Frank Herbert s Bu-Sab stories 13 describe ways of keeping computers from making government too efficient. In Herbert s imagined future, computerization has accelerated the pace of government so that computers automatically pass and amend laws in a matter of minutes. The speed of government is so fast that no human can possibly understand or keep pace with the legal system. So government saboteurs deliberately introduce bugs to slow things down, even assassinating those who stand in their way. Robbie is incapable of dispensing water to the thirsty burn victims who can t slip coins into his coin slot.
Computing technology seems to invite a different level of expectation than other technologies.
Problems like this tend to annoy us, especially when we can at least imagine creating devices that either repair themselves or don t fail in the first place. From no other class of tool do we expect so much, which is likely why we feel anxiety at Robbie s plight. Had his creators anticipated an emergency situation like nuclear war, he might have been able to help. There are almost countless examples like these that address some of the potential problems with the technology we re developing now and will be developing in the future. You needn t look very far to find science fiction in the first part of the century that anticipated problems like Y2K and computer viruses.