The communication expert was talking to one of his students.
The professor, a regular lecturer on the Bachelor of Communications degree course at the university, saw the opportunity to unburden himself by chatting with one of his favourite students.
He was saying, “It’s all about sarcasm, you know.”
The student sat listening patiently.
The professor nodded. “Sarcasm, even before modern technology, it’s been the cause of many wars.”
The student joined him in nodding.
“You see, back in the day of punch cards, sarcasm wasn’t a problem,” he went on. “It was simple then. Just a card with holes. Any given location on the card either had a hole punched right there or it didn’t. Dead easy, right? If the card had a hole or a group of holes that represented ‘yes’ that was it! ‘Yes’ meant ‘yes’ and ‘no’ meant ‘no’. No argument there. Communicating commands that controlled automated machinery through data processing applications was made easy. Simple, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
A pained expression came over the professor’s face. “Then, some smartarse, no, a whole string of smartarses come along with things like personal computers, keyboards, mice and trackpads. Then came emails. These could be fairly dodgy. Nothing could cause as much trouble as that which came next; voice control! Now, you have to be really careful.”
The student nodded again.
“Look, we all know that when a person has swerved off the road and hit a tree, causing the car to burst into flames and then stands back watching it, he says “That went well,” he doesn’t really mean it. But when a person looks down at a shirt that has been ironed, leaving only a few miniscule wrinkles, says “Nice job of ironing,” well, it could go either way, and that’s the problem with voice control.”
The professor shuddered. “I have to tell you, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck the other day when I read an article about the next step. Can you imagine how dangerous, how even more pear-shaped the whole thing could get with the advent of thought control.” His eyebrows lifted. “Can you imagine the number of things that can go wrong when someone blurts out some impulsive thought? How great would that be, eh?”
“Sir, aren’t you being sarcastic?”