MACHINES SHOULD WORK, PEOPLE SHOULD THINK

If you ever wondered what flying on Concorde was like, I flew it once coming back from New York. It flew at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, but it did not feel any different. All I thought was the windows were too small and there were no movies. One thing did impress me: the pilot told us we were flying faster than a rifle bullet. I could not see a rifle bullet, but I was travelling faster than one. That fact was hard for the human mind to grasp.

Proof came in 1956. Test pilot Tom Attridge flew one of the first supersonic jet fighters, the Grumman F11. It had four 20mm cannons. He was told to test-fire them at top speed. The military needed to know what would happen when the force of all four guns pushed back against the plane. Would Newton's Third Law affect it? What stresses would hit the airframe?

Over the Atlantic he picked an empty piece of ocean and fired a four-second burst. The plane shuddered but seemed okay. He took it up to the next level. He turned on the afterburner, which came on like a kick in the pants. He fired another long burst. The plane shuddered again but seemed okay. Then the windscreen shattered. The engine started breaking up.

He throttled back, turned the plane around and put it into a shallow glide. He nursed it back to within sight of his airfield. He could not make it all the way. He crash-landed a mile short, shattered a rib and broke three vertebrae.

Investigators found something amazing. His plane had been hit by gunfire. A cannon shell was in the windshield. One was in the nose-cone. One was in the engine intake. His plane had been shot down at supersonic speed in the middle of an empty ocean. How?

They eventually realised what happened. Tom Attridge had shot himself down. It had never occurred to anyone that such a thing could happen, because they had never had planes that flew that fast before. After the first burst, Tom had turned on the afterburner making the plane go faster. The plane's speed made it overtake the burst he had previously fired. He flew straight into his own 20mm cannon shells.

Once you fire a bullet it starts to slow down. Once you turn on the plane's afterburner it starts speeding up. The plane had tried to overtake its own bullets. The latest technology had run into old-fashioned reality.

All the pilot was concentrating on was the technology. He forgot about reality. We forget that old-fashioned reality still exists. We expect the technology to do all the thinking for us. That is what Steve Jobs meant when he said: "Computers are dumb. But what computers are is really fast." Computers can do a lot of the work for us, but we have to do the thinking.

Which is why Carl Ally's strapline for IBM many years ago was: MACHINES SHOULD WORK, PEOPLE SHOULD THINK. What separates man from the rest of the animals is the ability to use tools. Tools help us work much better. The operative word is 'help'. That is why Steve Jobs referred to computers as "a bicycle for the mind." A bicycle can take us places much faster than we could go on our own. But a bicycle cannot go anywhere without us. Someone has to decide where they want to go and then steer it. That is the creative part, and machines do not do the creative part.