Science & Tech Quote by Robert Orben

It takes about eight words for Orben to map an entire modern reflex: we don’t just make mistakes, we outsource them. The line riffs on Pope’s “To err is human,” then spikes it with a late-20th-century twist that still lands in the age of autocorrect and algorithmic alibis. Orben’s intent isn’t to dunk on technology; it’s to expose how eagerly we recruit it as a scapegoat. The joke works because it’s plausibly deniable. “The computer messed up” sounds technical, objective, beyond argument. That’s exactly why it’s such an attractive lie.

The subtext is that responsibility hasn’t disappeared; it’s been laundered. A computer can be blamed without hurting anyone’s feelings, and without forcing a messy admission of competence, carelessness, or bias. Orben smuggles in a critique of authority, too: machines are treated as neutral referees, so pinning the failure on them preserves the speaker’s status. It’s not my error; it’s the system.

Context matters: Orben came up as a gag writer when computers were shifting from exotic corporate machines into everyday workplace infrastructure. Early computer culture carried an aura of infallibility, and the humor here punctures it while also acknowledging the new etiquette of error. Bureaucracies love an impersonal culprit. Orben’s punchline implies we’ve evolved a second, even more “human” instinct: not just to err, but to narrate the error in a way that costs us nothing.