I bought along my son Jonathan,
who in the year 2,001 will be the same age as I am now.
Maybe he will be better adjusted
to this kind of world that you’re trying to portray.
The big difference when he grows up,
in fact, he wanted to wait for the year 2,001
is that he will have in his own house,
not a good as big as this,
but at least a console
to which you can talk to his friendly local computer
and get all the information needs for his everyday life,
like his bank statements, his theater reservations,
all the information you need in the course of living in a complex
modern society. This will be in a come back for him.
In his own house he’ll have a television screen like this here
and a keyboard, and he’ll talk to the computer,
get information from it,
and he’ll take it as much for granted as we take the telephone.
I wonder, though,
what sort of a life would it be like in social terms?
I mean, if our whole life is built around the computer,
do we become a computer dependent society
and a computer dependent individuals?
In some ways, but they’ll also enrich our society
because it’ll make it possible for us to live really anywhere we like.
Any businessman and executive could live,
comes anywhere on earth
and still do his business through a device like this.
And this is a wonderful thing.
It Means we wanted to be stuck in cities.
We better live out in the country or wherever we please,
and still carry on complete interaction with human beings
as well as with other computers.