Essay by the Secretary of the Air Force: The Law of War & Computing Power

“We should be cautious about undermining that society and the legitimacy of nation-states.”

byHeather Wilson

On July 20, 1969, a Purdue graduate from Wapakoneta, Ohio, stepped onto the surface of the moon. I watched it on a black-and-white Zenith television sitting on the floor in the den of our New England farmhouse with my two brothers.

That den was not a big room, and the television was wedged between the fireplace and the family bookshelf. In the next room, under windows that looked out on a hedge of lilacs, was a stereo—a solid wooden cabinet the size of a dining-room sideboard. On its turntable we set a fragile arm with its embedded needle into grooves on black vinyl disks and listened to Broadway show tunes.

On the wall in the kitchen in the next room was an avocado green telephone with a rotary dial and an extra long cord so that my mother could talk on the phone while doing dishes.

In the cellar, my stepfather had a dark room. There we turned the plastic cartridges containing strips of light-sensitive plastic from our Kodak Instamatic cameras into black-and-white images, moving the paper carefully with tongs from one acrid pan of chemicals to another in the dim red light.

It was 1969. And Neil Armstrong took one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind. Just half a lifetime ago. And today, nearly everyone reading this has a computer in their pocket that is a television, and a bookshelf, and a music player, and a telephone, and a camera that is about a million times more powerful than all the computing power NASA had available to put a man on the moon.

Computers have changed nearly every aspect of our lives, and we should be asking ourselves how computers have changed our behaviors and our understanding, as well. Our kitchens, our professions, our cars, our health care, our entertainment, the way we communicate with people we love, the way we get our news or decide where to go out to dinner—is all different, because of the power of computing.