to the INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES
Division (I), FORMATION OF IDEAS
Section I. Operations of Intellect in General
psychical research; telepathy, thought transference, thought reading; clairaudience; clairvoyance, mediumship; spiritualism &c. 992a.
992a Psychical Research.--- psychical research, psychical (or psychic) investigation; abnormal psychology; ... the subconscious... intuition... obsession... hysteria... hallucinations... mesmerism... telepathy... clairvoyance.
Even more interesting, entry 992 is Sorcery.
Something strange started happening after the last MacValley meeting, the one where Panorama was demonstrated --- with clairvoyance, the feature that automatically finishes your typing for you. I don't have Panorama on my system, I didn't win it in the raffle, I don't need a database, I'd never even heard of clairvoyance before the meeting, but --- something is happening ---. After the meeting I went through all of the disks of the month. I added some fonts. I loaded some games onto my hard disk, played them, then threw them in the trash. I added a system extension or two --- but nothing that would explain what seems to be going on now. Maybe it's System 7, Apple events, Data Access Language... I don't know. I can't explain it.
The first time I noticed it I was working on some music with Finale. I had a song that was half finished. I put in a couple of more bars in the melody line but when I played it back I had more than melody. The rest of the parts were there too. I could have sworn all I'd done was add a couple of measures and write in some more melody. But when I played it back it was orchestrated. I wasn't sure anything was wrong. When I write music I don't write just a melody line, I write a simple orchestration at the same time, one that my synthesizer can play back to me. Sometimes I even write the orchestration first and melody second. The orchestration on these few new bars sounded just like what I'd already written for the rest of the piece, but I could swear I hadn't written it. But maybe I had. It's hard sometimes to keep track of what you're doing in the middle of doing it. So I didn't think much of it.
The next incident was different. I pay my bills with CheckFree, a program which uses the modem to accomplish the bill paying electronically. I went into CheckFree to set up my payments for the month, but something was strange. I started to set up my Optima payment, my VISA payment, and the Library of America payment, I'd even entered the first few keystrokes, but then I noticed that the payments I had planned to make already showed up on the register. You can set up automatic payments in CheckFree that will be made at predetermined intervals, but I hadn't done that with these payments. They were for different amounts every month. I couldn't have set up an automatic payment for them. But I wasn't sure. My memory isn't perfect. Maybe it was me. Maybe I set up those payments and then forgot. But the next thing that happened convinced me my memory was fine. Without any action from me --- not the click of a mouse, not the touch of a key --- in front of my very own eyes, the program started transmitting all of the transactions to CheckFree. It made the telephone call itself. Itself! It wasn't a disaster. They were payments that had to be made. I would have done it myself. But it did it before I ever told it to.
I can't live without my Mac anymore. I write words on it. I write music on it. I pay my bills on it. I draw pictures on it. I do mathematics on it. But this was scary. I tried to find an explanation. Maybe, it was possible, that CheckFree was like America On Line, that sometimes when you called in the program would be told to update and modify itself. What kind of change can be made this way? I don't know. Maybe there was an update and the program modified itself the last time I called in. Maybe the transaction transmittal to CheckFree was a new feature, or a bug. But how did it know how much to pay VISA? I pay off VISA in full every month because of the ungodly interest rate. How did CheckFree know what my VISA balance was? Did CheckFree have a line to VISA? How could it know what bank my card was with? Maybe it did. And if it knew that, what else might it know? .................................. Could I learn to live without my computer?
The first night without my Mac was no problem. I watched a little bit of the news. I talked to my wife. I read a book. The news was all bad. My wife asked me who I was and wondered why her husband wasn't in at the computer. Richard the Third was betrayed and hacked to pieces at Bosworth Field. I was looking forward to my second night without the Mac but there was a message on my answering machine. It was my sister. She wanted me to call her. Her phone number (unlisted phone number) is on my Mac, in the Address stack.
I was trapped. I booted up my Mac. Nothing was out of the ordinary. I double clicked on the Address stack and it opened up without incident. Then I clicked on the Find button and typed in the first two letters of my sister's name. Hypercard jumped directly to my sister's card and dialed the phone.
I can't live without my Mac. The question now is can I learn to live with it?
That's the question really, isn't it? How much do I want my computer to do for me? I am intimidated, and frightened by a machine that does what I would do before I do it. I am not much given to soul searching, to that old old question, "Why am I here?" But why am I? If this machine can preempt my very thoughts, what is the use of me? I am afraid to sit down at my Mac and write a lyric because I know it will finish it for me. It's getting better at it all the time. It's too bad I don't know much about making money. If I did I'd type in a couple of numbers and let my Mac fill in the zeros. Failing that what does the future hold when a machine can look into my thoughts? What does the future hold when a machine can see a thought that is yet to come?
Editors Note: Shortly after receiving this article via America On Line mail Gregg Butterfield called me to say that he knew it was sent under his name but that it wasn't fair to put his name on it because he didn't write it. He said he did have something to do with it, but not much. He typed the first two letters.
Gregg Writes
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