MAN. I brought along my son Jonathan who in the year 2001 will be the same age as I am now maybe he will be better adjusted to this kind of world that you’re trying to portray.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE. The big difference when he grows up in fact we wanted to wait for the year 2001 is that he will have in his own house not a computer as big as this but at least a console through which you can talk to his friendly local computer and get all the information he needs for his everyday life like his bank statements his theater observations all the information you need in the course of living in a complex modern society this will be in a compact form in his own house you’ll have a television screen like this here and a keyboard and you’ll talk to the computer get information from it and he’ll take it as much for granted as we take the telephone
MAN. I wonder though what sort of a life would it be like in Social terms I mean if our whole life is built around the computer that we become a computer dependent society and computer independent individuals.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE. In some ways but they’ll also enrich our society because it’ll make it possible for us to live ready anywhere we like any businessman any executive could live almost anywhere on Earth and still do his business through a device like this and this is a wonderful thing it means we wanted to be stuck in cities we better live out in in the country or wherever we please and still carry on complete interaction with human beings as well as with other computers.