Ebook: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation

This book is only nominally about computers. In an important sense, the computer is used here merely as a vehicle for moving
certain ideas that are much more important than computers. The
reader who looks at a few of this book's pages and turns away in
fright because he spots an equation or a bit of computer jargon here
and there should reconsider. He may think that he does not know
anything about computers, indeed, that computers are too complicated for ordinary people to understand. But a major point of this
book is precisely that we, all of us, have made the world too much
into a computer, and that this remaking of the world in the image of
the computer started long before there were any electronic computers. Now that we have computers, it becomes somewhat easier to see
this imaginative transformation we have worked on the world. Now
we can use the computer itself - that is the idea of the computer - as
a metaphor to help us understand what we have done and are doing.