High-tech Anxiety/Mind, by D. Collier
Brought on by our increasingly automated lifestyle, it is fueled by a sensory and informational glut that creates a confused internal debate over who is in control, man or machine. We either are intimidated by the pervasiveness of technology or become dependent upon it and fear its removal from our lives. ...rush to your bank's cash machine...miraculously find the thing working, and then have the machine spit out your card with no explanation? Did your...calculator go dead...? ...a watch...that you were unable to figure out which button-pushing sequence would tell you the time? ...tasks that once required mental effort and manual dexterity are preempted by bleeping, blinking push-button machines. Women, who confront high-tech in the home and office, often feel intense anxiety...
Programs for Plunder, by Roger Rapport
More than ever before, computer crime pays. Who are the EDP swindlers? "Most perpetrators...love to play computer games and...trying to beat the system." many...began their life of crime after taking college computer courses. "Teachers like to show students how to crash the computer. Instead of discouraging this sort of behavior, many colleges let their students form crash clubs. They actually compete to discover better ways to compromise equipment. The result is that universities are turning out a whole new generation of computer criminals." Even without crash clubs, schools breed "hackers," who spend most of their working lives close to data terminals. "Wherever computer centers have become established, disheveled young men, with sunken, glowing eyes can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike at the keys... They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer. But only for a few hours."
Macro, by Dan Ross and Arthur J Maher
Large-scale projects can now transform our environment so completely that we can no longer afford to build them helter-skelter... ...the realization that macroprojects have special problems has been catching on in both academia and the outside world. Planetran:...a mag-lev railroad (a wheeless, frictionless train kept off the ground by magnetic forces) in a semivacuum tube. In other words, a transcontinental subway. ...25,000 kilometers per hour..
Plains of Forever, by Robert Sheckley
"And here we have light, transparency, the bubble of consciousness. Transparent bubbles with coherent light at the core - that's us. We are simultaneously the light and the thing being illuminated. Our lives are seeing what there is to be seen by our own light. We see through ourselves into the universe."
