Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Will Man Become Obsolete?
By Stephen Jay Gould
The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe
by Robert Jastrow
Simon and Schuster, 183 pp., $13.95
I spent an hour on Fifth Avenue last week, just a visitor from Boston now, but awed, once again and as always, by the size and vitality of my native city. In the shadow of St. Patrick's, I stood transfixed before the window displays of commercial spinoffs from computer technology—watches that play baseball and beep 'Dixie,' radios thinner than my bankbook, $10 calculators representing a thousandfold advance upon the $400 device I bought with such a sense of modernity just ten years ago. It took this scale of densely packed, beeping, flashing, almost living and pulsating objects to force my reluctant paleontologist's soul to a recognition that the revolution is already upon us—the most profound change in human life since everything from trains to television brought us all together. One block west, at Rockefeller Center, an inscription proclaims: 'Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times.' I wonder. Wisdom, perhaps, but....
Review, 2602 words
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