In the Eyes of a Computer, Only John Doe Stands a Chance
Fear of computers--call it analogaphobia--is a civil-libertarian neurosis so far unsustained by fact. Only a decade ago, Americans were afraid of losing identity and privacy to machines that would make them numbers instead of names, reducing their persons to something as impersonal as a series of digits on a Social Security card or lumping all their heretofore separate credit codes into one big serial number.
Then we learned that machines, like people, make mistakes. Instead of prying into every cranny of a citizen’s life, baring secrets withheld from loan officers or revealing political idiosyncrasies, the computers’ outrages turned out to be bills sent to the wrong parties or failures to credit consumers with bills already paid.
Far from being omniscient, computers were error-prone because the people who operate them were--and are--error-prone.
Computers can’t keep track of a human being with a real name, much less a number. The Jack Smiths and Jack Joneses of this world are no less confused with each other today than they were when mere people tried to recognize the dignity of the individual. The Arthur D. Seidenbaums of this world, people whose cumbersome identities must be spelled aloud for every reservation or receptionist, are more confused than they used to be.
On my office wall are computer-generated letters ostensibly aimed at me; in their varieties of address they hang as a rich mosaic of imprecise word-processing.
To the Easton Press of Norwalk, Conn., offering leather-bound books to “a privileged group of individuals,” I am Art S. Edit. To Inc. Magazine, aimed at American enterprisers, I am Art S. Um. To the Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery of Mount St. Mary’s College, my name is Eiden Baum Art.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, by contrast, knows me as Art S. Opnion. So does KCET. And so does Amnesty International. Among the thousands of mailing lists for sale in this great nation, one of them is busy merchandising me as Opnion, perhaps a misspelling of Opinion where this wall full of misnomers is daily witness to the compounding of computer error.
The Constitutional Rights Foundation, bastion of civil liberty, addresses me as Art Seidman. The Foundation for America’s Future calls me Art Steidenbaum. (Imagine the difficulty of generating an extra letter for an already run-on name.)
The most improbable and unpronounceable identity I have been forced to assume, however, is at home. US Sprint, the long-distance telephone service, addresses me as Art Seodembaum every month, with a bill. For two years I have paid those bills, using checks with my real name, hand-lettering a correction of the computer error and asking to be dunned properly. I have never received an answer, a correction or anything but a new bill for Seodembaum’s telephone calls.
I wonder whether my widow, heirs or assigns will have to assume such a burden after I’m gone. Meanwhile, no one need worry about computers; so long as they are servants of human programmers, the machines will behave much like people--keeping some secrets, remembering a few faces but forgetting most names and generally refusing to admit mistakes.
