While watching Jeopardy, Bill Nye the science guy was brought up which made me try to remember the first science guy in TV’s infancy. Was it Mr. Science? He would demonstrate simple experiments and such.
As we tried to retrieve the guy’s name we both said “I can see him, I just can’t
remember his name.” Which made me think about how mankind thought in pictures first, before language.
Somehow that made me wonder if the “new & improved” computers of the future will be organic…living organisms. The brain is still as vast a frontier as space and the depths of the ocean. The chemical/electrical synapses fascinate me. Could a future small computer be alive and utilize such ability?
Unfortunately, that made me remember the craze where kids had to “take care of” their little electronic “babies.” (Can’t recall what that was, either.) But aside from that, do you think we could become dependant on living data “banks,” and they become our friends?
Frank Herbert already predicted exactly your future. Human “mentats” were human calculators, and any machine that was made in the image of the human mind was entirely illegal.
So human computers are the norm, in the Dune universe anyway
I haven’t read Dune but it has a lot of fans, doesn’t it. I need to put it on my list.
BTW I got one of those 1001(?) science kits because of Mr. Wizard. That show was great. The workbook was good. But I missed the Tamagotchi craze entirely.
Miller was also popular in the US, billed as “Professor Wonderful.” I liked him better than Mr. Wizard (maybe partly because I couldn’t get NBC when I was a kid, but could see Miller on ABC).
When I was in graduate school in the 1970’s, Mr. Wizard once gave the weekly colloquium. The place was packed. I would say about 50% of us considered Don Herbert to be one of our principal influences in choosing a career in science. One of the grad students wanted to “kick him in the nuts” for that very reason.
