Science & Tech Quote by Howard Aiken

Aiken’s line has the polite, almost self-effacing ambition of early computing: he frames automation not as a revolution, but as an old itch finally getting scratched. By calling the impulse to save time and mental effort “as old as” arithmetic itself, he performs a neat historical sleight of hand. Computing stops looking like a brash 20th-century intrusion and starts reading as arithmetic’s logical next chapter, the same way the abacus and logarithm tables were once “just tools.” The intent is legitimization: if the drive is ancient, then building machines to do math isn’t a fad, it’s fulfillment.

The subtext is a sharp diagnosis of human limits. “Liability to error” is doing heavy work here. Aiken isn’t merely praising efficiency; he’s pointing to the fragility of calculation when it scales beyond what a person can reliably hold in working memory. In an era of ballistics tables, census work, and engineering at wartime speeds, the cost of a small mistake wasn’t embarrassment, it was catastrophe or wasted industrial effort. His language anticipates the central bargain of modern computation: we outsource not just labor, but trust.

Context matters: Aiken helped build the Harvard Mark I, a landmark electromechanical computer. This sentence reads like a grant proposal in philosophical clothing, aimed at skeptics who saw machines as gimmicks. He’s selling a moral argument as much as a technical one: mechanize calculation to protect humans from themselves, and to free minds for the kind of thinking machines can’t do.