If Jesus was a computer,

If Jesus was a computer, this guy would have been his Paul, and this would be his bid to evangelize the world. What's so wrong with that? Ask yourself this: what happens WHEN they break? Cha-ching! goes the computer industry. What happens WHEN they need tech support? Cha-ching! goes the computer industry. What happens WHEN they wear out? Cha-ching! goes the computer industry, and Plop! goes the computer on a trash heap, where the heavy metals leach out into the area water supply and work their way up the food chain. Yum!

Y'know, when Marie Curie discovered Radium, everybody thought it was great. Someone then thought they had a great idea for how to use this new stuff: paint things with it so they'd glow in the dark. Until they realized it was killing the people who were closest to it. Oops! Too little, too late, for too many....

So here we are, with a new idea. We have a device at our disposal, which, like Radium and Uranium and the like, is so far out of our realm of normal experience that we have no precedent for it. Engineers built computers, then found that the things were, and became increasingly, so complex that they needed Scientists -specializing in an entirely new discipline- to help them understand what was going on. To date, Computer Science has been concerned in large part with the study of what computers do, as systems in and of themselves, with almost no research at all on the biological or social-behavioral aspects of their use. Some sparse research has been done on the effects of electromagnetic fields on human bodies, but so far nothing conclusive has really been shown. Just like in the early days of Marie Curie's research, non? Now what happens if we find, ten years down the line, that electromagnetic fields, when placed in close proximity to, say, immature reproductive organs, cause ...say... cancer? infertility? Hmmm? Will Dr. Negroponte's estate be paying for the cleanup? Will MIT? Or will we just turn our backs on the (now-infertile?) Third World (like maybe Appalachia, or bayou country?) like we did to the Radium painters?

Or maybe Negroponte's right, and computers everywhere will make everybody happy and apples will rain from the heavens -er, slowly, of course- and wine will flow in the -er, very clean streets, cleaned by um... robots!- and every computer geek will have a beautiful -and round-headed girlfriend. Who knows, right?