We're now a good 40 years into the computer revolution, and maybe the best way to understand what's happened would be to construct a scatter plot of the results. We need to graph everything onto a Cartesian plane, in other words, with a vertical axis for the personal effects computers have had and a horizontal axis for the social effects.
So, for example, the ability to perform extraordinarily detailed, second-by-second monitoring of patients in a hospital—that would score high on beneficial personal effect for the individual patients, and it has fairly benign social effects. Plot it in the upper-right quadrant.
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