There appears to be an implicit assumption that as technology advances, human kind has to regress. Yet with the invention of the plough we are able to create more food, with the axe with were able to cut more wood and build, and with a bow and arrow we became very effective hunters. Today, very few of us have to use any of these instruments of production and killing - we have moved on. In the same way as the printing press negated the need for thousands of quill pen guiding monks, IT is empowering people, realising new skills and allowing them to do new things. In fact they can now do, experience, and achieve far more than any previous generation. A typical PhD student or engineer now has an output 100s of time greater than their counterparts of 20 years ago, and each generation sees more.

For those who fear for the future of books, I would pose this question; where is most information now stored and presented? If your reaction is the printed page and the library then you are mistaken. Electronic libraries and display systems now present orders of magnitude more information than was ever recorded on paper. Ink on paper has already gone the same way as the quill pen, and yet we can still read and write, and we still like a good book, and quite rightly. It is important to remember that technology is our slave and not the other way round. We should not deny technology and neither should we use it where it is inappropriate. Paper is very user friendly, but limited.

Technology has always been an alternative means of meeting new objectives and doing new things, and as such is an opportunity to create new worlds. In business, medicine, production and education IT has a major role to play. It is no longer feasible to organise the logistics of a nation or the planet on the basis of the written word by hand on a piece of paper. Reverting to that process would see chaos and millions of casualties - people would simply starve for want of communication. Nor is it possible to go back to the days of Aristotle and word of mouth teaching. Thinking how a chicken works can be a lot of fun and very satisfying, but in reality taking a chicken apart, or better, building a chicken is far more productive. It is also one of the few routes to true understanding.

For most of us it is not feasible to do experiments with a real or metaphoric chicken. But it is possible to participate in the dissection and construction of almost anything on the screen. This is conducive to greater joint creativity and output, but it will not be a successful prospect if the architects and designers of IT do not take into account our human limitations and preferences. Machines with a rapidly decreasing list of inability?s look set to enhance us, and our limitations by more than most imagine.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk