6 — the Intellect ' S New Eye

N THE OTHER ARTICLES in this series the digital computer has been thought of as a purely menial tool—in fact, as a kind of intellectual spade. This, it has been shown, can indeed assist a human scholar who is working on language, by performing for him a series of irksome repetitive tasks: tasks such as counting the number of words in a text, making a concordance of their occurrence, and mechanically reversing a large bi-lingual dictionary. It is, however, characteristic of such tasks that, when he programmes them on the computer, the scholar already knows—all too well— what kind of thing the output will be; he also knows exactly what increase of knowledge (or of doubt) will be the outcome of performing them. It is true that their performance depends on the computer in the sense that the scholar, unaided, just cannot get through them. They take too long, they are backbreaking, they are eye-wearing, they strain too far human capacity for maintaining accuracy; in fact, they are both physically and intellectually crushing. But they provoke no new theoretic vision, intuitive or mathematical. In this article I wish to suggest another quite different use for the digital computer in this non-numerical, data-processing field, namely, its potential use not as a tool but as a telescope. Of course, in one sense, a telescope is a tool, just as a spade is; but in another important sense it is not. For the use of a telescope, especially after its great development in the seventeenth century, so enlarged the whole range of what its possessors could see and do that, in the end, it was a factor in changing their whole picture of the world. I suppose that a spade which was sufficiently powerful to cut rapidly through the earth's outer crust—as the deep-boring drills of the future probably will—would be a tool in this new sense— that is, if its use reliably transformed our whole picture of the interior of the earth. But an ordinary spade would not, since it has not the right order of power. The potential capacity of the