Weekly Short Story: The Feeling of Power by Isaac Asimov

In many science fiction stories from the mid-twentieth century, interstellar travel is presented as a  certainty, but computers are also pictured as filling up entire rooms, completely failing to anticipate microtechnology and how much it would pervade nearly every aspect of our lives.  A notable exception to this misjudgment of the future is Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story The Feeling of Power, appearing in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 20 (1958) (DAW Books). 

The Feeling of Power is only eleven pages long but it packs a big punch, with great application to what's going on today.  It is in the future and space travel has humanity going to the stars, settling there, trading...and, sadly, going to war among themselves.  The computer technology has developed to the point where scientists and engineers just push buttons...the machines themselves come up with new innovations.  A lowly clerk has discovered how to mentally multiply numbers, which he demonstrates to the skeptical top brass by quickly answering 9 x 7 = 63.  That gets their attention...but then he amazingly demonstrates that he can multiply any two numbers ON PAPER with a system of his...of course, this is stuff we (well, at least my generation) learned in early elementary school.  The generals and officials are flabbergasted...eventually one of them realizes that this could be the breakthrough to free themselves from the total dependence on computers that have placed both sides in an interstellar war into a stalemate.  The story's ending, which you can read for yourself, is not a happy one...

When I read about the clerk's arithmetical demonstration, I had to chuckle...but there's some profound truth here.  There's no doubt that having sophisticated computers and software has lightened the mental burden of computing that heretofore was tedious but necessary, either mentally, on paper, or by slide rule.  But now we have incredibly powerful machines that do the tough work for us, be it arithmetic, correcting our shoddy grammar and spelling, instantly translating other languages to our own (no need to learn a new one, right?), telling us where we are by GPS without us ever having to orient ourselves through maps, and just about any other area where people went to school to learn certain skills.  With this super-technology we may be falling into a trap of collectively losing old skills after they have been deemed "obsolete"...there was even a push in schools to eliminate the teaching of writing in cursive!  As our digital gadgets make us appear to be smarter, without them to supply all the right answers we're becoming a society of dunces.  Maybe we should take a moment to reassess where we're going with all this...