Tom Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in publishing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing.
“My business now is to weave circumstance, happenstance, intention, and mischance into stories.”

The Machine Condition:

Anything You Can Do …¹ – November 8, 2026

I recently posted on Facebook: “If I wanted a worker who hallucinates, I would hire a human being.” And that got some open-mouthed “Wow” responses from my friends. So let me explain.

For all my life, going back to my college days in the late 1960s, when the Penn State campus was run—bursar’s billings, my campus address and phone number, my course registrations, my grade transcript, everything but my photo ID, which wasn’t available in pixel form yet—by an IBM 360 in the basement of the computer building, we trusted our information to the machines. A lot of that activity was punched into Hollerith cards by data-entry clerks for feeding into the machine. When I registered on site, at a great meeting in the gym where each department set up tables for their classes, I was issued a data card punched with my identity upon walking in. I collected available data cards for my coursework at the appropriate tables. And then, as I exited, an attendant read the card bundle read into a machine. Wow, the future.

By today’s standards, it was primitive. The memory core of the computer that ran the whole campus was about 48,000 bytes, about the same as the Apple II computer I bought ten years later, and pitiful compared to the memory and capability of the Apple Watch I wear on my wrist today. But back then my entire identity—name, home address, billing status, campus address, and transcript—probably took up less than 2,000 bytes (or characters). And it only flashed through that computer memory on its way to a magnetic tape drive or, eventually, a hard drive for more permanent storage.

With that Apple II, I was introduced to the innards of computing. This was because unless you bought a prepackaged program on a cassette tape or 5.25-inch floppy, you operated the machine by learning to program in BASIC. And I did. I thought I might follow a second career track, late in life, of becoming a computer programmer. But after fooling around with “spaghetti code” and learning about if/then statements and random-number generators, I figured that a whole generation of junior programmers were already working magic where I was making mud pies.

But I did join the Apple Computer Users Group in San Francisco and attended Saturday morning meetings in a big hall for about a year. It was embarrassing, sitting next to a nine-year-old who could perch on the folding chair and still swing his legs. He watched the adults mess around with a BASIC program on the big projection screen and said, “They should just enter three-dog.” I asked him what that was, and apparently pressing three-D-zero-G accomplished something basic (no pun intended) that the adults were groping toward. This was a kid who today is probably retiring from Apple as a senior programmer.

It was at a similar meeting that I saw the adults trying to describe a new program from a company called “Visi-On.” Across the top of the screen, they explained, you had column headers A, B, C, D, and so on. And down the side you had rows numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, and such. And the intersection of these rows and columns defined “cells” where you could put words and numbers and commands to do stuff. The kid swinging his legs muttered, “That’s a stupid game.” But I saw every adult in the room suddenly sit up and point. I heard gasps of amazement. Visi-On had automated the accounting spreadsheet with a small desktop computer. This first program went by the name Visi-Calc, which soon became SuperCalc, and eventually was brought out as the Microsoft Excel of the present day.

At about the same time, one of the engineers in my company Kaiser Engineers was doing chemical analysis of coal mine samples. In the normal course of things, he would write the customer-supplied data on a paper form and send it by interoffice mail to the computer department in the basement. There a data-entry clerk would punch cards for a mainframe program he had written to analyze the samples. And two days later interoffice mail would bring him a fanfold printout of the results. When he learned about the capabilities of the Apple II, he brought one, along with a green-screen monitor and dot-matrix printer, to his desk at the company. Everyone kidded him: “You going to play computer games, George? In the office?” What he was doing, of course, was transferring his program to BASIC (or maybe something more sophisticated running on CP/M) so that he could analyze the data as soon as it came in and give results back to the customer that same morning. In the engineering business, fast and good beats cheap.

The point of all this history is that we wanted the computer to be fast and accurate. We wanted the record in digital form, backed up on hard disk, stored offsite but quickly retrievable. We wanted the machine to be mindless, mute, and letter-perfect. If the computer in the basement or the one on our desk went probabilistic on us, so that sometimes two plus two was five and sometimes three, that would be unthinkable. If the word processor kept trying to finish our sentences with obvious nonsense, so that you had to go back and correct it every few lines, that would be a bad thing. Tiresome. Irritating. Naughty, bad computer!²

We grew up in a world where computers are more accurate than human beings. They don’t daydream, they don’t get confused—or not after some cautious human being has debugged the program and then sent out an update with bug fixes and more security. But those errors were the human programmer’s fault. The computer is an unthinking black box: garbage in, garbage out. Dependably dumb. And we like it that way.

If we are now going to have to watch every transaction, run every output through a separate reality check, looking for hallucinations and off-track rambling, then this world and its promises have changed. We’re going to have to treat the system itself like it’s the klutz in the mailroom who put our envelope in the wrong slot or the data-entry clerk who fumble-fingered a name or a number.

Not even garbage in, garbage out. But accurate data in, bizarro hallucinations and complications out. And that is going to get old fast.

1. This is the first part of an old song lyric. The second part is: “I can do better.”

2. I recently tried to send a wire transfer from my bank, which meant typing in the name of the recipient for reference. The name was in German and damn close to an English cognate. I typed it carefully, watching my fingering, but autocorrect chose the English version. And all the while I was looking at my fingers, not the entry line. When I sent the transfer, it bounced back—accruing transfer fees both ways—because the recipient’s name did not match the account number. Bad computer!

Comment on this post at Blogspot.com.

Subscribe to my Facebook author's page by clicking “Like” at Thomas T. Thomas.

My Favorite Novels About Time Travel

Contact me.

This is the official home page of Thomas T. Thomas, the fiction writer. Member of The Authors Guild and Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. As there are a number of other Thomas T. Thomases alive and active in the world, please see the Biography sidebar “What’s the Middle ‘T’ Stand For?” to make sure you have found the right one.